EZ Communications

According to Prensky, what category do you fall into, and how has this affected your learning? I'm a Digital Native. I enjoy being a Digital Native, and think it has served me well up to this point. I think there's probably levels to being a Digital Native -- Prensky wrote about this subject ~20 years ago now and the digital age has only continued to catapult itself into the future. I think that I'm probably one of the first generations of Digital Natives, born in 1997, right at the beginning of the .com boom and just as home PC's were about to enter the market is around the time that I was old enough to be capable of using them. I find myself today being shocked at what kids in elementary school can do with technology. So, while I'm certainly a Native and a lot of this digital era has come naturally to me and is still intuitive, I think there will be another shift. It won't just be Natives and Immigrants, technology is changing so much that kids today will now ...

 Knapp's Relational Model For the purpose of this post I decided to analyze my relationship with one of my oldest friends. We grew up together, so the initiating phase of our relationship is something that I don't even remember -- our parents were friends so we were friends, basically since before I could talk. Most of my childhood we grew up in the same city and saw each other on a regular basis. My family ended up moving away right before I started high school and we were forced into the stagnation phase of Knapp's model. Source:  https://www.communicationtheory.org/knapps-relationship-model/ Since then we've fluctuated around the middle, re-integrating at points, bonding over new things, but never really differentiating. I think that this will be a lifelong friendship and I can't imagine a day where I don't feel comfortable picking up the phone and text or calling him. Online communication has allowed our relationship to remain healthy and active. We share a ...

Do different social networking sites offer other benefits and drawbacks? I think different social media sites inherently offer different strengths and weaknesses within their platform. Each network caters to a somewhat different audience -- Facebook still appeals to an older generation, offers long-form text capabilities and makes it easy to see each others "friends"; Twitter (or X) offers an onslaught of short-form text and videos, this is a platform that is perfect for breaking news and headlines; Instagram is an image based platform, this offers users an excess of visual content. All of these networks are slightly different, but they also share a lot more similarities than differences at their core -- especially when considering impact on mental health. Reference: https://www.statista.com/chart/30579/us-survey-girls-of-exposure-to-harmful-social-media-content/ This chart highlights a decent amount of access to mental health resources on social media. The problem is that th...

 My name is Ethan Krueger and I'm a Senior at OSU in the Digital Communications program.  I'm originally from Seattle, WA but am currently living in Portland, OR while my girlfriend is in chiropractic school. We got a corgi last year and have been adventuring around Oregon with her ever since. My two biggest passions in life are Food/Cooking and Sports -- I'm not sure exactly what I want to do for a career yet but if I can find something at the crossroads of media and sports that would be a dream.  I have been actively trying to scale back my online social media intake, but my primary channels are Twitter and Instagram. I don't actually do that much "communicating" on either platform as much as consume sports and cooking content.  I think this class sounds very real world applicable and I'm excited to get started!