Chapter 5 Summary
After my review of Chapter 5, I had a realization that I really have been using social media, and video sharing sites basically my entire life. I learned many many things about how sharing content and how communicating online through chat sites, DM’s/PM’s works behind closed doors. This portion of our textbook focused mainly on the main differences of push and pull technologies, push and pull technologies were the first ones I read about and found very interesting. First off with push technologies, they are able to deliver information directly to the consumers, like celebrity/sports/news social media updates, IM’s and notifications from some sort of blogging website. But with push technologies, this is really where I got intrigued the most in this first part of the section. I was unsure whether subscribing to a podcast, or just instagram/tiktok feeds was just something you are already looking for but at the end of the day feeds like those are algorithms which shows that they technically “requested” it since they have watched similar videos on the same topic.
In my readings, another aspect I felt was pretty interesting was the idea of “Web 2.0”. I always thought the internet was this way normally since I grew up in the era of when everyone was already creating their own content. This means that everybody using the internet are the ones who are actively supplying it with content. What this includes are blogs, youtube videos, social media posts like Instagram, X, or Facebook. I never really looked at this as any difference from the initial “Internet”, but back then most people were just reading webpages with a bunch of text and maybe some pictures here and there but no videos or “subscribing” features to gain more access, at least not as prevalent at the time. This information made me more aware on how much influence regular people have because of social media, especially journalists not with major news broadcasts.
Another very interesting part of this chapter was learning about older communication services such as Usenet, maillists, and newsgroups. In the early days of the internet these were the very early ways people were able to discuss topics online and share information in a more neatly listed style. It was very cool for me to see how they used to work, and reminded me a lot of today's forums such as Reddit discussions, but they were way more text focused without any of the memes, stickers, or gifs. Overall after my review of Chapter 5 it showed me how many protocols and structures online communication has to go through. In my entire 22 years of living, and using the internet for probably more than half of it, I never was aware of concepts such as push/pull technologies and “Web 2.0”. I was always under the impression that the internet was truly interactive and only the users create the content that is on there.