Talk:Joe Demery
Comment 1: Joseph,
I enjoyed reading your avatar as it was full of creativity as the mother and father’s contrasting views kept my interest. First of all, I liked the point you bring up on the mother's viewpoint of how Facebook is used to keep connected with your close friends rather than a networking site. I believe perhaps you can mention more of what you actually do on Facebook such as chat, messages, or activity with your several groups. I know you provide an example of your friends conversation in the B squad as a group, but in the father's section you say you have had very minimal activity in the past 6 years so how do you stay in touch with your friends through Facebook? In addition, what keeps you from digi-suiciding from Facebook besides your groups because I know for me it’s keeping up with old high school friends?
Also, you state that "we should judge people on Facebook by how their friends post about them". It would be nice to see an example of what your friends post about you and how they interpret it. I know sometimes friends post inside jokes only your inner circle would understand and could post material about you that could still portray you as what the father views (the semi-alcoholic college student). So maybe you could elaborate more on what you mean here because I feel like there are both sides to this.
Another small thing is that I feel like you could clarify how you use your privacy settings because you say you change your name so that employers can’t search for you but you also say you don’t care what the public thinks of your posts with your friends so there’s no point in censoring what you say. These are somewhat contradicting as you want to be private to employers, but then you don’t really care what others interpret how you interact with your friends so I’m just wondering maybe you’re private for professional reasons, but less private for social reasons?
Lastly, from a reader’s perspective, it seems that your viewpoints are more of your mother’s. I suggest that you could say what you actually think about Facebook. Ultimately, there was a lot of substance in your article as I think you connected your avatar to your real life in a creative way through contrasting the two perspectives of Digi-Joe. All the photos were relevant with your points you made and supplemented to your article accordingly.
- Johnson
Comment 2:
Hey Joseph,
You took a very creative route in your autobiography as a father and mother feuding over the authenticity of their digital son. Naturally, I haven't read everyone's, but I thought this was very inventive and engaging. Overall, I thought it was a genuine portrayal of how you used Facebook. By turning the discrepancies into argumentative banter, it made the implications of how you use various tools, such as music interests and uploading photos, blunt and easy to understand. Also, the humor and colloquial language gives your work a nice flow even when playing with the two distinct voices of the mother and father. This type of style additionally gives the reader a closer look at you outside of the explicit content you are writing.
One thing you could do to improve it is to perhaps make a greater stride in analyzing the long term effects of your lack of use, keeping in mind that the content could potentially be up forever since you don't make great strides in maintaining it and with 922 "friends", things can be misconstrued. Currently, you talk about how this isn't of interest because you feel that you wouldn't want to invest yourself in people who would take your digital information at face value, however even this lack of interest has consequences when the other party may have a different opinion on digital information. Furthermore, even though you may not use Facebook as a tool to connect to coworkers or employers, as a social networking tool, perhaps you could talk about the risk of missing out on opportunities from Facebook "friends" that may not be as close as your typical current target audience?
Another thing that you could possibly do is to explicitly say the reasoning behind your lack of use or use of some of Facebook's tools. You do this well with the Facebook groups tool, but regarding other tools such as music or the 'About' section, there isn't much background. For example, I understand that you value groups as a way to stay up to date on your extracurricular activities, but liking music pages could also be a way to stay up to date on your favorite musicians. Perhaps you don't value this benefit or you'd prefer keeping your music tastes to yourself. By being up front with your reasoning, readers can see a whole new layer of your authenticity argument.
Lastly, I'm curious which side you yourself weigh in on the most. You make several valid points from both sides of the argument whether or not authenticity is still an important value to hold over avatars. Perhaps a way to bring in your own concluding remarks is to have the son intervene between his two parents, either to end the feud by siding with one parent or to negotiate between the two.
-David Fein
