Journal Entry#3

Commercial Concerns on Social Websites (2010)

This article criticizes the intended purpose of social networks for educators, as being over-commercialized by putting advertisers above the interests of educators.

Thanks to advances of web 2.0 technology, social networks are supposed to bring students and teachers closer. Social networking allows teachers and students to communicate online when they are not in class and to provide each student with customized lessons and homework assignments. However, most social networking services, like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, and Google are more interested in pleasing advertisers than students because these sites earn a large amount of money from advertising. Most of those sites serve advertisements and in some cases customized advertisements, based on the visitor’s activities and preferences.

According to the article, if anyone visits a social networking site for any purpose, they will see many advertisements on the page they visit, meaning that they will see a lot of corporate logos, for the purposes of selling products. Some will find this as a distraction because the main purposes of social networking for educators are to learn and connect and that seeing too many advertisements can affect their experience. Some sites, like Facebook, will even customize the advertisements when you visit that site in order to improve the user experience and to increase revenue for advertisers. At the end of article, the author stated that there is a major conflict between interests of educators and advertisers when they visit social networking sites.

I agree with the author that social networking is over-commercialized and that most social networking sites are more concerned about revenue than interests of educators. While some may not care about the over-commercialization of social networking because they use these sites primarily to meet friends, but for educators, too much advertisements can defeat the intended purpose of creating new learning opportunities.

Link to Article Here

Questions

1.    Since 2010, when the article was first posted online, how much has social networking has changed?
Answer: Social networking has been increasing in popularity. By 2013, 73% of all Americans use social media. In addition, more and more students and teachers are using social media while in school. This means that commercial concerns on social websites has increased has more and more people join Facebook, Twitter, Google and etc.

2. What actions can social networking sites take to make more pleasing for educators?
Answer: Social networking sites can offer special, ad-free subscriptions for educators, either for free for current students and teachers or for an annual fee as one way to make social networks more pleasing to educators. Another option is to find social networking sites that are designed specifically for educators, such as Lynda and Edmodo.