MSTU4020: Life on Line and Academic Achievement

Have you ever been worried that the selfie you post might look bad? Or have you ever been anxious to know what others comment on your new post? The positive answers to both questions will not lead to a diagnosis of "social anxiety disorder", but may reveal some common phenomena in this digital age.

Though born as a homo zappien, I am always tired of maintaining self-image online, especially when involved in more and more different social media nowadays. Concerns for others' responses, as is described above, seem inevitable, therefore we turn to post different messages and news according to different groups of people we are related to on different media, which serves as an example of what Jan H. Kietzmann puts in his paper: the identity on a social medium is often aligned with the relationship on it. I remember, in Abby's first post for this class, she also talked about the distinction between her post on Facebook and Instagram. In her words, the one on Facebook was just an ordinary "I" while the one on Instagram showed the ideal image of "I".

Both the theory and our daily experience unveil the core element, identities, that distinguish our life online and offline. In the physical world, although we have to play different roles under different circumstances, the bound of space and time acts as a string that bunches all those "beads" to be a rosary. However, the possibility of multitasking provided by the virtual world breaks this congruity by presenting scattered scenes on various platforms, which results in our life online being fragmented and sometimes duplicated through presenting a lot of "I"s on different channels.

From my perspective, the current situation seems far from stable since the entropy and duplication of information we create is the symbol of the uneconomical use of computing capacity. As the phrase "social media ecology" used by Jan H. Kietzmann, will those social media merge together in a more unified form to enhance the resilience of this "eco-system" by taking better advantage of all the resources? I will wait and see.


No matter what the future holds, our attention is bound to be spared for keeping our voice on so many media. Hence, despite the dispute between Karpinski and Pasek over methods to study the correlation between Facebook usage and academic achievement, I always find that we will shut down our phones if we are rushing for the deadline. Moreover, it is definitely a cognitive interference if we try to check Facebook while doing homework since they both need to occupy the our visual channel. Thus, a trivial conclusion here is that irrelevant Facebook usage will negatively influence our work if we try to manage the two at the same time.

Whereas academic achivement is not just an one-off output. If we take Facebook usage as a broad term, apart from following the leader of an acedemic field or paying attention to the page of a research centre, even a relationship that is maintained on the Facebook may play a key role in our academic achievement one day, which is hard to be quantified and measured.

To be honest, I am not so interested in such a big topic on the correlation between Facebook usage and academic achievement for all people. Obviously, it is almost impossible to come to a general conclusion that everyone will agree on as people are so miscellaneous and so are the ways to use facebook. Maybe the best answer to this question would be two words, "it depends".