Principle 7.4. Values of a social tool

I am grateful for chat apps. I am grateful for Facebook. I am grateful for internet forums.

Thanks to chat apps, Facebook, and internet forums, I have been able to live a human life.

There have been many days where I would have been isolated and unable to have even a single conversation with another person if it weren't for chat apps, as I don't often leave my room. For instance, I entered my dorm room on a Friday last week and didn't leave or even look outside the window until Monday, but I was still able to talk to people thanks to chat apps (though I didn't use my voice for three days). In fact, I find it much more comfortable to chat with not only anonymous users on the internet but also my real-life friends. When replying, I can take my time to carefully review my response multiple times, and even during real-time chats, there is a brief moment to review my words again, which is not available when speaking. I prefer chatting because I feel I can fully express my thoughts better than when speaking. When speaking, I often regret saying too much or too little, but this doesn't happen in chats. I am truly grateful for the development of communication technology that allows for real-time text communication and am happy to have been born in the 21st century when this became possible.

During the heyday of Facebook in the early to mid-2010s (when there were few ads and only posts from my friends and their friends appeared), I enjoyed being able to read and share what my friends were doing and thinking. I moved a lot to many different cities, and I was thankful that I could continue to share daily life and converse with my friends, even after moving to other cities (and still do so). Also, thanks to Facebook, where I first met some high school seniors (5 to 10 years senior than me) as friends of friends, I became close to them through comments and posts. I am grateful for the great help I received from these seniors who had immigrated to the United States before me. I am thankful to Facebook for providing a place where I could showcase my comedy through well-thought-out posts and memes that I worked hard to make funny. I was overjoyed when my posts received 50, 100, 150 likes from friends. I am very sad that Facebook has changed so much that it no longer exists as it did. None of my friends use Facebook anymore... I prefer Facebook to Instagram. I liked writing long posts of three or four paragraphs on Facebook without photos, and others also wrote many of their thoughts on Facebook. But after people switched to Instagram in the late 2010s, they no longer write. The way Instagram is designed has completely changed the way of communication on social media since the late 2010s. It is a completely different genre. The mainstream genre of social media has changed to almost non-writing due to Instagram. On Instagram, unlike Facebook in the early to mid-2010s, there is no sharing of thoughts or ideologies.

I am happy that I can converse with people thanks to internet forums because I have minor hobbies and tastes (electric guitars, audio equipment, Japanese animation) that I cannot often talk about with real-life friends. One interesting point is that the web design differences between internet forums in Korea and the U.S. have led to entirely different internet cultures.

In Korea, original posts often have long text (on par with several pages on Word) with several photos inserted between paragraphs. The writing style itself, optimized for eliciting laughter, becomes a meme. In other words, Koreans try to amuse people on the internet with the style of writing and comedic development. Or, they cleverly place several photos between text to create a comic-like development that makes people laugh. Then people comment solely on the content of the author's post.

In the U.S., the thread-based image/message board format means that original posts are short (to the point of seeming insincere by Korean standards). There are usually one or no photos, and there is no function to insert photos between text paragraphs. Americans seem to have to rely on a single eye-catching image for humor. Such funny images become memes. The thread-based format starts with one topic and then diverges into multiple conversations.