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Fan communities and Activism

When Fandom Meets Activism

So, what exactly is activism? It is an action to challenge against and provoke social or political change (Oxford Dictionary 2019). In order words, activism is basically resistance, confront current system in order to provoke change.

Fandoms can work together to challenge civic, political and social issues with the unique culture that they love. Young generations often been criticized of their lack of civic engagement and political involvement because they feel excluded (FanActivism.com 2019). Besides, they are not invited to participate, hence they were not able to address their issues.

When fandoms meeting activism, it is a great thing to see. Young generations can be civically and politically engaged, and have free access to fandoms as well as social networks which can aid them for resistance.

Fan Activism

According to Jenkins (2012), Fan activism means a movement of civil and political engagement that rises from the passions of fandoms and fan cultures. A fan activism could be a fan-driven efforts to engage and confront civic, political and social issues (FanActivism.com 2019).

Fan activism has a lot of potential and can bring significant impact to the society. This is because fandoms can be both cultural or ideological resistance to different values of the society. The enormous capacity of fan communities unite and mobilize to support campaigns for human rights and social justice are always well established. This can act as an inspiration to young generation to engage and address their opinions.

Is Being Part of Fandom Beneficial?

A psychotherapist of Columbia University stated that being a part of fandom can be beneficial psychologically as it offers a sense of belonging and social interactions that many young generations nowadays struggled to deeply connected to. Furthermore, being part of fandom also provides a sense of purpose and it develops the belief that you are cared by others. This can help those who had a tough life to endure life’s challenges. Finding a “family” online might not be easy but finding people who share common interest is a great starting point (Wiest 2017).

However, one should make sure being a fan does not develop into an obsession. This is because obsession normally conflates fiction with reality, it can heavily interfere with one’s quality life. Based on the report by Wiest (2017), the show runner of the drama, Pretty Little Liars received death threats from the drama’s fandom because they were very unhappy with the finale. This shows how obsession is different with genuine passion. The difference is not about who is more impassioned, but its whether or not one can retain a healthy perspective and stay engaged with other responsibilities.

References

#fandom #mda20009 #week9 #woohoo

Global Social Media: China

Surveillance and Censorship Beyond the Great Firewall

People outside of China normally thinks that the internet censorship practices of the Chinese are primarily domestic, performed through the famous “The Great Firewall of China” - a surveillance system and internet blocking technology that stop the China citizens from accessing websites and application outside of the country. Chinese government explains that the reason for the firewall is based on the concept of “Internet Sovereignty” (O’Brien 2019).

Well as for Hong Kong, part of the “one country, two systems” agreement, has the freedom of internet access outside of that firewall. The Hong Kong citizens are able to access platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google without interference.

With the ongoing restless Hong Kong protests, and China’s extensive attempts to stop the movement globally, have emphasized that China is not trying to expand their reach beyond their borders. China are now trying to stop the protest by revealing the tools that can be used to silent the criticism and protest worldwide.

The “Great Cannon” Targets Sites Outside of The Firewall

The Great Cannon is a web tool technology that China ISP (Internet Service Provider) uses to attack foreign websites. What is basically does is inject JavaScitpt code into customers’ insecure internet request (Citizen Lab Team 2015). This code was placed in the citizens internet connections and when it detects that the user is accessing blocked websites, the user’s browsers then run the government's malicious JavaScript without the user knowing. The execution of the code will potentially bring the website down.

According to O’Brien (2019), the Great Cannon had took down the website Github, where Chinese users were hosting anti-censorship software and provide access to banned news outlets such as New York Times.

Just in September this year, the Great Cannon launched another cyber attack, targeting specifically at the Hong Kong protestors. It was proven that the attack was indeed from the Great Canon as the internet experts were able to trace it back to the Chinese ISP companies (Lam 2019) . It successfully took down LIHKG for some time, it is an Hong Kong social media platform where the Hong Kong citizens used to organize their protests.

So, Is China setting the Standard for Global Enforcement of Local Law?

It is clear that “Internet Sovereignty” is not enough to meet China’s needs. It require Internet control both inside and outside of its borders. China now shows its Internet capabilities worldwide with its extensive use of malware, government-supported DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, client-side filtering and surveillance.

In my opinion, it is crucial that the lawmakers, corporations, and internet users to be brave and make their stand as an authoritarian like the people of Hong Kong. If not the concept of the great firewall might be adopted by other countries, and limits the freedom of every user on the internet.

References

#week11 #greatfirewallofchina #greatcannon #mda20009 #cybersecurity #cybercrime

Social Gaming

What is Social Gaming?

Social gaming is an activity or practice of playing an online game on a social media platform (Oxford Dictionary 2019). Social gaming is now the becoming more popular than ever and people are taking gaming seriously nowadays, to the point they recognized gaming as a type of competitive sport (known as E-sport).

The Evolution of Gaming

When video game was first introduced, it started out to be single player and low in graphic. For example, arcade games. There were not much interaction between gamers, all they can compete back then is to beat the high scores of other players, hence less competitive. After that, 1v1 battle is introduced in Arcade games, for example Street Fighters and Mortal Kombat.

Fast forward to the rise of social media, games evolves along with social media as well. Games in social media are often casual and addictive. Facebook games are a trend for some time due to its simplicity and game interactions with Facebook friends. There are more interaction between people which you can compete more than one people in real time.

As the time goes by gaming has taken a serious turn. Games now requires gamers need to have good team chemistry and formulate strategies. Competitive games such as Dota, LOL, and CSGO has become famous. These games is extremely competitive and they often organize large competition with tremendous amount of prize pool. Gamers now could make a living out of gaming and then E-sport is introduced.

Why People Play Games?

Based on an article by TeachThought (2017) there are 5 reasons why people play games:

Escapism - Play games to escape from reality.

Competence - Seek to control and dominate certain things in game.

Accomplishments - Desire to accomplish something in game because it harder to accomplish things in real life.

Autonomy - Desire to feel independent, does not want to obey to any rules.

Relatedness - Feel like making a significant contribution to society within the game.

Can Gaming Be Beneficial?

Well...it depends on how you manage your play time.

With the correct amount of play time, gaming is proven to be beneficial to a person’s cognitive function. Gaming can improve one’s decision making and reflexes due to the unpredictable nature of games. Furthermore, playing games with a group of people can enhance teamwork, a study conducted by Brigham Young University (2019) proves that by playing games together can improves one’s interactive skill and cooperative ability. Gaming now can provide job opportunities as well, an average professional gamer can earn around 1000 to 5000 USD per month, while a professional gamer at the highest tier could earn a mouth-dropping 15,000 USD per month, excluding the bonus from competitive prize pool.

On the other hand, playing too much games or too immersive towards game can cause more harm than good. If one is too immersive into their games, it can cause the person to have aggressive behavior, and rage when they lose the game. Games such as GTA 5 has too mush adult content and it provides wrong values to the younger generations. In addition to that, people tend to be violent and toxic towards the community by either discrimination or bring physical harm to innocent people.

So... please control your gaming time and understand what’s right and what’s wrong.

References

#week10 #mda20009 #gameow #retrogamer #socialgames

Crowdfunding & Crowdsourcing

Both are innovative approaches, both requires a tremendous amount of collaboration to a achieve accomplishments. Gathers crowd full of talents or capital can improve growth, increase work efficiency and make the impossible possible. Profit and non-profit organizations are utilizing both methods to revolutionize productivity (Schweissguth 2019).

Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing might be similar, but there are key differences between the two. People should understand their definitions and differentiation to help them decide which tool they need to boost their efforts with the power of the crowd (Schweissguth 2019).

What is Crowdfunding?

According to Smith (2019), Crowdfunding is collecting small amounts of capital from a big amount of people to fund a new business venture or campaign. Crowdfunding utilizes the accessibility of the social media platforms and crowdfunding websites to bring all investors together. It has the potential to increase entrepreneurship by increasing the number of investors and extend beyond the owners and capitalists.

Through crowdfunding, new products and technologies are created. Platform such as Patreon fund artists to create films, music and art, while developers design new application or games. The use of crowdfunding also empowered disaster relief with funding from throughout the world.

What about Crowdsourcing?

Hargrave (2019) defines that crowdsourcing is an action of obtaining work, information, knowledge and opinions from a large group of people who contributed their data online via social media and phone applications. People who contribute for outsoucring some worked as paid freelancer, while there are some contribute on voluntarily. For instance, traffic applications use data contributed by the driver to report roadway accidents, traffic situations and even police checks to other application users in real-time.

To further explain crowdsourcing, the process is not as straightforward as crowdfunding, this is due to crowdsourcing is more varied (McGowan 2018). There are a wide of things that can be crowdsourced and following are the few examples:

- Finding a logo on the website 99designs, were users submit options and the client picks their favorite one.

- Wikipedia is a crowdsourced encyclopedia, with thousands of people from around the world contributing every day.

- Asking a Facebook community for opinions on which bank to use is an example of crowdsourcing.

- The hugely popular technology development site GitHub often utilizes crowdsourcing to solve technology problems.

- Journalists and bloggers use crowdsourcing to gather a wide range of opinions or viewpoints, sometimes on sites like HARO.

Conclusion...

The difference between crowdfunding and crowdsourcing

The differences between the two depends on the end result. With crowdfunding, people are seeking to raise capitals from the crowd to fund projects and campaigns. While with crowdsourcing, people are seeking anything else, like information, manpower, talent, skills and ideas.

References

#crowdfunding #crowdsourcing #week8 #mda20009 #monneeyy

Social Media Trolls

People are now depending on social media heavily to keep in touch with their friends, do business, obtain news, purchase stuffs and many more. Undoubtedly, social media has played a huge part of our lives. With approximately 4.33 billion people worldwide (56% of global population) using the internet, it will not come as surprise users will be subjected to social media trolling during their use of the internet (Statista.com 2019). Trolls can be spotted everywhere in the internet, in other words, they are inevitable. They can cause havoc and create problems that interfere users’ life, businesses and the well-being of social media.

What Do We Know About Trolling?

The term “troll”, in dictionary defined as an act of leaving an insulting message online in an attempt to annoy someone (Cambridge Dictionary 2019). As for “social media troll”, it basically means someone who intentionally declares controversial comment to get a rise out of other users in the internet (Hanson 2018). As frequent social media user, chances are you have a good understanding on how internet trolls work and even experience one yourself. Trolling is scattered across all social media platform, especially Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

The Internet Should Be a Place That Promotes Positivism, not Negativism

Social media is a great medium to connect us to the whole world and perfect platform for businesses. It can be positive, but also negative if you encountered trolls in social media. Trolls are bad but it can be a good thing as well if you know how to handle them. There are a few approaches can be made in order to neutralize troll’s comments and criticism.

So, How to Deal with Social Media Trolls

According to an article by Martin (2019), there are a few ways to handle social media trolls:

Don’t Feed the Trolls

Best thing you can do to deal wit trolls is to ignore them. Try not to respond to anything they say, eventually they will get bored and stop attacking you with negative comments. This is because Trolls get their entertainment from your anger, if you do not entertain them, they will leave.

Set Guidelines for Your Community

It is best to clearly establish your guideline for your community from the start. Block anyone who attempted to bring negativity, delete any offensive comments if spotted. This action will put you in an offensive stance and alert the trolls to keep away from your community.

Don’t Take Negative Comments Personal

Trolls can cause depression and anger very quickly if you take it too personally. Try to take it as a joke and do not keep it in your mind. Because the more you think about it, the more negativity is building up in your mind.

Can We Eradicate Social Media Trolls?

Well, like mentioned above, trolls are inevitable. They are scattered all around the internet and there are no stopping them. So instead of asking can we eradicate them from the internet, we should focus on how we can handle them. Once we have the ability to become immune to their negativity, they might find trolling less entertaining and hopefully stop what they are doing.

Reference

#troll #blek #week7 #mda20009 #lol cats

Social Media Activism and Protest

What is Activism and Protest?

Well, according to the definition from Cambridge University (2019), activism is the use of direct and noticeable action to achieve a political or social result, while protest refers to a strong complaint that express one’s disagreement or disapproval.

What about Social Activism?

Social Activism defined as a wide variety of activities that benefits the society or interest groups. Social activists work in groups to voice out, educate and demand for change (Amherst College).

There were some quite inspiring social activism stories throughout the history, such as Civil Rights movement and the fight against climate change (Ghobadi 2018). The rise of social media has really benefited a lot of activism to be successful, but there is also underlying threats in it.

Online Social Activism Positive Impacts

In recent years, voices of defiance have progressively been carried through the rapid evolution of the internet. Social activists now utilize the power of the internet to pressure large organizations, from #Metoo, #TimesUp, #WeStrike to #NeverAgain and #BlackLivesMatter. Online activism enables activists to establish events with strong engagement, focus and network strength (Ghobadi 2018). Furthermore, the anonymity advantage that social media provides creates the possibility of one to express their thoughts and opinions to sensitive topics without being caught or penalized. Online activities also help to strengthen unity by reducing the differences between people, for example education level, social class and ethnicity (Ghobadi 2018).

Online Activism Threats and Drawbacks

Online Activism probably increases the participation in online activities, but it might merely establish the impression of an activism. Sometimes, online activism have negative impacts by creating social stereotypes and some social activists got arrested for participating the activism in some countries.

There were a few notable negative impacts of online activism based on a publication by Carnegie Council (2016):

Private Gains

Because of the privatization and manipulation of online activism, public’s trust has declined. There is online activism that is unethical or self-interested instead of acting as an activism to serve the public.

Personal Ethics

Online activism can create a bubble for people just to take part in descriptive ethics to describe what we actually do as a society instead of recommending for methods to emphasize social change.

Self-Fulfilment

Online activism can mislead people to join the course of social issues to become prominent figures of a movement. It can then further mislead those same people a false sense of what they do is ethical with post once a week in social media.

So, Is Online Activism Good or Bad?

Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer to that. Overall, social media can really help activism to achieve their goal to serve the society in need and do injustice. But if it’s not being used ethically, in can cause a series of negative drawbacks hence adding more problems to the current issue.

References

#week6 #mda20009 #digitalcommunities #wow

Social Media on Political Engagement

How Social Media Changed Politics

Social media has undoubtedly altered political campaigns in many ways. Famous social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are being used by political figures to promote their campaigns and enable direct contacts between them with their voters. With the power of social media, politicians are able to broadcast their content to millions of voters instantly and simultaneously. Politicians can also access to their voters’ information through sets of analytics provided by the social media platforms (Satterfield 2016).

How Social Media Impacted Politics

According to Murse (2019), there were several ways social media has impacted political campaigns. Here, we will only discuss on the top 5:

1. Direct Contact With Voters

Instantaneous contact with the voters has completely altered politicians’ traditional way of contacting voters through paid advertising or traditional media.

2. Advertising for Free

Instead of paying television or radio for advertising, politicians can promote their political campaign online without paying a single fee through the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

3. Campaigns can Go Viral Easily

With the ability to “like”, “share” and “retweet”, voters can help spread the campaign around like wildfire in a flash. With that, campaigns can become a trend online and people will be talking about it.

4. Politicians can Alter their Message to Different Audiences

Politicians can access to analytics and information of the users that is following them on the social media. With the rich information provided by the analytics, politicians can edit their message based on it.

5. Feedback from the Voters

Feedback from the voters is very valuable to the politicians. It can be useful or vice versa depends on how politicians react to it. Feedback are often been collected to improve their campaign.

Negative Impacts of Social Media

Social media can be a good way to promote political campaigns, but it can also be impacted negatively by stories spread online, no matter if its its true or not. Haters always create a “credible” fake story just to demote a certain campaign. The more powerful the internet is, the harder it gets to differentiate genuine news from fake news (Bhat 2019).

Other than fake news, politicians sometimes play dirty by publish news to mislead the voters, or politicians publish out unfiltered message and making other candidates in a awkward situation (Murse 2019). The truths are often mixed among the untruths hence misleading users to spread the wrong story across the world (Bhat 2019).

References:

#week5 #meowpolitics #lols #mda20009 #digitalcommunities

Is Tumblr a blog or a social network site?

The answer to the question “is Tumblr a blog or a social network site?”, is that it can be both. People have the freedom to use it fully for blogging, social networking, or use it for both purposes (Moreau 2019). Tumblr is known to be more than just a free blogging platform, it contains a lot of built in sharing features as well. People can utilize Tumblr to perform social networking by following blogs from other blogger, re-blogging, and many more. Tumblr is easy to use because of it’s user-friendly interface design and your profile is fully customizable. Furthermore, it has other useful features for the bloggers such as adding pictures, gif, audios and even videos to make their blogs overall more interesting. In addition to that, bloggers can add tags to categorize their blogs just like Twitter. These hashtags enable other bloggers to find your post easily by searching the relevant hashtag keywords. To further establish that Tumblr is more than a blogging site, user can add followers through dashboard (Moreau 2019).

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