Qinqin Liu

Online environments are surely complex and there will always be positive and negative effects of “ life on line ” . Of course, our roles are not just passive in the digital age. For example, the article of Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media helps firms and corporations to explore, maintain and enhance the relationship between them and the customers by introducing a creative and useful framework that “ defines social media by using seven functional building blocks ”  (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy & Silvestre, 2011). But in my personal opinion, in today ’ s society, it is easy and common for people to distort the idea of openness, honesty and freedom of virtual environments. One may be afraid of confrontation in the real world while enjoying attacking other people online without being sensible, respectful or considerate to the people they are lashing because one can avoid all the tension and anxiety caused by face-to-...

I am always amazed at the quantity and quality of the online information we can easily have access to in modern times. Instead of going to libraries or bookstores in search of the book we want, we can simply input key words into different search engines on various platforms to obtain the electronic edition of it. Instead of actually being in the place where the job interview is going to take place, we can simply use Skype to achieve a virtual face-to-face interview. Instead of writing letters to each other, we now simply take advantage of social media to keep in touch with our family, friends or colleagues. Undoubtedly, the technology has offered lots of merits to make our lives more convenient by saving our time and energy. But sometimes those merits blindfold people, leading them to only focus on the positive side which is surely not the entire story. As said in the first article, law is one of the four forces regulating social systems (Lessig,1999) and legislation has already ...

After reading Technology as Social Practice,  I wonder whether there is a comprehensive theoretical framework or thinking system addressing the problems we should try to avoid when making critical decisions regarding usage of technologies. As stated in the article, social relations and technologies are intertwined with each other. Technologies are designed and employed by human beings and technologies are also going to affect people in a way that might not be anticipated by their users, like the incident about “ piano lesson ”  in the essay (Bruce, Bertram C. 1996). This makes me curious about how we can foresee potential risks and improve our decision-making process when it comes to the topic of technologies. Are there any similarities between all those real cases in life about unwise ways of using technologies leading to terrible results? Can those similarities be categorized in an efficient and reasonable way? The other question I want to ask is about an opinion I saw ...