Modern Communication Society

Hi, welcome to my blog. This is where I share my weekly post for Digital Communities.

[jakephamm]

Online conflict: cyberbullying & trolling

The introduction of online platforms opens out so many opportunities for expanding communities, especially digital communities. Despite the benefits it brought to media users; it also comes down to internet risks as well as public conflict on the media platforms. In this last discussion, I will talk about online media conflict which is a very sensitive topic nowadays.

First, we need to understand the definition of social media conflict, Zeitzoff (2017) addressed that the origin of media conflict comes from miscommunications, severe disagreements and misleading arguments made on the digital platforms, these arguments include topics such as politics, racism, gender balance, etc. Most conflict will end up dividing the audience into two or more categories, these groups will eventually do anything to support their claim even if they must swear or curse the other. Valenzuela, Piña and Ramírez (2017) proposed that online conflict rarely ends due to its continuous engagement, the behavior of these people dramatically change when the arguments get to its climax, the most common behavior is body-shaming and cyberbullying to gain advantages over the opposite sides. Whittaker (2014) illustrated cyberbullying as a toxic behavior that may potentially cause lethal consequences to its victims such as psychological and emotional distress or low self-esteem symptoms, as negative as it is, cyberbullying is very common on popular social media sites including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Alice and Robyn (2018) discussed the victims of cyberbullying and online harassment that it could be anyone, the most vulnerable target would be female due to social norms.

Another noticeable type of cyberbullying is trolling, according to Baccarella, Wagner, Kietzmann and McCarthy (2018), trolling is Internet slang for the action of purposely inflaming or upsetting other to provoke a person or a group of people online. By definition, this seems to be a harmless action but in reality, this has caused major issues to their victims in terms of physical and mental health, the most dangerous consequence being people suicide because of internet trolling. This also leaves a bad reputation of online digital communities such as distrust or image damage which may result in external crises to the existence of the communities. Trolling activities are very active in social media, the people who “troll” other people are called “troller”, knows the bad consequences of trolling but they choose to ignore or simply do not care about it. This has been always been a problem on the dark side of the Internet since everyone is vulnerable to Internet criticism and cyberbullying.

In conclusion, social media conflict such as cyberbullying, online harassment and trolling is a very sensitive topic, it is important to note that the destruction them is immeasurable due to its natural severe characteristics. These behaviors are not and will never be acceptable even if it is created for fun as hurting others’ feelings and make fun of them is never okay. These types of behavior need to be gone forever.

 Reference

Alice, E & Robyn, C (2018), 'Drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment' , Feminist Media Studies, vol. 18, no. 4, p. 543-559

Baccarella, C, Wagner, T, Kietzmann, J & McCarthy, I (2018),’ Social media? It's serious! Understanding the dark side of social media’, European Management Journal, vol. 36 no. 4, pp. 431-438.

Valenzuela, S, Piña, M & Ramírez, J (2017), ‘Behavioral Effects of Framing on Social Media Users: How Conflict, Economic, Human Interest, and Morality Frames Drive News Sharing’, Journal of Communication, vol. 67, no. 5, pp. 803-826.

Whittaker, E & Kowalski, R (2014), ‘Cyberbullying Via Social Media’, Journal of School Violence, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 11-29.

Zeitzoff, T (2017), ‘How Social Media Is Changing Conflict’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 61, no. 9, pp. 1970-1991.

[jakephamm]

The Gaming World.

Video games have always been an important part of the Internet ever since it was introduced back in the days which results in a new definition of ‘gaming culture’. This is not an unfamiliar term to us, who was born during the rise of the digital age since gaming has been a vital part of our lives, especially me where my entire childhood is based on video games. In this week's discussion, I will discuss the gaming cultures and game live streaming.

First, what is video games? Granic, Lobel, and Engels (2014) defined video games as digital electronic interaction between the player and the virtual environment, online games, however, is the interaction between a person and others through a third-party interface. The gaming culture has changed over the past decades, starting from hardcore gamers want to try out new games and experience the features into gamers watching other playing video games. This also results in E-sport, “a form of electronic sport where the team competes to gain victory and reputations” (Jenny, Manning, Keiper and Olrich 2016), the most popular E-sport competition is The International organized by Valve were teams coming from all over the world to compete over the game called Dota 2 with the prize reached approximately US$34,330,068 in total. This has significantly changed the perspective of both gamers and non-gamers that gaming can make money, A LOT of money. With the reputation of The International by Valve and Worlds by Riot Games (another tournament compete by League of Legends), the gaming culture rises as one of the most profitable industry in the world, highly developed countries immensely invest in a professional team and spend millions of dollars to recruit professionals players so that they can form a team where they can outweigh others and win the championship.

Live Streaming, is another aspect of the gaming culture, Taylor (2018) proposed that live streaming is a newly introduced proposition of gaming culture, people participated in live streaming are considered ‘viewers’, they come to watch or even interact with the ‘streamers’. The most well-known streaming platforms can be mentioned are Twitch and Youtube Gaming which have the most viewers counts compared to other platforms. Hilvert-Bruce, Neill, Sjöblom, and Hamari (2018) discussed that people logging in to Twitch for multiple reasons, social interactions, entertainment, meeting new people and information seeking but mostly to watch their favorite streaming playing and interacting with their viewers. Live streaming forms a social digital community where people seek to one particular person to share the same interest and a person does not have to be in one community but rather in multiple communities.

  Reference

Granic, I, Lobel, A & Engels, R (2014), The benefits of playing video games, American Psychologist, vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 66-78.

Hilvert-Bruce, Z, Neill, J, Sjöblom, M & Hamari, J (2018), Social motivations of live-streaming viewer engagement on Twitch, Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 84, pp. 58-67.

Jenny, S, Manning, R, Keiper, M & Olrich, T (2016), Virtual(ly) Athletes: Where eSports Fit Within the Definition of “Sport”, Quest, vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 1-18.

Taylor, TL 2018, ‘Broadcasting ourselves’ (chapter 1), in Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming, Princeton University Press, pp.1-23

[jakephamm]

Digital Activism & Campaigning

This week, on my blog, I will talk about something a bit different and controversial which is activism and campaign in the digital age. This is a very interesting topic since as a PR student myself, I found this topic is super relevant to what’s currently trending in the fields as PR is slowly but surely shifting from traditional campaigning to digital campaigning as it is more effective and more cost-efficiency compared to the old school PR approaches. Austen-Smith (1995) defined campaign as active efforts and activities carried out over a specific time period to influence a movement or to achieve a particular result that impacts the society. On the other hand, Baer (2005) proposed that activism is a set of activities to encourage social change. These two definitions will be the main point of this discussion for this week.

While traditional activism and campaigning heavily focus on the protest or physical activities to spread their message to the public, digital uses social media platforms to effectively promote their key point with much less effort. Lewis, Gray, and Meierhenrich (2014) mentioned that online activism and campaign is approximately 30% more effective compared the traditional in terms of interactions and public engagements, the reason behind this is because digital activism and campaign accurately target their aiming public audience with reasonable and efficient messages. Moreover, with appropriate tactics and strategies implemented into the campaign, the message will not only be delivered to s specified target audience but also attract more potential audiences that possibly interested in the campaign itself.

Take the example of #ASLIceBucketChallenge, originally from the ASL Association to raise awareness about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that weakens nerve cells, brain, and spinal cord and caused them to slowly break down which dramatically affect physical functions. Their campaign involves a person pouring a bucket of ice and water over their heads to participate, this becomes viral when celebrities such as Lady Gaga, Bill Gates and Conan O’Brien started to participate in this campaign which results in more than $41.8 million in 2014. The campaign spread all over social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram with more than 17 million participation entries all around the world to help funding the ASL Association.

The power of the hashtag is unmeasurable, social media has never been so powerful as it is today by spreading positivities throughout the world. Through the example above, we can see that why digital activism and campaigning is a lot more successful compared to the traditional ones, with the help of social media, people are a lot more empathize and easily attracted by something that is unordinary or different from what they are seeing every day. From a PR perspective, where activism and campaign have always been a concentrated issue, PR specialist always needs to adapt to changes and familiarise with the ongoing flow to get on the trend. The shift from traditional PR campaign to digital PR campaign is noticeable because of the presence of digital community.

   Reference

Austen-Smith, D (1995), Campaign Contributions and Access, American Political Science Review, vol. 89, no. 3, pp. 566-581.

Baer, H (2015), Redoing feminism: digital activism, body politics, and neoliberalism, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 17-34.

Lewis, K, Gray, K & Meierhenrich, J (2014), The Structure of Online Activism, Sociological Science, pp. 1-9.

[jakephamm]

Public Health and Social Identities Surgery

When it comes to the digital age, people on social media platforms starting to shape their identities that may or may not differ from their ‘real’ personalities that participate in one larger society. Some aspects from ‘the real world’ are also defined as the digital communities, one of those in Public Health. According to Croner (2003), digital public health involves campaigns and projects launched on social media by KOLs to intervene or promote positive well-being health, this includes well-known campaigns such as Slip! Slop! Slap! To reduce skin cancer among young Australian adults as well as ice bucket challenge to raise awareness about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) disease.

In these campaigns, of course, celebrities and microcelebrities are pioneers to not only influence their followers but also create and maintain a positive image in front of their public audience. Opposed to traditional celebrities, Marwick (2017) refers to this term as “the state of being well known to a niche group of people, and a practice whereby people present themselves as public personas, create affective ties with audience members, and view followers as fans”. As previously mentioned, the person themselves needs to be who the public wants them to represent so they must adapt and change accordingly to whom they called ‘fans’ or ‘followers’. This leads to my second point, self-branding, Khamis, Ang, and Welling illustrate this as a marketing action that continuously develops and maintain a social media persona’s reputation to influence a group of targeted audience, this is actually what microcelebrities are been doing, to show their personal values and reputation through several tactics and strategies.

One of the most common strategies is visual cosmetic surgery through social media platforms, this involves changing all or parts of the influencers’ identity, characteristics, or sometimes physical appearance to serve their purposes. Let’s take Instagram as our example, these days, we can easily see Instagram models or influencers using filters or editing apps to change how they look to attract more interactions. Furthermore, they can easily attract more potential influencer by posing parts of their body that is barely inappropriate, the fact that they are not afraid to show their body for the sake of building a personal image online. Ironically, microcelebrities always encourage their followers to respect their own body that they should embrace what they have but the thing is microcelebrities are not entirely being honest of what they did and have done to their own bodies.

 Reference

Croner, C (2003), ‘Public Health, GIS, and the Internet’, Annual Review of Public Health, vol. 24, no. 1, pp.57-82.

Khamis, S, Ang, L & Welling, R (2016), ‘Self-branding, ‘micro-celebrity’, and the rise of Social Media Influencers’, Celebrity Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 191-208.

Marwick, A, (2017), ‘Microcelebrity, Self-Branding, and the Internet’, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, pp. 1-3.

[jakephamm]

Fashion in the Digital Age

Welcome back to my weekly post regards to Digital Communities. This week, we will explore on Fashion, which is an interesting topic for me because I am very into fashion myself. The main point I want to discuss here is fashion in the current digital decade, the slow fashion movement and influencers in fashion

So first, what is fashion? Fashion “is a form of imitation and so of social equalization, but, paradoxically, in changing incessantly, it differentiates one time from another and one social stratum from another” (Simmel 1957). Fashion shift very fast in the recent years and open out several of new styles, this includes the rising of streetwear and avant-garde, in the current time, fashion is the representation of a person that express their culture as well of their belief in some context. Since the introduction of social media, the fashion world is expanding bigger than ever. The gap between fast fashion and high-end fashion has never been as close before in terms of designs and inspirations, brands such as ZARA or H&M are now directly competing with luxury brands such as Dior or Chanel, this has never happened in the past few years due to different consumers market and consumers’ segmentation graph.

According to Bhardwaj and Farhurst (2010), fast fashion apparel refers to brands that quickly capture the trend or fashion flow straight from the catwalk and modify it in terms of material and details so that it is suitable and affordable for everyone. Even though fast fashion is extremely affordable, it carries a heavy impact on the environment, this is mostly because of the number of synthetic fibers, the chemical from the clothing (dye ink), and the level of textile waste are extremely high. Claudio (2007) illustrated the negative effects of the fast fashion industry is unmeasurable, fast fashion is one of the industries that contribute most the environmental pollutions. This has led to the Slow Fashion Movement, which Pookulangara and Shephard (2013) defined as the concentration in quality and longevity of the garments instead of quantity and trendy pieces. The movement promotes slower garments production, lower carbon footprints, and zero waste that cause minimal to no harm to the environment. This sustainable and eco-friendly movement is supported by the majority of designers from all around the world as well as their consumers.    

Influencers, especially fashion influencer has a major role in the brand themselves, they are not only the representation of the brand but also a leader in the trend developed by a specific brand. For example, Veronica Ferraro is an influential campaigner for Dior with more than 1 million followers on her Instagram profile. The identity of the influencer will be highly developed by the brand so that they are suitable for the brand vision and idea throughout the campaign and because of the influencers, the brands will attract more potential customers to buy the brands’ products as well as maintaining the loyalty of current customers to keep purchasing their products.

 References

Bhardwaj, V & Fairhurst, A (2010), Fast fashion: response to changes in the fashion industry, The International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 165-173.

Claudio, L (2007), Waste Couture: Environmental Impact of the Clothing Industry, Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 115, no. 9

Pookulangara, S & Shephard, A (2013), Slow fashion movement: Understanding consumer perceptions—An exploratory study, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 200-206.

Simmel, G (1957), Fashion, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 62, no. 6, pp. 541-558.

[jakephamm]

Digital Citizenship in relations to politics

Last week, I have touched on the importance of Tumblr as a modern digital community and how it affects the current flow of society in terms of communications and social identities. This week I will discuss the terms ‘digital citizenship’ and its effect on politics.

According to Jones and Michell (2016), digital citizenship can be defined as the use of technology to gain information to interact and engage with society through online platforms. Similar to traditional citizenship, digital citizenship refers to essential understandings of the digital world such as online safety, digital responsibilities as well as digital health and wellbeing.

Since the introduction of social media, the election process, as well as related political activities, change differently, Bennett (2012) refers to the shift between traditional politics to digital politics as the election process, participation patterns and political identities had been dramatically changed in recent years. The relationship between social media platforms and politics is significantly recognized as politicians from all around the around are building their image upon their personal social media profile, this includes Twitter. Twitter is the most common platform that politicians use to run their online campaigns with highly professional PR strategies in order to successfully develop their personal reputation and image. Social media has never been as powerful of a tool as it is today, highly active profile individuals such as Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton can result in the public’s concentration, making them the center of any political discussion. This can result in both positive or negative consequences depends on their intention, attracting enough attention from the public will produce constant interest in the figure themselves.

As powerful as the social media platforms, Rambukkana (2016) proposed the development of hashtag is also noticeable and significant due to the critical public sphere and digital politics engagement. I am not a big fan of politics but there are quite some popular hashtags in politics category such as #auspol or #scomo. By all means, the hashtag allows the reader to have a better look at ongoing conversation about “Australian politics”. In the election process, whether politician wants to gain support from the public or demolish their opponents, they can use hashtags as a tool to effectively boost their reputation as well as downgrade their opponent to ensure the advantages compared to their opponents.

 Reference

Bennett, W 2012, ’The Personalization of Politics’, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 644, no. 1, pp. 20-39.

Jones L, & Mitchell, K, 2016, ‘Defining and measuring youth digital citizenship’, New Media & Society, vol. 18, no. 9, pp. 2063-2079.

Rambukkana, N 2016 Hashtag Publics. New York: Peter Lang.

[jakephamm]

Reflection on how Tumblr acts as a digital community

In today’s digital society, social media has become a vital part of our everyday life, platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Tumblr dominate other traditional media platforms such as television or radio. In this blog, I will particularly focus on one of the key dominant social media platforms which are Tumblr.

Chang et al. (2014) illustrated that Tumblr is one of the most popular microblogging platforms which has the hybrid characteristics of both traditional and digital blogosphere. Similar to other social media, Tumblr also has its communities regards to the difference in users’ involvement and engagement, Tumblr allows its users to do create a profile page acts as a persona or identity where they can post, comment, re-blog or show interest in the desired fields. When people with the same interest or mutual category, they come together and form a community. Fink and Miller (2013) stated that Tumblr is a game-changer and a culture shifter for LGBTQ+ community for self-representation between 2011 to 2013, this is one of the examples of how Tumblr has created its community based on its consumer mutual perspectives. In the community, they can be themselves and express what they feel understructure of arts, political views, and subjectivities.

The public sphere can be described as “a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed” (Haberman, Lennox & Lennox 1974). Tumblr itself can also be called a public sphere where people participate in a discussion and express their point of view on a particular topic. Although all social media platforms share the same features, Tumblr is still a unique platform for its users to comfortably post anything they want on their blog site without any limitation or specific rules supported by the idea of personalization. To conclude, although, Tumblr is an old-school social media platform with outdated interface and functions, it is still a very popular open community especially to young people where they can freely express and exposed themselves.

 Reference:

Chang, Y, Tang, L, Inagaki, Y & Liu, Y (2014), ‘What is Tumblr’, ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, vol. 16, no 1, pp 21-29.

Fink, M & Miller Q (2013), ‘Trans Media Moments’, Television & New Media, vol. 15, no. 7, pp. 611-626.

Habermas, J, Lennox, S & Lennox, F (1974), ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)’, New German Critique, no. 3, p. 49.