My work was mostly done by using American version of Facebook and Naver which is one of the mostly used Korean search engines, that provides a service called ‘지식인(Ji-sic-in)’, meaning ‘Intellectual’ in English. As a person who has not used Facebook so actively, I was very glad to see that Facebook’s group service could invite many people so easily so that they could participate in our project. However, thinking about myself ignoring group invitations so many times, I was worried that not so many people would actually take their time to accept my invitation and even leave comments on each picture. So I sent invitations to only 10 people whom I think would react with curiousness. Fortunately, three of the 10 people joined our group, and all of them left pretty long, serious and interesting comments on every picture and a video showing picture slides. It was interesting to see that the three were the people whom I spent time with most recently and that they were all Design majors. I think they accepted my invitations asking for comments on pictures, since they were more used to participating in critique about images then other majors because of the curriculum of most design courses. I could conclude that audience’s interests could affect the rate of participation.
Naver’s service, ‘Ji-sik-in (Intellectual)’ works differently compared to Facebook’s group service.
Ji-sik-in is all about asking questions and answering others’ questions in lots of fields. People can set their interests up to three when they join the site. Then questions in their fields pop up when they log in. One can earn a few points for posting or answering questions, and if their answer is selected as a best answer by the questioner, they receive much more points from the questioner. So, to post a question and get truly helpful answers, one must have many points to ‘attract’ people since they click on questions from a long list, looking at how many points they can get if they get selected as a best answerer. While earning more points, one’s level goes up from ‘commoner’ to ‘superior’ which is the highest level and the look of his/her virtual character changes also. Top ranking people get to be introduced on the first page of the site. This is how the system makes people spend their time to participate.
www.naver.com
I could require people to answer my question seriously in certain length I wanted. However, up to about two people for each question answered seriously, as maximum number of people to be selected by a questioner were two. The other answers after the best two were mostly jokes or simple opinions like “creepy” or “I like it”. Of course, many times there are people who post their answers very seriously even after the best answers are selected, truly wanting to help the questioner although it did not happen this time. Therefore, I think this is a beneficial medium as it encourages people to share their knowledge although it dose not allow users to conveniently select or invite certain people I want to answer my questions like Facebook dose, giving chances to bored people to post random jokes which are sometimes even insulting.
One of the best answers I got
To conclude, I found out that all popular media have their own ways to attract people by providing convenient services which might also have downsides. So, in order to make our project as successful as possible, combination of various media is a good way to start with as each medium targets different types of audience.
1 comment:
I really begin to feel the post's momentum in the middle: your use of examples and images help the readers more fully understand the descriptions you provide. The conclusion is exactly where you should have begun your post because in it, you make a specific argument. Notice in your current introductory paragraph you mostly describe the group's project. Push yourself in these posts to get beyond description and to analysis, much like we have been doing in class. I already know what your group's project is, so I would like to see you work more directly with the different media and their intended audience. For example, you could have spent more time analyzing the differences between Facebook and Naver. I am fascinated that it translates to "intellectual" in English. How is that very different than Facebook, for example?
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