Thoughts on SNS

The first impression from this page was the pretty stale and uninteresting due to the dull presentation combined with a long page. At least they included a navigation...bar? list? I'm not quite sure what to call that thing there. But putting that aside, some parts of this article were interesting to read, namely the histories of various social networking sites (SNSs), and some of the descriptions of how they worked and what their intentions were. Although I guess that's really just my opinion as someone who didn't know where the Hell SNSs came from (they seemed to just pop up out of nowhere in 2004/2005).

As far as the content goes, I thought it was a decent crash course in the motives and functions of SNSs, but not much else occurred in the article. Judging by the abstract and the title (SNSs: definition, history, scholarship), though, a crash course may have been the desired result.

Considering the article from a rhetorical standpoint, I don't think the author did all too great a job of imparting ideas and using effective language. Most of the time I found myself bored and skipping over sentences or even paragraphs at a time if a quick skim didn't pique any interest. The language was pretty dry and uninspiring, and used (what I feel was) too many technical terms that weren't really called for, nor explained either before or afterwards. As an audience member for this article, I can't say that I feel I took much from it. The areas that shone through as interesting and enlightening were those that were written casually and naturally, seemingly without conscious effort to be eduational. Perhaps the author should have taken that approach toward the article as a whole (though of course, the intrinsic nature of the article is to educate, forcing language to reflect that purpose is counteractive).