Morgan MDA20009Digital Communities

All content produced and published on this page is for the subject MDA20009 Digital Communities Semester 1 2014 at Swinburne University Portions of this site and the works within it are being produced with the intention of critique and/or educational use under Australia's 'fair dealing' exceptions to copyright (Section 40 & 41). However, if you feel your IP is being infringed, please contact my service provider [Tumblr] with the appropriate DMCA requests, as I, the single author take full responsibility for the content of this site.

[morgandunnisme]

Blast from the Past

It seems amidst all the blog posts I have written this semester I may have missed writing a blog for Week 6 but I aim to rectify that mistake right now. This week we looked at Digital Citizenship 2: Activism and Protest, in this lecture we considered some of the global contexts in which social media has come to support activism, protest and revolution and examined cases of ‘everyday activism’, ‘subactivism’ and ‘culture jamming’. We also looked at criticisms of ‘clicktivism’ and claims that social media simply introduces a new passivity to activism.

   I was interested when we talked about how New Media allows us to build and sustain communities without geographical restrictions, gain visibility and voice, Resist or talk back to dominant views, confront dominant media institutions, politics and structures of power, present alternative or marginal views legitimately and lowers the barriers for entry into the debate. We moved on from this to look at various examples like the Occupy Movement, The Arab Spring. Mobile Eyewitness and Egypt, we looked at the use of New Media through these specific examples.

   Being that I am writing this late I don’t remember much about what engaged me during the lecture but reading my notes I’m interested in the notes around when we looked at the London Riots, I think that this is because that is one of the events that I was personally more exposed to due to my level of new media activity at the time.

   This was an interesting week, even as I re-read through my notes I am starting to remember how important new media is when it comes to Activism and Protest in these modern times.

[morgandunnisme]

Week 11 Social Media and China: A Case Study

This week in Digital Communities we were looking at the Great Firewall and Social Media and China: A Case Study. I personally didn’t get much out of this week, I mean I learnt in great detail about the Great Firewall and Social Media in regards to China but I personally didn’t find it as interesting as some of the stuff in previous weeks.

   I was interested in a quote from Mary C Joyce (2011) that said “The effect of digital technology on political contention is neither good nor bad, it is both. Yes, the internet can help activists mobilize and re-frame public issues. It can also distract citizens and feed apathy.” I guess I just found it interesting how it is neither good or bad but is both, that can probably come across as confusing to some people but I felt that in this political context it was actually quite an understandable way to look at it.

   There wasn’t much else that particularly engaged with, we briefly looked at the idea of ‘slacktivism’ and I did like the discussion about how people and communities created secret languages to get around the censorship. But yeah apart from what I’ve already mentioned there wasn’t much else that I particularly engaged with and that is probably partly that it isn’t something that interests me and that it is coming to the end of semester and I’m just full of knowledge and information.

   So this isn’t exactly my best blog but I did my best to pick some parts of the lecture that I found interesting and I think we will just be keeping this week short and sweet.

[morgandunnisme]

10 outta 10

    Week 10 Digital Communities presented us with what I considered to be an interesting topic, this we discussed Social Gaming. Our objectives were to consider the particular characteristics, explore some of the processes of forming rules and norms, and to consider the implications of these cases for how we can understand digital communities more broadly.

   We look at different types of games, we looked within games and around games; we discussed physical co-location with things like expos and internet cafes etc. Online and Offline were discussed and how it can be hard to separate the practices neatly , platforms such as Xbox Live and Steam function as type of social media. I thought it was particularly interesting how games facilitate communities as a site for competition, conflict, and co-operation as well as a site for imagination and fictional experiences. We finished off the lecture with a case study of Eve Online which I found to be rather intriguing.

   I have been a bit of gamer for a while now but I’m not really I hardcore gamer, I prefer to think of myself as a recreational gamer. At first most of my online gaming was conducted through Steam playing games life TF2 and CSS but eventually my laptop couldn’t handle it and I got an Xbox 360, here was where I started to just engage in solo play but when my dad updated the internet I was able to play online with friends in games such as Halo, GTA V and Titanfall. Recently I have made a return to PC gaming as I got a new laptop that could run Steam and I have been playing lots of mods with my friends as well as still engaging with Xbox Live.   My personal experience with online gaming communities has varied, in Xbox 360 games like Halo or Titanfall I play with my friends as well as playing with other random online people and this is always fun and some might even say enriching, but with games like GTA V I prefer to play in closed games with friends or ‘Crew Members’ as there is a lot of “Griefing” in public sessions, this is where plays hassle, annoy and kill others for no reason and it does get old.

   Only recently did I start PC gaming again and my experience with that has been solely friend based, we all organize a time to play and we communicate through Skype while we play various mods like ‘prop hunt’ or ‘murder’. There are open servers for these games but I feel more comfortable playing with my friends as we have established jokes and banter that make the game more interesting and dynamic. I do play some public sessions in some games but most of the time I stick with my friends who I normally play with.

   I find that social gaming is both positive and negative depending on the communities you are involved with, some are great and will lead to many positive online experiences but others can simply lead to a lot of grief.

[morgandunnisme]

Week 9 for Rhyme (but nothing else I've written actually rhymes)

This week in the extraordinary journey through the world of Digital Communities we looked Visual Communities: Imaging platforms and the new camera consciousness and we aimed to consider the notions of networked visuality and visible publics as well as explore the expanding role of personal images in facilitating and shaping digital communities, whilst doing this we also considered the ethical, cultural and technical dimensions of shifting notions of public and private in relation to visual-social media.

Through the lecture we discussed Visible Publics, Networked Visuality, Personal Photography as well as Immediacy & Ephemerality. But the part of the lecture that stuck with me most was when we looked at Imaging Communities and Tags, specifically looking at Instagram and yes while the parody song by College Humor was funny and engaging I started to think about my own personal interactions with and through Instagram. On Instagram I follow a few friends who do the whole posting food art thing (some of them are cooks so that’s okay I guess), I follow some people who think they’re photographers as well as following friends who are actual photographers or who are passionate about photography and these pictures always stand out because they have put more effort into their shots as opposed to simply adding a filter. Although honestly most of my Instagram feed is filled with people posting memes, quotes from tv shows/movies, screenshots from television shows/movies and stupid short videos, I feel as if my Instagram content provides the same sort of pop culture entertainment that I also find on my other tumblr page and I am okay with that, I mean majority of the pictures I post are funny quotes or screenshots from shows or movies, interspersed with pictures of things I like/want and funny things from my life…there is also a few selfies but try not to hold that against me.

   So that is my experience with Instagram and if that makes any of you feel like following me well then that is great if not I completely understand but unfortunately that is all for this week, tune in next for another thrilling blog on whatever it is we are studying next week!

Au Revior

[morgandunnisme]

This week was Gr8

   So this week we were back to business after our ever so brief and busy break and kicking us of in the lecture for Digital Communities this week we looked at Crowd Sourcing in Times of Crisis, we were giving some objectives of the lecture and such but one of the main points of this week was how social network sites are seen as integral to the way information about disastrous events has come to ‘break’ and circulate, we looked at it as a platform for information flow, communication, reaction, and other forms of action.

   We of course started by looking at Crowdsourcing which according to Merriam Webster Online is ‘The practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers’, from there we delved into such topics as Social & Mobile Media, & Witness Generated Content, Visibility of the disaster zone as well as looking at Social Mapping with the Ushahidi example.

   In the tutorial we continued to explore this topic, being that it was my groups week to present we had done extensive research on Crowdsourcing in times of crisis, specifically we looked at the idea of verification. We covered this topic extensively in our presentation and I do not wish to repeat our presentation through the medium of this blog, I wish to discuss the other idea the came up during our tutorial, the idea of ‘Fundsourcing’.

   If we take the definition of Crowdsourcing from earlier ‘Fundsourcing’ or ‘Crowdfunding’ Online is ‘The practice of obtaining needed finance or funds by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers’. A classic example that first came to my mind when this was discussed is Kickstarter, I’m sure many of you have heard of Kickstarter and how it is a new way to fund creative projects. They have had many successful project source funding from large online groups, a current success story would be the reboot Veronica Mars movie.

   This project was started by Rob Thomas and was successfully funded on April 13, 2013. It got 91,585 backers and received $5,702,153 pledged of a $2,000,000 goal, this project became the fastest project to reach 1 and then $2 million, it is the all-time highest-funded project in FILM category, the third highest funded in Kickstarter history and had the most project backers of any project in Kickstarter history.

This really goes to show the power of networking sites and online communities in providing funding for projects in need of financing, this idea of Crowdfunding coupled with sites like Kickstarter are really starting to give people the opportunity to help and choose the content that is created.

[morgandunnisme]

Trolling & Social Media Conflict

    This week we discussed heavily the themes of Trolling & Social Media Conflict, we looked septically at how trolling and bullying differ in the minds of adolescents compared to the minds of parents and adults in general.

    We also looked at referring to trolling as provocation and looking at Acts of Social Media Provocation. Media provocation goes way back, and includes mainstream broadcast media, news, celebrity stunts, shockjocks and rightwing commentators (Olivier Driessens 2013).

   In our tutorial we struggled to think of productive ways to monitor and police the internet and stop provocation and bullying, it is hard to do without impinging on people’s freedom and privacy in regards to the internet, it is also not productive to put all the responsibilities on teachers and parents who may not understand the contexts of the interactions.

   In this blog I would like to explore my experience with these concepts and perhaps you will relate or have had different experiences. When it comes to Social Media Conflict, specifically bullying my experience of it is often through the social media platform of Facebook and most of it is between friends and isn’t often taken seriously. This statement is odd but the experience I’m used to is that the insulting and attacking of a person is a norm between certain friends and friendship groups, this is what their relationship is built on. Whether or not this is a good type of relationship this could be considered bullying by outside parties especially if it’s multiple people attacking one of their mates, to parents this could be seen as bullying but within the group it is just viewed as mucking around. From my experience we see that context is important when it comes to accusations of bullying on platforms like Facebook.

   In regards to Trolling the only real experience I have of it is through News stories that relate to the unfortunate outcomes of trolling which leaves me with quite a negative view of the act of provocation. But I also have some experience through a small number of friends who consider themselves trolls and from their perspective they attack people who they see as being the “bad guys” on social networks and in regards to this small group they have their own set of rules that govern how and who they troll, this has led me to think that perhaps there are those who troll for attention and attack without though simply to provoke but that there are perhaps those who view trolling as a way of upholding a twisted form of justice on Social Media Platforms.

   These are just my experiences with these dark sides of social media and I don’t condone any of it but it is interesting to look at why people do these things, especially if like me you know people on the other end and are able to get a look at their perspective of these acts but this is actually a bit of a darker subject and I think I’ve had my fill, so in the immortal words of Captain Jack Sparrow “I wash my hands of this weirdness”

[morgandunnisme]

This week we looked at Trolling & Social Media Conflict so with this in mind I present to you the troll face.

[morgandunnisme]

Digital Communtities: This One Goes To 5

So we are now 5 weeks into first semester and this week in Digital Communities we looked at Politics and Civic Culture, it was hard to contain my excitement when I discovered we would be looking at politics but I think I managed it pretty well and I’m sure I will continue to do so in this blog post.

   So the aim of this week was to explore how political parties and politicians connect with their communities (local, state and national) through social media networks. We looked at examples from the US and Australia and saw successful uses of social media and not so successful uses of social media within the political landscape. A specific Australian example we looked at was the ‘KEVIN07’ campaign which was good because it rhymed!!  Who knew that we like politics more when it rhymes! Dr. Seuss should have pursued a political career instead! But in all seriousness I was too young to vote and care about the elections that year but I remember the amount of talk about KEVIN07 amongst my fellow Year 7’s purely because it was entertaining and we liked the idea of a politician who was actually entertaining. This brings up a question mentioned in the lecture “Is there an increasing need to provide entertainment as well as credibility?”

   In regards to this question I feel entertainment is important, but this is perhaps because I myself enjoy consuming and creating entertaining content, ultimately I want to create entertaining content for a living and I feel that politics is definitely dry and can benefit from some entertaining aspects. This being said I understand other people may disagree with the mixing of politics and entertainment but why can’t we have credible politicians with good policies who will also dance with Kerri-Anne?

   I was 18 for the last election lets just say lots of my political information came from entertainment sources like Gruen Nation and the Chaser Decides because they provided political content in an entertaining manner that made it easier to understand and consume. I’m not saying that you should take all your political advice from shows such as this, you should always do more research.

   I have moved slightly away from the main point but I now come back to it with the idea that entertaining sources were a key factor for me in the last election and I think that if a politician is able to provide something a bit more attention grabbing (aside from scare tactics) through the use of social media networks in a campaign then they will have a massive advantage over their contenders.

I feel like I have talked about this too much so I’m signing off for this week, catch you next week with a new installment.

XOXO Digital Communities

#digitalcommunities       #MDA20009

#swinnersarewinners     #kevin07

[morgandunnisme]

Today we had a lecture regarding the use of Social Media within Politics and Civic Culture and I felt this video was relevant but also entertaining.

Post to come later this week :)

Viva La Digital Communities

#DigitalCommunities #MDA20009 #swinnersarewinners #key&peele

[morgandunnisme]

Digital Communities: The Journey So Far

    In the past couple of weeks I have been swept up in the exploration of ‘digital communities’ and ‘social media’ and I have been drowning in theories, theorists, frameworks, practices, approaches etc. but this is where I come up to breath and gasp my overview through the medium that is my awesome blog.

   My first introduction to this subject was through the readings from dana boyd, Rowan Wilken & Anthony McCosker. I particularly identified with the reading Participating in the Always-On Lifestyle (boyd, 2012) as it talked about the idea of being always connected to the network and how that is what it means to be always-on (boyd 2012, pg. 72), I identified with this because you can simply look around and see that many people are living this always-on lifestyle thanks to the help of technology like iPhone’s that keep us connected 24/7, I don’t know about you but my phone is never off, if I want to be discrete I will put it on silent.

   So the first week opened my eyes to just how much this subject would relate to my own always on lifestyle and how it could take me from just living it to analysing how and why I am always on. In the second week we looked at ‘Social Theory & Social Media’ which sounds pretty dry but I did learn some interesting things, I learnt that sociality is the idea being together with others and that this can encompass online environments  and this lead to discussions regarding virtual communities and networking. This is where I discovered something I had never even considered, this is where I learnt the secret art of defining Social Network Sites.

   “We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system” (boyd & Ellison 2007)

   In the third lecture much like many of my other lectures I spent a lot of time on Reddit, this time however was different it was actually for academic purposes!!! This lecture was a specific case study of Reddit Gonewild and whether it is a network, society or community. Now their were some conclusions we came to in regards to Reddit Gonewild but my personal feelings and experience with Reddit were not explored which is what I am going to do now. I first started using Reddit to entertain myself and strangely enough to read news so I was using it purely as a source of information but that changed. There is a media production company I follow called Roosterteeth and although they have their own site and YouTube channel their subreddit is where I felt I really became a member of the RT community, in this subreddit fans post art, videos and posts that relate to the company in some way and that also allows fans to discuss new content from the company. From my experience this a great way to bring fans together and promote a sense of community, in fact many ‘Community Days’ have been organised through this subreddit where fans in local areas get together in person. Another great aspect of this subreddit is the presence of RT staff, they will often comment or reply to others as well as supplying their own content to the page. So although some subreddits like Reddit Gonewild may not be seen as a community I believe the subreddits I experience are some of the strongest communities on the internet.

   We also did stuff in week 4, specifically it was Blogging Practices and Case Studies which involved Publics, Counterpublics & Micropublics and blog fundamentals but I have typed about 600 words now so I won’t go on anymore for your sakes, besides you can always learn everything you need to know about blogging by blogging.

Look out for my next post in about a week, if it’s as big as this it shouldn’t be hard to miss.

Viva La Digital Communities!