Social Network Analysis- Charlie Betts

For the most part, most of my networks on social media are relatively connected. Apart from a few outliers on Facebook and Twitter, I know/keep in touch with most of the people in my social media network. This definitely mainstreams my social media feed, as many of the people I am connected with on social media are either from my hometown or people that I have met while here at State. While many of these people have differing opinions on certain subjects, they generally all post about similar things.

I generally don’t like or comment on things on social media, but when I do it is because the post was something important to me. I don’t really care about how someone feels about politics or whatever, but if someone posts a big announcement or something important to me, I will like or comment on it. The people whose posts I am drawn to are people that are important and close to me. I do not think my friends have that great of an influence on me through social media. Every now and then when I see someone post something really cool or exciting I might get a little jealous, but that’s about the extent of their effect on me.

I rarely post anything to social media so when I do it is something important to me. The other day I uploaded a picture of me and my family to Facebook and received a lot of positive comments from my close friends and family, who are usually the ones who react to things I put on social media. I don’t think I really influence anyone over social media, unless they really like (or dislike) seeing pictures of me and my family.

I don’t really mind sites like Facebook having my information, as long as it is not publicly shared with my name attached to it. I think that social media sites use my information to suggest friends and connections, which doesn’t bother me. I know that Facebook kind of does a “top friends” thing, where if you create an event and invite people, the friends you interact with most will be at the top of  the “suggested invites” list. Like I said, none of this really bothers me unless sites start getting extremely invasive and start sharing some of my private information with other people or publicly. It will be interesting to see how sites manipulate our social networks in the future.