Digital Communities

Weekly posts for Digital Communities, MDA20009. Majoring in Media and Communications & Politics and Public Policy. Yes, that is a lot of ands. About.

[phoebelvh-blog]

Kenneth Tinkin Hung

All credits: Kenneth Tinkin Hung

Source

[nation-of-one]

Source: Kenneth Hung (TinKin.com)

[phoebelvh-blog]

8 Going Global

As I’m sure we all know, social networks and media platforms aren’t exactly exclusive to a particular culture or country. You’d think that would make them global and part of the great big free utopia that is the internet, but you’d be wrong. How often do you really interact with people on social media that aren’t from your country? When travelling in other countries maybe? And how about those that aren’t from your city? I don’t think it would be much better. Largely we use social media to interact with friends that we see pretty often.

We’re limited by language, by culture, by who we’re connected to and interact with, by what news and memes we understand and find relevant. Sure, I can spend 5 minutes googling the meaning of an American meme based on something local that happened last week so that I get the joke, but it’s not funny after that. However, show me a meme about Myki and I’ll laugh and laugh and then cry. And there’s something special about feeling like you’re part of a localised group that suffers inept public transport software together.

There are still some types of content and personal connections that cross borders and oceans, but it’s not half as common as the ‘global community’ ideas would have you think.

As China is one of the few states that is in many ways completely cut off it makes for a good example (plus it’s this week's case study!) Things really aren't that different in China despite the Great Firewall in terms of social media use. They’ve even got their own Twitter rip off. Sina Weibo shares almost all of the affordances of Twitter (in some cases before Twitter even has those affordance). They’ve even got their own meme culture, one that is very influenced by the limitations of censorship and the puns used to get around them (The idea of puns promoting free speech makes me very happy).The major difference: it’s more popular. Social media use in general in China is far higher than the global average. 

I’m going to go off into a bit of conjecture here, but there are a few possible reasons for Weibo’s comparative popularity that I could think of. For starters, 140 characters in Chinese is a whole different story to 140 characters in English (Sina Weibo have just ditched the limitation while Twitter is still considering it). Although the affordances were technically the same, this made it entirely different. I would also consider that maybe a general lack of freedoms and free speech makes even the possibility of the internet as a giant almost unmanageable space an exciting idea.

The TED talk by Michael Anti deconstructs these ‘freedoms’ a bit, and I found the strategic use of freedom interesting. If you don’t want to watch the video (although you really should) the gist is that the government carefully chooses which issues to allow free speech on, to give themselves a mandate to get rid of particular figures for example. The idea of controlled freedom is an interesting concept, and one that can be applied beyond China.

Anti goes on to talk about Western government bodies that control, or try to, the internet, and it’s a good point. We’re allowed free speech sure, but you can and will be fired, prosecuted or fined for what you do online if it goes against your boss or your government’s ideas of what is or is not appropriate to criticise or share. What you post on social media is monitored, even if it’s just by the platforms themselves. As he likes to put it, it’s still a game of cat and mouse, even if our cats are smaller and cuter.

And we all know this. It’s why you untag yourself from photos from drunken nights, and why you consider whether something you post may come up in a job interview four years from now. Even when we are not overtly censored, we practice self-censorship because there are indirect penalties for social media use done wrong, and our networks are too large and too public for us to control the damage.

Content and laws may differ wildly in different countries, but usage is roughly the same. The desire to connect with others and to express yourself is universal, but it’s always limited. Although theoretically you could interact with almost anyone, you don’t. These limitations can be Great Firewalls, affordances, laws or just trying to present a better, more palatable version of yourself online. 

It’s a reminder that social media hasn’t really overcome the challenges associated with location, freedom, and privacy.

[phoebelvh-blog]

7 Social Gaming

With just shy of half of Americans playing video games in 2015 it’s safe to safe we’ve moved beyond the idea of gaming as niche, or an isolated past-time. It’d be nice to say we’ve moved beyond the idea of gaming as a male practice (it’s definitely not) but I think we all know the answer to that. 

This scale of growth translates in to online communities springing up in and around gaming, such as e-sports and live streaming sites like Twitch. There’s some great stuff going on, but it’s not protected from the issues that plague gaming as a whole. 

E-sports have been getting pretty big, with 113 million ‘hardcore’ viewers & 147 million occasional viewers in 2015. The prize pools are huge and the players are like celebrities. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of a real life community around video games, and whole heap of it takes place online, but not in game.

Youtube has traditionally been the home of a lot of the gaming community, and where let’s play videos, the ancestor of live streaming, came in to being. It’s obviously been successful. You know who Pewdiepie is. I’m sorry for that. I can’t make myself like him.

And now, we have Twitch.

More like this...

Think of it as a let’s play video running in real time, plus chat. Viewers can communicate with whoever’s streaming as it’s happening, which definitely changes the dynamic. And it’s becoming more like a social network by the moment. You can now add friends, message privately, follow streamers, all the usual social networking suspects. The difference being, this network is all about video games and those who play them (I really don’t have it in me to use gamer as anything but an insult). 

A huge chunk of these interactions, connections and friendships take place entirely online, with no real world links. It’s all pretty warm and fuzzy stuff really, and it is nice to see the positives that can come out of the video game community.

However...

E-sports and Twitch are not safe for the male-centric idea of gaming. Yeah, it doesn’t seem to be outrightly misogynistic, just insidiously so (is that better or worse?). 

E-sports divide tournaments in to separate men and women’s divisions, for no discernible practical reason. The argument in favour of this is that it will “provide a comfortable atmosphere for women”, but personally I would rather see gaming in general be a comfortable atmosphere for women, rather than further casting female gamers as a niche category.

With Twitch, we’re going to take a look at some numbers. Women account for roughly 20% of streamers on Twitch, so less than half of the rate at which they play games. Of the top 100 streamers, 9% are women. So nowhere near representative of anything but problems.

Look, I know I’ve seemed really down on games this post. The issue is that I’m not. I love them. I love the supportive cultures that can occur around them, that they help shy kids make friends and build confidence. They’re also just a heap of fun. 

But as they get bigger, and particularly now that the communities are not just in the game but growing and spreading on to other platforms, it becomes so important that we create these new social networks with the aim of addressing the ongoing issues between video game culture and women, not just mirroring them in new online spaces. 

I don’t think top down policing will be enough either, we need a community based movement towards inclusiveness to match it. The sooner the better, I’d like to go pro.

[phoebelvh-blog]

6 Health & Media

As a pretty fundamental concern for basically any living creature, health crops up a fair bit online. We ask questions, share concerns, tips, experiences, and create communities and support networks. Same stuff we do in real life really. 

This can have ups and downs, we can find support and info we need, or we can diagnose ourselves with rare brain tumours over a headache. But there are definitely better ways to do online health, something a little more engaging and relevant to the format than just sharing a jpeg of a poster with an unwell person above a warning that this could be your fate.

Example one: Hello Sunday Morning.

HSM is kind of like Alcoholics Anonymous’ younger, hipper, less judgemental, non-religious sibling (I suppose all they actually have in common is that they’re about drinking, or rather not drinking).

It’s an Australian NGO, and takes place entirely online. The goal is to challenge the social binge drinking culture in Australia through individuals, and to get people to take a closer look at the when, where, why and how much of their drinking habits. So it’s not necessarily about being an alcoholic per se, which stops it from scaring people off with ominous diagnoses. Nor is it about never drinking, just being in control and happy with your drinking choices.  

HSM has linked outposts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and does a great job on all three. It just looks like social media. Insta filters, picturesque hikes, yoga, fitness inspiration etc etc etc. Having a look through, their hashtag is pretty popular too, and their followers seem pretty engaged. 

It’s probably worth noting the origin story too, Chris Raine the CEO had been drinking habitually, and was helping on a government program to reduce alcohol related violence among teens. As a young person he found their ideas very dull. He was also drinking an awful lot. So, he stopped drinking and started blogging. HSM was built from the community that formed around his blog during his year of sobriety. So this came from social media to begin with really.

This basis in social media is mostly what makes a difference in the tone, and the real focus on community (buzzword!). Instead of scary/boring government PSA style, it’s positive and all about wellbeing, and improving yourself which does seem to help HSM connect to its users (all 50,000+ of them, making it the largest online movement regarding alcohol).

The website/app itself though doesn’t just use social media, it is a social media platform. Laid out a lot like Facebook combined with a to-do list, users share long statuses or blog posts and images, set goals or challenges, and interact with other users and their content. 

You can like, follow, tag, message and comment. The affordances are a combo of popular social media platforms and self improvement apps. It’s all done with usernames, so in most cases you’re anonymous. In many cases online anonymity is a dangerous thing (please see trolling for a recap) but in this case the community is overwhelmingly supportive, even to those who fall off the wagon.

And HSM is doing well. It’s been steadily growing, picking up funding, spreading internationally and helping people for a few years now. This combination of expert opinion, research, community and social media is significantly helping a lot of people change their lifestyles and improve their health. 

It’s a good model, one often used by fitness apps and the like, and it has a lot of capacity to be used in health, and if we want to engage those young folks with their smart phones, I reckon this is how we do it.

[365reasonstobeafeminist]

#322 Because of these mean tweets.

So, I’m guessing that some of you will think that is just mean people trolling on the internet and has nothing to do with misogyny (because it doesn’t exist, right?)

But let’s just take a look at this:

- These are women who publicly express their opinions on sociopolitical issues = something women are traditionally not supposed to do. This will anger misogynists.

- These are women who publicly highlight and discuss patriarchal oppression = something women are traditionally not supposed to do, but also something modern society find provoking (as we’ve achieved equality and stuff, right?) 

- The tweets are not criticising these women’s actual opinions or arguments, but trying to shut them up. 

- The tweets refer to sexual violence.

- The tweets use terms, such as whore and slut, which target, and attempt to control, female sexuality. 

- The tweets focus on these women’s appearance, which stems from the patriarchal belief that women exist to please men.

If these tweets were written by mean people who simply disagreed with these women in a gender equal society, their hatred would not have been phrased like this. 

Watch the full video here.

[phoebelvh-blog]

5 Emergency Social Media

This time around I’m going to get a little personal on you. It’s relevant, I promise, but before we get in to the how and the why of that I’ve got to give you some context. Set the scene.

On Christmas day this year there was a bushfire at the tiny coastal towns of Wye River and Separation Creek. We weren’t there this year luckily enough, but that’s definitely not always been the case. My dad’s house is there, and two doors down is his sisters holiday house.

Dad’s been building his home for 15 years, and this was going to be the year he finished it (although admittedly, this wasn’t the first time he’d made that claim).

So Christmas day and the whole family is crowded around the television, with the radio blasting ABC in the background. Very festive stuff.

The TV hadn’t shown anything new in a while, so being a product of my generation, I started scouring social media on my phone. And I was finding stuff the news wasn’t showing.

On top of that, there was support, a whole communities worth of shared experience, and sympathies that felt a bit realer than a news anchors condolences read from a teleprompter.

That evening, it turned out that dad had made a break for his property, despite fires still blazing and road blocks in place. This behaviour is not out of character. By the next morning, through a bit of scheming and a whole lot of absolute disregard for the rules he made it through the blockade.

Accurate depiction of my father.

He took a heap of photos, before being tracked down and kicked out. He sent them to the family, and from us they trickled on to social media, and in one case in to an online article.

We used social media to track down neighbours and give them news of their properties.

A twitter user, @tompjacobs, did this on a much larger scale. He was down at Separation Creek before most people, and long before the authorities let people know whether their houses had survived. His photos and videos are featured in half of the news articles from the first few days.

He systematically photographed streets, and responded to tweets asking him to check out specific addresses. He gave people certainty while the authorities were still scrambling to compile data (plus dealing with a fire). By providing photographs he legitimised his information.

This may not be the biggest example out there for the use of social media in emergencies, but it captures a lot of the reasons it can be a great tool in these situations.

Social media created a community of people undergoing a shared experience, it expressed support, raised funds, and by crowd sourcing shared information to those who needed it. And that’s not even touching on the use of social media by authorities in this context, which was pretty comprehensive, ongoing, interwoven, and nicely done.

It also meant an awful lot to me personally, to feel connected to other people who also consider this tiny little town, three hours away from Melbourne, to be a place where they feel at home.

[phoebelvh-blog]

Just a quick reminder that Mark Latham still exists, and this is what he’s been up to.  Equally as good as being PM I’m sure.

[phoebelvh-blog]

4 What makes a troll and what do we do about them?

You already know what trolling is. Online harassment, often intended for the trolls own amusement. I’m going to stick with what I know best, old-fashioned online misogyny.  It’s a big topic and I have a lot of questions. Possibly more questions than answers.

Is it worse for someone to abuse you online because they mean it? Or does it matter more that they’re intentional upsetting you just for the sake of it? If they’re only being a misogynist as a joke, does that change how hurtful it is?

 How about we take the idea of intention to a bigger scale. You can (pretty validly) argue that trolling enforces social norms, what you can and cannot talk about on the Internet, who does and does not get to have an opinion or a public platform. Is it better if trolls knowingly or unknowingly enforce (their personal idea of) social norms? Is it better if a troll is intentionally is setting out to crush women who dare to express opinions on the internet than if they just happen to accidentally?

 And where does accountability come in to all this? If you consider harassment, abuse and threats online to be no different than in real life, and if we assume that these are all really horrible things to do to anyone, then people should be held accountable for these actions, right? 

But then the big question; who is responsible for holding people accountable, and how should they do it?

Laws and police don’t really seem to cut it, and often don’t understand or take online harassment particularly seriously, despite the real world equivalents of death threats, slander, stalking etc. all being actual crimes. Platforms don’t want to impact their profits by creating more stringent privacy systems. So that leaves us in the always terrible situation of requiring victims to be the only ones able to keep themselves safe, and they’re doing so by turning the enforcement of social norms back on their harassers.

There’s a growing number of examples of victims of trolling confronting their trolls, going against the traditional folk lore passed down to us by our forefathers&mothers: “don’t feed the trolls.” Some publicly shame them, others personally message and confront, and some contact their family and friends, or even their employers.

I think these actions are brave, and in these cases, very effective. They sometimes work to not only stop that single case of harassment, but to make the troll rethink their actions and their impact entirely.

However, I don’t think these are the people who should be responsible for creating online accountability. I don’t think it’s fair to make every victim have to be brave and stand up for themselves, And I think it all basically comes down to how we think of the internet.

We picture ‘online’ as a separate thing, things are less serious than in reality, anything is fair game in this glorious (please note the sarcasm) free-for-all and if you fail to take it all as the joke it is, that’s on you. Above all  freedom  reigns, even if that is the freedom to be an absolute d*ck to other people.  

But the absolutely fundamental problem here is that the internet isn’t disconnected, it’s full of real people, with real feelings, and it is completely entwined with our everyday lives and our social systems. Opting out often isn’t actually an option. No one should have to learn to keep quiet or face death threats for holding pretty standard opinions, like “women are people too”. Social norms and opinions expressed in one surely are mirrored in the other, and in this case thats a super dangerous scary idea. 

We need to start taking what happens online seriously, as the people online trolling women do actually exist in the real world, and I don’t think its possible that those opinions don’t spill over in to their real lives.

[aiweiweiart]

[phoebelvh-blog]

3 Activism, Social Media & WeiWei

So before we talk about activism, a quick PSA: activism is literally any action that views change as its purpose. Protests, petitions, boycotting things, crashing a website, occupying a space, raising public awareness via the media etc etc etc. It can be easy to think of activism as limited to traditional forms, more along the lines of protests, but it has always been more changeable and open than this.

So, how are social media platforms being used by activists?

 It depends a bit on the affordances of each platform. Facebook has its groups, its  pages, likes, shares, and events. Its affordances allow for a really different set of uses than say Twitter, which is better for documenting things in the moment, sharing news and events, whilst youtube is used for providing evidence after the fact typically.

The core ideas here, like organising or educating, aren’t really different to what activists have always done, they’re just now using smart phones rather than pamphlets.

Ai Weiwei is a good example of an activist who uses social media. His art is very political and addresses the corruption of the Chinese government, the downright neglect of human rights and the freedom of thought and speech, and global imbalances of power.

Late last year, while preparing for the exhibition at the NGV WeiWei tried to place a bulk order for Lego blocks and was denied. The companies argument was that it “cannot approve the use of Legos for political works”, more than a little ironic, as the piece they were intended for was about free speech. 

This was not going to work out well for them.

WeiWei took to social media to tell his followers what was going on. Immediately offers poured in offering to donate lego pieces, and many people used social media to express their anger at the company. Some of these tweets and instagram images took the form of culture jamming. Culture jamming is taking a cultural icon, in this case lego, and subverting is meaning. Fans of WeiWei expressed this through forms such as recreating pieces of his in lego, like WeiWei's “Study of Perspective”, and created images of him as a lego piece.

The offers for donations were so common that WeiWei had collection points set up globally. For the piece at the NGV he ended up using imitation lego pieces, but is now planning a piece with the donated blocks. Lego have since changed their policy because of the backlash and will in future sell to WeiWei.

This incident is interesting because it mostly occurred on social media and organically. WeiWei's followers took it upon themselves to speak back to the lego company and by doing so changed its policy.

And sure, not all activism can or should take place entirely online, but social media definitely has its place in the activist's toolkit. Just think of it as the 21st century printing press.

[vincent-avenal]

In Australia, you can win a politician in a claw machine. It’s why our elections run so smoothly.

[phoebelvh-blog]

2 Political Engagement - The Downsides

#auspol is my life. 

I am outspokenly political on my Twitter account, but only mildly so on Facebook. If I really had to think about this (it wasn’t a conscious choice) I’d say it was to do with who I interact with in each space, and an attempt to separate the two so I don't need to get into more political arguments than I absolutely have to.

Facebook is where I engage with people I know in real life, from my grandma, to someone I met once at a party six months ago. Twitter is where I engage with interests, news, and my friends who are like-minded.

You see, I tick a lot of boxes in terms of political engagement on social media. I’m young, left-leaning, (on my way to being) educated and I come from an urban area. These are all things that make me more likely to be politically engaged online. As you’d expect, most of my friends are pretty demographically similar.

But this is an increasing problem with online political engagement; we’re not hearing from or interacting with those who disagree with us. Social media’s use of algorithms has isolated us into neat little echo chambers, or filter bubbles. And when something opposing your views does get through? Expect it to be Trump or whoever this week's Australian knock-off comparison is.

This can have some pretty nasty side effects, such as increasingly radicalised politics and manipulation of political views. By boiling complex political attitudes and opinions down to data that can be fed in to algorithms, we lose a lot of detail and nuance, and simplify it to us vs. them, black and white thinking. And every time a friend posts something social media deems in line with your interests, your views are affirmed and entrenched.

We’re all influenced by or friends, something pretty clearly illustrated by an experiment conducted by Facebook in 2010. Manipulating users newsfeeds in the US to show how many of their friends had voted mobilised approximately 60,000 people to vote. All in all, getting more people to vote is not such a bad thing, but if political views were to be targeted by this, falsified social pressure could decide elections. It’s the digital incarnation of manufactured consent. Jonathan Zittrain, author of the article, compares it “subliminal messages in TV advertisements”.

It all sounds pretty menacing really. I mean, it’s definitely not going to stop me engaging with politics online (never), but I do think that we need to really consider how social networking platforms filter, alter and manipulate what pops up on our newsfeeds, and make an effort to seek out the people that disagree with us every once in awhile.

[phoebelvh-blog]

1 What is Tumblr?

Tumblr is not something I've dabbled much in previously. Browsed, sure - created, never. After a week or two I think I've learnt a little. Although Tumblr seems to consider itself a microblog, it’s really social in ways blogs typically aren't. However, despite often looking like a social media platform users engage in ways that aren't restricted by who they know in real life (or even who they are in real life).  

This is part of what gives it as a community something unique. The endless reblogging and notes is where creativity and in-jokes happen - not just through original content. It's often as much about selecting the right thing to share as it is about creation.

We all sort of understand how it works, the gifs, the fandoms, the puns. But there is a difference between recognising a Tumblr screenshot and defining what Tumblr is.

There are a few options here. You could consider Tumblr to be a blog. It has many of the usual characteristics and allows for use as an anonymous (web) log, a diary on the internet. Blogs can be:

Run by an individual or a group

Typically pretty informal in style

The writer (or writers) can be anonymous, go by pseudonyms or their real names

Usually centre around an individual, a theme or a topic

Long or short form writing, or primarily visual

Filled with original content, or more a curation of other people’s work.

So, even within trying to define blogs there is a pretty large amount of diversity.

Well how about a social network then? There is something innately social in its affordances; You reblog, you reply, you like. You can have private, message based conversations. The things that keep Tumblr users coming back are embedded in its community, its network; the fandoms, inclusivity, common interests and shared experiences. Many users love it for feeling like they can be themselves, or at least a part of themselves, in a way that they can’t in real life. And despite being primarily based on weak ties, as a community it’s tight knit with an average of 4.7 degrees of separation.

Where does that leave us? Surely Tumblr fits pretty well into either of those categories, without fitting into either exclusively. My answer:

[actualdogvines]

“He’s still learning about glass”

[actualsufjan-deactivated2016092]

this guy in my biology class sent this to me when i asked if he did the homework

[phoebelvh-blog]

learning to tumblr