Language & New Media

[cezblogs-blog]

The Art of Airing

Before I get off to the wrong start, I won’t be blogging about how best to air your laundry, or even how to most effectively broadcast a message. No, I will in fact broach the topic of ignoring a message.

Almost every messaging service offers a ‘read’ feature, enabling the user to see when the recipient has opened their message. WhatsApp is perhaps the most infamous service of all- giving a whole new semantic meaning to blue ticks.

Yet only a mere few of these services offer the freedom to switch off this feature. The inescapable nagging feeling of being ignored is cemented in reality with one quick glance at the conversation. Blue ticks glare back… and you glare back in annoyance. And it really begs the question: are there things we are better off not knowing? The encouragement of monitoring other peoples’ online movements is, in reality, quite unhealthy. 

Because, well, let’s be honest, there’s a whole host of activities that could cause you to read a message and not immediately be able to type a response back. In a face-to-face situation, you might gesture ‘one second’, but without the capability to do so through a phone, a virtual pause is put into play instead.

But it’s when this virtual pause becomes a virtual age, and then the approach to being ignored isn’t so rational.

[cezblogs-blog]

DuckDuckGo, the search engine that doesn’t track its users, grew more than 70% this year

Yet it's still a fraction of Google's size.

Reclaiming privacy sounds an increasingly appealing move in this age of 'the cookies invasion'.  Maybe that’s why many, like myself, are turning to search engines such as DuckDuckGo. Still relatively unknown in comparison to the likes of Google, Yahoo, or Bing, it boasts a unique selling point: “the search engine that doesn’t track you”  (Although, this article was published December 2015, so DuckDuckGo's usership will, undoubtedly, have grown further.)

The company claims that your info isn’t stored nor your movements tracked, so without any search history there's no targeted advertising. Sounds peachy, right?

But in my conscious effort to keep DuckDuckGo as my sole search engine I find myself having to trawl through results that would have automatically been filtered out if I were using a service such as Google instead. This is because they have to reconfigure my search preferences every single time.

So, is the act of compromising privacy for convenience lazy, or just plain understandable?

[cezblogs-blog]

Emoji Cover Blown!!!

An American newsman has been the object of ridicule ever since this video went viral.

I don’t know what 'cyber experts’ he consulted with but they might need to reevaluate their position in the field... Especially considering that general consensus on Twitter seems to be that people relate to the video for its hilarity, not its accuracy.

The ambiguity and changeability of emoji meaning is a characteristic of the paralinguistic feature.  This is a fact seemingly widely understood by younger generations.  Yet, it’s apparent in this video that it’s not quite the same for older generations.  The meaning of an emoji is dependent on, and indicated by, the linguistic context surrounding it.

The newsman revealed that the flower emoji 🌺 could mean “let’s get some drugs”. Now, call us basic, but the majority of people I know just use the very obvious pill emoji💊, maybe even drop in the syringe 💉 if they’re feeling risqué. AND even if they do use an such an emoji in this context, it has no definite correlation as to whether the person using it actually takes recreational drugs or not. As in a most cases, emojis are used playfully.

If you’re reading this 🐸 but 🐸☕…

[cezblogs-blog]

Suicide Share

This morning I, among hundreds of others, witnessed a man jump in front of a train in a successful effort to end his life.  Except, I wasn’t actually at the scene. I was an unwilling, not to mention horrified, online spectator.

I came across the video while scrolling through my Twitter timeline- on which videos start to play automatically. Within a few seconds I’d seen a very desperate man commit suicide. Surely anyone in their right mind wouldn’t find this to be suitable viewing material. Surely?

So why did this particular user think this was appropriate content to share? Because of course, the tweet didn’t just reach his followers. It reached other users on the app, like myself, through it being retweeted and replied to.

The really unsettling thing is that this video was deemed as entertaining, and not just by the user who initially posted it with the accompanying (& quite frankly sickening) caption “CROYDON IS WILD”.  Hundreds of people ‘retweeted' and ‘liked' the content.  I can only hope that some of those people were retweeting to raise awareness in order to have the video reported and removed from the site. Which thankfully, within about 20 minutes of me initially seeing it, happened. But judging by some of the comments that poured beneath the post some people had absolutely no issue with it being on their timeline.

Just how desensitised must someone be to share a video capturing the moment a stranger takes their own life? How would that individual feel if, through the callous online actions of another, they witnessed their own family member in their last despairing moments of their life and what exactly their desperation pushed them to. Or even if that individual had to loudly proclaim “Croydon is wild!” to the grieving family in real life, instead of an apparently detached online world. 

A man died and it was posted for all to see. This very man’s ‘wild’ behaviour was something to be marvelled and goggled at- even worse, criticised.  For that’s what sharing on social media invites. A reaction. But sharing this sort of content shouldn’t be accepted or normalised. Boundaries were crossed, but can they really be enforced anymore? The video was removed but not erased, from both the Internet and my mind.

[cezblogs-blog]

Really private privacy settings

Following yesterdays post, I thought it apt to share this:

Previous developments in Facebook's default privacy settings encouraged the reach of an even broader audience for users.

Although, in 2014 the company announced a move back to ‘Friends’ being the default viewing setting for status updates (as opposed to the entire Internet). This change was pushed by the biggest user complaint being when an random stranger interacts with a post.

This change gave the illusion of returning power to the user, when in reality only one setting was changed out of a whole other bunch of them. That said nothing you post on Facebook is truly private, no matter what setting you select. Your movements on the site are tracked and logged by the company, who are continually building an archive of you. A pretty comprehensive one at that.  

[cezblogs-blog]

The Impulse Update

It’s fair to deduct, from even the briefest of usage, that Snapchat and Facebook are inherently more personal apps than their slightly less intimate counterparts: Twitter and Instagram. Take the terms ‘friends’ vs. ‘followers’ for example. Both have almost identical functions, but one just sounds a bit more exclusive, doesn’t it?  Slight difference: following ‘subscribes' to posts, while befriending ‘associates' you and another as contacts (following dictionary definition, that is).

Except, the criteria for allowing someone to be your online ‘friend’ is somewhat looser than in real life.

And without realising it you’re broadcasting your personal life to far more people than you think.

Updates that previously would have been shared with relatively close friends and family alone, are now accessible to a wider (and largely irrelevant) audience. Of course, you choose who you want to let see the content you post, but little thought seems to be given to this fact. Especially when I find myself accepting friend requests at 2am from ’Tom’ a 20 year old with 12 mutuals who looks vaguely like he might attend the same uni as me. I guess it’s just Facebook etiquette really.

What does irk me about this social practice though, is the normality of disclosing information to the entirety of a social network, like Facebook, before telling someone who might really, actually like to know.

It’s commonplace for people to react through social media platforms before more closed channels of communication (i.e. a phone call, a text message, or face to face). You could even say it has become impulsive to do so. But maybe some information should be kept for those who really care. 

[cezblogs-blog]

The ‘Like’ Culture

I’m unashamed to admit took me a good year or two on Instagram to realise what the comments 'L4L' & ‘LB' actually meant- and for those still baffled, they’re short for ‘like for like’ and ‘like back'. Any one familiar with the likes of the Kardashian/Jenner sisters will be at least acquainted with these terms, which literally flood the comments section beneath their posts.  

People seek validation from strangers and as much as many may deny it, it has become the norm. But if you wouldn’t care about what a random person on the street thinks of how you look that day, why is a virtual nod of approval so prized?

We all have that one follower that uploads a ‘repost’ because Instagram magically happened to ‘delete’ the original post that wasn’t doing quite as well ‘likes-wise’ as they’d hoped.  People are literally embarrassed to the point of entirely erasing all proof of their lack of ‘likes’. Or, at least giving it another shot- perhaps at a peak time for people to be scrolling through the app. (Trust me, it’s a thing).

Here’s my take on a ‘likencyclopedia’:

'Like my posts too, please'

'This is aesthetically pleasing’

‘You look quite nice, but I’m only really liking it out of social obligation’ 

‘I like the way you look, notice me’  

‘I’m liking this to annoy someone who I know will see it'