A Brief Summary of my Blogging Experience



The chosen blog post: Using txt talk is a kind of unintelligence or creativity?

I have chosen this piece of blog as I think txt talk has influenced me so much. When I was in secondary school, I used txt talk to chat with friends on MSN, SMS and some of the emails. At that time, I thought I have reached a crazy level of using it as I also used txt talk to write my composition unconsciously! Then, I started to pay more attention to my language used and tried not to use txt talk even if I was chatting with friends on MSN and SMS. After a period of time, I could use the language used for academic and txt talk separately. So I fully believed that if you can manage using txt talk well, you have certain level of managing English as you have to understand the form of and relationship between English and txt talk.

Creating this blog gives me a chance to re-taste the fun of blogging since I abandoned using my Xanga. I am a quite lazy person. It is a bit hard for me to write blog posts continuously without a specific topic. It’s good to maintain a blog for a school course as students can share different interesting ideas for the lecture topics. This provides us a different perspective to think again towards the same topic when we read others’ blogs.

Thanks everyone for reading my blog and leaving comments to me! Hope you also enjoy your blogging experience here!

Here is a list of my comments to others:

http://en2848aggie.blogspot.com/2011/04/wed-monitoring-between-superiors-and.html?showComment=1303132360793#c51677649042161223

http://agnes5062.blogspot.com/2011/02/font-size-pictures.html?showComment=1303133211219#c6640681567681323301

http://agnes5062.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-digital-life.html#comments

http://en2848claire.blogspot.com/2011/03/normal-0-0-2-false-false-false-en-us-zh_18.html#comments

http://en2848claire.blogspot.com/2011/04/normal-0-0-2-false-false-false-en-us-zh.html?showComment=1303134401942#c1731648965348346347

http://en2848claire.blogspot.com/2011/02/normal-0-0-2-false-false-false-en-us-zh.html#comments

http://en2848crystalwan.blogspot.com/2011/03/social-networking-and-me.html?showComment=1303135260030#c4648640360837880606

Is it good or bad to have the new communication technologies in workplace?

I have asked my friend who works in a logistic company as an operation clerk this question. It seemed that he would like to answer me “good” but finally give me a “bad” after picking up a phone call from his colleague!

I asked him immediately for the reason of changing the answer. For him, the “bad” is from the convenience of the use of internet. He is in charge of handling the shipment, booking and schedule things. No matter whenever or wherever he is after work, he has to deal with the urgent orders when he has a mobile connected to a network. He has two mobiles, one with network and one without. I witnessed him using the one with network to check the e-mails and changed schedule from clients while using the one without network to communicate with his colleague! He said it made him feel like working all the time which is so stressful.

 

However, from his point of view, despite of this bad thing, the new communication technologies did help him when he is in work. It is more convenience for him to work with his colleagues overseas. He can use the network to launch a video meeting or simply ask them questions by instant messenger such as MSN. They can cooperate better with this communication method and save a lot of money for the cost of overseas calls! LOL

New communication technologies somehow help people for their work, but also bring some harm to them! It really depends on how people use it and what the employers require workers to do!

Does Technology Control Us or Do We Control Technology?

My answer was the latter one and it is the former one now! What makes the change is an Iphone with an unlimited data plan!

Without an Iphone, I didn’t switch on my netbook everyday. I just used it by mood or purposes such as doing assignments. I was definitely a controller over the technology. I survived without network as it was not convenient for me to use the netbook. I had to rescue it first from my mountain of notes and books on my desk and clear all those stuff from my chair! Haha!

Using an Iphone, I was not constrained to a fixed place. I can use my Iphone to surf the network by anytime and any place. In less than a month, I formed my habit of checking Facebook, finding free apps by itunes and playing apps and games everyday! Here are some captures of my Iphone frame and the apps I played.

What’s the point of keeping contact with the ones who don’t really know you and staying away from the ones who really love you?

Many people always check their facebook all the time in order to keep contact or updated with their “friends’” statuses, pictures, videos and so on. But they don’t really visit their friends and relatives much in person, for example, their grandma and grandpa. I think it is fine with keeping checking facebook all the time. But how can somebody keep herself/himself updated with her facebook friends but not grapping the chance of visiting her relatives in time?

People always think they still have time to visit the ones who are there all the time. Last Thursday, I lost my beloved grandma. Getting to know it in the morning, I called my siblings immediately to ask them to go to the mainland in order to see her for my really last time and attend her funeral. I really believed that it is kind of respect to attend an elder’s funeral no matter you love her/him or not. Obviously, someone doesn’t really think this way. My cousin, who always said in her facebook how worried she was about grandma, didn’t come back to attend the funeral. How ridiculous it was! It makes me rethink about the use of facebook and people’s relationship in facebook.

Facebook keeps people in touch with some of their friends, but not all the friends in their friend list. I think most of you would just take a look at those who are your real friends or the ones you interact with most. Would you suddenly greet someone you don’t know much and you just add them because of the shown common friend list? Instead of wasting time to keep updated with the one who don’t know much, it would definitely be better to visit some of your relatives in person in time! Don’t think that they would always be here for you! Treasure your time if you can still visit them and be good to them!

In order to know how many groups I have and how many friends I actually interact with, I use an application called touchgraph. Here is my touchgraph!

Here is a list showing the colours of my groups.

Red: my first secondary school – PPVIC

Blue: my second secondary school – SLCSS

Green: BAEP

Purple: AATI

Orange: Wing Chun friends

Most of the friends I interact with the most are the connectors between different groups. I found one common thing – they connect at least two or more than two groups.

Using txt talk is a kind of unintelligence or creativity?

Adapted from: http://thetased.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/imagem.jpg?w=500&h=403

Few years ago, when I was having a lesson about grammar, my teacher said, “The one who use txt talk are unintelligent and incapable of managing English well.” At that time, I believed what he said and abandoned using txt talk no matter in SMS, IM or Facebook without thinking much. But after acquiring more knowledge about different parts of English, I rethink this question now and wonder whether the teacher is correct.

As discussed in the lecture notes and quoted, there is no correlation between the ‘non-standard’ language in IM and students’ assignments. (Jones 2003) The saying mentioned above may be just a stereotype or an exceptional case. Rather than unintelligence, I see it as kind of normal language change and creativity.

When languages come to a new era, languages changes according to the new cultures, different issues and so on. It happened in the past too. For instance, when French invaded Britain in the ealier centuries, more than hundreds of French words were adopted to British English and some of them are still used today. The txt talk are going thtough the same stage. A new language is developed and still under development to be accepted by public.

The txt talk creators are really creative to make up all these abbreviations, homophones, emoticons and so on. When people want to type faster, they may just simply practice more and speed up their typing speed. But those creators establish a brand new system of language, txt talk. Not only speed up the typing speed by practicing more, they also do it by shortening the words and sentences to show what they want to say. It is a kind of intelligence and creativity from another point of view. The creators have the ability to manage English well and create those tex talk. What do you think about it? Do you think you can be one of those “creative” creators?

Tagging – a good thing or a bad thing?

Tagging is very popular among people now, but is it really good to use tagging? We can see people using tagging in different websites or computer systems such as Facebook, Flickr, Gmail, etc.

I think all of you know the advantages of using tagging. For instance, it is very convenient to search things by use tagging. You can simply get what you want in a huge database by just typing in a keyword or a label. Flickr is a very good example of it. When you type in a word, e.g. blog, you can get different pictures tagging “blog”. They may be pictures of a real blog, blog headers shared by people or even a picture to promote bloggers’ newly developed blog! They can be anything that is tagged “blog”. When I work on different projects and need pictures to support, I would fully appreciate tagging as it saves my time to get the pictures I want. Here is a screen capture when I use Flickr to search "blog".

However, things always have two sides, good and also bad one. Tagging is good about its convenience, but also bad about its convenience! I think most of you use Facebook now and like uploading photos on Facebook. Would you use the tagging system of Facebook to tag your friends in some photos? Frankly, I sometimes hate this system. When I am tagged in a photo that is uploaded by my friends, I cannot set the privacy of it. I have no control of these photos shown on my page! You may say that I can simply remove the tag, so it will not be on my page. But! I may not have time to keep checking my Facebook all the time. Before you remove the tag, your friends may have taken a look of it already! When you don’t want others to view some photos, you have no control of them. How frustrated it is!

My digital life

Thanks for technological advancement, we are now enjoying a wide range of Internet services and electronic devices such as desktop and laptop computers, mobile phones etc. With all these devices or tools, we can keep ourselves updated to the things happened around our friends and also the world.


And what’s about me? Of course I also have a number of devices and enjoy my digital life with them. Let me tell you how my digital life is!


Laptop was my main device to connect myself to the world. Instead, I use Iphone now as it is much more portable and convenient. Mostly importantly, I can do what I was used to do with my laptop by using the Iphone! I use different ways to communicate with my friends and the world as listed below.

1.      Facebook! My facebook

I think most of you would have a social network website like facebook, twitter etc. Everyday we can update our life by putting up status, photos, blogs so as to share our life to others.

2.      MSN/Skype! Or Textme/Pingchat of Iphone (If you would like to be a friend of mine, please feel free to ask me for my account! =D)

Instant messenger software is very useful. People can communicate with more than one friend at the same time. I always use it to chat with my friends as I can talk to more than one friend and do other things at the same moment.

3.      Youtube!

I can watch video clips and music video from Youtube and leave some comments. As a fan of Twilight movies, I always searched video clips about twilight. I recently watched video clip about an interview of Ashley Greene, who is the actor of Alice Cullen, and want to share with you.=]  Click here for the video clip.

4.      Some Iphone Apps or games

I used to play games on Iphone and those games always build a social networking system. People can register an account to share and communicate the information of the games. I am now playing a game called Pocket frog! I can share my frogs with other players in the network. It’s fun! Haha! I also use some applications to search information about restaurant, locations etc.

By taking this course, I think I could learn how the digital media that we have would benefit and also damage our life in different ways. For example, is the newly developed language system for using in instant messenger or text messages a kind of creative or just error? Would the technological advancement improve or hinder people from communicating with others? Also, I may learn to analyze the forms of digital media and how the different forms would help express ourselves. For instance, how are video clips or photos different in the ways of presenting one’s self?