Week 16

Honestly at times this course felt like I was playing catch up constantly.  Getting used to the pattern of having due dates outside of class and assignments announced entirely over the web portal was new to me for classes like these.  I found myself constantly trying to meet deadlines with my work and school together.  However I did have fun and I did learn several new skills.  This was my first time really running a blog.  Having to make weekly blog posts about what we learned was a bit much and I wound up doing several in bulk at once, but it was definitely interesting to put down your ideas on the subjects you were learning in class and posting them online. 

Another part of this class I enjoyed was the constant discussion of current affairs.  I did appreciate the opportunity to learn more about groups such as Black Lives Matter from their perspective, it was one that I didn’t get much exposure to initially and while it didn’t change my overall views on the movement, I did appreciate the additional perspective on the matter.  I think that I would like to take another course like this in the future, it would be nice to keep learning more about other perspectives and other communities.  

Week 15 Blog Post

This week we started working on our online charity project, which was encouraging users to use their codes on the bottle of their Hydroflask bottles to get donations for charities.  Honestly the main problem for me was how small scale the steps were.  I’m not much of one for online activism, and the idea of one of our main steps simply being to retweet a hashtag was strange to me.  It took some getting used to, to get rid of the sensation that I wasn’t just firing and forgetting a tweet. 

Image copyright Hydroflask

Unfortunately, I was out on that Thursday so I wasn’t able to continue the project with the others, but I am placing an order for a hydroflask bottle myself and when I get it I’ll use the code and add a picture to a tweet with a hashtag to try to keep the movement going.  It still doesn’t feel like much to me, but evidently it is enough for this type of activism.  

Joe Biden Memes

One thing I really enjoyed from this course was learning about how digital media spreads and is shared over the web.  Concepts like spreadability and stickiness were quite interesting to me, but mostly it was fun learning about current affairs that were going on and how the internet was responding to them.  For instance the Joe Biden memes were fun and were a breath of fresh air during a very tense election cycle. 

The Joe Biden memes were very spreadable, they were interesting and relevant to people’s lives and their success showed it.  It took Joe Biden’s real world history of being a bit of a goofball and extrapolated it to comedic levels.  I wound up spending a ton of time just reading those memes, one after the other.   While the meme itself would be difficult to describe as sticky, the websites that hosted it often were.  Imgur, reddit, and others were able to use the meme to keep their user’s attention on the website for some time.

Daily Dot and BLM

One thing I’ve noticed about a lot of the Black Lives Matter coverage is the intense degree of polarization that the movement causes.  Every article I’ve read on it has been either disgusted with them and loathing them or absolutely fawning over them.  For instance the Daily Dot article we read was definitely on the latter side.  Everything from the title (It was the racist coverage that made the Baltimore protestors a riot!  Nothing they did!) to the way the article lapped up every claim that Black Lives Matters Made (The almost complete acceptance of Black Lives Matters narrative about Freddy Gray’s death) honestly made me a little tired of the article.  I felt like I wasn’t reading a news article, I was reading propaganda and it left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.  Even with the problems evident with the way the media responded to the Baltimore Protests, the participants still have agency of their own and deserve credit and blame for their own actions.

Copyright held by Daily Dot

Fair Use and Copyright

I know that fair use requires that the amount of the work be kept limited to ensure that it is a protected use, but is there an exact amount of how much?  The only real guidelines I can find refer to “substantiality,” which is rather vague.  I remember in one of my ISTA classes an exact percentage being mentioned once, but I can’t find reference to that anywhere else.   It was somewhere in the ten to fifteen percent range, but I’ve never heard of this again.

In my research about court cases, it appears that the real criteria for fair use is not how much is used, but rather why it is used.  Interesting to note is the idea that fair use doesn’t apply when the usage acts as a way to supersede the original work in the market.  This suggests, to me at least, that the original ideas of ownership are still the dominant factor in determining the nuances of copyright law.

Copyright symbol

We spent time in this class talking about Black Lives Matter and why the organization is so “effective.”  In fact I have to disagree with this assessment.  I believe that the disdain the movement has for “respectability politics” are crippling the movement’s ability to reach a wider audience.  I talked about this a bit in the review for my group project , but the black lives matter tactics make it so they can’t reach people who don’t want to listen to them. 

You saw this during the 2016 election season when  the only politicians that Black Lives Matter was able to reach were the liberal politicians who already agreed with them anyways.  This lead to these politicians taking further action to help back up and support the Black Lives Matter movement, sometimes at the expense of the opportunity to reach a broader audience.  In fact, this inability to reach parts of white rural America is what is widely credited for costing the Democrats the 2016 election.

Copyright held by Black Lives Matter.

Hashtags vs Slogans

The more I think about transformational hashtags, the more convinced I am that they are just the technological equivalent of a slogan.  They have many of the same principles, a brief statement or term that signifies a larger idea, one is just searchable on Twitter.  For instance, take the hashtag #HandsUpDontShoot and how it turned into #PantsUpDontLoot, that sounds like a transformation unique to hashtags, but it is easy to find examples of slogans that have similar transformations.  Take for instance something from the other side of the political spectrum, Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again.”  This was promptly parodied and re-purposed for just about anything you can imagine.  Democrats turned it into “Make America Hate Again” to disparage his political stances, it was repurposed for just about any advertising gimmick you could think of, and it will continue to be used for the near future at the very least.  

One of Trumps iconic signs.  Copyright held by donaldjtrump.com

Facebook Filters and Smug Liberalism Part 2

Another interesting note, I’ve noticed that most of the sources I see complaining about the filters on Facebook are liberal sources trying to understand how Trump won.  In turn the Washington post found that these are the people most likely to unfriend someone over politics, both online and offline (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/10/21/liberals-are-more-likely-to-unfriend-you-over-politics-online-and-off/).

There is a lot of recent writing on the “smug style” of liberalism that liberals just seem to have noticed (http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism, http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/04/liberals-smug-condescending), and I suspect that this has a lot to do with the filters that others are complaining about.  It’s not just that people aren’t exposed to others viewpoints, but when they are they instinctively dismiss them.  For instance it’s easy for a smug liberal to dismiss a conservative as being a dumb uneducated hick, and in response conservatives can dismiss liberals as arrogant or unconcerned with their lives.  Neither of these are inherent to technology and I suspect that removing the filters on Facebook wouldn’t resolve the whole problem.

The memetic face of  "smug liberalism"

Facebook Filters and Smug Liberalism Part 1

Copyright held by Gizmodo

We were talking about filter bubbles the other day in class and I found an article on them on CNN.  Facebook Shows You What You Want to See Post-Election (http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/09/technology/filter-bubbles-facebook-election/) describes how Facebook uses filters to make sure their users only see content that they like.  However, I have to admit that I’m still skeptical of how influential these filters are.  While I have no doubts that they exist, I’ve personally noticed that my news feed is more dominated by political posts that I disagree with than ones I agree with.  I suspect of the major filters that people may be facing is self imposed.  I’m sure that everyone has had had an argument or two over the last election, but increasingly people have let these arguments ruin friendships that they have.  Increasingly people have been letting politics ruin their friendships as noted in Politico’s article Trump and Clinton wreck Facebook friendships (http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-facebook-friendships-227175), this is what I personally suspect to be the largest filter on Facebook. 

Copyright Abuse and Patent Trolling

Today in our readings and in class we discussed Copyright Abuse, particularly with regards for fair use with regards to digital content such as music or other media.  This is an important topic, but I honestly feel that the bigger threat to intellectual freedom is actually patent trolling.  While copyright is important, it principally protects creative freedoms and there is significant room for give and take with regards to that as acknowledged by fair use laws.  Patent trolling targets technical innovations directly, making it more difficult to develop new technologies or programs.  For instance in 2009 a company called World  Com sued NCSoft for violating one of its patents.  The patent in particular was for a “System and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space.” (https://www.google.com/patents/US7181690?dq=7,181,690)  If this patent was upheld, it would in essence allow World Com to monopolize all digital interactions between people and machines. 

Penny Arcade sends up the World Com lawsuit.  Copyright held by Penny Arcade.

Silver Article

One thing that immediately came to mind when I read Silver’s article was the obvious question of how accurate it was.  Immediately one red flag that emerged was the study about how Americans had fewer close confidants than ever before.  It was a 2006 study that Silver cited, as the chart I am attaching back in 2006 Facebook did not have nearly the market penetration it has now.  To be honest Americans started to lose close confidants well before Facebook began to dominate social interactions.  That would suggest that the cause of the loss in close friendships wasn’t as much social media as it was other factors that changed in society.  In fact, the study even concludes by suggesting that social media might help counter the effect of this demise in close confidants. 

On the other hand, Facebook was hardly the first social media project.  Before it there was MySpace, chartrooms, and a plethora of other forms of electronic interaction.  Any social effects of social media would have been felt long before facebook showed up on the scene.  Anonymous message boards where people don’t disclose their own identity certainly can make Silver’s hypothesis true, after all how can you be friends with someone you don’t even know the name of?

Week 1

So far the ESociety course has been interesting.  I’ve been particularly interested in the concepts surrounding collaboration and the power of groups, particularly with regards to collective intelligence and the dangers of groupthink overcoming individuality.

Collaboration is defined as working together towards a common goal, but strong collaboration has some prerequisites.  It needs to be intentional, if you cite someone else’s work and they never even knew you existed, that’s citation not collaboration.  It needs to be towards a specific goal, you need to collaborate on something after all.  And it needs to have some significant scale.  The greater the scope of the project, the stronger the collaboration needs to be.

The other interesting concept from this course has been group power and its potential and dangers.  For example a large group of people would be able to more accurately guess the number of jelly beans in a jar.  Whereas an individual person would have trouble with the idea, a large crowd would be able to guess the weight to within 5% or 10% according to studies on collective intelligence.  However there are dangers associated with this power, people tend to get trapped by collective thinking when they let it overwhelm their individual thoughts.  The analogy of note here is a group of army ants that get so trapped following their own scent trails that they get stuck in a circle and die there.   This has associations with the psychological concepts of group think and social pressure.  Finally the power of a group has the ability to amplify the existing prejudices and biases of the group’s members and reinforce them.