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Thursday, December 12, 2013

Online assignment #4&5, Kexin Jiang

After viewing all the information in my Facebook and Google account, I realize that everything once existed online has a backup. A digital society creates opportunities for people to interact and communicate with each other online while also provides a way for people to remember past memories. In this way, the backup is a good thing; but the Internet will also preserve some things that people actually do not want to remember. Hence, online backup actually has two-sided effects.
I thought the first time that I used Facebook is before college in 2012, because Facebook is actually not allowed to use in my home country. But after I looked through my profile summary that Facebook creates for me, I found it very surprising that since the beginning of 2011 I already had a Facebook account. So, this actually reminds me of my experience of being a translator for the visiting foreign students in my high school, which is a very special and good memory. It was at that time that they taught me how to use Facebook. I am so glad to find those memories that I was with them. Besides, I also found out a really interesting section in the file, the messages. From the messages part, I discovered that there were some people who I once talked to a lot but now do not contact anymore. I felt a little bit sad when looking at those messages from past but I also felt thankful that Facebook kept those precious memories for me. The other part that impressed me a lot was the ads section, which showed the topics that I was interested in. As for me, 90 percent of the ads topics were about basketball. Since I am a huge basketball fan, I feel those ads topic indicated myself correctly.
Then I took a look at my Google account. I did not use Google+ very often; the only things that I would use Google were searching and emailing. So, before I looked at my Google account, I felt like there would not be much information about myself. However, when I opened the link, I was so surprised to see very complete basic information of myself as well as my interests on my Google account. First, Google automatically guessed my gender, age, and the language I speak correctly. And then it even provided 105 of my interests from my previous searches and 21 of my interests based on the websites that I have visited. The 105 interests indicated from my previous searches were so many that I could not take a look of all of them. So I just viewed the 21 interests based on the websites that I visited before. Those interests included largely the part of beauty, skin care, makeup, cosmetics, and also nail care. I think in this case, Google really provided an accurate summary of what I usually searched online, because I am really interested in those sorts of things and usually bought beauty stuffs online.

The account summaries provided by Facebook and Google are very interesting to explore. And the experience of checking those summaries makes me more aware of the power of today’s digital society. Our life in the digital society are more convenient because we do not need to remember what we have done; Internet already help us preserve those memories and past experiences.

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