Social Media on Mental Health in Sports

I think virtual worlds are the future. Virtual worlds can be used for training and is seen in classrooms as it gets better. It has allowed students to take virtual field trips, learn about the lives of refugee families or study the inner workings of volcanoes (Earle). Virtual reality is new and exciting and may help students be interested in learning. Advantages of these virtual worlds can improve gaming experiences, virtual prototypes, therapy, and training programs for the military, medical field and astronauts. Disadvantages of these virtual worlds is that it is difficult and time-consuming to truly recreate a virtual environment that captures all the details of the real world. Like most new technologies there are minor flaws that can make the experience mundane. However, for many kids it helps foster creativity. Minecraft is a space for kids to exercise their imagination and to connect with others to also want to build and create things (Morie). It allows kids to do things that the...

 First and foremost, a discussion is when a group of people share and exchange ideas of a certain topic. So the main difference between a Twitter discussion, BlackBoard discussion, and an in-class discussion is the medium in which it is used to discuss. On Twitter, anyone who sees the tweet can reply and join in the discussion. A BlackBoard discussion puts a small limit on that, because you can only join in the discussion only if you are registered in the class. Lastly, an in-class discussion puts the most limit, because you have to be live and present in the room to participate in the discussion. All 3 can have the same topic for discussion but its a matter of where and how the discussion is being hosted.

 The four social networking sites I choose were Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have a lot of similarities. You can post videos and photos along with a caption to update friends and followers on your lives. Twitter, however, is usually shorter and quicker "tweets." Instagram is very visual dominated, meaning every post is accompanied with a photo, video, or both. One thing I would also like to note is that Facebook owns Instagram, but they have their differences. LinkedIn is nearly identical to Facebook, but for professionals where you can find jobs and/or job candidates. One thing all four have in common is that if you want to see more posts and content, you have to keep scrolling.

Ways that social networking can be used is in work, avocation, health/medical, games, and for purely social. Social networking can provide many benefits, one being job recruiting. Using sites like LinkedIn, recruiters have a easy way to sort out potential candidates to work for their company. Maureen Crawford-Hentz used LinkedIn looking for consumer product marketing and stumbled upon Alfred LaSpina, in which she reached out to and is now an employee of the company (Langfitt). Social networking, which comes to no surprise, has many privacy issues. Mark Zuckerbergs sister, Randi, posted a family photo which she thought was private, was retweeted by Vox Media marketing director that drew a lot of attention that Randi did not want (Greenfield). This shows the privacy issue that social networking comes with. I think in the future social networking technologies may move onto virtual reality (VR). I think this could be a possibility because the technology is getting better and maybe in the f...

    Blogs and wikis are very similar and very different in their own respects.  Similarities include, one, that both are places you can go for information or for a deeper understanding about a certain topic, and, two, both are a place where you can share knowledge (Cook).  One major difference between blogs and wikis is who it is owned by.  Blogs are generally owned by one person or have one author and others comment, on the other hand, wikis have multiple authors and is continuously created, revised, edited, and deleted (College of St. Scholastica).   Another difference, is the relevance of the information.  Tom Johnson says, "wikis are suited for information that doesn't expire in a short time, while blogs are better for short-lived news."  And once the news on the blog becomes "old" it is no long relevant it is essentially trashed, whereas a wiki will always have relevant information on a specific topic.      I think in toda...

I chose to do my project on how social media affects mental health in athletes.   Social media is new media that is here to stay, and it is only getting bigger. Especially now that there is a push to raise awareness about mental health, I think that there is a strong correlation between the two. I would like to cover the good and the bad of social media and how it affects professionals and even amateurs. I would like to focus mostly on professional sports players because we look up to them as role models. And many times, we forget they are also just human and do battle with mental illness.   Today, there are cameras everywhere and if you do not perform as expected you will receive a lot of backlash from critics and everyday people commenting on posts.   Social media is not all bad, as it is a way for people with a platform to speak their opinion.   And we have seen this in recent events, where many professional athletes have used their platform to stand up for what t...