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Anonymity

After reading the Dibbel article about 4chan’s creator, I really began thinking about anonymity online. In order to access many parts of the internet, you need to “create a profile” and therefore you need to submit a bunch of information about yourself in exchange for the services or goods that that website provides. However, recently, another option has been popping up. Rather than wasting your time imputing all of your personal information on one site after another in order to access goods and services, many sites have a “sign in with (facebook or twitter)” button. This button allows you to quickly get right into a website without any of the tedious data imput previously required by many sites. When this first came out I was stoked. It seemed like a great time-saving idea, however, after more reflection, especially after reading the Dibbel article, I’m not so sure that it’s so beneficial to me. By “sign(ing) in with (facebook or twitter),” I am essentially giving all of my facebook and/or twitter likes, interests, and other demographic information to this website and additionally facebook and/or twitter are receiving that I use whatever website that I am registering for. This helps the website that I am registering for better understand me and therefore they change their marketing tactics to what they think I would be likely to purchase. While some see this as helpful I find it kind of creepy. Additionally, this allows facebook and/or twitter to then know that I use the other website and then when i “sign in with (facebook or twitter)” on another website, they will then know that I use the prior website and all of my other data and then they will be able to even better market to me. This “sign in with (facebook or twitter)” button is a seemingly helpful time saver but Is actually just a more efficient way for companies to better understand their users and therfore tailor their marketing to that set of customer. 

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Social Movement Media

These readings are about social media being a Petri dish for fostering dissent and unrest in societies. While they can be a place for dissent, social media can move societies in a positive way as well. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was a huge success and rose millions of dollars for victims of the disease. Without social media, this would have never been possible. Social media is a way to reach millions of people with very little effort which can either be a very good thing or a very bad thing. The fact that anyone has the potential reach millions of people is a very new concept and giving that reach to anyone with an internet connection is kind of a scary concept. On one hand, it means that people can start uprisings from unfair governments, on the other hand, it can create false leaders who can start unfair uprisings. This wide reaching audience reminds me of the Kony 2012 campaign that created so much  stir back in 2012. Everyone freaked out about Kony for like 2 weeks but the campaign turned out to be kind of bullshit for lack of a better term. Something like 95% of the money raised went back into the campaign. It was mostly about raising awareness rather than contributing to the actual cause. And then the guy running the campaign went insane and jerked off drunk in public one day which kind of invalidated the cause even more than it already had been. The power of social media can be wide sweeping and therefore it gives power to those who before, would have never been able to have power. 

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Amateurs and Fans

The Slender Man article really interested me. I think its kind of amazing that such a well known internet character was created in the way it was. Typically when there is open-sourced creation of something online, there is a lot of fighting and a final product never really comes about, however, it would seem in this case that it happened. Like the example in class when something is posted on 4chan, it usually gets some attention for about an hour or less and then they move on to something else when they get bored with it. Yet Slender Man seemed to take off and really evolve into what it is today. 

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Week 10 Gaming

The Nick Yee article discussed how online games are taking over our lives and how they have become more like chores rather than forms of entertainment. I know this is a dated reference but I remember experiencing this when I (embarassingly) used to play everyone’s favorite Facebook game: Farmville. I remember every day getting home (from middle school) and loading up the good old family desktop and first checking my Facebook notifications, and then loading up Farmville. I would then plow all of my crops because (after waiting 5 hours I think it was) I had a full tank of gas for my virtual tractor. I didn’t even really like Farmville, yet for probably over a year I played the stupid game probably spending an hour or so on it a day. I think this stemmed from the fact that I had invested so much time into it that if i let it die, it would feel like a waste. 

Since Farmville I have moved on from such petty games...just kidding, I actually haven’t at all. My most recent addiction takes the form of an iPhone app called Two Dots. Its a really simple game where you connect dots of the same color. It shares a similar platform with Farmville in that it gives users time based lives. You get like 5 lives every few hours unless you want to pay for more but there’s no way I’m doing that. This brings me to the concept of Freemium which was the subject of a South Park episode. This concept of using games to control people has, of course, succumbed to Capitalism. By getting users to pay for lives or other online commodities rather than waste their time waiting for them, these games make a bunch of money. These games also generate money through ads (which I’m starting to realize are everywhere thanks to Consumer Media Culture). Typically I don’t really care about banner ads but when they appear right when you’re supposed to click somewhere on the screen and one suddenly appears and you accidentally click it and it takes you to a different webpage or application, that’s what really upsets me. It also bothers me when games send a notification to your homescreen, thus waking your phone up (which wastes battery life) and then asks you to play the game. This is another form of mental conditioning in that it reminds you about the game and therefore it makes you want to play it, or in my case, annoys me to the point where I have to go into my settings and disable the notifications for that app...either way it wastes my time and still ends up making me think of the game. It used to be one purchase of a game disk and that was it but now these companies, especially those on mobile platforms, are nickle and diming you to the point of both monetary and physical exhaustion. 

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The execs still run us

Media is no longer selected by a ruling class of television and radio station executives. Today, anyone with an internet connection can produce media that has the potential of reaching millions of people. However, even with this user generated material, the same old misrepresentation of women, minorities, social class, etc. exists. So what does this say about media in the world? Apparently, even without a ruling class to tell us hat we should watch, listen to, and intake, people are still racist, misogynistic, homophobic, class snobs. The reasoning for this is endless, however, one big reason I can infer is that we have been trained to think as such from the aforementioned media executives. These executives have set a up a ruling class through traditional forms of media and through this ruling class they have created through years of one-sided, gendered, raced, and sexually oriented broadcasting. 

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Week 7-Minorities

As I read the Phillipov article about emos, one section in particular stuck out to me. When the article spoke about many newspapers talking about how parents should not "leave the young alone to suffer in silence," and then goes on to talk about how "part of the pleasure of social networking sites for young people is the possibility of escape from the surveillance of parental authority." This disconnect between outcries fro help and the need and want for privacy is an interesting paradigm. Teens should absolutely have their freedom, however, this freedom should at least be partially monitored by their parents. In this age of technology, it is getting easier and easier for parents to snoop on their children which, is good in some instances, and bad in others. This new ability to track children's every move with services like Find my iPhone which tracks kid's phones, or the sharing of iMessage accounts which makes it easy for tech savvy parents to view their children's texts are services that can at times help, and at times be hurtful to children. If parents believe that their children are in genuine danger, these services can be invaluable to parents, but when parents use these services to just snoop around, it can can hurt their relationship with their children because it can shatter the trust that the child has with their parent. 

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Gender

While reading the Hasinoff article about sexting, especially about the “ownership” of explicit images and text conversations, I began thinking about how you could create a way for people to sext without the ability to share the conversation in any way. Because there is no actual way to stop people being hurt from having their private conversations and photographs shared (other than not sending them in the first place), why not come up with a way to send these scandalous messages in a way that cannot be shared with anyone other than the person you intend to share them with? Snapchat tried to do this with their wildly popular app that deletes a photo after x number of seconds after sending them to the other user. They also have a similar feature with text based communication where as soon as you exit the conversation, it is gone from your phone. This application is a good start, however, it is so easy to screenshot these images and conversations on both Android and Apple devices, and therefore Snapchat is not the ideal method to sext. If they wanted to truly make conversations private, which is not totally the intent of Snapchat in the first place, they would have to disable the phone from screenshotting the conversations. This could be tough due to different devices having different methods of screenshotting and that is why the companies themselves (Apple and the makers of Android phones) should work together to create a type of private messaging where they take Snapchat’s automatic deletion of photos and add the disability of screenshotting so that conversations can become truly private, unless someone is looking over the person’s shoulder and accidentally sees the conversation/picture, thus making the picture/conversation unable to be shared.

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Week 5-Intimacy

The Clark article, while dated, brought up a few good points about online dating. It discusses a young girl named Elizabeth who at any given point has up to 4 boyfriends. She discusses how in real life she has very little success with boys her age. The author then goes on to talk about how she "employ(s) her excellent skills in verbal articulation and humor, she seemed to have no difficulty meeting and developing relationships with boys..." I found this interesting because it makes it seem like the internet gave her a great deal of confidence to talk to men online. While her lack of luck with boys in real life may have something to do with her looks or other factors, it seems that Elizabeth is much more comfortable talking to boys online. This is an interesting phenomenon that I have personally witnessed. People seem to have a new found sense of confidence the second they get behind a computer screen which I have always found fascinating. Its like they sit down in their desk chair and there are a pair of balls attached to it that they strap into when they use their computer. It reminded me of high school when people would start Facebook or Twitter wars online. These people would never say anything to each other in person, yet on social media, there would be at least one online fight a month (usually more like once a week) at least at my school. However, I saw maybe two verbal or physical fights in real life in my entire four years at high school. 

Social media has also fostered the confidence that is talked about in the article, of an intimate nature. This article was written about 15 years ago and I'm not sure if sending pictures was a reality back then but now the whole phenomenon of sending "nudes" has grown and has caused a ridiculous amount of controversy from girls under 18 sending this photos and being indited of sending child pornography, to the more recent iCloud scandal where celebrity's iCloud accounts were hacked and their nude photos were stolen from them. This sending of a nude photograph to someone has been around since the advent of the US Postal system, I'm sure, however, in this new digital age where they can be send within seconds of taking them meaning the deed can be accomplished with little or no thought. This instantaneous nature that the digital age has added to intimacy has added confidence and the ability to make decisions quickly without much thought before a message is already sent and the possession of another person. 

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Week 4

The Deresiewicz article talks about the history of "friendship" and how the term has become bastardized over the course of hundreds of years. He also touches on the deterioration of friendship through the rise of freedom, democracy, and capitalism in his quote, "we can be friends with whoever we want, however we want, for as long as we want." This is quite a striking quote because it rings so close to me. I am still friends with people that I met at summer camp 5+ years ago on Facebook, yet the last time I actually talked to them was probably the last day of summer camp 5+ years ago, yet I see them on my feed at least once a week. At that time in my life, in Rhode Island, at camp, it was convenient to make friends with these people. For that week, I was good friends with that person, but now? Not so much. 

This is why when I scroll down the feed of one of any of my social media sites, I constantly am saying to myself, "I don't care, I don't care, I don't care." This fake friendship that I have with so many people is so stupid honestly. Like why do I follow the girl that I had German class with Freshman year of high school? Other than the fact that we had German class together Freshman year, we have NOTHING in common and quite frankly I don't care that she's eating ice cream at her college in D.C. yet here I am seeing it. There are about 5 people that I care about on social media, and yet I follow hundreds of others on various sites. However, those 5 or so people that I do care about, I actually care about. These are the kind of people who, when I see their name pop up on my feed, I feel actual excitement and I'm stoked to read what they have to say or see the picture that they posted. This is where the real friendship kicks in. When just seeing that the person posted something and possibly having the opportunity to comment on it and have some sort of communication or even connection with them excites you, I think that is a true friend. Deresiewicz seems to think that real friendship is one similar to that of the Greeks, but that was not friendship to me at least. That was different kind of relationship because once you're engaging in sexual acts with someone it is something else. That is either a friends with benefits situation, or a romantic love type thing, not a friendship. To me, friendship is something in between that sexual love that Deresiewicz discussed and being friends with someone on Facebook. It is truly loving and caring for someone without wanting a sexual relationship with them. It is different than a romantic love, it is caring for someone as much as you can, without being "in love" with them. 

I also wanted to comment on a few other small things in the Deresiewicz that didn't really fit into my first two paragraphs. First off I loved the point about how people turn to making friends rather than being close to their family. While I don't know about that in an immediate family. I definitely agree to that with extended family. My extended family is huge and they live all over America so how can I actually be close with any of them? Additionally, in the article, Deresiewicz talks in extent about how the thought of people who are really close friends were deemed as "homosexual" when the rise of Christanity happened, however, what about people who are of different sexes? One of my best friends is a girl so I thought his argument about that was stupid. Also, Deresiewicz often describes friendship as this kind of perfect relationship, yet I find that I fight with my best friends more than anyone because we feel that we can discuss anything and everything with them and we call each other out on each other's shit. This is not something I would do with someone who I occasionally see because I don't know if that would offend them or not. 

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Here is my class selfie. I think it is a pretty accurate description of my time in class. I took it from a low angle which is where I usually have my phone when I'm in class, unlike many of my classmates who outstretched their hands up and away from their face to get that good "selfie angle." I also have a kind of plain look on my face which represents my typical face in class. I also have my hand on my face, another typical feature that you can see me doing every class. 

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Week 3

The concept of "microcelebrity" in Marwick and Boyd's article immediately spoke to me when I was reading it. While this concept talks about the fact that "micro" fame allows celebrities to be more accessible to their fans, this concept reminded me of a friend of mine who is really Tumblr famous. While he is not technically "famous" he does have a definite fan base. While he is not traditionally famous he does everything that a celebrity does, "ongoing maintenance of a fan base, performed intimacy, authenticity and access, and construction of a consumable persona." He lived in my residence hall for the first semester of my freshman year. Since then he's gone to community college, joined the Navy, dropped out of it, and now he's back at his local community college. Through all of this, he has maintained his online fandom.This "tumblr fame" that he has come across has always intrigued me. He acts like a normal kid 95% of the time and I would absolutely consider him one of my good friends, however, the "mircocelebrity" in him occasionally comes out. I remember one time him, some friends, and myself were at a party and a group of girls came up to him as if he were Tom Cruise all nervous and they asked if they could take a picture with him. It was a completely bizarre experience because my normal friend was being treated like a celebrity

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Week 2

Boyd's article is about social networks compared to networked publics. The article starts off by describing what is considered to be a "public." While the article goes into many different definitions of what a "public" is, the first definition it comes up with is, "people who share 'a common understanding of the world, a shared identity, a claim to inclusiveness, a consensus regarding the collective interest." This definition of a "public" reminds me of the definition of the word "culture" and while there is certainly a culture associated with each social network and its users, does that too mean that each individual and those that are "friends" with them on that social network mean that the individual and their friends are a culture in and of themselves? These people have become friends for some reason or another whether it be that they know each other in real life, or that they saw something on the other person's page that they enjoy and they sent a request. This means that they have some sort of relation to one another and thus they have created a culture or "public" between the two of them. Now, while the liking of one thing or concept can certainly be considered to be a "culture" or "public" by their definitions, can the simple network or web of people that are friends of a certain person be a culture within itself? If this group of people are associated through their "friendship" of a certain individual then their mutual friendship with said individual in turn makes them a culture or a public. 

This then brings us to another definition of a "public" which is that "publics can be reactors, (re)makers and (re)distributors, engaging in shared culture and knowledge through discourse and social exchange as well as through acts of media reception." This definition of "public" are the people who are friends with a certain individual on a social media site and who frequently see, talk about, and comment on a certain individual's material. The mutual friend in the middle of this creates a culture and "public" just by having more than one friend. However, many people have many more than one friend on any given social media site. Not to brag at all but I think that I have at least a hundred followers/friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and because of my connections to all of these people, I have created a fairly large network of people who regularly view and in some cases partake in the content that I post and therefore I have created my own culture of people who part of their cultural identity is simply "following @cletisfox on Instagram." This culture goes for anyone who has any number of followers or friends on any social netowrking site because they have done just that, created their very own "social network."

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this is my second tumblr (my first one is just stupid reblogged pictures so i made this one for this class) and thats why i called this one tumblr #2. i also attached a few of my other social media sites on here, seeing as this is a class about social media. a lot of them are private but feel free to follow me if youd like. 

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yo

my name is cletis. i grew up in morristown and ive been alive for 20 years. im a sophomore studying journalism and media studies and im the secretary of phi kappa tau. i like movies (ferris buellers day off being the greatest one of all time), tv, cars, skiing, and other things. i aspire to grow up to be ron swanson.