Challenge 4

This weeks challenge is to lurk on two social media sites. The objective is to read posts and dialogue between the community on a certain topic and analyze the interactions without adding to it. My topic was the affordability of higher education. I chose twitter and facebook for my lurking process. On twitter there were many posts but not all were legitimate sources of information. I found quite a few people discussing loan payments. But any who so I then clicked on a page because it had a few more posts on the topic. It had even more posts about loans, financial aid, the rising costs of tuition. as well as some posts of a political nature. I noticed that only “tips” were retweeted but if that group shared a link for information then it wasn’t retweeted.

I then went on facebook and lurked. I found more posts of information on the topic rather than just social posts. And it has quite a bit more professional posts. However if you see it you can comment on it. And so I would say I liked facebook more because on certain topics people can add there view on it and be relevant and question things. The thing I observed on facebook is that people or organizations would put out information and then other people would comment on it mostly intellectually. It gave you a peoples perspective on the information as well as the topic.
I slightly felt like I was eavesdropping almost because I didn’t give anything to the conversations.