Heidi Jane Designs

Student Designer | 22 |

[shantellmartin]

[santanabellas]

@terracot-ta and i

shot by arman g

[bhloomest]

xo great things take time xo

[wisdominthecrowd]

Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem-solving and production model.

Daren C. Brabham (via wisdominthecrowd)

[crowding-blog]

Checking out beta Evly – a social media crowdsourcing tool launched this week. I’m just not wowed by it. The platform allows people to post their crowdsourcing project and have members of the community (who have to join the Evly network) help them with it. So far, the community and projects look mighty shallow, but it is only a week old. The project with the most members (unsurprisingly) is called Entrepreneur Incubator and appears to be a place where people can go to seek advice on how to get start-up funding, or whether they have a good business idea. Community members give them advice or solutions and other members vote on both the issues and the solutions. Will start a project to see how the tools make it easy or difficult to start something, and how the interaction with the community goes. Evly was created by the Springleap folks who started out crowdsourcing designs for their t-shirt sales site.

[heidijanedesigns]

Blog 6: Crowdsourcing in times of crisis

Moments of crisis can leave us feeling terribly alone. It is in these moments of terror and natural disaster that the concept of Crowdsourcing is imperative. 

But what is crowdsourcing?

The concept is simply this: the collaboration of information from a wide range of people to inform the larger population. In the age of globalisation, mobile phone usage and internet access is rapidly increasing as these technologies are becoming more cost effective with later telecommunications range.

An example of using crowdsourcing in times of crisis can be seen with the earthquake in Haiti. The 2010 January earthquakes in Haiti ignited a completely new type of emergency response that involved the contributions of individuals, companies, NGOs, and staffed by thousands of volunteers around the world. Within the first two hours of the earthquake, Ushahidi was deployed. The volunteers of the crisis mapping team combed through tradition and social media sources such as Facebook, Twitter and Blogs to identify actionable scraps of information that could be helpful for responses on the ground. Within four days, systems were set up in place where the people of Haiti could send reports for free to the number 4636.  

"Approximately 85 percent of Haitian households had access to mobile phones at the time of the earthquake. . . . Mobile phones were the most direct means of communication for Haitians during the crisis and emerged as “a lifeline for many survivors.” (Biewald, 2010)

The 4636 number was first announced via twitter which then sparked the flood of messages that would stream in asking for help and assistance. The extremely he task of collating thousands of reports was only manageable due to the work being crowdsourced to a very dedication network of international volunteers. 

"Crowdsourced maps enable targeted disaster response in a rapidly changing environment. Disasters have the ability to significantly affect the local geography, making existing maps outdated in an instant. Roads are blocked, IDP (internally displaced person) camps emerge, and landmarks are destroyed. The collaborative model used by OSM enabled individual volunteers, mapping experts, and international actors to update the map of Haiti rapidly and accurately to assist responders on the ground" (Heinzelman & Waters, 2010).

Founder of the Ushahidi Haiti information mapping Patrick Meirer speaks about how they used crowdsourcing in the moments of Haiti crisis. 

Without the application of crowdsourcing, people are left alone in the devastation and horror of world crisis events. It gives me great comfort to know that social media content has been appropriated and used to selectively benefit those in times of need. It gives me great hope for survival that if anything tragic were to happen in my neck of the woods in sunny Australia that such efforts of crowdsourcing would be deployed.

What we know now is, "social media can play an important role in crisis communication and emergency management, and the wider user community is generally willing to support and assist the work of emergency services if that work is undertaken in a way that is compatible with the established community conventions of the social media platform itself."(Bruns, Burgess, Crawford & Shaw, 2012). 

References:

Heinzelman, J., & Waters, C. (2010). Crowdsourcing Crisis Information in Disaster- Affected Haiti (pp. 1-14). Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace. Retrieved from https://www.preparecenter.org/sites/default/files/crowdsourcing_crisis_information_in_disaster-affected_haiti.pdf

Ciufetelli, I. (2014). Crowdsourcing and Social Media in Times of Crisis. Retrieved from https://ldi.upenn.edu/sumr/blog/2014/08/11/crowdsourcing-and-social-media-in-times-of-crisis

Biewald, L. (2010). How crowdsourcing helped Haiti's relief efforts. Retrieved from http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/how-crowdsourcing-helped-haiti.html

Bruns, A, Burgess, J, Crawford, K & Shaw, F 2012, #qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods, Arc Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, pp. 7-10, viewed 26 September 2018, <http://www.cci.edu.au/floodsreport.pdf>.

[maverickdiculous-blog]

Week 7- Digital Citizenship: Trolling and social media conflict

As Web 2.0 has grown, so has the ability for users to contribute to platforms and websites such as social media and forums. Access to user-generated content is richer than ever, but along with the pros comes the cons, like social media misuse such as trolling, cyber-bullying and harassment.

“Trolling is described as the posting of provocative, often deliberately misleading and pointless, comments with the intent of provoking others into conflict and/or meaningless discussion” 

(Klyueva 2013). 

According to Bishop (2013, pp. 28-29), trolling is distinguished into two categories- ‘kudos trolling’ which are productive provocative messages and ‘flame trolling’ which are meaningless and offensive messages.

Offensive messages from trollers can produce negative psychological effects on their victims, much the same as offline harassment (Synott, Coulias & Loannou 2017, p. 1) and can therefore be described as a type of cyber-bullying and/or online harassment (Phillips 2015, p. 2).

The video below gives an insight into trolling, the characteristics of the people who troll and what pursues them…

Scroll through any social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram and it’ll not take you long to find some sort of trolling within comments on posts. I’m not crazily into all the different social media platforms but I do use Facebook often so here’s a couple of examples that I found while scrolling through my feed… 

Both examples are aimed at businesses but I want to highlight the last example… While the trolling comments shown are aimed at outfits worn by models, the models themselves could also feel that the demeaning comments are directed at them, hence, turning the trolling comments into cyber-bullying… Which brings up the question of whether the rise of the internet and social media has amplified bullying or not.

According to boyd (2014, p. 152), the internet and social media has not radically changed the amount of bullying that happens in society, but has made it visible to more people making it seem as if it has increased bullying behaviours. Personally, I disagree with boyd’s view on bullying behaviour not increasing…

I think that the internet has certainly increased the amount of bullying simply because people can connect to broader communities, which wasn’t really an option before other than snail mail or physically changing locations to speak in person. Public content such as news articles and advertising never had the option for people to comment other than physically writing letters to the organisations, and even then, comments of bullying or harassment would most unlikely be published. People who troll or bully through the internet wouldn’t do it if it the content wasn’t readily available to conveniently comment on… and I think a lot of people wouldn’t troll or bully if it wasn’t for the fact that they can remain anonymous on certain platforms because they would be worried about any consequences arising from their victims knowing their personal information.

What do you think?

References

Above the Noise 2018,  Are internet trolls born or made?, 24 January, viewed 19 January 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLggqoPEfJU>. 

Bishop, J 2013, ‘ The effect of de-individuation of the internet troller on criminal procedure implementation: an interview with a hater’, International Journal of Cyber Criminology, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 28-48.

boyd, d 2014, It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens, Yale University Press, New Haven.

Klyueva, A 2013, in RL Heath (ed), Encyclopedia of Public Relations, Credo reference. 

Phillips, W 2015, This is why we can’t have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture, MIT Press, ProQuest Ebook Central. 

Synott, J, Coulias, A & Loannou, M 2017, ‘Online trolling: The case of Madeleine McCann’, Computers in Human Behaviour, vol. 71, pp. 70-78.

[heidijanedesigns]

I too disagree that the internet has not led to an increase in bullying. I believe as children we get caught up in physically and emotional bullying but as we mature we tend to stop these sort of behaviours. With the internet, it gives us access to troll and bully those without the shame and disrespect received by bystanders. A sense of invisibility is provided and therefore I feel people, especially adults are more likely now to engage in such trolling purely because they have access to it. I think of it like this, if you had a block of chocolate in your house, you would eat it. It you didn't have one, you couldn't eat it. There fore the access we have to social media has led to trolling. If we didn't have social media, we wouldn't have online trolling. 

[arfaduzn-deactivated20190217]

Happy New Year!/A week in the life

Greetings and happy new year everyone! Hope your christmas and new year’s break went amazingly well. Quiet one over here but sometimes after a busy year you just want a no mess no fuss break and that’s exactly what I got – and I’m not complaining! The course is going well, I’m astounded at the marks I’m getting though – I would never have guessed I would do well with this overall! I’m very happy with my progress and long may it continue – and so onto Week 7. We’re in the midst of group presentations at the moment and so far the teams have been putting in an amazing amount of effort, and this week the discussions have centred around Team D’s presentation of trolling and social media conflict. This resonated with me big time, as I have been a victim of online trolling in the past, but although I won’t go into too many details here, the people concerned knew pretty much everything they could ever know about me – right down to my address and personal mobile number…and I wasn’t listed in the phone book! Really scary and quite unnerving to say the least. It went so far as getting the authorities involved to try and find out who was behind all this. I had a vague idea as to who was behind it all but I kept silent. I don’t think they were ever found but honestly, I looked over my shoulder every time I went out, which wasn’t often, and I would often refuse invitations to go out for dinner or movies etc etc. I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind. This year it has been 16 years since it all transpired and it’s taken me this long to get over. It was just a crazy time, and it was only weeks before I had been diagnosed with an incurable medical condition which still manages to overtake me completely some days. It has also managed to completely stifle many plans I had. With the support of my doctor and specialist, they have been keeping me up to date with meds and the like but when your life is being governed by how close you need to be to a toilet on bad days, it does take a toll on you. But I digress. What happened originally started online and then progressed offline – and I would not wish it on anyone. Yes, death threats were involved. In the pursuit of their goal, trolls might rant (often on a topic unrelated to the one at hand), make ad-hominem attacks, post death threats, or spew hate speech. (Walters, 2015). Unfortunately, Facebook also is not immune to this sort of behaviour. A common phenomenon in online discussion groups is the individual who baits and provokes other group members, often with the result of drawing them into fruitless argument and diverting attention from the stated purposes of the group. (Herring, Job-Sluder, Scheckler and Barab, 2011). I have seen it happen countless times myself, and it involved me actually having to leave a Facebook group because of this very thing happening.

The key thing here to remember is that people think they’re anonymous behind a keyboard. Unfortunately, you’re not. Every move you make online can be cross-referenced to your IP address – and if you’re hiding behind a proxy, that won’t completely anonymise you either. The term “think before you speak” speaks volumes.

Susan Herring, Kirk Job-Sluder, Rebecca Scheckler & Sasha Barab (2002) Searching for Safety Online: Managing “Trolling” in a Feminist Forum, The Information Society, 18:5, 371-384, DOI: 10.1080/01972240290108186

Hootsuite. 2019. How to Deal with Social Media Trolls. [ONLINE] Available at: https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-deal-with-trolls-on-social-media/. [Accessed 3 January 2019].

[heidijanedesigns]

How terrible for you to experience such online and offline trolling. As awful as it sounds i think we all have experienced it some way or another. The online world draws people in like a dark and secret place where we can do what we want and leave no trace- but you are absolutely right in the way all our actions are actually traceable. It’s just frustrating that people believe they can and most of the time will get away with trolling behaviour. I myself have been in some way trolled. My instagram images were taken and used as content for someone else instagram page pretending to be me under a different name. It was very unnerving and I felt extremely helpless. It was 100% wrong, but who was going to stop it happening? It gives you shivers down your spine at what some people are capable and think its perfectly reasonable behaviour online, so it makes you wonder how these people behave offline. 

[xehasmenos-k]

[foreverfreo]

Celeste Barber [x]

[thefiercediaries]

[the-fashion-alba]

[igxbaddies]

[lavendergin]

[aperiodofsoftness]

[uptional]

[sundeae]

“Happiness is not the absence of problems, it’s the ability to deal with them.“ - Unknown

[hibabytiger-deactivated20220908]

http://hibabytiger.tumblr.com

[foxeia]

[simplistic-serendipity]

if you’re in need of something new i would highly recommend sussing out this online store, they have literally everything you need; both cheap and expensive AND they ship worldwide (plus if you want an extra 10% off sale items you can use the code COMF10SAFE ) xxx