First off, I want to say that i will be using they/them pronouns or their name to refer to the author, since I didn’t see them specify any pronouns on their blog. Regarding Asia’s post here, I broadly agree with much of what they wrote. The concept of public communication being a double edged sword is something that I touched upon in my post, as well as the concept of networking online allowing for people to feel more comfortable with self-disclosure. I also tend to agree with their writings on why we engage in networked publics, though I did not place the emphasis that this writer did on the overall importance of social media networking. While it is certainly true that social media networking has been more and more important as time has gone on these past few years, especially in light of the covid pandemic, it has been my experience that there are people who still greatly value in-person networking, and, to use the example that they used, those who still greatly value the effort people will go to to drop off a resume in person rather than applying online with a few clicks. The last thing that I wanted to reflect on in this post is regarding the line “Thus, networking using social media is not a passive experience of hitting ‘follow’ and ‘follow back’ but an active iteration of searching, communicating, and collaborating with others in the network.” While I think that the bulk of productive networking could certainly be described like this, I think that the follow and follow back element is still an important part of the networking process. Specifically, to me, it seems to me like it would fall into the category of the connectivity layer of networking (very weak ties) as described in the reading by Rajagopal et al.. I think that the use of the friend-ing/following/connecting etc tools provided by the social network is often the first step in the networking process, being the initial creation of an (albeit very tenuous) connection that can be built upon and activated later on. Overall I think that Asia offered well thought out and insightful reflections, and I am thankful to them for sharing their analysis and letting me share my own thoughts about what they wrote.
Next, I want to discuss my thoughts about Catriona’s post. I think that while a lot of what she wrote about how different social media services can serve different purposes in terms of networking, I think that having linkedin as the definitive best one for networking isn’t quite true. While for a lot of the more “professional” business world it may be the best, I think that alternatives like Instagram of Discord may be best for certain careers, specifically with work like fashion in Instagram’s case, and esports or other internet-hobby related content creation like YouTube in Discord’s case. I have friends that do work in these fields, and they tend to use the social medias I mentioned as their primary tools for networking, outside of making use of in person connections. I think that setting up a paradigm that has these sites as inherently worse in terms of networking could implicitly devalue the work that takes place using these sites as the primary site of networking. In my experience/opinion, many social networking sites can be used for networking, all located within their own specific professional subcultures of those that makes use of them.
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