Joshua @100061900-blog - Tumblr Blog

Week 11 China’s Social Media & Censorship

Before we start, I would like to say thank you for reading my all my blogs for the past few weeks, at this is the final one and for anyone that has been following me, thank you and I hope you enjoyed the ride.

Now social media platforms such as Facebook, Youtube, Whatsapp and even Twitter are some of the most commonly used outlets, now certain countries and governments have tried to censor and banned such platforms in fear of not being able to control them or, to manipulate the data so as things don’t go out of hand, but no other country does this better than China. It’s a whole different world when it comes to China. China has banned all these social media outlets as well as even Google and even censoring things so that the daily average person does not know what else is going on outside of China.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7sogJ7W3TI

A video of why Google Facebook And Youtube Blocked in China

The great firewall of China

Now how you make ask China is able to achieve this, now if you have heard of the term ‘Great Wall of China’, get ready to meet the great wall of the 21st century which is the Great Firewall of China.

The construction of the system started in 1998 and China is continuing enhancing the system till now. Major functionalities of the firewall include DNS pollution and injection, IP and port blocking, TCP reset, interfere secure connection, proxy blocking, IPv6 censorship and Email blocking. GFW is well-known by blocking famous foreign websites including Facebook, Twitter and Google in main land China. It has become an invisible cyber wall blocking the Chinese people from the outside world (Bu n.a).

In short, to not make things to complicated, it’s basically China’s way of blocking out all unwanted foreign entities on the internet to control what they want to show to the people.

What is the alternative in China?

Instead, they have their own social media platforms. Such as WeChat that not only replaces Whatsapp but goes even further than that.

This social platform WeChat was developed and owned by Tencent, which is a multinational investment holding conglomerate. The reason and thoughts behind why they developed this application was to have an application to be an all in one messaging platform meaning that you would be able to do everything you wanted without even leaving the application itself. For example, being able to do your online shopping, banking or even play games and being able to do all of this and not leave the application which is why this it has become one of the most popular social media platform in China. But it’s not just China, even in Western countries it has become a widespread phenomenon, and because of this, they have started to recreate this technology in hopes to recapture the western audience (Softonic Team 2013).

Conclusion

In conclusion, despite the censorships happening in China, there has been some good that has come out of it such as WeChat and many other applications but in my opinion, China should abandon their thoughts of trying to control their people as, everyday people are trying to break away from their system and control in order to attain freedom and I believe they should as if they were to lock themselves from the world, they will be ignorant to what is happening around them and that is not a good thing.

And that’s the end, once again thank you for being with me in this entire journey, I wish you all the best, and good luck in your finals.

References

Bu, RW, n.a, The Great Firewall of China, RacerNet, viewed 24 November 2018, <http://campus.murraystate.edu/academic/faculty/wlyle/540/2013/Bu.pdf>.

Softonic Team 2013, ‘WeChat: What is it and how does it work?’, Softnic, viewed 24 November 2018, <https://en.softonic.com/articles/wechat-what-is-it-and-how-does-it-work?>.

#mda20009 week11

Week 10: Social gaming and social communities

Social Gaming

The term social gaming has several meanings, but today we will focus on the social aspect of it which is, social gaming is when multiple players interact with one another in order to play a game may it be online or even offline, it be a cooperative game or through competing with one another, also, Within a social game, an individual player is aware of other players’ presence, actions and accomplishments. Social game players are also able to interact with each other. Besides that, people with the same interest will tend to form communities among each other so that they may exchange thoughts and opinions among themselves or even meet up and play together.

Social gaming in tabletop gaming

Quick Summary:

Tabletop games are games that are normally played on a table or other flat surface, such as board games, card games, dice games, miniatures wargames or tile-based games.

In order to play a game of tabletop games for example board games, it requires players to interact with one another in order to play, may it be a cooperative game or competitive.

People who play such games, will form communities to share or to even meet up to play table top games.

Sabah TableTop Community

Through the power that is tabletop gaming, it has brought in many different individuals, regardless of their gender, race and so forth.

A convention where by people meet up to play board games

Besides just different backgrounds, people with disabilities can play them as well, for example, a blind player named Richard has found a way to play magic the gathering, a very popular trading card game that has been around for more than 20 years.

He does so by pressing braille patterns onto his cards so that he can read them by touching them.

Tabletop and crowdfunding

Besides that, many tabletop games have been brought to live with the help of a strong and loving community that just loves board games.

This board game received more than 8 million in dollars through the website Kickstarter which is a crowdfunding website that helps make ideas come through.

Does the size of an online / digital community affect the relationships of its members?

Now in my opinion, the answer for this question is yes. The reason behind this answer is that, when a community becomes larger and larger, it can start to get out of control as if a community which is open to the public, it can get out of hand as take for example that this is an online game and this is a guild which is an organized group of players that play together, now there might suddenly have divides between the members between inner politics. Take for example group A wants to be a more social and casual group, while group B wants to a more competitive guild, this might cause conflicts among one another and might cause a rift among each other and even causing them to separate due to this conflict. The larger the size of the, higher the chance for conflicts to happen as you have so many individuals they may have different opinions among each other.

Conclusion

Now in conclusion, social gaming is a vast aspect in the digital world has as brought together many individuals with the same interest together, may it through their love for a certain game to show their appreciation for a franchise, or through conventions, social gaming is starting to be a widespread phenomenon and is here to stay. Thank you.

References

Weston D, N.A, Social gaming – A usability perspective, Spotless, viewed 13 November 2018, <https://www.spotless.co.uk/insights/social-gaming-usability/>

#mda20009 week10

Week 9: Fan communities & activism

To start of this week’s blog, we will talk about what is a fan and what makes a fan, a fan. Now to summarize it off, a fan is someone who likes a certain thing, may it be a series, a book, a music bands, movies and the list goes on and on. There is a some misconception that fans are seen in a negative light, some quote unquote experts say that fans are just mindless zombies that just follow mindlessly to what they follow and that they just spend their money on a whim, in my opinion that is not a fan but someone who is just obsessive, now what can be up for debate but what I think a fan is and the general consensus of it is that in truth, fans can be some of the strongest critiques, a true fan knows what’s wrong and what’s right, they are the people who have followed their interest the most, they know that if the direction of the for example series is going the wrong direction, they won’t be afraid to voice it out and this is true on many cases. Tldr, fans aren’t dumb.

Fandom

Now that we have established what is a fan, let’s get down to business, just what is a fandom? A fandom according to Henry Jenkins, is whereby a group of people with the same interest on a certain topic, come together and create a social community where they share their thoughts, knowledge on the topic, fan art, and even fan fictions (Benett & Lucy 2014).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmuuOJms62s

A youtube clip that describes just what is fandom and how it works.

Fan Activism

Now an example of fan activism is during the great controversy of the #WheresRey, to bring some context into this tag After the release of the long awaited Star Wars film The Force Awakens, Hasbro the toy company were the ones to release the new star wars toys but to everyone’s disarray, a certain important individual did not make it into the toys, yes it was lead heroine Rey, for some reason, they were no toys of her and fans were furious and took it onto social media and started the trending #WheresRey and it spread like wild fire.

A picture of the toy set with the entire cast except the missing Rey

A comment on not including Rey into the toy line

This of course caught the attention of the manufacturing company behind the toys Hasbro and that they even issued an apology on their twitter saying that the fans love for the series is real and promised to include her into the toy line as soon as possible starting with their new Monopoly star wars game.

From Hasbro’s official tweeter

Fan art

There are still some arguments about how fandoms are like fan arts are actually the act of stealing of intellectual property as they do not get any money from any fan art being sold or commissioned as this is a bit of a grey area as of now but, many companies are in truth very thankful for these fanarts and other things created by the community, even if they do not get a cut of the money from these fanarts, there are in theory getting free advertisements from the artist’s followers.

Conclusion

Fans are something that every industry needs because without them, most series will die off and in truth a lot of corporates and individuals owe it to the fans for sticking with them for so long, from all the support, may it be from fan mail or buying their merchandises, spreading their love in anyway possible, fans make communities great.

References

Benett & Lucy 2014, Tracing Textual Poachers: Reflections on the development of fan studies and digital fandom, Ingenta, viewed 10 November 2018, <https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/intellect/jfs/2014/00000002/00000001/art00002;jsessionid=12pm0n9le0p49.x-ic-live-02#>

#week9 mda20009

Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding

Crowdsourcing

The term Crowdsourcing was introduced by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson in a Wired Magazine article in July 2006, the meaning of crowdsourcing is a term that which is the process of outsourcing of actives by a firm through online communities or online crowds as a form ‘open call’ which means any member from this crowd can complete an assigned task and be paid for their efforts (Whitla 2009).

Crowdsourcing in this day and age has become a very common norm, as compared to just using newspapers or other platforms to reach out to people, the internet is by far one of the biggest platforms for gathering ideas, talents, labor and much more.

Crowdfunding

Just like crowdsourcing, crowdfunding was also introduced by Jeff and Mark during the Wired Magazine article in July 2006 which he describes as a way of gathering money to support their cause by getting the trust of the people usually on the internet so that they in turn will help the cause of the person or organisation by funding them.

Summary of Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing

In times of need, how can crowdsourcing and crowdfunding help?

An example of how crowdsourcing and crowdfunding helped in a major incident was during the April 2015 Nepal Earthquake. It was during the morning of April 25th, between the capital city of Kathmandu and another city, Pokhara, a powerful earthquake had struck. The magnitude of the first earthquake was 7.8 to give an idea how strong it was, tremors could be felt even in the nearby countries such as Pakistan Bangladesh and even India. It said to be biggest earthquake in the past 80 years. The earthquake had nearly killed 9,00 people, as well injuring 22,000 people and leaving about 3.5 million people homeless. The estimated total damage was a total of 10 billion dollars which is about 50% of Nepal’s nominal GDP (Rafferty 2015).

Now this is where crowdsourcing comes in, a non-profit technology company called Kathmandu Living Labs was created by Nama Raj Budhathoki created a ‘crisis mapping’ through the help of more than 2,400 Nepali’s which collected hundreds of reports from earthquake affected areas which was used to map and coordinate where aid and relief was needed (Sinha 2015).

Besides that, over 4 million dollars was raised by more than 553 campaigns that were hosted by three of the largest crowdfunding sites which are GoFundMe, Crowdrise and Indegogo (Sigdyal 2015).

Crowdfunding gone wrong

If every product and ideas goals was met, then it would all come into fruition. There have been cases where a company had started a crowdfunding campaign promising that if they meet their goals, they would release the product and people who backed them would get their rewards and everyone would be happy but that’s not always the case. Take for example the iBackpack. The iBackpack was promised to be a black backpack filled with plenty of USB gadgets, posed as an all-in-one tool for people who travelled frequently with their computers, promising over 50 compartments and even including features such as being bullet proof and what not as well many other over ambiguous features. It had raised more than 700,000 dollars from both Indiegogo and Kickstarter in 2016, and after a year later, there was no news. The company had stopped updating about the products and it was safe to say that they had disappeared with the money leaving many people disappointed (Carman 2018).

Conclusion

Despite there being a few bad campaigns here and there, from companies scamming people to the campaign failing due to miscalculations or over ambiguous promises, crowdfunding has given birth to many successful products and it should not be shunned due to a few bad ones. Thank you for reading.

References

Carman A, 2018, The FTC is investigating a crowdfunding campaign that disappeared with more than $700K, The Verge, viewed 2 November 2018, <https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/8/29/17793720/ftc-ibackpack-investigation-indiegogo-kickstarter>

Rafferty J P., 2015, Nepal earthquake of 2015, ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, viewed 2 November 2018, <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nepal-earthquake-of-2015>

Sinha S, 2015, 3 Ways Nepalis Are Using Crowdsourcing to Aid in Quake Relief, The New York Times, viewed 2 November 2018, <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/world/asia/3-ways-nepalis-are-using-crowdsourcing-to-aid-in-quake-relief.html>

Sigdyal P, 2015, Crowdfunding raises millions for Nepal earthquake victims, CNBC news, viewed 2 November 2018, <https://www.cnbc.com/2015/05/02/crowfunding-generates-millions-for-nepal-earthquake-.html>

Whitla P, 2009, Crowdsourcing and Its Application in Marketing Activities, Lingnan University, viewed 2 November 2018, <http://www.cmr-journal.org/article/view/1145/2641>

#MDA20009 #week8

Digital Citizenship 3: Trolling & Social Media Conflict

What is a troll?

If you have been on the internet long enough, chances are you have stumbled upon the words, you just got trolled bro. Now what does this mean? We first have to explain what an internet troll is, an internet trolls are people with the deliberate act, of making random unsolicited and/or controversial comments on various internet forums with the intent to provoke an emotional knee jerk reaction from unsuspecting readers to engage in a fight or argument. In short, someone who bad mouths someone to get them to react and get a kick out of it. Sometimes trolls can mean harmless things but there are some extreme ones that get pure satisfaction from seeing someone suffer from their acts and it can get messy and ugly. Sometimes, trolls give birth to trolls a number of people have said that, the reason they started trolling others, is because they got trolled first (Kubota 2017).

How to deal with a troll

In theory, the best way to stop someone from trolling you is to just completely ignore them, because they thrive on getting a reaction from you, they want to see you get frustrated and retaliate in anger so with that in mind, if you completely ignore them, they will eventually give up and go troll someone else. In order to stop the cycle, one must not give into trolls.

Does Internet/social media governance work?

Yes and no, yes that governance does help to minimize some damage done by internet trolls as their main goal is feed on misery and suffering as well as the anger of others. There have been cases where by people have trolled and cyber bullied people until the point that the target has committed suicide from these acts so, with the help of internet social media governance, by creating and limiting a cyberspace whereby users are safe from these people does actually help. No whereby even if the internet or social media were to be limited and governed, it would not guarantee safety from said trolls. Take for example China, China has limited the access of their internet as well as social media platforms but that has not stopped trolls from doing what they love most, where it be at their own local social medias or forums, to even using things such as VPNs (Virtual Private Network) to access the rest of the internet, trolls will always find a way no matter what you do.

Are certain platforms more susceptible to trolling and hate?

Obviously there are places bound to have more trolls than others, take for example 4Chan, 4Chan is said to be the home of the anons and trolls so with that in mind, that platform is more subjected to trolls and hate speech here and there.

Is social media trolling ever a productive practice?

Honestly, no, the art of trolling is to get someone frustrated and mad so its quite a no brainer question but than again, the person who is doing the trolling might find it so as to them it is a productive way of having some laughs and giggles.

Why do people troll?

Now this question has already been answered but the reason I am asking this question not as to the reason why they do it but why not? Freedom of speech has come along way and with that, the way we use it has changed as well, because we are now sitting in front computers, we are not afraid of what we say anymore to per say someone half across the world, unless they have a way of tracking you, there are no consequences and that is the reason why people troll as the internet has given them that opportunity to say whatever they want and not think about the consequences of their actions.

Conclusion

In conclusion, just because someone has trolled you in the past, does not mean you should do the same thing to someone else, remember violence can only give birth to violence and trolls only give birth to trolls, do the right thing and end the cycle of trolls and remember, even though you are just sitting there in front of your computer typing comments on peoples wall and videos, your actions have consequences and you should always remember the person you are commenting on is human just like you.

References

Kubota, T 2017, Stanford Research Shows that Anyone can Become an Internet Troll, StanfordNews, viewed 26 October 2018, <https://news.stanford.edu/2017/02/06/stanford-research-shows-anyone-can-become-internet-troll/>.

#mda2009 week7

Digital Citizenship 2: activism & protest

People have been fighting for their rights or what they believe in their own way may it be joining rallies or protesting with signs but now that we have arrived in the modern age, the way people have done so has changed as well.

Ever since the dawn of the internet, people have been finding new ways to express themselves or to show their support in many many ways, and today we will be talking about one of those ways and it is called digital activism.

Digital Activism

What is digital activism? Well digital activism also known as cyberactivism is a form of activism that uses the internet as well as digital media as a platform for mass mobilization as well as political actions. Such early uses of digital activism can be found as early as the 1980’s. Some examples of such activities are like hacking into websites to leave messages but at the same time not do anything harmful as it would to be served as a message and not a major threat unless provoked (Fuentes 2014).

Now that we have that out of the way, I will talk about something that I find interesting as it will be about The Sunflower Movement.

The Sunflower Movement

Now a brief explanation of what The Sunflower Movement is, it refers to the social movement which broke out in Taiwan with the storming of the Taiwanese legislature, the Legislative Yuan, on March 18th, 2014. This was the first time in history that the Taiwanese legislature had become occupied and the subsequent occupation of the Legislative Yuan would last 23 days. The movement involved a number of civic groups and regular members of society but was largely youth-led. As a result, the movement is frequently remembered as a student movement. What started the occupiers of the Legislative Yuan and other participants in the movement to occupy the Legislative Yuan in protest was the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement (CSSTA), a free trade agreement with China which was feared to be damaging of Taiwan’s ability to preserve its de facto independence from China. China claims Taiwan as part of its integral territory, even though Taiwan has its own independent, democratic government. However, at the time of the 2014 Sunflower Movement, the ruling party in Taiwan was the pro-China KMT, which sought to facilitate the eventual unification of Taiwan and China through economic means, as led by the presidential administration of Ma Ying-Jeou (馬英九) (Daybreak Editor 2017).

Well what does this has to do with digital activism? Well I will now be talking about how digital activism made an impact on The Sunflower Movement.

During the 23-day occupation, in fear that the government would block internet access in the area or because there were just so many people in the protest areas, making cell network slow, they began using a newly-released app called FireChat, which can send messages from one phone to another even without an Internet connection. Using a so-called mesh network, the app works by sending a message from phone to phone until it reaches its destination, meaning that the more people use it, the better it functions. In three days it became the No.1 app in Taiwan (Lewontin 2016).

In conclusion the lengths and the ways on how people can show their love or their passion to fight for something and the ways has improved drastically, no longer is it just mere people holding signs and rallying on the streets. It has become something that can truly make a difference.

References

Daybreak Editor, ‘An Introduction to the Sunflower Movement’, DayBreak, viewed 13th October 2018, <https://daybreak.newbloommag.net/2017/07/22/what-was-the-sunflower-movement/>

Fuentes, M, A, ‘Digital Activism’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, viewed 13th October 2018, <https://www.britannica.com/topic/digital-activism>

Lewontin, M, ‘Five Times Internet Activism made a difference: Taiwan’s students protests’, Christian Science Monitor, viewed 13th October 2018, <https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/0105/Five-times-Internet-activism-made-a-difference/Taiwan-s-student-protests>

#MDA20009 week6

Digital Citizenship 1: political engagement

How social media helped Pakatan win GE14 In this day of age, social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, has become an important factor in our daily lives and has impacted us to a point of no return, but not just us mere individuals, even important figures such as the likes of former president of the united states Barack Obama as well as the current president Donald Trump both have an outlet of social media of their own that they use to reach out towards their followers, changing how politics works and how politicians interact with their voters and supporters (Murse 2018).

Official Twitter of Donald Trump @realDonaldTrump

How does social media change how we engage with politics?

Back then, we would never have thought that we would be able to engage directly with such important figures but now, with the power of social media we are able to do, from commenting on facebook post to tweeting on their personal tweeter’s, social media has brought us closer towards our respected politicians. Likewise, politicians can now be more open and direct their supporters as sometimes the media can censor out some topics or some journalist can change the context of an interview to get a big headline in their newspaper. Besides that, social media is fast as it can be used to dispel any false rumours that people have spread in an instant as compared to traditional media outlets (Murse 2018).

How social media helped Pakatan Harapan win GE14

It is no surprise that this story would be mentioned, as a Malaysian, we witnessed earlier this year, during our 14th general election (GE14) we witnessed a great moment in history on how the opposing party Pakatan Harapan dethrone the reigning party that has been in power for more than 60 years in hopes of creating a new Malaysia. It was revealed that an important factor that lead in helping Pakatan Harapan was with the help of social media as compared to the reigning party that was focusing on just making their chairman, Datuk Seri Najib Razak look good in front. They posted messages and tweets and keywords that there were about 155,615 searches and tweets between March 1 and 5 that words such as “bendera, ROS, diturunkan” (flag, Registrar of Societies (RoS), down) had appeared for BN, while “undi (vote), change, pledged, Negaraku’’ (Ruban 2018).

How social media kept everyone informed

During the time of GE14, it was through social media, everyone was constantly being able to keep up and informed with what was going on during the elections. Even through Dr. Mahathir bin Mohomad’s own facebook, he used it to communicate with everyone on what was ongoing and even went on Live to show everyone what was going on during those times that was even faster than the television media. With social media, no longer could the reigning party used any tricks that they have been using as everything was circulating on social media and almost every fake news was dispelled as the main politicians of Pakatan Harapan with the use of social media dispelled them all. Besides that, as on the tally itself, while the results were being delayed on purpose, Dr Mahathir with the use of his own facebook went live and posted the results telling the people that they have won.

Best of all

The memes that came with GE14

And with that I would like to thank you for reading my post thank you.

References

Murse, T, 2018, ‘How social Media has changed politics’, ThoughtCo, viewed 5th October 2018, <https://www.thoughtco.com/how-social-media-has-changed-politics-3367534>

Ruban, A, 2018, ‘How social media helped Pakatan win GE14′, malaymail, viewed 5th October 2018, <https://www.malaymail.com/s/1631921/how-social-media-helped-pakatan-win-ge14>

#mda2009 week5

Is Tumblr a blog or a social network site? #MDA20009 #Week4

For this week’s topic, is Tumblr a blog or a social network site?

To answer this question, we should start by answering and defining what is considered a blog and what is considered a social network site.

What is the definition of a blog?

A blog (shortening of “weblog”) is an online journal or informational website displaying information in the reverse chronological order, with latest posts appearing first. It is a platform where a writer or even a group of writers share their views on an individual subject. This is would is the basic definition of what a blog is but we can go dig deeper in to what blogs are all about and why people use them and of course that would be to blog, at first a blog was originally used by users as a means of a personal that goes back as far as the 1994 as an online journal where you could share your daily life. Users could even design their own blogs structures from headers to backgrounds and etc. Eventually blogs began to evolve, and various types of blogs came out that focused on various things instead of just mundane life, from adventurous lifestyle blogs to delicious food blogs to even blogs about various animals, it was not just that typical blog anymore of diary of just words, it became something much more with pictures and even videos (Djuraskovic & firstguide team 2018).

Okay, now that we covered the definition of what is a blog and what are the various things people do on blogs, let’s move along and talk about what is social network sites.

A graph on the history of social network sites

Figure from: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 13, Issue 1, 1 October 2007

What is a social network site?

To start things of, a social network site a website that provides a venue for people to share their activities with family, friends and colleagues or to share their interest in a particular topic. Some very modern and popular examples are Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter which are the current leading social sites. In order to use these websites, a user first starts of by creating an online profile with biographical data, photos and any other information they choose to post. Which than they can start to communicate with each other by making their latest thoughts public in a blog-like format or via email, instant messaging or video chat. Like many things that start of, social network sites began to evolve as well, what began as a place for personal use evolved into a place to do business, as more and more companies started to use social network sites to advertise products, gain brand recognition, as well as expand traffic to their main website (The Computer Language Company Inc 2018).

Tumblr itself

Alright now that we have all that definitions out of the way, let’s finally talk about the main topic at hand which is Tumblr itself, now what is Tumblr? instead of a another long and boring wall of text, here is a video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z5CgSt_tc8

Source: Common Sense Media

The conclusion?

Based on what has been said here today, it can be quite safe to say Tumblr is more of a social network website that just a personal blog, as said by Tumblr themselves, ‘Tumblr is where your interests connect you with your people.’ as currently Tumblr is still at that stage where its still more about connecting people, we will have to see how it evolves further down the road. And with that I thank you for reading my post.

Reference List

Djuraskovic ,O & Firstguide team, 2018, ‘ What is a Blog? – The Definition of Blog, Blogging, and Blogger’, Firstguide, viewed 28 September 2018, <https://firstsiteguide.com/what-is-blog/>

The Computer Language Company Inc, 2018, ‘ Definition of: social networking site’, PCmag, viewed 29 September 2018, <https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/55316/social-networking-site>

#MDA20009 #Week4

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Joshua