Twitter

Twitter is a valuable tool for communication.

For this thesis I must say I am against. First of all, you can only place a message from 140 signs on twitter. Short messages like these are very often misinterpreted. A valuable tool for communication has to give the person, who tries to provide a message, the space to make a message. With only 140 signs it gets very hard to get a message across.

Secondly, the main question of twitter is: What are you doing now? My answer to that would be: Why do you want to know, and what is your business asking? There are lots of people though who do like to share this information apparently. I just do not understand why people would constantly want to let others know what they are doing. I also think this information is not relevant at all in many cases. At least, for a random individual probably only around 5 people really care about what the individual might be doing.

In some cases the information provided by one can be valuable. For example, if the queen had twitter, it would be interesting to know what she is up to. There is a profile under the name Beatrix van Oranje Nassau but this is a fake. So, is that valuable? I guess not.

A valuable communication tool should be able to get across any message from anyone. Twitter is therefore in my eyes not a valuable tool for communication. Twitter only gets across the message about what people are doing on a certain moment.

  

Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence is a pretty interesting thing. It is wonderful you can find anything on the internet nowadays. Together we have so much knowledge. I think everyone who has to do something for school just searches on the internet for information and why wouldn’t we? It is easy, fast and there is so much information available.

 

Again on the other hand there is also a lot of false information available and people place a lot of baloney on the internet. It is hard to look for the specific information you need, but even for that something has been invented! Don’t we all love filters.

 

If I search for things on the internet the overload of information always strikes me. At these times I realize how much people know. Like, I do not know a lot of things and I usually go to someone who has knowledge of the specific subject. What I could also do is go on the internet and find information about it. Now I am not the computer type person, but the idea that it is possible makes life a lot easier and gives less worry.

 

All I am trying to say is that all people’s knowledge bound together is like a master brain. For that, we have internet and it is great that we can all share our knowledge. Collective intelligence binds not all information together but also all the people and it helps a lot of persons to understand certain subject matters. People like me need it…! So, thanks to collective intelligence!

Hyves

There are many sites for social networking. Even though Hyves exists for over 5 years already it only began to be a hype for over the last year. Hyves concurred Holland. Some people in other countries, like Germany and Belgium, also have a Hyves profile but it is in general a real Dutch thing. Not only the teenagers but also the middle class and older people in Holland are active on Hyves. It is now becoming so big that even dogs, or other pets, and babies have their own profile.

 You can do many things with Hyves but you first of course have to make a profile. It is for free which might also be the reason it got so big. Which most of the people do is put their interests, photo’s and some general information on their profile. This is not the only thing you can do. You can post a blog, write notes to your friends and chat or send private messages as well.

 When talking about friends it becomes interesting. If you add or accept people they are immediately your friend whereas this in real life might not be the case. Many people try to get as many friends as possible with the goal of getting popular and being well viewed. This comes with fun but on everything there is also a bad side.

 Which many people forget is that everyone can watch their profile (unless you make it private but this is most of the time not the case). Putting your favourite crazy pictures on Hyves also means that your boss can see them!! Which is also not necessary for everyone to read is a note you got from a friend about how drunk you were (or are every day..).