Participation Counts

 Growing up, some awards given in elementary school was a participation trophy. Just doing the bare minimum is awarded from an early age. As we progress further in life, participation is not enough to get by. Actually getting involved rewards you more and can lead to better things. In todays social media landscape, participation is what leads to more interactions with one another. These interactions could lead to other projects outside the platform that can turn into something bigger than the platform it was started on. Participations exist all over different platforms. Many platforms include direct messaging (DM for short) to interact with various people, or brands. These messaging features also include group chats so you can interact with multiple people or brands for much more private conversations. Twitter includes spaces where you can communicate with others through voice chats much like a telephone conversations. Twitter users use tweets to talk about almost anything on their mind. Instagram uses pictures as a way to express ones self. TikTok includes videos as a way to convey messages to others. These media platforms use hashtags indicated by # that can include a key word or phrase as a way to describe what their post relates to, it could be a genre of music or a popular trend as a way to stay updated with what could be currently happening. A personal favorite of mine is Discord, which is a social media platform which groups uses into servers. These servers either marked as public or private depending on the main topic is about. There could be a public server on your favorite musician, or content creator where anyone can join in. Private servers are personal which can include personal friends or other associates which require an invite from someone in the server to join. I have a server with all my friends where we game and communicate with each other. This is at the heart what participation is in social media terms. Communicating with others on the platform with the features given at hand and making the most of it. As social media becomes more advanced, as well as technology. The age of automation is now emerging. Artificial Intelligence starts to become public to the people. With this happening, social media begins to talk about a new phenomenon that is going on. ChatGPT has been a hot topic for a few months. ChatGPT is a engine where you ask it almost anything, and it will give you an explanation from various sources compacted into a single message. With this new technology gaining popularity brings many new problems it brings along with it. While it may ease certain jobs and make them obsolete, some students use it as a way to do assignments for them. Some students use the engine to write essays for them, ruining the academic integrity that the said schools implement. With the way ChatGPT structures its written answers, it makes it easy to tell how the engine explains its answers. Though ChatGPT is made public, it constantly changes and will continue to change as time progresses. 

With the way that social media advances and as Artificial Intelligence improves day to day, 

Will the news be written by Artificial Intelligence, and so will it be unbiased and be nothing but truthful?

- Rheingold, H.(2012) Net Smart How to Thrive Online, MIT Press, Chapter 3

- Social networks and virtual communities(1).pptx (From Week 2 Readings)

- ChatGPT.pdf (From Week 2 Readings)