Weekly Blog 7

How does social media engage communications?

Social media engages communications by having topics that interests others show up in posts or blogs. This then explodes when users of PLNs start resharing the post which causes a topic of interest for discussion by everyone that are pulled by the topic. For example, Seoul, Korea was heavily locked down up until this year. So everyone wanted to go out and celebrate for Halloween. However, the amount of people in that attended a small strip of road for celebration caused up to 100 deaths from being trampled which can be read here. This caused an enormous amount of conversation through many social media platforms because of the severity of it.

Is it inclusive?

I believe social media can only be as inclusive as it can be allowed by exclusion by countries, or by the people that decide to use it. There is an app called douyin which is the exact Chinese version of TikTok that recently required users to bind their Chinese identification in order to continue the use of it which excludes mostly everyone outside the country. Another example would be KaoKao Talk which is a messenger app similar to WhatsApp. However, the vast majority of users are Korean. It ultimately comes down to how the social media is being used, who is restricting the users, and how comfortable is it to those who use it to demonstrate how inclusive it is in general.

What are the benefits of a diverse and inclusive PLN in social media sharing that understands where you are coming from with messaging that impacts the community?

A diverse and inclusive PLN in social media sharing helps reduce all misinformation of all religion, ethnicity, disabilities which leads to fear which results in aggression online. This would be the utopia of a 100% diverse and inclusive PLN social media platform. This would include all views and perspective on any given topic which would be beneficial for a non-bias controversial topics that are fully rationalized.