Where is the digital community? @northeastmda20009 - Tumblr Blog

Real-time updates of the #selfie tag on Instagram

Creating a Global Selfie that goes further than anyone person.

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In China, the Gangnam phenomenon carries a special pique. It has left people asking, Why couldn’t we come up with that?

It's a strange shift from Australian culture, that users humour and embarrassment in news and entertainment, but in China, having a laugh at yourself is not commonly done, nor is it acceptable. From censorship online to what is acceptable in mainstream music, we gain an insight into a very different culture.

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Strange socialities' appear in a censored environment

According to socialmedianews.com, in 2013 Australia had close to 11.5 million Facebook users, however in China where Facebook is censored to prevent 'corrupting its people from evil cultures', they are using many similar sites some with nearly 600 million users!

However, China’s government censors many sites and social media platforms, and what they do allow is continually watched by somewhere between 30,000- 200,000 Internet police, who are employed by the ministry of public security to look for content and communication that is offensive or embarrassing. China will ban anything from; pornography to social activism sites to religious sites, news sites and any micro blog post they feel are unacceptable. This makes it hard for people to feel like they have a voice and speak out against what they do not agree with. This presents a pressing shift from what we experience in Australia. We are basically able to say anything we like about the government online or create embarrassing memes, posts and videos. We could even say it is expected with Australian politics, because after all a decent proportion of the media leading up to an election is going to contain stories about how our prime minister got photo bombed by a school child or how Tony Abbot said something that made him look stupid or just general updates on where he goes for a swim in budgey smugglers. However, this is not the case in China, anything that could slightly be seen as offensive or embarrassing for the government will be deleted soon after it is posted and the person who posted it is at risk of prosecution.

Because of this censorship a lot of interesting socialities appear. For example, Chin, Lin and Silverman say that, Chinese consumers prize peer-to-peer recommendations because they lack trust in formal institutions because of this censoring. On singles day last year, a day when the Chinese celebrate being single and buy gifts for themselves, more money was spent online than ever before in the world (Approx 5.75 billion Us dollars). So it is clear that just because much of the Internet is censored the Chinese are still using it, perhaps more than anyone else in the world! For every western social media platform China has several versions of, which are fast becoming popular outside of China as well. Another strange sociality that the censorship creates is that Chinese people have come up with ways of using these platforms to resists the strict censorship or the great firewall. There is a new generation of people who are creating languages through communication and visual images so they can talk about what they want and express how they feel. This is happening at such a speed that when the government catches on to what a symbol or word means these groups are already using something else.

So, admits such a controlling censored environment people are still resisting the censorship in their own, new social ways.

#MDA2009

Many of the sites we currently use daily are censored in china, and much of the content that gets posted on the sites that are allowed is watched and can be deleted by the government.

#MDA2009

Striving to be better! .... through gaming?

Online gaming communities are some of the biggest and most popular digital communities. They connect people who come together for shared interests. They provide an escape for people from their daily lives and for some people they let them slip into an alternate reality that can encompass and become their life. However, there are more simple ways people interact with games and a lot of people who do interact with them wouldn’t consider themselves gamers. I used to have Candy Crush on my phone, only because when I was board I used to scroll through whatever games my boyfriend had on his phone. Eventually I just downloaded it but what began as something to pass the time turned into a week long obsession until the hype died down and I got to a certain level where you had to ask your Facebook friends to help get you to the next one. I stopped there because I didn’t want to be one of those annoying people on Facebook who pesters their friends to play games and I also didn’t want to let all my friends know I was playing games. In this way I was socially affected by something that I did in private. However, in the time that I was hooked on this game, I was playing it in all my spare time and staying up late to play it, waiting for my lives to come back, one night I swear I even dreamed about coloured squares!

So in this way perhaps gaming restructures our idea of freedom and free time. Yes we choose to play games and engage with them through social platforms but in another sense it is just another form of labour and a way for us to keep up the flow of stimulus that we increasingly need to keep us entertained. It is a form of labour in the sense that we are doing something and constantly trying to better ourselves, much like we do in our day-to-day jobs or at university. No one really plays a game half assed or casually, there is always a sense of trying to be better and this can be taxing as you can fall into the trap of tiring yourself out by not accepting that your good enough and that you should stop and do nothing for a while. If we look at gaming like this, as a way to get clear results on your improvement and validation that you are becoming better at something (a feeling that everyone wants in many aspects of life) then we can see why gaming has such an addictive nature. Gaming in South Korea has become so large that people have starved themselves by forgetting to eat because they are so caught up in their game.

Melissa De Zwart discusses Goffman’s idea of framing, that we perform different roles for different audiences. She interprets this in a gaming context saying that the gamer plays three roles at once. She plays the role of an embodied person, the game player and a fantasy character she has made herself in the game. The embodied person is herself in the “real world” and the game player is herself in the “real world” who identifies herself as a game player (when she talks to other game players) and the character is the avatar she controls through the game. But what happens when we prefer one of these selves more so than we prefer the others, especially if our life as an avatar is more fulfilling then our lives as ourselves. Or, if our lives as a game player is embarrassing (aspects western cultures) so we try to hide that aspect of ourselves from others? Can we slip into a world of altered reality that we cannot escape from? Or hide these aspects of ourselves away from our family and friends? Sounds much more like drug or gambling addiction now than a game or something we use to pass the time.

#MDA20009

"New or old-school, hero or side-kick, female video game characters like Princess Peach are too often designed as stereotypically feminine. We most often see female video game characters featured in dresses, skirts or skimpy clothing, wearing bows and make-up, and maintaining dainty, delicate, or over-sexualized dispositions. These features make any character disadvantaged in race or combat. Such stereotypical signifiers, which were specifically drawn into the design of the characters, are then mechanized as disadvantages. These characters not only stereotype women, but also send the message that qualities specific to females are limitations to a character’s ability" Eugenia Zobel de Ayala

Eugenia Zobel de Ayala

#MDA20009

Everything recreation drugs represent in the US (and here)--escapism, socialising and a means of becoming a fantasy creature is embodied in South Koreas Gaming culture.---Groom Legalities, norms and rules are a debated topic from the internal and external aspects of gaming. South Korea's parliament aims to put new laws on gaming in the hope to control the gaming companies but in this culture pro gaming is seen as fame and fortune.

A take on life without our devices and social media

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Seeing The Cracks In Our Online Identities

If you write ‘how to.’ into Google, ‘How to take the perfect selfie’ will come up the in the list weather you take them or not. From just looking at the broad Google search you can take the perfect selfie in 6 to about 15 steps or just get general tips and advice on how to do it.

Within the top few items in the search there is news about a woman who apparently got plastic surgery to look better in selfies, YouTube video’s and tips from super models and pro photographers and how they take the best selfies

Even the Sydney Morning Herald has an article about how to take the best selfie, with the headline being its time to ‘practice or perish’.

Tips in this article include information on what should be in the background of your shots and what lighting makes you look the best. Also, repeatedly there are instructions telling us to look in the mirror and get comfortable and to find out which is your best side.

The articles generally paint the picture that this is a positive and healthy thing to do. It almost sounds as if they are saying that the practice of taking selfie photographs has been around for ages and that it’s a really important thing to learn how to do.

They say we should all look in the mirror more often. They use words like, ‘comfortable’ and phrases like ‘getting to know yourself’ so it is perceived that this is a good and healthy thing to do. They skim over the fact that you then post these photos online to be seen, commented on and used by anyone. Some articles don’t even mention the social media side of the practice, as if they are saying just taking a selfie is completely separate from posting one.

The thing is, that it hasn’t been around for a very long time so we don’t know if there are any major consequences. At this point, what is really solid is that we have come from a society with a tradition of viewing vanity being a bad thing but that that is slowly changing. We are increasingly and constantly now being told to indulge ourselves and make ourselves look good so this whole conception of being vain is dying down. It is still, however, a bit off-putting to be near someone who is constantly looking in the mirror or obsessing on how they look so is a selfie just another way to express these insecurities?

An article posted in March this year outlines an attempted suicide of a boy named Danny Bowman who tried to kill himself after failing to take the perfect selfie. He was 19 at the time and would spend up to 10 hours a day trying to capture the perfect photo of himself and when he realised he couldn’t get what he wanted he lost control and sunk into a deep depression.

Taking excessive amounts of selfies and posting them to different social media accounts expands what we have traditionally thought of as constructing out own identity online. We can now see the cracks in these identities as we start to see people’s insecurities.

The difference between a group of people taking a photo and posting it online, for the purpose of trying to show people they are out having fun (constructing identity) and posting multiple selfies, is that selfies ask people to comment on weather they think we are good looking or not. They become about a persons appearance rather than who they are with or what they are doing, which I believe is more dangerous and can have greater ramifications for someone’s self-esteem and well being.

What is ironic about it, is that posting these pictures online only makes us more insecure. For most people once they start posting selfies and receive likes and comments that they are good looking, they need the validation again and again. So it appears like a remedy to our insecurities but I would argue it is probably just fuelling a fire of insecurities.

However, we could view this kind of photography as a kind of deemphasised version of Skype or Facetime because some people only post selfies to tell other people how they are feeling, where a picture can describe things better than words, this is often how snap chat is used. But perhaps these more innocent versions of selfies have lead to the potentially more dangerous ones we are seeing occur more on other platforms.

Others would argue that it feels good to show off your body in this way and that’s it’s liberating to post these images (like bikini selfies or revealing selfies,) online and it’s a positive things they are now more socially acceptable.

However, when you really think about it, the selfie and our expectation of them lead us to have preconceived ideas about what people should look like and how they should act. In this way, you could say they confine us to hegemonic gender roles.

A girl I know posted a half-selfie (bottom half of person) photo in her underwear and she had a small amount of pubic hair showing out the top of her underwear. She was forced to take this photo down because of the amount of death threats, abuse and commands to take it down she received.

So in this way, perhaps photos like these also open up an outlet for people to comment on how we should look. As Danah Boyed mentioned in the readings in the week on trolling, these platforms invite people to engage in trolling and bullying on other people’s photos.

After all there are about 102 million WebPages and articles telling how to take the perfect selfie and what happens if we defy that many people by not taking them in the way that we are meant too??

In the words of the Sydney Morning Herald, we will perish.

#MDA20009

Am I pretty or Am I Ugly? A trend that took off in the States last year on YouTube, where girls as young as five would ask this question to fellow YouTube users. YouTube as a platform provides a direct line of communication for these young girls to communicate with strangers, which wasn't really possible before it's arrival. In these videos, these girls are seeking a strangers opinion rather than a friends, which is why they turn to YouTube rather than Facebook or other commonly used platforms. Although some of the comments were supportive, many of these girls, received horrible abuse through the comments on these videos and were also sexually propositioned by older men. Girls as young as these lack an understanding about how social media platforms invite people to engage in their life in ways that might not be how they expected. So is YouTube over looked as a potentially dangerous platform for young people?

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Social Media-A Vital Portion of the Puzzel.

‘To avoid social media is to be missing an ever-increasing and vital portion of the puzzle.’ - Julie Posetti

Over the summer I did some work experience with ABC radio in their emergency broadcast department. I worked closely with a friend of a friend who was the emergency broadcaster reporting on the bush fire situation across Victoria and interstate. My duties were only helping and observing but it gave me great insight into what is actually involved in reporting and sharing information in these times of natural disaster. At first, being very naïve about what actually goes on in a media organisation, I believed that they would have lots of people performing all sorts of roles. I was wrong. This friend of a friend I worked with pretty much did everything on the nights that he worked and the responsibility and importance of his job was greater than I ever could have imagined.

The night would consist of putting out a radio broadcast every 20 minuets to update people across Victoria of any new or continuing ‘emergency warning’ and ‘watch and act’ status fires that occurred throughout the night. This meant that we had to have the CFA website up and constantly be refreshing it for new information. We also talked to on the ground fire fighters and volunteers of the CFA for information and interviews. We continually had to report in certain sectors across the state and give total fire ban warning to all areas of Victoria that had the ban. We were able to interrupt any program on these ABC radio channels to do both these broadcasts. This was an eye opener, as it was the first time I fully realised how important this information was, It overruled all other broadcasts on air! The ABC also gave this incredible amount of power, priority and responsibility to the emergency broadcaster that was inspiring to see.

Near the end of each broadcast, the broadcaster would direct people who wanted to engage in conversation or had any information to share to the Twitter and Facebook pages that we were monitoring at the same time. In the time that we weren’t doing the broadcasts we would preparing the next one, but we were also updating the Facebook and Twitter sites with similar information issued from the CFAs website. This is mainly where I worked, using the hash tag #vicfires, to close off my tweets.

Alex Bruns, when talking about the Queensland floods mentions that social media plays an important role in crisis communication and emergency management. This proved true for me as I noticed how many people retweeted my tweets to spread the information further. The challenge however, with monitoring and updating the twitter account for me was that the CFA would release huge statements and updates about the areas effected by the fires and I had to relay as much information as possible in 140 character. This information included, the type of fire, weather people needed to leave now or could stay, and exactly where the fires were, how fast they were moving and where the nearest relief centres were. We also had to tell people in certain areas not to fall asleep because the information that they may have received in the hours to come could potentially save their lives.

Facebook offered a little more room for detail but the experience was still challenging because everyone in Victoria knows just how vital the right information about bush fires and natural disasters can be. In saying that, I do think there is a tendency for those who live in the city, like myself, to forget how frightful and challenging every summer in Victoria can be for most Victorian citizens. Working at the ABC gave me a huge insight to how important the role of social media can be in collaboration with other more traditional media. As Julie Posetti mentions, ABC radio is still central to the spread of information in natural disasters but it works in tandem with their social media sites, their other broadcast and print outlets and the CFA and their social media sites and website. I was shown an eye opening and hard-hitting importance and responsibility for the need of information from people on the ground, in effected areas and people working directly with the fires. Also, the danger that can occur if the right information isn’t accessible to these people or the wrong information is spread. Also, how we need a large variety of platforms working together with mainstream media and people who can multitask across all these disciplines when working in a media organisation, to establish a two way conversation and stream of information that encompasses everyone involved.

Id be lying if I said I wasn’t a little overwhelmed.

#mda20009

On Tuesday, February 28th, a twenty-nine-year-old Canadian male fan of Suzanne Collins’s dystopian young adult trilogy, “The Hunger Games,” logged onto the popular blogging platform Tumblr for the first time and created a site he called Hunger Games Tweets....

Expressing how you feel online it seems has drastically different social rules than than in actual space.

#trolling Mda20009

An Inerasable Online Legacy

Too many times I have got upset or anxious about a text or Facebook message I have received because I miss read the context of the message. It changes things when you can no longer read someone’s body language and sense their emotions. Many times I have thought someone was annoyed or just having a bad day because there enthusiasm doesn’t match mine in terms of putting a smiley face at the end of a message.

When you start to text someone new, you start to way up what kind of a messenger they are; are the blunt and to the point, or they over the top with their use of emoticons and hence appear to keen? There is also a politics on what symbols to put into a message depending on whom you are writing too. I have got my self into a pickle before for putting winky’s face in messages after jokes, but my recipient took that as a sign of flirting and hence I gave out the wrong idea. When I spoke to my friends about this particular example most of them agreed that it was stupid that winky face equals, ‘I want you’, but that’s what a winky face in a text message means and id you use it out of context or you might end up confusing people.

However, who is it that creates these politics around what’s acceptable in social messaging and on social media sites? Because clearly there are some seemingly widely accepted trends about what is and is not acceptable. However, expanding this to a macro level there is also a sense that anything is acceptable online, you can be racist, sexist, a bully, homophobic and whatever else and that doesn’t seem to correlate entirely well to what is acceptable offline.

Even when these people know they are easily traceable they still continue with trolling and hating just by creating multiple accounts to get their voice heard.

So is it social media platforms that create these Internet trolls and bullies? Dahna Boyd would argue that they do, but for her the key reason is because these platforms provide a visibility into the already snide and cruel interactions carried out online. This visibility invites people to engage with these comments and this propels the bullying or the hating further.

Sometimes the initial hate comment or bullying is awful but the comments from the “onlookers” and people who engage after the first attack can be just as bad or worse and they are often not what gets removed from these social media platforms. So there is this idea of an online legacy where very little gets removed and the evidence is always still out there, in-erasable, regardless of truth or how much hurt it causes.

Now what causes people to think they can act in these ways online as opposed to offline is far from simple. Many times these platforms provide people with a voice and an audience where they can edit what the say and back track and say it was someone else if they take it too far, as opposed to offline, face-to-face communication. Dahna mentions that often these bullies or trolls feel unheard themselves are dealing with their own problems. She suggests that they may need more attention than their victims.

So if it is one of us who is being bullied online or the victim of a troll or hate attack the things we would want to happen next seem so simple but so far out of reach. We would want to have control over our data and be able to properly delete it if this kind of bullying and defamation happens to us. We want to be able to delete our online legacy and block users from accessing our accounts even when they have multiple accounts. However, this is a luxury that these online platforms don’t afford, our Facebook accounts will probably always sit there only deactivated if we decide to leave them. However, what happens if one day these platforms go bankrupt and crash, where does all our information and data go then, is it up for anyone to take and use with how they please? The consequences and ramifications of our online legacy can be very severe regardless if we have been a victim of trolling or not. And because this is all still so new to the general population and something we would rather not think about when we sign away our information, we are clearly still coming to terms with how to deal with and manage our online legacies and what to do if they are abused and defamed.

#MDA20009

#ThisisnotSlacktivism

‘You’re going to save the world with a few retweets’

Do you really feel like you know a lot about a cause when someone asks you to sign a petition in the city? Or when you talk about some cause that you heard about, do you feel as though you have supported it just through one on one conversation?

I would say that you are. Any amount of support no matter how small is still support and is still awareness of issues that may otherwise not have got that awareness. Not everyone is a hardcore activist but I would argue more people know and are talking about these causes through platforms like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter and this has an impact that has lead to these platforms having a defining role in activism.

There has been a lot of discussion about how social media sites can be used for activism and their implementation in social movements. However, many people speculate about how this leads to a kind of false activism or ‘slacktivism as Morozov calls it. Slacktivism or ‘Clicktivism’ as it has also been called is basically where people feel good about themselves for supporting a cause but all they have really done is liked a group or a page on Facebook. It is where people think that they are doing good but all this clicking doesn’t really achieve anything in the real world.

However, While people may get a kick out of liking a page, I think we are forgetting that even one small click can create a conversation or provide information to a person who may not have otherwise received it.

These platforms, in particular, Twitter, Youtube and Facebook do provide a channel of communication for individuals to become a collective and share their information in a way that undermines the mainstream media. They can create discussion about topics the mainstream media can miss or be slow to get to, therefore, as Anthony mentioned in the lecture it’s a way to enter into a debate.

In regards to this false activism, there have always been people who are interested in social movements and will take it to the streets and those who may be political in some regards but will not stand up and take action in an organised social movement. Now perhaps, instead of thinking these sites create a fake way for people to get involved we could look at it's potential for creating a more accessible way for the information to be spread around and even those people who are "slack" are now engaging even though it may only be in a small way. Say someone stumbles across a Facebook page of a cause they think is good but have no intention of acting upon apart from liking the page. That page will send that person updates and eventually enough information may get through to the person that they might talk to someone about it, who intern may be particularly interested and get involved more deeply. The potential for even those people who may not seem to interested at first is too great to call ‘Slacktivism’ when it could in fact lead to activism. Perhaps this is one of the ways social media plays such a huge role in activism. We know social media doesn’t cause activism but as Paolo mentions it’s influence is hugely felt, and maybe this is because even the people who aren’t out on the streets know, are taking about these issues and are watching the videos. If anything the conversation is spread more widely than ever before and for this reason I don’t think we should be pointing figures at anyone for being slack because, is anyone seriously arguing they saved the world with a retweet?

#MDA20009 Slacktivism

‘Facebook used to set the date, Twitter used to share logistics, Youtube used to show the world, all to connect people.’

Jarred Cohen

#MDA20009 Digitalactivism

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