The research I would like to pursue for my senior seminar project revolves around complex theoretical and epistemological questions. What applications and interfaces are currently being most successful at allowing knowledgable information to flow between users online? What impact does digital identity have in using such applications and interfaces to interdisciplinarily compile insights, epistemological viewpoints, emerging concepts and theories, new research methods, and empirical phenomena? From my preliminary research, “Free information flow” applications can guide intellectual discourse through an online medium. The activities of the online community can socially direct communication to be educational; utilizing scholarly research methods on an individual basis to create free, credible, and insightful information for the use of any visitor. A user’s digital identity- their ‘virtual’ representation of themselves- creates an interesting situation, where the individual can continuously evaluate themselves, the insights they research, and the information they have received from other users asychronistically. The peer-feedback capabilities of social networking interfaces can alter an individual's perspective of themselves, as well as change the user's understanding of the world. Multi-User Environments take communication between avatars to a more complex and interdisciplinary place, where interactive conversations actually involve more honest dialogue of interests and concerns. Interfaces give the users exchanging the messages the autonomy of directing when the conversation happens. This autonomy allows the conversation to actually be more substantive because insights have been thought-over, rehearsed, and edited (probably several times) before sent. These digital objects- such as texts, research, supplemental resources- used in appropriate interfaces, are becoming a legitimate medium by which information and emerging concepts can be discussed, researched, and given credibility. The scholarly significance of the research I am conducting is that emerging online symposia for intellectual communication creates connections between individuals, potentially allowing infinite possibilities for research culmination and the innovation of new social-technologies. The integration of disciplines into my research will be interesting to say the least. I will be studying communicative aspects and qualities of certain social networking sites. Understanding how social identity is understood within the context of online digital avatars is of sociological, psychological, and philosophical importance. Aspects of computer information systems and the assumptions and epistemology which is utilizes will form much of the methods I use for analysis. The phenomena I will be observing within these disciplines will take use of a unit of analysis based specifically on individual digital identities participating in an online community, and the intellectual interactions which can potentially create new knowledge formations. I would like to evaluate the qualitative aspects of information flow through these social networking interfaces. What are the specifics of why such interfaces allow communication to flow more easily than past interfaces? Such evidence cannot easily be quantified, so an interdisciplinary approach to observing the efforts of popular interfaces must be used to see holistic trends and the valuable traits and skills which exist out of that communication. In analyzing what it takes to create more intellectually valid conversations, and the sharing of research online; a post-modern theoretical approach should be used so that I do not create conclusions about the research, only an analysis which provides images of what proficiency these interfaces could provide to intellectuals. My theoretical approach is not operating under an assumption of creating truthfulness within the information exchanged online; only that with this increased flow of information comes the potential for a culmination of intellectual insights that can provide a more holistic view of reality. How do digital identities use emerging socially-technologically advanced methods for compiling interdisciplinary insights? My work is cut out for me.
Here is a writing about digital identities and marketing:
It is important that, because humans have developed the social and physical technology to form interdisciplinary communication, communities of online research must be able to comprehensively, from multi-faceted approaches, actually find substantial information on goods or services that can quite holistically conceptualize what this product or service is really about. Authentic critiques of certain goods or services can be circumvented through social networks. This allows factual based evidence of the social-economic, and political repercussions of the existence and operation of some parent company's product or service. So providing the digital entity with multi-dimensional resources on the brute facts about some product or service can actually change the way markets function. From http://fora.tv/2007/09/28/Identity_2_0_Who_Are_We_Now#chapter_01, Dick Hardt developed a concept called "Identity 2.0.” This discusses how digital identities should be able to more directly reflect our real personae by allowing the user profiles to transfer with them from platform to platform, between various forms of social media. What this allows is a reputation to develop of the user to the social network, perhaps to future social entrepreneurs or research acquaintances. This means that as other digital identities submit advice or research about an aspect of some market, their knowledge, their digital identities' opinion is of worth. Therefore, the most reliable place to find information about some new product or service will be to research a social network or forum because more than likely, someone else will have had the same concern as yourself. There are now powerful companies using social media to pay certain influential digital identities to promote some specific product or service. http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/04/i-believe-the-children-are-our-social-media-future.html says that because social media marketing is the future, users must beware of future advertising and marketing techniques of products through paid users within the social network. From the http://www.slideshare.net/wah17/social-media-35304 class text, it should be obvious that the generations after us will capitalize even more on the communicative potential of social networking. I feel that the future of social media and marketing could go many different directions. As technologies, and the cognitive abilities of humans evolve, I feel that social networking can be oriented to communicating the transdisciplinary subject matter of solving complex problems through online symposia. When my children are in college, the universities perhaps will not even use traditional seminar-classroom (click and mortar) settings and may perhaps conduct live, recordable lectures- sent to mobile interfaces. Perhaps interfaces for mobile applications would develop to the point of community wide communication and simultaneous education, critique, feedback, and new theorizing new efforts. By 2030, new interdisciplinary education should be available at the user's fingertips the second the thought occurred. Communication online has evolved so quickly, that the advertising and marketing space which has been utilized on social media will always have to continuously change orientation because the digital identities within social networks will always find loopholes to being controlled by such a “modern” market system. I just hope there is still a free and open online social network by the time my children grow up to use it.
I'll be posting more writings soon..
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