Midterm 1: Part 1

To start with, here is an archive of all of my posts up until now:

• Still Figuring Out Academic Blogging
• Thoughts on Finishing Moby Dick
• In Defense of the #Hashtag
• BYU and Technology
• BYU Tech Expo
• Connecting or Disconnecting?
• XML and HTML: What Does That Even Mean?
• The Digital Age as an Illumination of the Humanities
• Hi!

So, really looking at my various blog posts, I am struggling to find a common thread. But, something that I am seeing a bit of is how institutions like Brigham Young University and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is implementing and taking advantage of available technologies. In my post about BYU and Technology, discussing some ways that BYU is moving forward, Prof. Burton commented, "Too often institutions simply buy a lot of tech and think they are on the cutting edge. But you can have technology and yet not be enfranchised in the digital civilization."

In class and in blog posts, I have seen and heard a lot of discussion about how a person creates a digital presence and how we create our internet personas, like one of my teammates Derrick discussed in his post Reflecting on My Internet Persona: A Caution. As I have been working as the senior editor on BYUs blog Stance and with a publishing company in Salt Lake starting their blog, I have been thinking about how a company or group creates an internet presence for themselves rather than just an individual.

My question that I am thinking of is, How can organizations utilize the technology that is available to them in a productive way, rather than creating an online presence for the purposes of having one? And how can these online personas of large groups like the Church be positively and in some ways negatively effected by this? How does this involve people with a "product" and what importance does this online presence have for an organization/company?

I think I just asked too many questions.