Oh my god! I know how far I am behind in these blog posts I feel really bad about it but two jobs, both of which have one of their most frantic times of the year this month have been keeping me more than busy. Once I get caught up I will keep up. Hopefully the quality of the posts will outweigh their late start? :-/
Hope so
For this week’s original topic I thought about looking in to what exactly social media entails and how easy is it to define. The example I want to bring up, and ultimately question is Dropbox. Dropbox is a tool that I use for debate to make it easier to share files and research. Though there are not pictures and status updates on Dropbox, it does allow a lot of information that potentially could be personal (though usually isn’t). At its core what a social media site other than a portal to share information with others.
Dropbox is a very simple idea in concept that is probably more impressive in terms of coding than I could give credit to. With a dropbox account one can invite others to join a “dropbox” that acts as a shared folder on the computer. You can access the folder from anywhere and it seamlessly will update anytime you are connected to the internet. To use the debate teams as an example I am not only able to edit, work on and share files from anywhere with my whole team, but I am able to separate both of my debate teams and have individual folders for each team. Not only does it improve my efficiency but organization is much easier than copied paper evidence could ever hope to be.
I know this doesn’t seem like what we imagine as social media but I’m not sure it isn’t at least capturing some aspects of social media. I am updated with a small unobtrusive notice on my taskbar any time someone updates a file and though there is not necessarily a signature just from communication between the group and what types of things people would want to work on you can usually have a good idea who has done what. It doesn’t have a messaging system, but it could be used as one theoretically. And everything you share on traditional social media sites can be shared through folders on Dropbox.
I thought this was a good original post because it could introduce you to a program you may have not already known about and could make you question your definition of social media.
So is Dropbox a form of social media, or is it something else?
I think it is acceptable to label Dropbox as a social media platform. Communication is not limited to the exchange of ideas in the form of a conversation. The example you gave illustrates that there is an ongoing interaction between different people in a specific document. That IS a a collective effort. Even though the main purpose of Dropbox is not to post comments and pictures about our daily life, we should not limit the notion of social media as the exchange of thoughts/pictures/comments about our social life, but rather as something bigger that entails all possible aspects of it.
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