For my remediation this week I decided to run my own little experiment. I opened up google and searched for something I genuinely knew I have never searched: France. I looked at flights, things to do, places to go. Afterwards I logged into my Facebook page and within a few scrolls the first ad for a sports team in France popped up.
Surveillance working at lightning speed.
This technology involved with big data has the power to learn so much about us without our knowledge. A video made last year tested the theory that your phone is listening to everything you say. Check it out to see the results!
If Facebook is generating ads based off 30 seconds of google searching, what kind of other information do they have the power of obtaining? We already put so much of our lives online that we are just giving them more leverage to track our everyday lives.
Do you think there is anywhere left where you are not being monitored?
Thanks for sticking through the semester with me! Its been fun BCM 112, now its time for me to head back to the states.
This week I wanted to focus on the difference between open and closed sources.
It may be an overused example, but the best way to discriminate the two is by using the case of Apple and Android. The two share a rivalry with incredibly loyal consumers but what is it that makes people go wild over something like a phone?
I would argue it is the interface that you interact with on a daily basis.
Android users prefer the ability to customize their display with apps, widgets, and the freedom to download from more sources.
Apple users love the simplicity and ease of design that comes with the iPhone.
Do consumers know that by supporting one particular brand they are also supporting a specific type of source code? Or is this just passive consumerism.
Im curious to know, which format do you prefer? Let me know in the comments below!
As I was sitting at Tuesday night musical bingo at North Wollongong Hotel, I started jamming out and preparing to bust out into “ice ice baby” when the song was cut short and the DJ announced that the song title was Under Pressure by Queen & David Bowie.
I sat in confusion for a moment, how could I have mistaken this song?!
For my remediation this week I chose to sample the two tracks and then layer them to show just how similar they are. I gotta say, its pretty darn close. This resulted in a lawsuit against rapper Vanilla Ice, in an interview, Vanilla Ice claimed that the songs didn’t sound anything alike and then later said “yeah, we sampled from it, but it’s different!”
But it’s different.
How different does media have to be before you can claim that it was original? What is the threshold for originality?
Over the course of the semester my digital artifact has taken a couple turns, I learned to #FEFO by not getting likes on my page or engagement from my followers. After modifying my posts and format I came to the conclusion I needed to make some bigger changes. This is how my original page vegan.onthemove became
@carson.abroad
While I don’t have any screenshots of my original page (smh what was I thinking) my follower count grew from 42 to 93 and my most popular post has a total of 35 likes! #ftw
I learned a lot through this process about how to build up my online presence and actually putting the tools we have learned in this course to boost my page. A neat little outcome of this project is the opportunity for me to become a Madera Outdoors brand ambassador!
Check out my page and drop your insta in the comments below so I can give them a follow as well!
For my digital artifact, I chose to use Instagram as my platform. How original, right?! I always joke about “getting the picture for insta” or when being challenged “gotta do it for the gram.” These are all jokes we make today because we are aware that much of what we see on Instagram, amongst all the other social media platforms, is just a simulation of reality.
“Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” – Baudrillard
Now, I do not want to dive into what has been changed about this image but rather the fact that the altered image on the right, looks perfectly normal. If I saw this online I would not question that this is a real image but the concept of (wait for it…) framing has taught me to not believe everything I see posted online. My frame is that of growing up in a social media centered generation where altering images is “normal.”
Hyperreality is essentially the inability for us to comprehend what is an is not real. This layer of editing is just an extension of the image that we can not see without the raw image in comparison. In the modified image, reality and hyperreality are blended. (Just like they blended her skin in the edited image *ba dum tss!*)
What are your thoughts on hyperreality and social media? Should we accept that hyperreality is what we get when we log on, or should we expect more authentic images?
This weeks topic of framing had me chuckling to myself more times than I should admit during lecture and tutorial. While watching the “most Aussie interview ever” I thought it was funny but had no idea where it was coming from. Yeah at home we have similar people but nothing clicks for me when someone says this is a very Aussie-like thing. For me, this could have been a guy from the southwest corner of downtown Cedar Rapids, which means absolutely nothing to a non Iowan, just like this means absolutely to me as a non-Australian. It’s all about how you interpret it based on your background and experiences. This is a phenomenon called framing.
Now these images are what made me laugh. When I see this I immediately think of girls in the midwest and I could instantly picture at least three Instagram handles of girls who post content like this.
You may see a girl who likes camo, hunting, and working out. What I see is an unfortunate stereotype. If this is you, I am very sorry to be roasting your pictures but for the sake of this post (and that HD) it is a necessary evil.
What I see is a girl who is trying to impress the actual country boy who works on a farm and hunts with his family. She bought herself some camo and a crossbow and took up learning this new skill. Shortly after, she gave up on the “hunting” because she never actually cared about it but now she has some cool insta pics. BUT(T) she still has to throw in some workout pics to show she is fit and some dressed up photos to know she can still be girly.
Maybe this was a bit over the top, but maybe I also have personal experience with someone like this, the world may never know..
On to something a bit funnier, check out my remediation for this week!
I decided to play around with this video because it contains one of my favorite quotes of all time: Bacon is good for me.
Kinda ironic because I am vegan but thats beside the point.
P.S. just abiding by Vegan Rule #1: Always remind people that you are vegan!!!
I think this kid, King Curtis, is hilarious. Wife Swap is an American show where they literally swap wives for 2 weeks to live by the others rules. This is totally nonsensical but it was a hit show that everyone watched when I was a kid.
How does framing come into play? If you have no idea what wife swap is then this means nothing to you. For me, it’s an iconic moment.
Who regulates the news? Do we actually know? Being an international student from the US (where I think we can all agree is a weird place in the news world) I want to talk about the American government and news sources.
Whether you subscribe to CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC, or any other media conglomerate, we do not outwardly know where exactly our news is coming from. In fact, I am having a really hard time researching media regulation in the US at all. There is no government regulation of the media and news produced, the only boundaries are laid out in the constitution with freedom of speech, even hate speech is protected under this amendment.
This means any news we see can be ‘fake news.’
When we choose to follow the opinions of a particular news source, we are choosing to follow what the news casters report. This means many people choose their news source by preference of the person delivering it, not based off how legitimate and objective the source is.
Welcome to my blog! My name is Carson and I am an exchange student from the US. Iowa to be exact, the land of corn.My home uni is the University of Kansas (Rock Chalk!) where I am a third year in Applied Behavioral Science (Early Autism Intervention) and pre-Occupational Therapy. When I am not at school I work full time at Camp Courageous, a year round camp for children and adults with intellectual and physical disabilities. It’s basically the most fun job you could ever have. Who doesn’t want summer camp all year long? My hobbies include hiking, camping, canoeing, playing games, and just exploring. I recently spent a month and a half traveling in Europe, so of course I have to bring it up in any situation I possibly can. (Did you really travel if you don’t remind people of it every 5 minutes? Asking for a friend.)
Now, the big question: why did I choose to come to Australia?
One reason: Oprah.
Now you may be asking, why Oprah? Well, when I was a child my mom would watch Oprahs show every day when I got home from school. In 2011, she brought a group of her biggest fans to Sydney and 12 year old Carson was very disgruntled that I was not invited on this trip. What a rip off.
If you made it this far, thanks for hanging in there pal.
I think everyone these days recognizes that placing social media on such a pedestal can have damaging effects on social and emotional areas of our life. Did we know that it could have this deep of an effect?
Jordan Hall says the the problems with social media can be reduced down to four main categories (read the full article here):
Supernormal stimuli
The way I am understanding this concept is how we revolve our lives around what will get the most likes on a post. If a picture doesn’t get enough likes, many people will remove it because it doesn’t keep up with their standards.
2. Replacing strong link community with weak link affinity
This section discusses how we have come to value online relationships versus in person formal contact. By having such a high affinity for obtaining likes and comments we form a connection with our online audience rather than ‘physical proximity.’
3. Training people on complicated rather than complex environments
For this concept, Hall uses the example of Facebook emotions which I think is a great representation. You think that you have complete control over your actions, but in reality you only have the choice of 6 reactions. On other platforms you have even fewer, this strictly limits what you are able to do and makes it a much less complex environment.
4. The asymmetry of Human / AI Relationships
This was a concept a bit tougher for me to understand but i’ll take a go at it. Essentially, we have entered into a “relationship” with Facebook. We provide information (posts, friends, our details) and in exchange it produces content that it thinks we would like. The way we interact with this content, (ie. scroll past, open, remove) will alter this algorithm. This is a form of collective intelligence that is used on us without our knowledge.
I will admit, I am really bad with keeping up with the news. Like really bad. I do not have a regular news network I subscribe to, a newspaper I read, or any traditional news source. I get all of my news from various social media platforms.
You know those eye catching posts you see on Facebook? The ones that start playing a video before you can even scroll past it. Yeah those are how I get most of my news.
I am pretty willing to listen to any news source, like I said, I don’t regularly subscribe to one in particular. With all the talk of media ownership, it makes me think. Are these posts curated for me? Do I see and watch news sources based off what Facebook thinks I will like the most and have watched in the past? Maybe I need to do some more research and be more purposeful with the news I watch. (I probably should have come to this conclusion long ago.)
To answer the question: if I had to say one person or being owned the media I use to access the news, it would definitely be Facebook.
I do think this matters. Knowing that Facebook has algorithms just like any other social media platform, I am not actually choosing the media and news I am consuming but instead, I am being passive and only consuming what is most convenient. I have put a lot of my trust into these sources but I need to realize that these short clips and attention grabbing posts only reach the surface. I need to learn to dig deeper into a trusted source and be more active in my news consumption.
With this being said, I feel like I am not the only person who thinks they are doing themselves in injustice by not having a trusted news source. What are your recommendations for picking? It can’t be as simple as listening to or reading a sample from each and going with the one that sounds the best. What kind of research have you done? Do you take action when you disagree with a source? I feel as though comments and phone in’s to the media are never legitimate. They are filtered to allow only the content the source wants to use.
Carson Whitford 