Christopher Alexander, who produced and validated by using a “pattern language” to empower anyone to design and build at any scale in collaboration with Sarah Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein.
As for the degrees of publicness compared to Facebook, there are some kind of thoughts must be recorded. Initially, Facebook came under fire for one of its most popular features, and now it became a redesigned model—the news feed. The newsfeed is the same as a town square, where you can hear what everyone is doing and talk about it. Some people want to live in the city square so that they are not going to miss anything. Others prefer to live on the edge of town, away from prying eyes and overwhelming updates (Eleganthack 2008).
In my opinion, Social media can have a big influence on public nature and it sometimes changes the way how people live. The nature of online degrees of openness is shaped by the architecture and the visibility of social media, but it is also shaped by people’s social backgrounds, identities, and practices. Therefore, in our tech- modern life these days, how to take advantage of socially mediated openness requires some new control mechanisms and new skills. When we are in the world of Facebook, all we need to do is to understand that socially mediated propaganda is a constantly changing process in which people switch back and forth between blurred boundaries, multilayered audiences, individual attributes, the details of the system they use, and the context they use. From my perspective, I agree that social media reflect and complicate a lot of aspects of people’s daily life, raising questions about supposedly stable practices and revealing controversial social phenomena. My own online experience when using Facebook is that different people do hold different or even opposite ideas about one thing. There’s a lot of voices voted sometimes it is easy to miss in the sea. The most important thing is to always keep aware and form your own opinions through analyzing and synthesizing various social perspectives in detail.
Another pattern I am interested in is the Mosaic of Subcultures. The variety is a problem and there is always a weak character in metropolis. But a person need to develop a stronger character by living with many kinds of people and know deeply about how these values or beliefs will affect himself or even interact together under different backgrounds. In today’s world, when we are having our college life, we meet different classmates who have different cultures, background and languages. We can enrich the college life by using the mosaic of small and different subcultures, and I believe this can make some changes locally and worldwide, even have a bigger impact to the society. This is similar to “small work groups”. When people choose to gather together, of course they will choose and form new different kind of small groups. But if different small groups can join and share their different opinions, I believe this would be better for the whole society to grow up and enrich their social life.
Reference:
“A Pattern Language: Degrees of Publicness.” 2008. Eleganthack. September 19, 2008. http://eleganthack.com/a-pattern-language-degrees-of-publicness/.
Baym, N.K. and boyd, danah (2012). Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(3), pp.320–329.
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