Pages

Showing posts with label reason. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reason. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Personal Information Disclosure

Most people are well aware of the undesirable consequences that making their personal lives public can bring, nevertheless they keep doing it. Why does this happen? Here are some possible reasons for it:
  • To stay close with friends and family members who live far away: Social networking permits folks to stay in contact with relatives who live in different cities. College students, sibling in different states and countries and family members who are only on vacation for a few weeks can all find value in being an affiliate of different social media portals. They can stay in touch more often than they usually would without the simplicity of being connected in an internet network.
  • To help construct their own narratives: Narratives are an often ignored aspect of psychology , though they are essential for us and are fundamental for providing us with a framework in which we can reconstruct our memories and think about the future. Narratives of the life stories we tell ourselves help to make sense of our lives.
  • Because they feel the need for more human contact: Social networking sites actually appears to reduce loneliness and improve well-being, as was reported as long ago as 2002 in the Journal of Social Issues, People who have difficulties with conventional socializing, such as those with Asperger's syndrome, experience great benefits.
  • To connect with people who have similar interests: Facebook created it's "Community Pages" for people to connect more easily with others on the social network who share similar interests. It will serve as an alternative to the official Facebook Pages for businesses, organizations and public figures. The aim is to let people create unofficial pages around topics, themes or ideas that don't fit easily in narrowly tailored Facebook Groups.
  • To achieve fame: There's little doubt that the Internet supports new kinds of publicity, enabling average people to develop audiences and speak broadly while also giving those who know how to build an audience new tools in which to do so. This is part of what makes Twitter such a fascinating phenomenon. And Twitter has become a space for celebrities, micro-celebrities, wanna-be-celebrities, and all of their fans.
  • To form part of a community where they feel respected and appreciated: In social media we can recognize how highly respected bloggers receive respect from others. In parallel to honor cultures, where public reputation is more important than one’s self esteem, bloggers achieve huge respect within their community.
  • To maintain relationships with people they meet offline: Social networking sites are a poor alternative to real-world socializing, but they can help people stay in touch.
  • Build on self-confidence: this can be attained through interacting with tweeps who continuously praise your tweets, personality,knowledge and/or looks.
  • To transmit personal experiences that they feel can be valuable for others.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Music Function

Making music is one of our most basic instincts. There’s a reason we refer to music as the “universal language”; there has been no known human culture without music. Dancing and music came before agriculture, and possibly even before language. Bone flutes were found in Europe dating back 53,000 years ago.

Music has the ability to change the emotional and physical status of people, whether they are in bad moods, good moods, or sad moods. Music can also make people feel the suspense or excitement while watching a movie.

Music is part of the complex organism that is the human being and emotional expression is a very great part of that. I would prefer to say that music is a unique way of knowing the world, which goes along with other ways of knowing the world: visual, linguistic, phonetic, psychological, and mathematical.

Music is utterly entwined with notions of memory, of emotion, of identity, of relationship with place and time; of relationship with other human beings, with all living and inanimate objects, relations with the heavens, with the gods, people's ways of interpreting their worlds or their cosmologies in their own particular ways, very culturally specific ways.

Different types of music directly trigger different emotions. While happiness causes you to breathe faster, sadness causes a rise in blood pressure and temperature and a slower pulse. Faster music played in a major key caused the same physical reactions associated with happiness, and slower music played in a minor key resulted in those associated with sadness.

We may wonder what is the utility that music provides to humanity, and if there is one indeed. There are tree main theories that try to explain this mystery:
  1. Music evolved through sexual selection - Charles Darwin
  2. Music allowed for social cohesion on a larger scale than was available to more primitive primates, which create and enforce group ties through the physical process of mutual grooming - Robin Dumbar
  3. The enjoyment of music is just a “happy accident,” a by-product of mental mechanisms that evolved for other purposes - Steven Pinker
What is music for? How does it work? What can it teach us? We feel there must be answers to such questions, but they tend to be scattered throughout a wide range of different areas of study, from acoustics to music history, from psychology to composition. This makes the answers very difficult to find.