New Communication Technologies

It Takes A Village To Find A Phone is all about this woman who left her phone in a cab and another girl ended up buying the phone off the driver.  The woman reached out to the girl to try and get her phone back, but the girl decided that she wasn’t going to return the phone.  The woman ended up telling her friend about this story and he was the one who blew up this whole story.  He ended up starting this whole discussion about her and all the things that were going down.  The story ended up getting world wide news and was just something so unique for the time.  In the end, it wasn’t really about the phone, but just about sending a message.

Modern technology was important during this whole ordeal.  If there wasn’t social media like MySpace, then I don’t really think this story would have taken off as much as it did.  Some people became really into the idea of being apart of this bigger story, while others just wanted to see a punishment for the girl who stole the phone.  Without the internet, blogs, or social media, I don’t think this story would have blown up as much as it did.  The connection between the people who were interested in this story was a lot stronger and what was a driving force in keeping the story alive.

When talking about “architecture if participation,” we understand that an every day man was able to track down information that would have never been available if it weren’t for the internet and the community of people who were helping him out.

I feel like people enjoying sharing their personal information.  It feels like this fun risk while also getting to know more about other humans.  At this time, people thought that there was little to no way that their information could ever get leaked, and I think the ignorance of that really helped keep people involved.  The source of trust comes from all the people giving out free advice or offering their services to the man.  There was really no reason to do that, but it allowed free publicity for the companies.  That was a free way to get their brand out and I’m assuming that it worked positively for them too.

An important lesson that I learned from this story was that you are never safe on the internet.  If you are not safe about your information online, it can easily be found by someone else for possibly bad intentions.  Making sure that you have multiple passwords and two-part verification systems set up when possible really help make me feel safer.