A Peek Into the Mind of Mikey G

These articles on social media were very interesting to me. A lot of the information that was shared reinforced how I thought about social media in the healthcare industry. The Forbes article on social media stuck out to me a lot because of what we went through recently with covid-19. During the pandemic, many voices on social media were silenced because of their opinion on the virus. A famous evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein was censored because of his view on the origin of the pandemic and we saw other medical professionals get censored because they did not subscribe to the original mainstream views. In the end I feel like a lot of them were vindicated in their views. On the flip side of people who were correct that were censored, we saw many people with incorrect and unsubstantiated beliefs also get censored. I think censorship is dangerous in this way because it treats all people as if they are children and stifles people's freedom of speech. The article mentioned a young...

I think that a couple of the darker drivers of human motivations are money and power. There isn’t anything wrong with these two tools intrinsically but I believe that there will always be a group of people who will abuse things and use them with bad intentions. I thought this module reinforced a lot of what I believe social media will lead to. If you take a look at the history of media you can see a lot of pivotal moments and I think we might be living in a time more pivotal than the invention of the printing press. We now have more information available to us than ever before and we can be updated on what's happening in the world in real time, but on the other side of the coin we are being bombarded with information that is opinionated, false, or divisive. The information we are fed is delivered to us via algorithms which are built ro reinforce our own beliefs by feeding us things we agree with and things that infuriate us. The algorithms aren’t built with bad intentions but to ke...

When I think about social media one of the first things that pop into my mind is the word selfie. Pictures were a driving force in the evolution of social media. The reason that a program like Instagram dominates Facebook with the jet demographics is that Instagram has a cleaner and more streamlined way of displaying images to the consumer. Instagram is also a super popular app because it adopts/steals other prominent software ideas. You can see an example of this with their Instagram stories taken from Snapchat, and reels which adopt a Tik Tok type model. As long as it’s legal, I guess you can’t complain, but it does seem kind of sleepy to blatantly copy someone else’s hard work for your own benefit. Since Instagram has become a hodgepodge of the most popular aspects of other social media programs it’s become a one-stop shop for me to share funny videos, post what's going on in my life, etc. The only thing about Instagram that I don’t like is the culture of its users. Instagram se...