Response 1

I now can place a reason to why I never, ever play on Facebook: I have absolutely no desire to make my life public. I’m a very private person with a very private life. The idea of having to manage a public identity is just too much for me, therefore I avoid it. I don’t even have the desire to post my “status” there. This is just a side note, really, but it puts me in that category described thus: “we need to figure out how to educate teens to navigate social structures that are quite unfamiliar to us because they will be faced with these publics as adults, even if we try to limit their access now” (Boyd 138). Truly, I am “quite unfamiliar” with these publics because of my own personal idiosyncrasies. I’m not a limiting kind of parent, but as a parent, I especially want to be the guide Boyd references, and will lean much about my wife for the immersion into the language of social networks.

I am still immersing myself into the language of pedagogies and school politics, which were so heavily alluded to in the two MacArthur articles, but much of Gee’s article was fresh air to me because it is uses a contextualization that I have been immersed in for years now. For instance, there is a book called, “The Purple Cow,” which talks about the development of niche novelty being of greater force than the creation of "better" commodities in the marketplace; you want to set yourself apart. Gee says, “What makes a product distinctive is its novelty … – customized – to serve the identity, lifestyle, or interests of a particular type of ‘customer’ …” (46). This was especially interesting in light of learning about MySpace and the fact that its novelty in relationship to musicians and music is what set it apart for teenagers. Knowing that many are abandoning MySpace for Facebook makes me wonder what it is in the novelty of Facebook that has customized it to serve our identities/lifestyles as a general society that attracts us to it.

Further, “What businesses market now are not products…but knowledge” (46) is extremely true based on what I have experienced. What I have learned about competitive advantage is, in fact, that knowledge capacity is the only true competitive advantage and that knowledge capacity is determined by multiplying your ability to discover with your ability to diffuse. Looking at networks and networking and at what happens with the SAB students, this idea especially holds true. Because of the social media, the SAB members are able to maximize their knowledge capacity about bylaws and such through a “community of learners” discovery of them and the inherent diffusion of that information across its membership. Their knowledge capability because of their informal use of these social media allows them to gain both identity and power in their situation. As hierarchical structures in the workplace become flatter, workgroups are able to spread their knowledge faster with the right kinds of technology. In our day and age, however, that technology is rarely easily accessible because either the lack of funding to put into place the media necessary or, more commonly, the old school thinking is still very much in management despite the creative use of resources that could be with some imagination and education.