VISA1500 – Assignment 3A Keishi Miya

SNS which I feel I am wasting time to reach what I want to find, are still irreplaceable by e-mails or phones. I use Twitter for gathering information, Skype to talk with my parent and Discord and Line for contact with other students in university and friends. I can contact people over long distances or in foreign countries, whereas phone services charge extra fees to talk with my parent in Japan. When I first came to Canada as a high school student without a smartphone or a computer, I have never contacted my parents because the computer in high school allowed me to send English e-mails which I could not write and they could not read. The devices and Skype made us time to contact each other as a family because of their accessibility, and cost.

Twitter is one of the giants of SNS which has 3 billion monthly active users (Nemoto and Fujimoto) and I personally read posts more than 10 times per day. To check and see the products of artists, the political opinions of others, or the stories of somebody, Twitter is a nice platform for me to acquire information and I cannot stop it. I was used to reading novels when I was in middle school, and now Twitter replaces my time to be alone. Except for Snapchat, Fear of missing out or FOMO is caused by social network use disorder and is related to the performance of work or study,(Elhai et.al), and those Hashtags, favourite buttons, replay and re-tweet functions let people enjoy Twitter as a communication tool and daily entertainment by approval-seeking posting. I feel this is not great because I sometimes open the app unconsciously just after I close it or before the exams.

Despite the hour of my spending on the phone, the number of my tweets and re-tweets (posts or share) is only 4 in 3 days, and 3 of them are auto-generated tweets and I do not use any other entertainment-type SNS like Instagram or Snapchat. Thus, I believe I am a lurker, who does only reads the posts on the SNS and does not participate in the communication. “The reasons for lurking included environmental influences, personal preference, individual-group relationships and security considerations,”(Ma) and because I would like to use Twitter to only gather some information. Fujimoto and Nemoto state that it is impossible to catch desired information from those SNS with a large number of rampant posts and moreover, they predict the next-generation SNS have features of “quantify values of information”. And this problem will not be a problem in Skype or Line, because they are made only for contacting who the user knows, and it is similar in Discord, the SNS for gamers and you only can join the server where you are invited. The picture I post here is a picture from a person on Twitter I follow who took his motorcycle. He and I have the same type of motorcycle, and he updates great information and pictures about the motorcycle that is why I follow him, but it was not easy to find that person on Twitter. A large amount of information that a person cannot deal with in entertainment SNS is clearly a disadvantage for me to discover information rather than communicating with others.

Reference

Elhai, Jon D., et al. “Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) and social media’s impact on daily-life and productivity at work: Do WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat Use Disorders mediate that association?” Addictive Behaviors 110 (2020). Web. <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306460320306171?casa_token=FR7uRsmope0AAAAA:ZtpsjBs2oVE83ZIZKkbR7JbjQq4AOd6hTMnBPyW8OUhnudYynqGM6IGMqvuerOkVr4JWXtCo>.

Ma, Liang, Patrick Pei-Luen Rau and Na Sun. “Understanding lurkers in online communities: A literature review.” Computers in Human Behavior 38 (2014): 110-117. Web. <https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.tru.ca/science/article/pii/S0747563214003008?via%3Dihub#b0230>.

Nemoto, Taishi and Takayuki Fujimoto. “The Mechanism of Approval Seeking Posting Guided by Present SNS Analysis.” Information Engineering Express International Institute of Applied Informatics 5.2 (2019): 36-45. <https://www.iaiai.org/journals/index.php/IEE/article/view/431>.