the--bibliophiles--diary-blog - Tumblr blog

[the--bibliophiles--diary-blog]

Tumblr

http://twiceuponadecember.tumblr.com/

Tumblr is a wormhole no one deserves to be sucked into. And yet, it is a beautiful place everyone deserves a part of. It is a walking contradiction of love, hate, screaming fandoms, political correctness, and just an all around collection of nerds who get to celebrate their nerdiness in every colourful shade it comes in.

           This was the first thing a friend of mine told me when I first got Tumblr. My following message to her involved me telling her I wasn’t going to get addicted. Five years later, it turns out she was right and I was wrong. Oh so very wrong.

           I’ve run hot and cold on Tumblr for the entirety of the five years I’ve been an active participant on it. There are days where I think it’s wonderful. When I’m having a bad day, it’s a place to rant in a blog post, or even talk to others through the chat function, and when I’m having a good day it’s a place to chat to others about common fandoms, or shared likes, etc. But then there are other times where it gets to be too much to me. Society these days is a very socially aware place. For the most part, everyone tries to be accepting, and understanding of others, but we live in a world where even something as small as using the appropriate pronoun for another person is important, and while I agree that that’s something each person needs to get right, Tumblr has a tendency to take it to an extreme.  

           Ultimately, however, I find that Tumblr has had a good impact on my own life, personally. While it is completely ridiculous eighty-five percent of the time, it has taught me a lot about treating people with kindness, and being respectful of everyone, regardless of how they may think and feel (and trust me, there are more options than you could possibly imagine.)

           I met one of my best friend’s on Tumblr. We’ve never met in real life, but we text every day, have talked on FaceTime, have exchanged country-specific packages of candy, and have connected on every social media outlet we’re both signed up for. There are days when Tumblr drives me crazy, and I feel like it’s a place that keeps everyone on their toes, walking on eggshells around any issue that comes up lest there exist someone who will scream at them for making a mistake (and believe me, someone will scream.) But if Tumblr didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have met this friend. And she’s such an important part of my life, that I can’t remember a time before I knew her.

Reflection on the Effects of Social Media

I believe that social media, and the huge presence that it has on society in today’s day and age, has both positive and negative impacts. Of course there are always going to be the instances where it’s presence is overwhelming, and people find themselves saying (or listening to someone older than them say) “well in my day, children went outside and played, rather than staring at a screen all day long”. My own grandma is often complaining or fussing about sitting in a crowded room alone, because everyone is on some kind of device or another. And to a certain degree, I can see where she’s coming from, and even agree with her. Technology is far too much sometimes, and is in a number of cases, abused.  But it also serves as a way to connect people far better than we ever could have imagined years ago.

           Of course there are pros and cons to everything though, even the technological age we live in that boasts so much good. While I’m staring at my phone screen talking face to face with my friend in another country, feeling as though we’re in the same room, my grandma who’s actually in the same room as me feels as though she’s an entire ocean away.

           In an effort to explore the pros and cons of social media, here’s a breakdown of the two social media sites that eat up the most of my time:

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Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/?stype=lo&jlou=AfeBmL-aUSXQk0PuZuxMfTguBAa-_9tb5sJ1TyBCxwcQAHjDOmpMYLS8jgVc2KYphKnloTtviInqj7RGe5-GXGkYGFyPVq-o6tY6voDYbUqUqw&smuh=43533&lh=Ac_yPt1RTo_gLo38

Like pretty well every other social media outlet I’m slightly obsessed with, Facebook took me quite a while to get into. The funny thing is even now if anyone were to look at my Facebook page, they wouldn’t really see very much activity. I don’t post very much, and yet nonetheless, every morning when I wake up the first thing I do is check Facebook. And to what end? To be updated on the minute by minute daily lives of friends I haven’t spoken to in years? To get news updates on which celebrities are in Twitter wars this week?

The world wouldn’t stop turning if I went offline for a day. I likely wouldn’t even miss anything terribly important. A good 50% of my scrolling involves clicking away ads that I have no desire to see, despite Facebook’s instance of “here’s something you’ll like!” Here’s one of the pieces of gold I clicked away that Facebook thought I’d enjoy: https://www.facebook.com/catladybox/?hc_ref=ADS&fref=nf&ft[tn]=kC&ft[qid]=6400448897228764406&ft[mf_story_key]=1976328287983454136&ft[ei]=AI%40a60e70f0ffda6aeab1c665fd880667a6&ft[top_level_post_id]=909145649226597&ft[fbfeed_location]=1&ft[insertion_position]=49&__md__=1

I am not a cat person. I do not, have never, and will never own a cat. I barely even like cats. But a friend of mine that I text every day owns a cat she loves very much, and three friends of mine that I have a group chat with on – you guessed it – Facebook each have between one and three cats. And I talk about my friends cats with them almost every day. Somehow in Facebook’s algorithms, they picked through my personal conversations – because I can guarantee I’ve never searched for or liked anything cat related anywhere in my Internet use – and noticed that I spend a good deal of my time talking about cats.

Facebook has zero idea who I am, despite all of the data it collects and all the things it sees. But I’ll tell you who does know me. The friend that tagged me in a picture of a stack of books, defining what a ‘bibliophile” is, or the friend that tagged me in a teaser trailer for an upcoming retelling of Anne of Green Gables, who I like to refer to as the Anne to my Diana, the same friends that see something on Facebook that for a second makes them think of me enough to think it’s something I’d like. And 100% of the time more than when Facebook does, these friends will get it right.

     Maybe Facebook doesn’t know what it thinks it does, maybe it will never actually send me an ad I want to see. But it is the place that connects me to friends that moved away, or friends that I haven’t seen in a while, or family members that live in a different province. Maybe eighty percent of its news stories are crap about celebrities arguing, but that still leaves twenty percent of stories that aren’t crap. As Highfield and Leaver mentioned in their article about social media, when the attacks on Paris happened back in September of 2015, it didn’t matter where in the world you lived, if you had access to the Internet, you were waving a digital flag in solidarity. And maybe making your profile picture the French flag for a week won’t stop terrorist attacks, or undo the damage they caused. But it does make any given individual in this world feel a little less alone. And that has to count for something.

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Reflection on the Effects of Social Media

I believe that social media, and the huge presence that it has on society in today’s day and age, has both positive and negative impacts. Of course there are always going to be the instances where it’s presence is overwhelming, and people find themselves saying (or listening to someone older than them say) “well in my day, children went outside and played, rather than staring at a screen all day long”. My own grandma is often complaining or fussing about sitting in a crowded room alone, because everyone is on some kind of device or another. And to a certain degree, I can see where she’s coming from, and even agree with her. Technology is far too much sometimes, and is in a number of cases, abused.  But it also serves as a way to connect people far better than we ever could have imagined years ago.

           Of course there are pros and cons to everything though, even the technological age we live in that boasts so much good. While I’m staring at my phone screen talking face to face with my friend in another country, feeling as though we’re in the same room, my grandma who’s actually in the same room as me feels as though she’s an entire ocean away.

           In an effort to explore the pros and cons of social media, here’s a breakdown of the two social media sites that eat up the most of my time:

[the--bibliophiles--diary-blog]

Reflection on the Effects of Social Media

I believe that social media, and the huge presence that it has on society in today’s day and age, has both positive and negative impacts. Of course there are always going to be the instances where it’s presence is overwhelming, and people find themselves saying (or listening to someone older than them say) “well in my day, children went outside and played, rather than staring at a screen all day long”. My own grandma is often complaining or fussing about sitting in a crowded room alone, because everyone is on some kind of device or another. And to a certain degree, I can see where she’s coming from, and even agree with her. Technology is far too much sometimes, and is in a number of cases, abused.  But it also serves as a way to connect people far better than we ever could have imagined years ago.

           Of course there are pros and cons to everything though, even the technological age we live in that boasts so much good. While I’m staring at my phone screen talking face to face with my friend in another country, feeling as though we’re in the same room, my grandma who’s actually in the same room as me feels as though she’s an entire ocean away.

           In an effort to explore the pros and cons of social media, here’s a breakdown of the two social media sites that eat up the most of my time:

[the--bibliophiles--diary-blog]

Proposal

Student Names: Alexander Covell, Ciana Canci, Maggie Kendall, Victoria Urban

Professor Moreland

ENG 3170 Writing for Digital Media

March 13th, 2017

GROUP PRESENTATION PROPOSAL: GROUP #11

Presenting on March 13, 2017, our group will respond to the reading  “Fiction as a Futuring Tool”. Each of the four parts of our presentation will focus on aspects of speculative science fiction discussed by the article and in our own research.

 PRESENTER 1: Alexander Covell (7401983) TITLE: The History and Definition of Speculative Fiction

DESCRIPTION: Before an explanation and analysis of the reading, I will first give a broad definition of speculative fiction. In defining this, my presentation will focus on past examples of speculative science fiction, as the article examines how science fiction looks towards the future. Examples of historic texts of science fiction that looks towards will be cited from Wells, Le Guin, Kubrick, and Miller. Finally, I will bring these texts back to the reading in their work at speculating the future, ending with online forms of speculative science fiction in the present.

 PRESENTER 2: Maggie Kendall (7306649)

TITLE:  Required Reading Summary & Other Pieces of Speculative Fiction

DESCRIPTION: I will begin by going over the assigned reading for the week, and giving an in-depth analysis of it, as it relates to our project. I will then introduce two pieces of 21st century speculative fiction found on the website strangehorizons.com (“The Lights We Carried Home” by Kay Chronister and “Blood, Blood” by Abbey Mei Otis), and I will explain how they relate to the article, and what exactly it is about them that makes them speculative fiction, and what they aim to say.

Finally, I will make mention to an app called ‘Ingress’ that can be played on phones, that is a futuristic game that relates to the genre of speculative fiction. I will explain briefly how it works, and then how it relates to our topic.

 PRESENTER 3: Victoria Urban (7831750)

TITLE:  Speculative Fiction & Self-representation in Digital Media

DESCRIPTION: I will be linking a piece of modern speculative fiction to the readings about self-representation and technology in modern society and digital media. I will specifically be looking at the episode “Nosedive” from the Netflix series Black Mirror, and comparing it to the reading “Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs, and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves” by Jill Walker Rettberg. I will discuss the current, real-life impacts of technology/digital media and compare it to Nosedive (as there are many similarities), and look at how technology/digital media might impact society as a whole in the future.

 PRESENTER 4: Ciana Canci (7188198)

TITLE: Creative Summaries (Comic Strips) & Conclusion

DESCRIPTION: My role in this group presentation is to summarize the other presenters sections with original comic strips throughout the presentation in order to keep the class engaged throughout the presentation and to ensure that key aspects of the presentation get retained by the students in the classroom. I will also be the one concluding the presentation.

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Most of my decisions to join various social media outlets have been based on friends persuading me. In the final project blog post I’ll discuss the effects social media has had on my life, particularly in terms of my ability to get highly addicted to each new media outlet I join.

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Abstract

I plan to write a personal reflection blog entry that states both the positive impacts and negative effects various social media outlets have had on my day to day life. Since I have accounts for Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, and Youtube, I intend to draw on my experiences with these sites to write this blog entry. Rather than simply stating a list of positives and a list of negatives, I plan to compare the negative and positive effects these sites have had on my life, and how they connect to each other. As supporting material, I plan to draw on the readings from class entitled “Self-Representation and Digital Culture” (Nancy Thumim) and “Instagrammatics and digital methods: studying visual social media, from selfies and GIFs to memes and emoji” (Tim Highfield and Tama Leaver). Since these two articles address social media and its effects, with particular focus on self expression and what it means to the people that use these forms of digital media, I feel that they will be excellent supporting material for the blog entry I intend to write. In addition to explaining the impacts digital media has had on my own life, I will also touch a little bit on my opinion of these media outlets, and the impact I feel they have on the world, through what I’ve noticed as a member of these communities. Overall, I generally enjoy using social media, but it does have an impact on my life, as well as the world around me both in positive and negative ways, and with this blog entry I plan to highlight these effects and explain my thoughts on them.

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Maggie Kendall is a fourth year English student in the Faculty of Arts. She is currently working towards a major in English and a minor in Linguistics, and is in her final semester. When she’s finished with University, she hopes to move onto a two year writing program at Algonquin college with the intention of moving to New York to work in a publishing company.

           When she isn’t in class, she is either at the Heart Institute hospital where she works as a communications clerk, or at home with her family, including a beloved black lab named Lady, and two dwarf hamsters named Stella and Luna. She is an avid reader and writer of many genres of fiction, and has been for most of her life. She dreams of one day seeing some of her own stories sitting on shelves of the bookstores she’s been frequenting since she was a kid.  

           In terms of social media, she is very active on Tumblr, Facebook, and Wattpad, but the URLs will remain unavailable at this time.