Group items tagged

The article John mentioned in class today

Youth and social networking as mentioned in class: http://dmlcentral.net/newsletter/05/2012/analytical-take-youth-social-networking-and-web-20-few-moments-amanda-lenhart

*Chapter 1- Spoiling Survivor- Jenkins NOT SAFE FOR WORK- (NOT SAFE FOR LIFE)! Jenkins mentions briefly the undercurrenty world of fan fiction. This has been a community that is often the butt of many jokes. The vocal artist "Duke", has a particularly hilarious audioboo in which he finds terrible things online such as facebook statuses, google reviews, foreign bootleg DVD descriptions, and reads them aloud in his advertising voice. (Spelling and grammar mistakes included!) I actually personally love the animated show Adventure Time, but in this link, Duke reads some particularly disturbing fanfiction. Fanfiction very often has a sexual connotation and reputation as fantasy writing, lending to it being laughable among "trolls" or other internet threads. Feel free to delete this if its inappropriate- sometimes my personal filter is off-kilter when it comes to the internet. I mean no offense or harm. It is media convergence in its seedy side, academically speaking.

"It moves the paper much more into the linked world we all now inhabit."

Boundaries galore--how much time do you allot to different media? 

Interesting talk about connectedness (now and in the past). Especially interesting around 25 minutes in when he talks about Seneca, Shakespeare, and Thoreau and how connectedness played into their times despite being before all the communication technology we usually think of these days. I'm thinking about this in relation to the Sherry Turkle article and "an imaginary past".

speaking of patents, inventions, creators, radio, and SCIENCE...

Another piece from The Oatmeal. This time, the comic honors Nikola Tesla, trumpeting his triumphs, his willingness to share knowledge, and his ability to remain quiet on the subject of how much of a jerk Einstein was. A humorous but relevant piece when read alongside Lessig.

Nice find...I saw this earlier, but did not make the connections to our readings!

Poke through the list of columns by Virginia and peruse a few that align with our general unit theme of "social" stuff & media...

(CNN) -- Remember earlier this year when Wikipedia went black in protest of anti-piracy legislation moving through the U.S. Congress? Yeah, well, that may be nothing compared to this. A group called the Internet Defense League, borrowing a page from Batman, is trying to create a "bat signal" for mobilizing open-Internet activists against similar legislation.

The battle for "internet freedom" continues! This time Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian will introduce the Internet Defense League just in time for Congress to visit the CISPA legislation, which allows the U.S. government, in cooperation with certain tech companies, to access various personal internet traffic information. The president has already threatened to VETO this bill due to concerns for confidentiality and civil liberties.

great example of the story of intention vs. interpretation, ironic appreciation vs. new sincerity In 1989, a group of unknown Utah actors starred in what would be crowned the worst movie of all time: TROLL 2. After two decades of running from this cinematic disaster, the cast can no longer hide from the legion of followers that celebrate them for their ineptitude.

/.....or this http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/06/bronies-my-little-ponys/

Sunday Review opinion piece from the NY Times that questions how much our use of media may or may not lead to "connecting" with others. Is technology keeping us from learning how to carry on a conversation? How to interact with human beings in-person? How much is one's self-curated (and self-edited) identity representative of the total package that is the self?

The immediacy of the social media seems to be drawing the audience, but what is lost in the translation? News takes time to gather, vet, and verify. So our demands for instant information would seem to be conflicting with the process of newsgathering. This piece showed that 49 percent of respondents had heard or seen a news item that turned out to be false. If we are to continue to absorb information that comes our way so quickly, at what point does credibility, authenticity, and factuality no longer apply? Worse yet, how many people will begin to remember some piece of news they saw online that is false without even realizing the error? How might this impact our own historical remembrance? Hmmmmm....

Uno, Nessuno, Centomila (One, No One and One Hundred Thousand) is a classic novel by Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello. Published in 1925, it recounts the tragedy of Vitangelo Moscarda, a man who struggles to reclaim a coherent and unitary identity for himself in the face of an inherently social and multi-faceted world. What would Moscarda identity tragedy look like today? In this article we transplant Moscarda's identity play from its offline setting to the contemporary arena of social media and online social networks. With reference to established theories on identity construction, performance, and self-presentation, we re-imagine how Moscarda would go about defending the integrity of his selfhood in the face of the discountenancing influences of the online world.

Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author provides another interesting facet to this discussion. In the play, a family of characters arrive at a rehearsal-in-progress, begging for the producer, playwright, and other actors to write down and perform the family's story. The family members do not exist outside of their interactions with the rest of the family; the characters themselves cannot exist without the acknowledgement and assistance of the artists; and, despite traditional lines between real life and fiction, every family member character and "real-life" character is altered by the interaction. How much are our identities--as we experience them--dependent on others for validation? Are we performing our lives for others? At what point do we (can we) draw boundaries between spectator and performer, especially in relation to identity creation?

Meghan, did you get to see this film?

How does Facebook's Open Graph and "Social Design" concepts apply to mapping social media?  I'm not entirely sure how the process and operations work just yet, but I think there is certainly something of importance here pertaining to this week's topic. 

There is no question that we should all evaluate our social interactions online, but it is interesting that we now have to reconsider how to censor ourselves and our "friends" in online environments as if those digital messages represented the same type of interaction as if we were face-to-face. We have given this type of communication the same status, but are they really? Or do we need to develop a different sort of etiquette?

As the matriarch of our home it wasn't long before I realized I was plugged in a lot, and when I looked around, it was clear I had little constraint with plugged in things. We were battling a fire-spitting media-dragon-our television. When I stopped to think about it, there were days I gave more of my undivided attention to it than any of my four children combined. It was my daily drug of choice, taking me to far-away places, allowing me to peek inside homes I prayed were more dysfunctional than ours, and taught me more about great white sharks than I cared to admit. Yes, I loved my TV. I couldn't imagine living without it.