LastAndFinal

Complete to WIN!

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So far throughout my posts we have discovered how social media plays a crucial role in the multi-directional distribution of information covering an array of topics. We have looked at the role it plays in politics as well as crisis and disaster, but what about public health. 

Social media is a great tool in broadcasting of information and creating networks of people who are interested in mutual topics and helps them connect through the distributed content. 

Around 80% of internet users seek health information online (Morehead, et al., 2013)

(I had actually written and almost completed this post when my laptop froze and when this page refreshed the post was gone. So I have decided to take this post down a different road this time around.)

Approximately 3 years ago, I began to develop cystic acne all over my face. As a teenager I never had acne and suddenly at age 22 my face was covered in red painful cysts that would last on average 1-2 weeks, with new ones popping up frequently. 

I had been to the doctor on multiple occasions, tried various antibiotic and was on them for far longer than I believe to be healthy for any human. 

At this stage I began to consult the internet to try and figure out what it was going on with my body. Here were my findings:

The internet proved useful in helping me gain knowledge on possible causes, types of possible acne and remedies.

There were many forums that consulted people who had questions that I could relate to. These forums consisted of decentralised networks of people who had been suffering or new of someone who may have suffered the same condition / symptoms as I.

These were some of the positive ways that the internet assisted me with my health concerns. Like me, there are many others, in various situations, whether that be a minor flu, some odd skin condition they know nothing about, or rather something more serious like cancer, mental illness’ or other horrible diseases and disorders. Unfortunately though, many conditions possess a list of generic symptoms such has, dizziness, headache, nausea, etc, and it can be very common in today’s society of hypochondriacs, for people to misdiagnose themselves on this basis. For this reason, I still highly recommend paying a visit to your health practitioner and addressing these concerns with them.

But what about social media...?

Last semester I wrote a paper on how social media can be related to MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game) ‘Second Life’ and discussed that similarly to this game, we are able to create a virtual representation of ourselves and our lives through the use of social media. 

45% of Australian teens feel peers have more rewarding experiences than them.

Whilst I found that there were several pages on the internet that assisted me to gain some knowledge on my condition, I found that social media played a crucial role in breaking my self esteem and almost worsening the situation. 

People can argue that they can use social media to promote their organisation and gain donations, as discussed in my previous post, this can and often does work. However, for the most part, people liking and sharing aren’t helping the issue at all.

However, I am not going to be one of those people. So if you have experienced anything similar to what I described above (relating to your skin), comment, and I will get back to you with any information I have, and support you through this process.

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Trolling & Social Media Conflict

Hey guys, today we are discussing an issue that is becoming more and more relevant in today’s online society - trolling and social media conflict!

Regulatory measures (depicting digital citizenship) which apply certain laws and ordinance on social behaviours have been put in place due to the ever growing count of cases relating to cyber bullying, harassment, online abuse and other deviant uses of social media and other online platforms.

For those of you who don’t know, trolling basically means: posting inappropriate messages or comments for the purpose of upsetting others to provoke a response.

About a week before I was due to submit this blog, which also happened to be the topic I was presenting on, I was on Facebook, looking through a group I am a part of called The Rent Network Melbourne. The group is basically designed for people who have a spare room to be leased in their house, and allows them to reach out to a large target group who may be on the hunt for a new home. In the reverse, people who have not yet found a home, often post a short description of themselves so that members looking for a new housemate, may come across the profile and contact them directly. Unfortunately when scrolling through I came across someone (a.k.a. a TROLL) who was misusing the page.

A girl who had posted a photo of herself with a short profile in the hope of finding a new home, seemed to attract some unwanted attention because of her profile picture.

Dahlberg (2001) sees trolling as aiming to ‘embarrass, anger and disrupt’ and states that “it is often undertaken merely for amusement”.

There has been a long history of research on the risks of problematic media content being exposed to young people, results reaching back to the introduction  of classification warnings on films and eventually games and even music. I remember being around 13 years old when music retailers were required to put classifications on their CD’s, making it a lot harder to buy the new EMINEM albums when they came out.

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Digital Citizenship: Activism or Slacktivism

There seems to be a divide on the benefits of mass media outputs (such as social media) reflecting on global events in the news. 

Viral video and social media campaigns are the perfect tool for activism groups to get their cause known. The massive audiences mean that a message can spread quickly among millions of people. But there’s a perceived negative side to this online form of social activism, people often use these campaigns to “like” and “share” allowing themselves to feel as though they were a part of a great cause, when in fact they have not been active in supporting, donating or further spreading awareness.

As many people may remember the ‘Ice Bucket Challenge’ otherwise knows as the ‘ALS Ice Bucket Challenge’ which was a social media campaign for the ALS Foundation that went viral on social media channel such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube in 2014. Thousands of people recorded themselves dumping a bucket of cold water over their head with the purpose of promoting awareness on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis disease as well as the hope of donations towards the foundation. 

The campaign was voted a success as it attracted 637,000 donors with roughly $32 Million raised for the charity (Alton, 2015).

However, although the ‘Ice Bucket Challenge’ was dubbed one of the most successful social media campaigns of its time and potentially still to this day..

“Does dumping ice over your head really have the power to instigate change?” 

The term ‘Slacktivism’ is used to describe an action performed via internet in support of a cause or issue, that requires little time or involvement.

So what was really happening as a result of this campaign?

Whilst it was evident that the donations were consistently coming in, there was also evidence of people using this challenge as a way to generate awareness, mostly to gain ‘likes’ and also maybe laughs, but without actually donating or creating a long term impact.

Social media often allows us to hide behind a screen and portray to others a sense of community but in reality we must in fact take those digitally written words and put them into action to support causes in need, rather than simply ‘like’ and ‘share’.

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Digital Citizenship: Political Engagement

I’m going to start off by openly admitting that I have virtually no interest in politics, I vote because I have to, but that’s about it. I know that it’s important to know more about the people who are running your country, but to be honest politicians are mostly just an opinionated group of people pretending to be honest and just - when really “politics is just a passing show of egos straddling some genuine heart and compassion. Intelligence too.” (Matousek, 2016).

I wont go into all the reasons why dislike politics but I felt the need to state this as I know I am going to have a hard time writing this post.   Nonetheless these are exciting times with almost limitless possibilities especially these days with people spending an inordinate about on time online. In recent years politicians have taken advantage of this by connecting with their communities through their social media networks.

Politicians and political parties across the globe are utilising social media channels and applications, such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and more to influence the political landscape. The main reason being, because they are able to broadcast and reach a wider and younger audience (Jericho, 2012), and with young people being the leaders of the future and all, it makes sense that they would want to that.. And although I am not interested in politics, I do get a kick out of seeing hillarious meme’s about Donald Trump.

Although social media is a cheap and powerful tool for politicians to promote their brand and the party they represent, it can also work against them very quickly, and as easily as a click of a button.. I’m not sure there are many people in the Western world that missed Trump’s #GrabEmByThePussy moment, which went viral and was one of the catalysts for stories relating to his sexual assault allegations.

Here is a (screen shot of) a Gif of SNL (Saturday Night Live) mocking the situation.

In short, a wise political candidate should realise that social media is a powerful tool to get in direct touch with voters, but has yet to replace the value of getting his face on the front page of the paper or on the 6:00 p.m. newscast.

Not for long..

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Publics can be reactors, (re)makers and (re)distributors, engaging in shared culture and knowledge through discourse and social exchange as well as through acts of media reception.

(Mizuko Ito, 2008: 2-3, 6)

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Tumblr - Blog or Social Networking Site?

According to various pages on the internet (not that credible I know..), Tumblr is counted as both a blog and a social-networking site – and, well that’s the way it was designed to be by creator David Karp. But lets go a bit deeper into understanding why.

During the week 4 lectures, we discovered more about blogging practices and related case studies which opened the door to understanding this weeks question: ‘Is Tumblr a blog or social networking site?’

Blogs are web page(s), typically run by individuals or groups and consist of publications in the form of short diary-like texts, images and links, which encompass and express ones interests and opinions as well as simple thoughts and ‘life’ updates.

Though blogging is accessible and open to the public, often the content is related to ones private or personal life and used as a form of self-expression or themed content. However, social networking sites or services on the other hand are typically online platforms used by people to build social relations and in turn form networks with other people who share similar interests or connections and generally speaking are more exclusive to those within the network.

Blogs are an experimentation of a “public diary format” indicating their “productive contradiction between public and private”.                                                                                   (Geert Lovnik, 2011:6)

So what is Tumblr? – Tumblr’s features allow its users to create custom blogs through publication of short posts of text, images, quotes, links, video, and audio as you would on any traditional blog.  Other users are then able to comment, like or repost content whilst also being able to follow particular bloggers / blogs. This is where we start to see hints of a social networking site. Through doing this as well as customizing your dashboard (the main user interface) we begin creating networked publics. To further support the social networking aspect of the site, Tumblr has features that allow its users to create #hashtags as well as link your Tumbr account to other social networks you use. You can make your ‘Tumbleblog’ private or just make specific posts private as needed, giving it that “exclusivity” factor we mentioned earlier.

So there you have it! The answer is undoubtedly both – in my opinion anyway :P

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Testing Testing 1 2 3

Heya! My name is Danielle, I am pretty technologically inept, but I’m 25 (technically counted as a mature aged student), and I am currently in my last semester of my Bachelor of Communications, majoring in PR. Wuuhoo!

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Crowd Sourcing & Crisis

Social media sites have become integral for broadcasting news on local, national and global phenomenon. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and even Youtube have commonly become many peoples predominant form of keeping updated on disastrous and current events.

In today’s society mobile ‘smart’ phones are altering the way that people are viewing and reading news as well as the quality of the content being produced. Mobile journalism which is the “use of content being recorded with a mobile phone” (Marrouch, 2014), is more and more common with such a large portions of the population carrying devices which not only allow them to take photos and videos, but upload them, send them and share them on the internet at the touch of a button.  The pinnacle of this type of journalism is believed to have occurred during the time of the London bombing in 2005, which occurred underground making it difficult for TV crews and journalists to access. At this time much footage became available through the use of civilians phones (Marrouch, 2014). This particular instance, like many that followed it, we can clearly see the strengths and benefits of ‘crowdsourced’ information for the use of journalism and news broadcasting.

“Within hours, BBC had received a thousand photographs, 4000 text messages and 20,000 emails from the public” quoted by Sarah Hadland, BBC News (2014).

In the video posted bellow at 2 minutes and 12 seconds, you can hear a woman (likely a news reporter) being recorded talking about footage of a bus explosion which was showed to her by a civilian on her mobile phone (link attached).

As platforms for multi-directional communication and information distribution, Governments and News networks have taken advantage of social media platforms to broadcast vital news and messages. In early years Youtube had many restrictions on graphic content being published on their site, however eventually came to believe that it was crucial for the distribution of news and events, unfortunately sometimes containing content depicting violence or graphic imagery. Youtube now claims that it has “become an outlet for citizen journalists, documentarians and other users to publish accounts of what is happening in their daily lives” (Support.google.com, n.d.).

Youtube is another great example of crowd sourced information, which is a contribution of content from a large group of people. Although Youtube often requires users to create an account and verify their age before viewing content which may be explicit or contain graphic content, there are countless situations where videos of crime, terrorism and violence have been made public and easily accessible for viewers who do not meet the age requirements.

References:

Support.google.com. (n.d.). Violent or graphic content - YouTube Help. [online] Available at: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802008?hl=en [Accessed 01 May 2017].

Marrouch, R. (2014). How mobile phones are changing journalism practice in the 21st Century. [online] Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Available at: http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/how-mobile-phones-are-changing-journalism-practice-21st-century [Accessed 1 May 2017].