Week 8/9...Academic Article Five / Disagreements

This article is talking about the issues that people encountered when sites like Facebook added new features. It also talked about the how the users joined a group to get these features reversed because it was too invasive and too much of a change. It covered how a Facebook official provided feedback to this group of users explaining it was a useful change for them and wouldn't trouble them. Upon reading the article you can see that the Facebook official was correct because these changes would only let you see information about friends you had already added so would presumably want to hear about.

Blogging sites were also covered in this article, the example used was concerning support groups. They claimed that due to the rise of people wanting support it became overwhelming to the bloggers enough that it stopped them blogging/supporting people entirely. The end of the article left a rhetorical question of "Are we ready for a continuation of social convergence".

Disagreements:

My first criticism is that he is basing his argument on the negative parts of social convergence through the Internet. His example of the Facebook group rallying against change is again and example of focusing on the negative aspects of social convergence, the rest of the time Facebook functions fine. My final criticism of the article is the fact the blogging group he uses as an example could be seen as biased. This is due to the fact it's only a single group - when there are hundreds of support groups on the Internet. The group is all female and it could be seen that the group was chosen because women are more likely to support people and in this case as it didn't go to plan with most users it makes a more shocking point.