Overview

SCENARIO
A Day in Your Online Life 13
1

PURPOSE

Understanding how you communicate online

AUDIENCE

You and your instructor

CONTEXT

Your life

TEXT

Data and analytical report (1,500 words)

Overview

Although it’s hard to imagine today, there was a time when people got along without e-mail, websites, text messages, tweets, or smartphones. Hard to imagine because for most of us today, these technologies have become nearly constant companions in our everyday lives: We use them to talk to friends, family, colleagues, and strangers; we use them to shop for everything from shoes to airline tickets; we use them to watch movies and listen to music; we use them to locate restaurants to eat at — and then to find turn-by-turn directions to get there and to write ratings of our meal after we’re done.

What’s even more surprising are the complex ways that we’ve developed for using the different technologies for different purposes: You might post a Twitter message to alert close friends of your movement from one place to another, but realize that giving the same information to one of your parents will require an e-mail message or cellphone call. You know that you can send a text to one of your profs with a question about an assignment, but that others will require an e-mail or even an office visit because they don’t text. Your grandfather forwards you the same corny jokes that have been forwarded on the Internet since the early 1990s, and you forward him the same jokes occasionally — not because you think they’re funny, but because you know he enjoys the interaction. Your mom may have a Facebook page where you can leave notes, but your uncle deals only with AOL e-mail. You’ve learned, probably without really thinking about it, some strategies for figuring out what types of messages work best for which people and what purposes.

It’s surprising how well we’ve figured this out, but it’s also clear that we all sometimes misstep. You may not have noticed yourself doing it very often, but you’ve probably been frustrated by someone trying to communicate with you in the wrong medium for the wrong message: someone sending you dozens of Facebook gizmos that you’re not interested in; someone using your school e-mail address for a question that needs a very quick response — even though you don’t check your school e-mail very often because it’s filled with spam or requires you to use a clumsy interface (Why didn’t they just call my cell, you think); someone posting an embarrassing video of you to their own Facebook page (without realizing how embarrassed you’d be at the publicity). Given how frequently this happens, it seems likely that you’ve done the same things to others without realizing it, at least once in a while.

2

In this assignment, you’ll spend some time looking more carefully at your online communication. Pick one medium you use frequently (e-mail, text message, Twitter, Facebook, and so on), and then track all of your incoming and outgoing messages in that medium for a 24-hour period. You can either set up the medium to archive the messages (for example, saving your e-mail program’s in- and outboxes) or keep track of the communications as they happen (copying them into a single file along with a timestamp, for example). Be sure you have a plan for tracking the medium in real time and test that plan out beforehand to make sure it works.

After you collect the data, you’ll spend some time analyzing it (see the following sections for Strategies and Questions to Keep in Mind). Then write a short (approximately 1,500-word) analysis of the data that includes answers to the questions listed below as well as concrete examples to support your analysis.