The secret lives of the digital herd

[theearnookclub-blog]

How to be a woman Caitlin Moran

How to be a woman is my absolute favourite autobiography. I read it last year after watching Raised by Wolves, a TV show Moran wrote, and telling my cool aunt about it. Aunty Lisa’s from northern England and Moran’s from the midlands, it turns out she’s a fan. I had never heard of this English journalist, author, and broadcaster but suddenly she became the coolest person I had ever heard of – I would hesitate to say, cooler than Lisa.

Moran was raised the eldest of eight children, a solid several of whom are sisters – in a council house without much of anything. She gets on well with her next-youngest sister Caz and the book begins with the two of them getting their first periods six months apart – but what’s more exciting is what Caz and Cat* do next*. Moran began writing for the weekly Melody Maker at sixteen and at eighteen she presented the pop show Naked City. Her and Caz are soon taking MDMA at pretentious parties and having the best of times.

How to be a woman is a mix of autobiography and manifesto. Moran writes it hilariously and is so so hilarious. She tells stories from her past and explains aunt-like lessons about life and womanhood. She loves her drugs and her cigarettes and her family. She has well-thought-out opinions about stuff I wouldn’t have even thought about - I really recommend you give this a read. She loves her op-shops and eccentric clothing and fervently believes LEOPARD PRINT IS A NEUTRAL!

*Caitlin isn’t her real name – she read it in a book aged thirteen and strangely pronounces it ‘Cat-lin’.

*What Katy did next – also a good gurlish read.

*In Lost in Translation, she presented us with the question, ‘Is it ever right to have sex with Bill Murray during a trip to Japan?’, to which anyone with any sense was able to answer, ‘No – you must always have sex with Bill Murray when you are on a trip to Japan.’*

*That last note belonged to Moran.

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

What was I saying about that being my last tumblr post? Have another look at my other blog!

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

Post 8

‘Global social media practice: case study China’

It seems China operates on a different world sometimes – which I suppose is true of everything foreign – but there is a certain similarity in their conspicuous consumerist culture.  I myself went through an online shopping phase which could have rivalled Alibaba’s single’s day. I think this online shopping aspect of Chinese social media is what intrigues me the most because it is just slightly an example of augmented reality. It is also so similar and just a bit different to what happens here.

I’d like to contrast two occurrences happening here and in China regarding online shopping. These are the western ‘haul’ video and China’s often disparaging ‘product review’ videos. Of course, we have product review videos here as well – and from what we have heard this week I presume China might have its own version of the ‘haul’ video – but what I’d like to talk about is how the differences in the social media landscapes effect each of the videos content.

The ‘haul’ is a shocker of a video category and I can entirely understand its appeal. Haul videos entail mostly teenage girls sitting on their beds revealing to a webcam their latest clothing and beauty purchases. There’s something covetously satisfying about it; and really, it’s exactly how I show everything to mum every time I myself get home from the shops. However, something to note is how only positive things are being said in the videos. The girls often haven’t used the products yet and consumers always want to like what they have spent money on. And on top of that – the most successful girls are often being paid for what they promote.

This is in contrast to the Chinese blogger and video star Laoluo who often reviews ‘defective products and technology’. There is a ‘remarkably vocal group of consumer advocates who don’t hesitate to condemn products they consider shoddy or substandard’ (Chiu, Lin & Silverman, 2012). Most of the successful ‘haulers’ and product reviewers here aren’t able be so disparaging because they are being sponsored or are holding out in the hope of being sponsored. This isn’t the aim of the Chinese product reviewers.

We here in the west honestly seem mostly okay with YouTubers being a conduit for advertiser’s messages – but the Chinese population has a lack of ‘trust in formal institutions’, they are ‘skeptical of information from news sources and advertising’ (Chiu, Lin & Silverman, 2012). This leads to social media having ‘a greater influence on purchasing decisions for consumers in China than for those anywhere else in the world’ because they ‘prize peer-to-peer recommendations’ (Chiu, Lin & Silverman, 2012).

Chinese product reviewers might be censored and restricted by their own government; but it seems western user-producers are hobbling themselves becoming beholden to a different sort of authority – large corporations.

Sources:

Chiu, C, Lin, D and Silverman, A 2012, 'China's social-media boom', McKinsey and Company, 1 May 2013

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

Boost Juice's 'cheeky pick-up bot' accused of being a total creep

Boost Juice has defended an online campaign to promote a new smoothie to young adults, following concerns it normalises predatory behaviour.

What on earth is this!

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

Researching online shopping and ‘haul’ videos for the last ever Tumblr post! and it reminded me of Lily Allen’s phrase ‘I am a weapon of massive consumption’ I think I used to listen to this song actually every day in year 7!

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

The viral condom ad from the reading! What is this 

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

Post 7

‘Social gaming: playing the crowd’

I thought the existence of the Council of Stellar Management (CSM) really fascinating. It is an elected council of players of the Massively Multi-Player Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG) EVE. Members are supposed to represent the views of the rest of the players to CCP (the Icelandic company which owns and manages EVE). I was reading through the readings and it clicked that I’d heard it all before. This is because I am majoring in advertising; the Australian advertising industry is self-regulated and so it has a vaguely similar ‘council’.

This ‘council’ is the ‘Advertising Standards Board’ (ASB), and I almost wonder why CCP hasn’t seemed to research existing boards like this before establishing theirs. Members of the ASB represent their own personal viewpoint. They are not expected to ‘speak on behalf of’ any particular group. So, the way in which the Advertising Standards BUREAU (the regulatory agency which the board is a part of) ensures the board is representative of the larger Australia is by selecting members from ‘a broad range of age groups and backgrounds’ and having it be ‘gender-balanced’ (ASB,2017).

The CCP could argue that the CSM being elected makes it more demographic, but I don’t agree. The ‘EVE community’ website – an official website – says that ‘As a CSM delegate you always represent yourself and your own views.’ (CCP, 2017). They are not expected to ‘speak on behalf of’ the EVE ‘playerbase’ and neither are they strategically selected to ensure that they do. Members of the CSM are asked to ‘keep ongoing discussion with CCP private’. The information I read on the official website does not fit with what I read on ‘Backstage Lore Wiki’ – an unofficial website. Backstage Lore Wiki says the CSM is meant to ‘represent the views of the players to CCP’ (Backstage Lore Wiki, 2014). I think this unclarity and the fact that information seems to only flow upwards demonstrates arrogance among some members of the gaming community.

Something else I found fascinating were the unofficial websites and forums themselves. This is because lots of the forums had strict ‘rules and guidelines’, which were enforced by moderators. I asked myself, if the gamers were able to adhere to some sort of standard here, why couldn’t they manage it in the game? But the ‘Lawless Frontier of Deep Space’ reading sort of answered me. It explains that ‘online game players negotiate a series of frames as they play. They can move from their primary frame of embodied person, to the role of player, to the role of character inside the game in quite a seamless fashion.’ (De Zwart and Humphreys, 2014).

So, the player act as ‘players of EVE’ in the forums; but more often as ‘embodied persons’ in the game. I think the three roles need different rules and regulations, and that different rules for different circumstances are what MMORPGs need to offer their players. The reading explains that already:

‘Game rules created by developers in the establishment of an online digital game space intersect and overlap with rules created socially by players, with cultural norms emerging from within the game space and from the contexts of play, with legal rules developed by lawyers managing the interests of publishers and with laws and values originating in the real world contexts of players in whichever legal jurisdiction they are located.’ (De Zwart and Humphreys, 2014).

Sources:

Backstage Lore Wiki, 2014, Council of Stellar Management, Backstage Lore Wiki, viewed 10/5/17, < http://wiki.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?title=Council_of_Stellar_Management>.

CCP, 2017, The Council of Stellar Management, EVE community, viewed 10/5/17, < https://community.eveonline.com/community/csm/>.

De Zwart, M & Humphreys, S, 2014, ‘The Lawless Frontier of Deep Space: Code as Law in EVE Online’, Cultural Studies Review, Volume 20, p. 77-99.

[theearnookclub-blog]

Paula Isabel Allende

I am still in the midst of reading this tragic combination of memoir, history, and correspondence. Isabel Allende’s writing is always beautiful, and here she makes me cry. Paula is meant for her daughter, struck young onto her deathbed, taking a long time going. Allende visits her every day in Chile, along with her mother, surviving in a sort of purgatory.  

Paula tells a family history first most. It is always melodramatic, but has so much reason to be. Allende has had the most interesting life. It seems to have happened somewhere else, which it has, but on entirely different world. She tells me exactly what it looks like and what it was like, and I feel privileged to be there. She could just as much have been lived in Rome thousands of years ago, it feels so foreign. Everyone she writes of seems like someone else to every other person who has existed. Her family is so strong.

I have read Isabel Allende before but only fiction. Here I am reading of what fed her to write it.

There is a description of her grandmother in the beginning of the book, and somehow, we take her with us through the rest of the book, after her death. Allende talks a lot of dreams and spirituality, which I like. She has done so well here.

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

Is this an act of shameless self-promotion? Oh well, this is my other book reviewing blog...

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

I Spent a Week Undercover in a Pro-Anorexia WhatsApp Group

The skeletal girls in it bowed before a mysterious leader known as "the goddess of emaciation."

This is the article I was talking about last week! 

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

Post 6

‘Public Health Campaigns & Communities’

What first came to mind after watching this week’s lecture and the presentation was this VICE article I read last year. A reporter went undercover into a ‘pro-anorexia’ WhatsApp group, and what eventuated was a very VICE version of investigative journalism. She said she thought of the article whilst talking to a friend about the subject, and it took her ‘no longer than five minutes’ to find a pro-anorexia forum, from where she found the WhatsApp group.

The group let her in after she told them her height, weight, and age; In return the young girls gave her an emancipated ‘target weight’ and a set of rules. ‘I was allowed a maximum of 800 calories per day. I was not allowed to eat anything after 5 PM. Every calorie had to be worked off with exercise. On Sundays, these skeletal girls send each other full body photographs and pictures of their scales.’ (Brenneisen, 2015). They took it seriously… ‘If you break the rules, you're thrown out of the group.’

The girls in the group were aged between 16 and 23. They posted passionately suggesting that the whole group should fast; or gleefully that they had ingested nothing but a cappuccino all day. Their use of emojis was out of control. Eventually the admin’s mother shut the group down.

The whole situation was very similar to what McCosker discussed using the example ‘depressiongrams’. These were Instagram accounts and posts which showed mopey teenagers and cut-up skin. The Instagram users and the WhatsApp group both seemed to almost cherish their sicknesses.

For the sake of some VICE-like journalism I found an anorexia forum myself; one where they were actually discussing the VICE article in question. It was actually easy and I only thought of it because it was the second result on the page after I googled the article in the first place. Curiously, the girls there seemed to think that the WhatsApp group members belonged to a different ‘tribe’ of internet anorexics to them, suggesting that there are different denominations of anorexia worshippers all over the world wide web.

The other strange thing was just how they don’t eat… and coach each other not to eat… it just sort of goes against nature and gets weird to think about if you think about it.

Something else McCosker observes is how in his data set of Instagram posts ‘there was a surprising level of consistency in content forms and practice’ (McCosker, 2015). He was able to separate the images into ‘roughly three broad categories: 1) people and bodies, 2) quotes, text and graphic or image-text combinations, 3) popular media, comics and humour, and 4) a small number of other representative objects.’ (McCosker, 2015).

This consistency is a phenomenon similar to the usernames in the anorexia forums; they are all variations on bony-ness, weightless-ness and shyness.

The internet sure is a place where uncommon sorts of people can come together… but surely with examples like this you wonder if it would’ve been better if they had stayed apart.

Sources:

Anthony McCosker 2015, Tagging Depression: Social Media and the Segmentation of Mental Health, Mental Health and Social Media.

Nadja Brenneisen, 2015, ‘I Spent a Week Undercover in a Pro-Anorexia WhatsApp Group’, Vice, 9/6, viewed 4/5, <https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/i-spent-a-week-in-a-pro-ana-whatsapp-group-talking-to-the-goddess-of-emaciation-876>.

[bluzella]

Finding help in a crowd

Crowdsourcing Presentation

https://prezi.com/view/6oDYBXA4wRL1QRdSR6BF/

@captainwhitestormy @socialmediakilledtheradiostar @pleaseconnectme

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

The Prezi!

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

He obsessively attacks Ricky Gervais on Twitter.

A Ricky Gervais approved article on trolling! 

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

The Rise of Crowdsourcing

Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.

The informative (but dated) article I was going to link to... I think it’s a bit of a must-read on crowdsourcing

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

Post 5

‘Crowdsourcing in times of crisis’

I’ve found this topic the hardest so far, but I reckon that’s just because I am putting the most work into it, since I am presenting this week. However most luckily, and because of the ANZACs, my group has had an extra week to prepare.

We found one of my favourite definitions of crowdsourcing quite early on in the research stage (long before any actual work began); it was ‘Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated employee and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.’ (Aldino, 2014).  

For the presentation, I focused on examples of crowdsourcing used throughout the recent Queensland disasters. But here I’d like to discuss a few of the notes I made whilst preparing.

Firstly, how crowdsourcing is often mistaken for outsourcing. I had never thought of the two being conflated, until I read a 2006 article in Wired, where Proctor & Gamble’s vice president at the times, defined outsourcing as ‘when I hire someone to perform a service and they do it and that’s the end of the relationship’ (Howe, 2006). Because the same article (which although dated, was a very informative read which I am going to post to this blog), described an example of crowdsourcing involving pharmaceutical, and other, research and development departments.

This crowdsourcing was undertaken on a platform called ‘InnoCentive’. Pharmaceutical companies posted ‘their most ornery scientific problems’ onto the website, and ‘anyone on InnoCentive’s network… [could] take a shot at cracking them’ (Howe, 2006). Where a solver found a solution, they were paid anything between $10,000 to $100,000, and I can see how this arrangement could seem very similar to outsourcing.

Lots of the solvers were undergrads, mums, or retired scientists. The article quotes a lecturer, Karim Lakhani, who has studied InnoCentive and actually echoes a lot of the what we have already read on network theory. Lakhani contends that “The strength of a network like InnoCentive’s is exactly the diversity of intellectual background,” and that “We actually found the odds of a solver’s success increased in fields in which they had no formal expertise,” (Howe, 2006). This is very reminiscent of the week one reading in which Siapera stresses that the strength of a social network rests not on the strength of the connections between the individuals, but upon the amount of weak connections the network itself can sustain (2012, p.198).

Something else which I noted, was how often crowdsourcing revolved around photography. The Wired article begins with an anecdote regarding stock photos. A photographer found his stock photograph prices being massively undercut by amateur photographers posting onto stock photography websites (Howe, 2006). Nowadays, professional stock photography hardly exists. This transition seems crucial to the evolution of crowdsourcing.

News outlets often put out open calls for photos and videos captured of events, and this is a sort of crowdsourcing. These photos and videos are often captured on phone cameras, and this occurrence has increased along with phone camera capabilities (I am going to post some examples of this so-called citizen journalism later on). The Wired article, from 2006, bemoans how professional cameras now cost less than $1000. How much more pronounced must this point be now that everyone carries good-enough cameras everywhere?

A last note which I made regards something which I cannot pretend to be pleased with. In the beginning, crowdsourcing wasn’t always free, but it costed ‘a lot less than paying traditional employees’ (Howe, 2006). Nowadays, it seems the labour is more often free than not, and I think everyone should be paid for their work (@you, Arianna Huffington).

Sources:

Jeff Howe, 2006, ‘the Rise of Crowdsourcing’, Wired, 6/1/2006, viewed 20/4/17, <https://www.wired.com/2006/06/crowds/>.

Reddy Aldino, 2014, Crowdsourcing, Prezi, viewed 20/4/17, <https://prezi.com/dwdjtrmge6rm/crowdsourcing/>.

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

How one teen's plea for free nuggets became one of the biggest tweets ever

16-year-old Carter Wilkerson’s tweet is catching up on Ellen DeGeneres’s Oscars selfie but still has a way to go to get the 18m retweets needed for free food

I am doing my presentation for week 8 on crowdsourcing in times of crisis and thought that this was an interesting, if lighthearted, example! #isthisacrisis #mostdefinitelyacrisis #firstworldproblems

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

Post 4

‘Digital citizenship 3: trolling & social media conflict’

I couldn’t sleep the night before I went to write this week’s post, so naturally, and like all of us have in this digital age, I turned to on-demand streaming services. And what luck it was! I started watching Samantha Bee’s ‘Full Frontal with Samantha Bee’, and was treated to a wild tale and exemplary example of investigative journalism. I’ve already posted the clip I am talking about to this blog.

‘Full Frontal with Samantha Bee’ is a late-night news and satire show from the US. McCosker discusses this sort of program in the reading, ‘Trolling as provocation: YouTube’s agonistic publics’. He proposes that ‘satirical news shows’ along with ‘demotic YouTube video production’ act as a productive form of ‘silly citizenship’, which he says is an integral aspect of digital citizenship (McCosker 2013, p.4).

If you’ll watch the clip, it contains Samantha Bee interviewing two masked Russian ‘trolls’, who claim to be paid to interfere with the US election. One of them describes her job as being to ‘make simple people change their mind about their vote and also about Russia’ (masked female Russian troll, 2016). She goes on to claim they operate in the comments sections of websites like ‘the Wall Street Journal, the New York post, the Washington post, Facebook, Twitter…’ (masked female Russian troll, 2016). This fits in with McCosker’s view of comments fields being a place for ‘reactive’, ‘deviant’, and ‘aberrant’ participation (McCosker 2013, p.4).

In comments sections, there is not much interaction between the posters of the original content and the commenters, but instead lots of engagement between commenters and other commenters (McCosker, 2013). What provokes this engagement is often ‘feelings’, like how the grief and pride provoked in McCosker’s two New Zealand YouTube video examples provoked intensified and ‘sustained collective engagement’, of trolling and commentating (McCosker 2013, p.13). In the case of Samantha Bee’s Russian trolls, these feelings which provoke engagement are themselves activated through the trolls doing what Samantha describes as ‘calling people pussies online’ (Samantha Bee, 2016). McCosker also says topics like politics and religion are more likely to trigger engagement (McCosker 2013, p.3).

This engagement which trolls can trigger is a bit of a double-edged sword. This is because ‘active and creative participation might also be used to help young people learn to be more ‘critical’ of media messages’ (Burgess and Green 2009, p.81).  

I think it is important to note McCosker’s contention at the beginning of the reading of how acts of trolling ‘can only be properly understood within their cultural and geographical context and in their ability to affect and extend ‘agnostic’ publics’ (McCosker, 2013), because this is exactly the task which these Russian trolls were undertaking in the context of the US election.

I think it is also important to note how McCosker maintains that trolling is an act of digital citizenship which is accomplished through a ‘performance that can be either genuine or counterfeit’ (McCosker, 2013). This fits in well with the female Russian troll claiming she pretends to be a housewife from Nebraska online (masked female Russian troll, 2016). It also fits in with how we are really sure whether the trolls being interviewed were actually pro-Trump, although we did hear that strangely, they saw nothing wrong with what they were doing.

Sources:

Anthony McCosker, 2013, ‘Trolling as provocation: YouTube's agonistic publics’, Convergence, Vol 20, Issue 2, pp. 201 – 217.

Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, 2016, Russian Thinkfluencers | Full Frontal with Samantha Bee | TBS, 31/10/16, viewed 11/4/17, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OauLuWXD_RI>.

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

I think this is what I am going to write my fourth post on! How crazy is it???

[pleaseconnectme-blog1]

Scott Morrison makes case for negative gearing change – despite ruling it out

Contradictory and selective arguments for retaining negative gearing fail to conceal the reasons reform is needed

I mentioned a few posts ago how the author of one of the week’s readings, Greg Jericho, was one of my favourite commentators. So here’s an article of his if you’d like a read! He writes about economics which I usually find very dry, but he is very comprehensible.