Final Digital Culture Blog Post

The concept of social proof has affected my thinking the most about digital culture. Though digital culture is a broad subject, to me the power it has to connect us with others and to exchange information and ideas is the most profound aspect of it. Before this course, I liked social media and used it to communicate with friends, family, or to entertain myself, but I never considered it as way to do academic research. I recently completed a final for my English language empirical methodologies course. Most of the final consisted of the instructor posing research questions and then asking us how we would go about answering the questions. One thing I noticed in many of my responses was a suggestion to search social media sites as one research method. I also suggested communicating with others either face-to-face or online as a valuable research method. I think without the understanding about digital culture that I've gained in this course, I might have restricted my answers to only more traditional academic methods, which can be much more isolated. 

I used a combination of online social proof and face-to-face social proof in my final project. I talked with professors, friends, family, coworkers, and campus departments about my ideas. The main part of my final project was getting feedback/social proof from BYU's international student population via an online survey. It was amazing to get 350 responses to my survey. As I read through what each international student thought, I gained a better understanding of their perspective and felt more of a connection to them.

Though this post is older, I really enjoyed what Paul had to say about digital culture and connection. This ties in well with my thoughts about social media and social proof and how research can and should be done differently in this digital age. He says, "New technologies give us different powers of connection, and thus the powers to alter the meaning of nearly everything in our lives." I too agree that connection gives meaning to life. Even though digital culture technologies are many times used to exchange superficial pop cultural text or images, there is still great meaning in the exchanges because people are connecting with each other like never before. And the digital culture world of connection has the capacity to allow for the exchanging of new research, great ideas, meaningful questions, etc. So my understanding and respect for digital culture has been enhanced through learning about social proof and connection while I strive to practice it myself.