Revision as of 04:55, 22 February 2018

Hi Sam!

This is an enjoyable piece that has many sentiments that I, along with many others, relate to in terms of having a "surface-level" social media presence. I appreciate how much your voice comes through the piece and that you explicitly told us you know you don't find maintaining a social media presence important and too demanding of time. This is very authentic and sometimes a hard thing for "millennials" to admit given that we are largely defined by our intimate relationship with technology. It was really interesting to read your interactions with AIM and Smashboard. You go into a bit about your behavior on those sites, but I think there's definitely room to dive deeper into how your activity in Forums especially defined your online presence and why that was so different from what you showed on AIM. I'd be interested to know what unique attributes or differences between these two platforms compelled you to act differently when interacting on them. Additionally, you could expand that idea by tying it back to Facebook and explaining the differences there. Also, I think you could expand on this idea "It wasn't until college that I created a profile with my real name attached to it which definitely shifted how I portrayed myself online." How did your full, real name play such a big difference in how you portrayed yourself online? Perhaps you could relate this to the notion of expressing "multiple selves" through different social media platforms and how on Facebook, your more "complete" self arose. In terms of your quality of writing, I think the overall flow was really nice! There are also a couple of sentences that need correct punctuation and an occasional "too" instead of "to" mistakes. Thanks for writing such a great statement!

---Tiffany Sheu

Sam,

I chose to comment on your post because I found it interesting that you’re so reluctant to participate and that decision, at least in this context, casts you as an outsider. I think that’s a quality that many of us can relate to. I liked your post for its uniqueness and I hope that your revision preserves that uniqueness.

Micro Level:

1. I think you may be able to rework your sentence “Another reason that this might be the case is that I am somewhat of a shy person that sometimes keeps to themselves.” so that it reads a little easier. Maybe something like, “It may just be that I’m a shy person who likes to keep to himself.”
2. Under the “Forums” heading, The sentence that begins, “Again posting under. . .” could use a comma after the word, “Again.”
3. ‘’Media’’ is the plural form of ‘’medium’’, so when you use “medias,” I think you mean “media.”
4. Under the ‘’Not Having Social Media. . .’’ heading, the sentence that begins, “The only kind of. . .” can be tightened up and combined with the next sentence using something like, “. . .which allowed me to communicate. . .”

Macro Level:

1. You might consider closing your introduction paragraph with a statement about your main point or something to the effect that you’re going to prove your main point.
2. I think that the main idea here is that you’re more of a consumer than an online persona, but even an anti-persona is still a persona. I’d like to read more discussion about the idea of “opting out” of having an online persona and how it is still a set of very deliberate decisions much in the same way that the construction of a fully-formed online persona is a set of decisions.
3. I think there might be something more to your decision to avoid social media— something more than that you just never wanted to make it a priority. There ‘’could’’ be some interesting points that you could make if you dig into some more reasons behind your decision, but it will only be valuable to this assignment if you can relate it to the creation of your “anti-persona.”

— John Voorhess