Econ 204

Blog Post

            A social network that has recently become a hot topic in both news and amongst college campuses is the website Juicycampus.com. This website has sparked a new wave of opinions on these internet based social networks that are present in out day today. The website is a blog post website which is basically a forum for anyone to post topics or comments on other topics that people have posted before about basically anything. These people can post anonymously or with a name, but with my experiences, people are posting anonymously. This forum has no real controls over what is being posted unlike some blogs, which must be approved by an administrator in order to be seen. Some of the blog topics, especially here at Cornell, are about drugs, sex, drinking, and rumors about sport teams. This website goes toward tarnishing the reputation of people and forming a sense of embarrassment, much of which could and should be avoided.

            This blog site, Juciycampus.com is indeed a social network with many related topics to some of the material we have covered already in class and our problem sets. The website information as stated in the article, is passed through social networks. These networks are a bunch of nodes that are connected to each other with edges. The nodes represent people and the edges, if positive, represent a friendship between those people. If one node or “person” notices that one of the people in his social network are mentioned on juicycanmpus.com, then he will pass the information through his network until it reaches the person the post was about. This is directly relates to how information passes through all different types of social networks in our world today. These friends that are passing information to its “neighbors” of “friends” can be considered local gatekeepers, which in this class are known to pass information to its neighbors through edges. I know that I did not know about this website until I heard that I was on it from a group of friends that I would include in my friendship network. This shows how the information went from each of my friends through edges until it reached me. Another topic that is related to this course from the article and the website is that of gatekeepers. Gatekeepers are nodes that connect two otherwise separated networks. Basically, there is no other path that the information can be passed through except for through this node, which makes it a gatekeeping node. This website was passed along and became popular through gatekeepers, in which friends of one network of friends that had a friend in common with another network spoke of the website and information was passed on through this gatekeeper.

            Another topic that is included in the website is that of game theory. When you see a post with your name on it or a friend’s name, you have two options to play. You can either post back attempting to correct the information and rectify you or your friend’s reputation or choose not to play the game and not post at all. If you choose to play the game and post back, you may gain some positive back, but that could change if the poster says another negative thing about you to put your reputation down worse. If you choose not to play, you might lose some embarrassment, but it shows that this post does not affect you and you may end up losing less than you would if u replied.

            All in all for me, I do not agree with the website and I would not reply back. I feel that the people that are posting on this website for means to hurt or harm somebody are just doing it to draw attention to themselves and really are the ones that are insecure. I would rather avoid the whole situation and hope that this website is soon fixed, banned, or more closely watched.