Digital Communities World

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Great year for censorship

PRAYUTH CHAN-O-CHA PRIME MINISTER OF THAILAND DISCOVER THE 2016 WORLD PRESS FREEDOM INDEX ON RSF.ORG INCREASING PRESSURE ON FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS ANTI-FREEDOM…

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Freedom of expression in social media: a wide view of the censorship around the world (week 11)

Freedom of expression is a human right, the article 19 on The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression including the freedom to hold opinions and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 2016).

During the last years the communication channels have changed a lot, 20 years ago people used to read the newspaper, listen to the radio and watch TV in way to know what’s going on with the world. Nowadays we have social media platforms to share our ideas and opinions and to access information.

It’s true that social media changed the way we communicate in many positive ways, but is not like that in all the countries, mass media is censored and social media too.

China is a great example of that with the social media revolution. People in China don’t have access to Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, the most important media platforms around the world.

But China is not the only country with freedom of expression problems. According to Reporters Without Borders, the world press freedom index in 2016 shows that Eritrea, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Syria and China are the countries with the biggest problems, having censorship in every communication channel.

(https://rsf.org/en/ranking)

And what is the main reason of that? The biggest player in those censorships is the government tolerance about sensitive issues affecting them.

But where is the citizen’s power? They are trying to find alternative forms of social media, but all that have many social, cultural and economic implications, and sometimes is really dangerous.

For the citizens is really difficult to fight for their rights but there are some organizations helping them. Reporters Without Borders (RSF), for example, launched an ironic campaign called “Great year of censorship” about 12 governors celebrating their victories over media freedom.

(http://www.slideshare.net/robingrassi/great-year-for-censorship)

There is a worrying decline in the ability of people to share their thoughts and opinions in a freely and independent way, that’s why we should be aware of that I try to find a way to help people from other countries

[candycrushjellysaga]

Switch and match the candy to spread that jelly 

Download Now 

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Social games era (week 10)

Video games aren’t just part of our childhood, age doesn’t matter, for a lot of people is a complete lifestyle. According to Newzoo and GlobalCollect, for august 2014 there where 1.78 billion gamers around the world, and almost the half of them where in Asia Pacific with 827 millions.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/293304/number-video-gamers/

Before the Internet boom, people needed to have specific video games consoles or use computers to play but nowadays, of course all that still exists, everyone can use cell phones to do it and it’s a great way to use your free time.

The video games concept has evolved from just entertainment and educational uses to a more complex way, like interactivity. There are a lot of communities around the world talking about things related to video games.

Videos games are the greatest storytelling medium of these times; the work behind them is huge and is the most interesting way of digital literature. Beside those huge video games productions there are some others simpler like the ones launched through social media platforms, the ones called social games. Online games have facilitated digital communities and online publics, forcing the users to interact with other players.

According to my experience, I have two great examples to talk about: Farmville and Candy Crush.

Farmville is a real time video game developed by Zynga and distributed by Facebook in 2009.

https://www.zynga.com/games/farmville

And Candy Crush, developed by King in 2012, started as a Facebook app but it was so successful that they adapted it to a mobile app.

https://www.facebook.com/candycrushsaga/

The amazing thing of these two video games was the users interaction they created to increase the number of players. Almost everyone on Facebook started to play, According to The Guardian in 2014, for example, 97 million people a day played Candy Crush. And those players started to send invitation to others friends to receive some help and that way King got new users every day.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jun/06/king-digital-entertainment-ceo-riccardo-zaconni

I’m not really into video games, but of course I was addicted to Farmville and Candy Crush and I saw how their popularity grew really fast getting any kind of public, from teenagers, children, moms, dads and grandmas. A lot of people spent hours of their days playing and trying to get help from their friends via invitations on social media.

I consider that these two games, Farmville and Candy Crush, are the best examples of the success of social games, where the creators got a huge digital community of players.

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(vía https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF_m6HBPufA)

[thetutuproject]

I Love #NewYork set of three prints on sale on our website! Follow the link in our profile to see them all!! Every sale donates net proceeds to our #nonprofit #breastcancer #Breastcancerawareness #timessquare (at Times Square, New York City)

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Wearing a Pink TUTU (week 9)

Social media platforms have many uses for different purposes. You can share your ideas or opinions; you can keep in touch with your friends and family from around the world; share your pictures or videos and share any content that you like.

Some people think social media is really positive but some others say is something negative. In my opinion, there are many positive things to consider about these platforms specially the aspects about how those are great tools to raise awareness and funds for specific cases.

Statistics shows that there is an interception between Internet and public health, 83% of Internet users seek health info online, and social media is a new dimension of health care because it offers a medium to inform and share.

Health communication and social media are about people sharing and recording their experiences, where they converse and connect while building communities. And a really important use of digital paltforms, like I mentioned before, are for creating campaigns to raise awareness and founds for specific illnesses.

One of my favourites digital and social media campaigns is “The tutu project” (http://thetutuproject.com/), it began with the love story of Bob and Linda Carey, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Cancer treatment is really hard for the people with it and for everyone around, that’s why Bob found a way to make things easier. He decided to put on a pink tutu and start taking pictures of it to make his wife laugh during treatment. That was so helpful for Linda and for the rest of the women fighting cancer with her that they decided to launch an online page that went viral with just a few hours thanks to people sharing the content through social media.

It started just as a laugh therapy but later it became a huge worldwide campaign to support women with cancer, reaching and connecting people in the community.

Nowadays the mission of “The Tutu Project” is to raise funds for women, men and their families to ease the financial burdens that come with breast cancer diagnoses. They way they do it is by offering a long list of products to buy online, things that people can share using social media to raise awareness and people can also make donations.

I think this project is amazing because is helping in an economical and an emotional way; it’s a hub for community engagement, emotional healing, education, resources and venting on life’s frustrations. It’s a great example that proves how useful is social media to help people. 

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Can citizen journalism change the world? - Amnesty, Witness, Storyful and CJs: Truthloader LIVE

The explosion in digital technology has transformed the way news is reported -- there no longer needs to be a professional journalist anywhere near what's ha...

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Crowdsourcing, the new way to help the world (week 8)

At this time, the crowdsourcing term is world-wide known but is always good to know the specific definition of it.

According to Merriam-Webster, crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas or content by soliciting or receiving contributions from a large group of people, specially an online community, rather from just employees or suppliers. And sometimes this combines the efforts of numerous volunteers and workers, when each contribution is combined.

Digital media affords many ways to form important networks and communities in relation to any topic or any crisis situation. Saying that and talking about crowdsourcing, is important to analize how social media is used in this crisis cases. The persons called contributors in crowdsourcing are helping using the facilities of social media platforms to share their information or ideas, and this is an integral way of communication and response between the two channels.

If something bad occurs somewhere in the world not always will be journalists or media to report in that moment it but there will always be witnesses, and those are the normal people there who can share what they saw on their social media, maybe with pictures or video. That is a way of multi-directional communication and is a networked action. This is the most important way of citizen journalism.

Nowadays, this practice became very relevant for big companies or organizations around the world. The first step is information dissemination for witnesses, the second one is data gathering and after that they share it. But a good question here is: Can citizen journalism change the world?

Is a fact that social media is helping humans to know what is happening in the world and for organizations that makes things easier. For example Amnesty International agrees that social media is increasingly helpful to not only monitoring emerging human rights emergencies but also to uncover incorrect information. One of the cases they share is the elections in Kenya in 2013, probably the best citizen monitored elections in history.

There are debates around the world of how citizen journalism is changing the world in the way of crowdsourcing in different ways like sharing real facts of serious situations or sharing their ideas for new products or campaigns.

I strongly consider that we need to use our social media platforms not only for entertaimnet or leisure, we need to use them as real digital citizens, spreading our ideas and helping the world.  

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The new way of bullying (week 7)

We are living now in a digital era, it´s true that internet is helping us a lot in many different ways specially with social media, but in the other hand, those social media platforms are kind of uncontrollable in the way of what people writes o share.

When talking about social media posts, the behaviour of the audience plays an important role in how appropiate is the use of technology and social media platforms.

The wrong behaviour in digital media, for example, when people offend others can be related to bullying, so in this case will be cyberbullying.

First of all it’s important to understand that bullying is something to be really concerned about, when someone gets involved in a form of it can cause him/her problems or traumas for life.

Cyberbullying, obviously, is bullying that takes place using electronic technology, like mean emails or text, rumors posted on social network sites, embarrasing pictures or offensive comments.

This is such a huge issue that there are many different associations, big groups of people, companies and government organizations around the world who are taking action about it, but, the question is: Is there a universal regulation for it?

Regulation is a hard and very deep topic to dig in talking about social media and it’s true that depending the country or the platforms the regulations are different. For example, according to Jurgen Feick and Raymund Werle, a significant point in this field in the distinction between those who regulate and those who are regulated can become blurred because public regulators depend on the co-operation of regulatory intermediaries and the continuing challenge is liable to centre around the norms and regulations governing this complex and dynamic space influenced by a variety of factors, parties, interests and institutions.

Even though this problem is more specifically affecting children, all the media users can be affected or exposed to it, that’s why we all need to know how to deal with it. Some of the best advices for me to deal with trolls and bullies on social media are to ignore them, or block them when is appropiate. We don’t have to let them get to us and if we want to reply them it is very important to always do it in a kind way.

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Digital Activism, a new way to change the world (week 6)

There are many social problems all around the world and there are always a lot of people trying to do something about it. The persons who do the effort to change the things or situations are called activist and there are different ways to do it. For example, some artists like Ai Weiwei protest using their art and social media. Activism and protest are always used by necesity looking for a change or to raise the voice due to injustice or problems.

Nowadays social media is a great alternative to do protest and it facilitates, prepares and defines the condition and character of civic involvement building community and sustaining it. Social media contributes by coordinating public action, distribuying information and generating a sense of collectivity and increasing publicity through global channels.

New media allow us to sustain communities without geographical restriction and to gain visibility and voice.

Around the world are many examples of digital activism like what happened during The Arab Spring or due to an awfull event ocurred in Mexico almost two year ago when 43 students disappeared and no one knows what really happened with them but is well known that the guvernment was involved

According to “El País”, the most important spanish newspaper in the world, Facebook and Twiter became substancial platforms from mexicans to raise their voices about the 43 Ayotzinapa students who disappeared. Social Media has played an important role in this case, specially supporting the families of the students and helping people to express their concerns.

(http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2015/09/24/actualidad/1443130011_560227.html)

Using social media platforms, millions of people from all over the world organized pacific walks demanding to know the truth, demanding to the guvernment an explanation of the facts. Hashtagas like #Yamecanse (I´m tired), #Ayotzinapa, #AccionGlobalporAyotzinapa (Global action for Ayotzinapa) and #JusticiaParaAyotzinapa (Justice for Ayotzinapa) became trending topics in Mexico for almost a month in september 2015.

Tumblr also played an important role in this case. Many Tumblr accounts were created (https://www.tumblr.com/search/ayotzinapa) to share information, share ideas and to show support to the families.

Some situations in the world are really hard to even understand them and some of them are even harder to do something physical to solve them, but now the digital world offers us a new way to protest, to defend our values and to demand some changes. Social Media facilitate us the condition for civic engagement and now we can be digital citizens and use our platforms to participate and achieve the change.

[mrhzgz-blog]

#Yamecanse #Digitalactivism 

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Digital Citizens

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Digital citizens

We live in communities and we have different forms of organizations, but we usuallly need a leader for each group to keep some order and that´s a reason why we have politics.

Politics it´s an important topic worldwide and we all have to get involved, not only because it is mainstream but because politics affects everyone.

Nowadays political campaigns are really different than they were 10 years ago. Politicians used to use TV, radio, billboards and printed advertising to reach the people, but now it´s more complex because of the Social Media. Today they also need to design digital campaigns, specially for us millenials.

In Mexico in 2012 we had elections and Social Media played a very important role. There was a candidate, who is now the president, who design a great digital campaign using all the platforms, but that is not the important thing.

For those elections Enrique Peña Nieto did an excellent job, he was the most popular in Social Media, but when I say popular it´s not for positive reasons.

In Mexico, we have bad previous experiences with the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), Peña´s politic party, because it party ruled for many years and it brought many bad and difficult things for the country.

And also in my country, mass media it´s controled by a big company who works hand by hand with politicians so years before many things where hidden for the society and we used to have many problems with our freedom of speech, but this time everything changed.

In Social Media we use hashtags and those facilitate connectivity through themes and keywords and facilitate search, generating afilliation. For those days, young people, specially university students, started to used Social Media to create a huge movement against Peña, PRI and mexican mass media called #YoSoy132 (I am 132 in english) and it was so big that it was proclaimed as the ¨Mexican occupy movement¨ by the international press. This was a great example of how we can use our digital platforms to raise our voices.

#YoSoy132 english subtitles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVvju2E3qcc

Digital citizenship has the potencial to benefit society as a whole and facilitate membership and participation of individuals within society and it is equated with participation in political life.

I really consider that Social Media improves the conditions for civic engagement.

[mrhzgz-blog]

A whole new era

So let´s talk about Internet. First of all I´ll do it in my perspective.

I was born in Mexico in 1993, at those days internet wasn´t “a thing” as nowadays of course. I´m from a small town near the west coast of the pacific ocean and I remember my first encounter with the Internet in primary school, it was so simple and only at school.

Years later, exactly in 2008 I went to Chicago and I discovered Facebook and it was the best invention in life for me. After that I started to link Internet always with Facebook, Internet was Facebook for me and the reason I loved it was beacause I could keep in touch with my friends and family all over the world. Maybe at that time I didn´t realized that, but now I strongly consider that Facebook started a new whole era for the world society.

For me it has always been amazing how we can keep in touch at the exactly same time with others, no matter where they are in the world, but now let´s talk generally.

Internet was born in the late 60´s earlies 70´s and it became a very important tool for society development in many fields and with it, in the 2000´s, a new concept was born: Social Media. (“The history of social media” http://historycooperative.org/the-history-of-social-media/)

We humans are social by nature, we live in communities because we need to interact with each other and we are an evolutive society. Today we use many different platforms to keep in touch with others no matter where they are and now we are also building digital communities.

Social Media help us to create networks among each others, those platforms give us social power, an imaginable power, to share our ideas and thoughts and to know what is happening in the world. We have new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge and culture, now we all can be journalists, writters and analysts, we are the producers and the consumers.  

We should understand how important Social Media and Digital Communities are in different context. In my country, for example, mass media is governed by a big communication company and they control all the information working hand by hand with politicians, so you never know the true of the facts. We have big problems with our freedom of speech and be a journalist is really complicated and sometimes dangerous. That´s why we mexican millenials find a new open door for us in Social Media expressing our ideas and knowledge, it is our best way to communicate and know what is happening in our country.

This new era is helping my country and some others to create digital citizens and we have to keep doing it. I consider Tumblr a great platform to do it, where we can share our ideas and knowledge and at the same time interact with others. We need and we have to use our Social Media for important purposes, let´s think about what we could accomplish with that.