Digital Exhibitionism

      I chose to comment on this article because it has such an impact on most people today. So many people spend hours a week on social media websites and it is really interesting to see someone analyze the difference between the digital world and the physical world. The article focuses on most of the popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but it goes further to compare how these sites have become embedded in our lives today. For example, Facebook was first designed as a formal dating site for college students to obtain photos and contact classmates. Now there are more than 400 million Facebook members and the company is making hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
      The social media websites of today have become very complex, but the article explains certain tests and interactions that were conducted to see how people interact on these websites. I found it pretty amazing that the people running the tests could gain information by simply interacting with people online and how if there were too many or too few people interacting, it was hard to have a successful test.
      I am honestly someone who is not very fond of social media websites for some reasons that the article explains. You end up losing natural building of relationships between people if you are only using Facebook or Twitter to communicate with others. Things can be distorted in many ways when you are viewing someone's Facebook page rather then talking to them face to face. These websites can be unsafe because a lot of the time you do not know exactly who you are talking too. For example the article mentions what they call Lurker's, or people who do not participate in traditional activity, and only stalk Facebook and Twitter accounts. For me, this seems very creepy and I prefer the old fashion approach of meeting people.