Conference Participation Reflection Paper

Engagement in The Conference

The latest conference was successful, and my participation is self-rated as good. I believe the rating is worth the results on my level of engagement and the quality of engagement. In the conference, I presented the paper How Facebook Affects Relationship, under the Communities & Web 2.0 category. I took the time to read six papers, all of which were interesting. Also, I commented on each one of the papers – the URLs of the papers are at the end of this reflection. At the stream, I was an active participant, making sure to contribute to ideas and asking questions. My participation at the conference level was not vigorous. However, I am still working on my ability to participate in extensive public commentaries.

The conference was organized in a way that we could participate as individuals and as a stream. On my part, I was active in both stream and individual tasks, making sure all deliverables were within time. I did not achieve 100% excellence in keeping time since my stream lagged in decision making and task delegation. Nevertheless, we collaborated to deliver quality throughout the conference. Also, I used the collabolation framework to nature my team player and leadership skills and public commentary, which I feel came out excellent. I had desired to take part in the conference promotion, but other people got the opportunity before I could.

Quality of Engagement

I chose to read six papers which attracted and interested me. My rationale for the choice of papers is that I would have an easy time understanding them, finding whether they relate to my paper, and, importantly, develop a relationship with the author. That way, I was able to understand the papers clearly, participate in discussions that concerned them, and engage the authors.  After reading the paper, I began by the shallow commentary at the stream, and when the debate became heated, other people in the conference would come in to discuss the matter. That way, I found an easy way of promoting debates and taking conversations in directions that would result in further understanding of the topics presented.

AY’s paper is one of the papers that interested me and evoked a significant critical debate. In that paper, ‘Fake news’ and Facebook: the growth of right-wing political groups in Australia, accounts that fake news propagated through social media has led to the rise of Right-wing in Australia. AY finds that Facebook is relatively unrestricted concerning the integrity of information posted. The right-wing political groups exploit the opportunity by spreading fake news and propaganda to grow their member base.

AY’s paper agrees with mine in that content posted on social media platforms is never 100% agreeable, which affects our relationships at the family or society level. I pointed out my agreement to the thesis of his paper – the link to the comment is at the end of this reflection. Overall, his paper led to a debate on how social media leads to mass movements, and or stereotypes, prejudice, or misleads may happen in cases where messages propagated are false.

Discussion About My Paper

In my paper, I argued against Facebook concerning its implications on the relationship of users. I recognized Facebook as one of the most popular social media platforms, whose impacts are possible to trace straightforwardly. I found from the literature review that Facebook affects individual relationships through concepts such as strong-weak ties, self-presentation, and compression management. Also, the effects it has on the relationship of couples include jealousy, oversharing on the platform, loss of communication, addiction to Facebook, and susceptibility to infidelity.

My paper received nineteen comments from five students, excluding mine. Each comment was visible to all students; therefore, some comments were about my paper, and others emphasized on other students’ comments. AM added to my idea that Facebook also harmed relationships through Catfishing – a concept that has already been studied. Nicola compared the information available on Facebook and dating sites regarding how people form relationships.  Overall, all comments praised my paper structure, and the reality of issues I picked from the topic – How Facebook Affects Relationship. Since I was actively engaged all the time, I responded to the comments almost instantly after receiving and reviewing them. I had an easy time answering the many questions that concerned my topic since I had reasserted extensively in the course of my writing. I was compelled by some questions to explain more, but we had to allow others to participate in the conference. Therefore, one student requested that I give her a detail of statistics concerning the harmed relationships outside the conference, which I did through email.

URL for my paper:

URL for papers I commented on:

URL of the comment to AY’s paper:

URL of AM’s comment:

URL of Nicola’s comment :