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Week 10: Social Media Conflict

In Week 10, the final week of these glorious blog posts, we looked at social media governance and conflict, and how that connected with digital citizenship. The lecture went through the normal recap of digital citizenship and the power of using social media as a platform. It then went into the juicy stuff, who really runs social media and regulates it. I found this part pretty interesting because I never really thought about who governs the internet and social media.

Next was the sad part, online harassment. I remember as a young teenager, having just gotten Facebook and the rest, being so dismissive of all the cyberbullying videos we used to watch in primary school. Like “wow, I must be lucky because this hasn’t been happening to me or my friends at all!” But then, as you get older, you start to see it a lot more. It doesn’t just come in the one form that everyone first thinks of. As the lecture suggests, it can come in the form of offending people on private messages, getting into arguments with girlfriends/boyfriends and spreading rumours about them. 

I found the reading 'Drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment' pretty interesting, especially the parts about Gamergate. There was a campaign targeting several women in the gaming industry and there were false claims made about their lives, leading to threats of rape and death.

I think it’s really unfortunate how far some people take it, and how easy it is for those keyboard warriors behind their computer screens to harass others, especially on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. All you have to do is look in the comment section of many of these popular posts and you can see it going on. I know from personal experience, as a sports fan, if one of the players on a team has a bad game, he/she will get tormented on social media for it for weeks. This most recently happened in the footy with Scott Lycett, a Port Adelaide footy player, when he received death threats after dangerously tackling an Adelaide player. You can see the story here if you’re interested:

https://www.foxsports.com.au/afl/teams/port-adelaide-power/port-adelaides-scott-lycett-calls-out-social-media-abuse-after-ugly-sling-tackle/news-story/8af6b74ca07b0ae1eb2e557e5b9222f3

Well, another blog post comes to an end. Thank you for all the interesting topics and hopefully reading my posts was worthwhile :))

References:

Alice E. Marwick & Robyn Caplan, 'Drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment'  Feminist Media Studies Volume 18, 2018 - Issue 4: Pages 543-559

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Week 9: Digital Citizenship and the Slow Fashion Movement

In Week 9 we returned to the concept of digital citizenship, this time through social media influencers and their impact on the slow fashion movement.

The lecture recapped digital citizenship and political engagement, and then linked it to the still present but not new, slow fashion movement. Sustainable fashion has been around for quite a while now, and although we are making progress, a lot still needs to be done, especially limiting the purchases of fast fashion from brands such as Cotton On. 

I myself, truth be told, have struggled with this one for sure. Although I have made many decisions in the past to change my behaviour in regards to using environmentally friendly products, such as taking and using multi-use bags to the shops for years, well before the use of plastic bags ceased in supermarkets, but this is one thing I need to get better at. I find it, as many others do, far too tempting to buy clothes due to their low price, but unfortunately this often means that the use of materials is harming the environment.

But it’s not just about the harm of environment, it’s also about the exploitation of workers, which the lecture touched on as well. Workers from overseas are being paid unfairly for the hard work they are doing and are often not completing these tasks in safe environments. This article summarises things well, and also includes the efforts of the Clean Clothes Campaign who are aiming to improve these people’s working conditions:

https://www.borgenmagazine.com/the-negative-effects-of-fast-fashion/

There were a lot of readings this week, but An Exploration of Consumers’ Perceptions Towards Sustainable Fashion was probably the pick of the bunch here. It broke down the definition of sustainable fashion (which, for me in particular, is always helpful) and then went on to the outlook of the movement, specifically focusing on the takeoff of the movement in the UK.

Another great movement to get behind for sure, considering our generation has a platform that many others didn’t have at the beginning of this movement in the form of social media. Looking forward to wrapping up my Tumblr posts with social media conflict next week!

References:

C.E. Henninger et al., ‘An Exploration of Consumers’ Perceptions Towards Sustainable Fashion – A Qualitative Study in the UK’, in Sustainability in Fashion: A Cradle to Upcycle Approach, edited by Henninger, C.E., Alevizou, P., Goworek, H., Ryding, D (2017)

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Week 8: Gaming Communities

I’ve been waiting many weeks for this one, and it’s finally here... I get to talk about gaming!!! Week 8 kicked off with another guest lecture, this time from Taylor Hardwick, a PhD candidate at Swinburne. I was pleased to find out that she is also into simulator games, as am I. She went over the history of games and their various communities, both offline and online. 

She also touched over the importance of social gaming in 2020, staying in touch over platforms like Among Us and Animal Crossing. I know this in particular was very important to me in maintaining my mental health during the many lockdowns we endured here in Melbourne, I was playing Fall Guys, NBA 2K20 and Madden with the boys almost every night, and we very much looked forward to it because although we couldn’t see each other in person, we were appreciative of the fact that we were privileged enough to find other ways to communicate and social gaming was certainly one of them.

Unfortunately, as with most things in life, there is a negative side to online gaming. The toxicity on many online servers is plain to see for sure. I personally get inboxes from other players when I have a terrible round in GTA or a poor performance in Rocket League, them asking me why I’m so shit and telling me I suck (among other profanities and slurs). And unfortunately it’s mostly from 13 year old boys that have nothing better to do. Although I do not use it myself, reporting functions on online servers and online bans have slightly improved this, but the toxicity that comes with competitive online gaming will perhaps never cease fully.

This was by far my favourite week due to my love for gaming, and I’m very grateful that this was included in the course design. On to Week 9 :)

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Week 7: Instagram Filters

In Week 7, face and Instagram filtering were the main topics, and we got a deeper insight on this in the guest lecture on face filters from Lauren Miller. Unfortunately, using filters on ourselves can make us very self-conscious and lead to body dysmorphia. The guest lecture also mentioned “Snapchat Dysmorphia”, which led patients to actually get cosmetic surgery to alter their faces to look like their filtered selves. I personally find this bewildering since there’s a reason why they are actually called FILTERS and not our natural selves. Seeking to look like something that isn’t real and altering our idea of being “perfect” is quite upsetting especially since I am a big believer in natural beauty. 

I found this week’s reading pretty interesting, one of the most fascinating things that was said in it was that was that the use of filters “defamiliarise” our lives, and we see things differently through other people’s perspectives (Rettberg, 25-26). I completely agree with the argument, I think that using filters at the expense of making our own lives seem unfamiliar to us is unnecessary.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jan/23/faking-it-how-selfie-dysmorphia-is-driving-people-to-seek-surgery

Excuse my terrible formatting once again, but I think this article was a nice, simple read about how filters are just aiding our discomfort in our insecurities. Not gonna lie, there’s been times where I’ve been insecure about my body, but I think there’s a difference between worrying about my skin health and secretly wanting to look my best in photos to obsessively filtering my face to look like a beautiful male celebrity or to have perfect skin.

Another great week with an interesting topic, a big thank you to the guest lecturer for her presentation and EAGERLY awaiting next week’s gaming topic 👀

References:

Rettberg J.W. (2014) Filtered Reality. In: Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. Palgrave Macmillan, London < https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137476661_2 >

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Week 6: Body Modification on Visual Social Media

Apologies for the incredibly late post, unfortunately I’ve been struck down by tonsillitis this past week, so due to lack of time and having to catch up on a bunch of assignments and posts, I’ll keep this as short and sweet as possible.

For starters, Dr Mavroudis’ lecture was very eye-opening. I’d obviously known the basics about body modification prior to the lecture, but the reasons that people decide to make these changes to themselves weren’t actually known to me. The fact that many influencers strive to look in real life how they look in their filtered social media photos is baffling to me. I can’t speak for others, but I personally believe that both men and women look better when they are as natural as possible. Filtering our photos and changing our bodies to keep chasing the ‘perfect look’ is a path that will lead us to dissatisfaction with almost everything in life, and more specifically, body dysmorphia, which was also discussed in the lecture. There’s a reason that we are the way we are, there’s no real need to change that.

Pornification is a real issue these days, and what’s even worse is that it’s starting at such a young age now. The younger generation are being influenced by older models and social media celebrities and it’s really dangerous. From a personal level, some of my closest friends have younger sisters that, from the age of 13 and 14, have succumbed to this desire to accentuate their body parts to look attractive to the boys at school and it makes me sick.

Anyway, as I said earlier, this week’s content was very engaging. I’m really into the curriculum so far, I think the topics have been wonderful. On to next week :)

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Week 5: Digital Citizenship

My apologies for not posting earlier, I had a very busy Easter break. I’m not gonna lie, I struggled a lot with wrapping my head around the idea of digital citizenship, and in particular, platformisation. I find that linking something I don’t know about in the terms of something I love is a great way of understanding new things, which in case came in very handy as one of the readings this week was ‘Platformisation in game development’. To say I enjoyed this paper would be a heavy understatement. The article takes almost a step-by-step approach into platformisation which really helped me understand at least the basics. It was easy to follow and I consolidated my knowledge in the field of video game development which was also a big plus.

I found it interesting when the article discussed the infrastructure of platforms, and it immediately led me back to the PowerPoint where the term ‘platform’ was described as being able to mean either computational, political and architectural, and I noticed that these were written by the same author, Tarleton Gillespie. Gillespie notes that platforms not only just focus on emphasising certain points, but they also put in a lot of effort to what they’re attempting to conceal from their users (Gillespie, 2017).

The article then delves into connecting these ideas of platformisation with video game development, and this is where my brain really started wrapping around these ideas. I particularly found interesting the ways Nintendo built their platform in the 1980′s, when video game development was really in strife with the interference of third-party developers. It’s actually quite fascinating how the digital era has pretty much killed off the dream of those original console developers up until the early 2000s, with digital distribution slowly poisoning and thwarting their market. 

Overall, although my brain came into this week with a slow start, I can say for sure that this week really got it going. Looking forward to next week’s studies.

References:

Chia, Aleena; Keogh, Brendan; Leorke, Dale; Nicoll, Benjamin (2020) ‘Platformisation in game development’, Internet Policy Review, vol. 9, iss. 4

Gillespie, T (2017), ‘The platform metaphor’, Social Media Collective, https://socialmediacollective.org/2017/08/24/the-platform-metaphor-revisited/ 

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Week 4: Reality TV Case Study

Week 4 was an interesting week where we looked at reality TV and the connections between that and social media engagement.

I actually learnt quite a bit in terms of the audiences of reality TV. I’d be lying if I said I was surprised that reality TV is the most hated TV genre, but as I mentioned on the discussion board, the ratio of viewers who watch reality TV compared to those who dislike it was astounding. It led me to come to the conclusion that viewers potentially watch reality TV for the sake of it, and not because they’re actually into it.

I did a bit more digging on the matter, and it turns out that there was a study done by Kansas State University researcher Erika Rasure, who found that people who watch reality TV to learn new things AND those who watch “for fun” both tended to be influenced by the contestants appearing in the show. 

I’m not very good at using Tumblr, but I’ll attempt to link an interesting article I found that goes into more detail on the subject:

https://www.chattr.com.au/australias-obsession-reality-television-reassessed/

Also tickling my fancies was the article in the additional readings section titled 'Love Island, social media, and sousveillance : new pathways of challenging realism in reality TV'. I remember the only reality TV show I’ve ever watched was Love Island Australia. Although the article describes the UK variant of the show, the premise is the same in the Australian version. Fans of the show are encouraged to participate on social media to vote contestants off the island, pick “best couples” and select which participants should go on a date, for example. This really ties in with the public sphere engagement that was discussed in the lecture.

Not only do they have this, but I remember when watching that the contestants were not allowed their own phones/technology in the villa, however they were each given a tablet where they could post directly to their social media accounts, which I found highly fascinating.

References:

Shukoor, Mansour 2020, Australia’s obsession with reality television needs to be reassessed, Chattr, viewed 4 April 2021, <https://www.chattr.com.au/australias-obsession-reality-television-reassessed/>

L'Hoiry, X, 2019, 'Love Island, social media, and sousveillance : new pathways of challenging realism in reality TV'. Frontiers in Sociology vol. 4,  no. 59

Rasure, Erika 2015, Exploring the influence of reality television on financial behavior, Kansas State University, viewed 4 April 2021, <https://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2097/18927/ErikaRasure2015.pdf>

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Week 3: How does Tumblr function as a digital community?

Communities in general are meant to be places where people can share their insights and/or other things important to them in an inclusive environment and feel safe doing so. Just by scrolling through many digital communities such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, one can see that this isn’t the case most of the time, as these social media websites have been met with an influx of users who contribute to an unsafe and worrying environment by participating in hate speech and otherwise downright cruel and unsympathetic matter. 

What should really strike a chord with people is the manner in which Tumblr operates. Although not used as much as the online communities aforementioned, Tumblr’s anonymous nature is what draws so many users in (Brennan, pg 37-39). Users have the ability to freely discuss things and provide their opinions on a range of sensitive topics (respectfully, of course) without having to worry about being identified or receiving backlash from people that are hating for hate’s sake. 

Examples of communities of people that have benefited from the freedom of speech provided by Tumblr includes the LGBTIQ+ community and women in general, which is a very timely matter considering the injustices committed of late against women. Surveys have shown that non-binary and transgender users utilise Tumblr significantly more than other social media platforms (Byron et al, pg 3).

References:

McCracken, Allison, Chapter 3 ‘Going Down the Rabbit Hole: An Interview with Amanda Brennan, Head of Content Insights and Social, Tumblr’ in a tumblr book: platform and cultures eds McCracken, Allison; Cho, Alexander; Stein, Louisa; Neill Hoch, Indira (University of Michigan Press: 2020)

Byron, P., Brady Robards, B. Hanckel, S. Vivienne and B. Churchill. "Hey, I'm having these experiences": Tumblr use and young people's queer (dis)connections.”  International Journal of Communication vol. 13 (2019), pg 2239-2259.