The final question of the MPR 270 final exam take you on a journey across a variety of social media platforms. Follow the directions/clues toward the final destinations where you will access the question for these problems.
In this course, we focused on creating content for digital consumption. The next question is, how do people find our creative efforts? We begin with a poem or “walking song” from J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit and its sequel, The Lord of the Rings.
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
This train of thought takes us to an important research and analytical process that helps social media sites to measure, predict, and direct eyeballs toward specific content. Purnamrita Sarkar of Carnegie Mellon University and Andrew W. Moore of Google, Inc. discuss this notion in their 2011 paper, Random Walks in Social Networks and their Applications: A Survey. This link takes you to the paper’s Abstract and a sample of the body, and is worth a look.
I warn you, the full paper contains much math and statistical analysis. You need not know about “graph mining” or “personalized page-rank vectors”, although it is worth noting that such tools are used by social networks to attract, measure, and add value to users of their networks, providing value to advertisers.
Now that you have read this far, post your response to the following in the MPR 270 Sp 23 Final Exam: A scavenger hunt, in Question 7.
- As a creator of digital content, why is it important to you that Google, Facebook, YouTube, and the other social media platforms spend time and energy tracking what users see, and how their actions impact and attract additional users.
- On the other hand, given all the sensationalism surrounding the mining of data from Facebook for use in political campaigns, does the analysis of users' digital consumption impinge on individual expectations of privacy?
Your response will be worth up to 20 points.
As a creator, it is important for the various social media platforms to track what users see, so that those platforms can make similar content (your content) visible to others with the same interests, and vice versa. This can bring together a community of like minded individuals, who may never have met one another otherwise. As for impinging on individual expectations of privacy, expected privacy can vary greatly from written terms of privacy. If you don't read the terms and conditions of use, you should have no expectation of privacy. If a company goes against what is stated in the terms and conditions, then trust is broken.
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