On Tuesday when I entered class I was actually quite excited about having the ability to use an entire class period to mindlessly surf the internet and not talk. In the beginning I found myself on Facebook like per usual with my Twitter, Email, and chat screen up for participation. Normally, when I am at home procrastinating I can spend an unlimited amount of time on Facebook alone looking at every post on my wall, but for some reason yesterday I couldn’t bare to spend more than 5 minutes looking at all the things going on. It was mostly due to my chat window being open and distracting me with bings and bright colors as people started posting things. It directed my attention to the discussion the class was having, and I found myself participating much more in class discussions when social media was involved than when we have class discussions without social media. It surprised me because I thought I wouldn’t really find much to discuss when we weren’t talking. I was happily mistaken though.

One particular discussion we had during our chat session online was about why we seemed more drawn to that medium than say Email or Twitter and most people agreed that it was self-gratification. I find myself thinking I was drawn to chat mostly because it was harder to ignore than the other forms. I easily got distracted by the colors and sounds that chat was producing so that it made it hard to do anything else but participate and pay attention in the chat.

The chat was a new but almost familiar way for us to communicate and it had less pressure attached to it. It was like the exact opposite of what Young-Hae piece presented when it was said that…

“The Internet and Web have become familiar and even boring and sometimes disagreeable spaces. The Web artist’s goal is to make it become less familiar, less boring, less disagreeable, to make it become fresh and new again…”

The chat room was a almost familiar yet unfamiliar way for us to have a class discussion that also gave us a much faster way to respond to each other. I used Twitter also to post things, but it wasn’t as user friendly for a class discussion and neither was Email. The ability to not have to refresh the page to see what the latest post was or to get the comment in instant time was nice.

 

https://randolphhum.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/todays-meet.gif

This specific chatroom actually advertises directly as a way to address the audience and receive feedback in real time. So, for me personally, using the chatroom was easiest to getting responses and having the almost familiar class discussion set up that we normally did. But because there was less pressure associated with it and I could almost be more myself in the chat room I participated more than I do in the classic class discussion set up.