What exactly are we saying about ourselves on social media? Are we telling a story? Are we writing in our digital public diary? Do we even realize that once something is posted, its out there forever? These are all great questions to ask, and all questions this week's articles seek to answer.
Social media and social network sites (SNSs) have created a new culture in our world. Before you have time to pick up the phone to chat with a friend you can know exactly how their day has been, via the social sites. What does this mean then? Where did all of this begin. Boyd and Ellison answer this question for us in their research, "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship." They define SNSs as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system." They discuss that through the first major social sites like Friendster and Myspace, this culture was born.
Everyone totally remembers when the only thing that mattered was who was in your top eight, who's top eight you were in, and what song was playing on your profile. Growing up in this era, a new culture was created where there was a new way to interact and socialize. Then, after moving away from being a college only site, all of the previous Myspacers moved to Facebook. Boyd & Ellison along with Page, Harper & Frobenius discuss what exactly our profiles say about us, what story they tell.
From 2008 to 2012 the range of limitations on what Facebook users can do has grossly expanded. Only a few short years ago we could only write words in a box, now we can tag, tweet, link, check-in, add pictures, and all but create a hologram of ourselves to these updates. So what does what we put on our profiles say about us? Page, Harper & Frobenius discuss in-depthly the narratives we portray about who we are and how we feel through what we post. Cultures and niches are formed throughout the social networking world and they truly mimic our lives. Andre Brock writes about African American culture on sites such as twitter. These niches created by certain races or cultures only mirror our lives. As human we stay in our comfort zones, we follow or friend who we know or would like to know, celebrities or athletes we admire, and the companies we support. To me it has little to do with race and a lot to do with the story we are telling about ourselves, whether that be who we actually are or who we want people to perceive us as.
Social media and social networking sites, if not already, will soon take over how we look at the information we give and receive. To that, there is much need for research to be done in these fields about how to capture an audience that is so 5 minutes ago.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
#meme
What exactly is a meme? There is actually academic studies for this cultural phenomenon call memetics, and as described by Davi Johnson, in Mapping the Meme, it is the emerging and contested science of the "meme." When asked what a meme is some might think of Kermit...
or this lady...
What do these new form of social "propaganda" actually say about our culture? Through the research and writings of Johnson, Jenkins, Shifman, Wiggins and Bowers I have come to better understand the history behind something I have always found as entertainment. Having no clue the study of memetics originated in 1976 through the book The Selfish Gene by biologist Richard Dawkins. This is quite interesting because we see this emergence of memes only recently, or at least that is when they exploded. Scholars suggest that there is no room for this virtual hilarity in the academic setting, but is there?
Why are these so popular? I believe they have become a new way to express ourselves, a new way to be parodize what is happening in pop and world culture. Let's take the famous and beautiful Ryan Gosling. Due to his ability to be innocent and play the loving and manly roles in great movies he has become the poster man for all preppy and scholarly memes. If this is a way to gain attention why is academic literature not tapping into this way to make learning fun for adults? Shifman suggests that memes must be imitated, remixed, and rapidly diffused, a perspective we could share and carry further to modify.
Wiggins and Bowers define Internet memes as as the spreadable media that have been remixed or parodied as emergent memes which are then iterated and spread online as memes. These memes progress and persist due to dynamic interaction among members of our participatory digital culture. Clearly these memes have emerged as our new form of SNL, or YouTube channel so why have they been almost banned from academia.
If you take a look at many of the University of South Alabama Sakai sites you will see that there are memes used to "break the ice" between online teachers and their prospective students. Personally I have seen multiple ones about public speaking, award shows, and history. Johnson states that memes use us to alter their environments so that their chances for replication are enhanced. If we as academic students and researchers are trying to spread information and teach others about our chosen subjects, why not use something that spreads like wildfire. Let's be honest, within fifteen minutes of Jameis Winston falling down for no apparent reason in the play-off game there were a multitude of memes and videos created to poke fun at the slip-up.
I am not saying that using memes is altogether the best and most effective way to teach higher education, but I am saying that it doesn't hurt to open up the doors and windows to the coming future or education. In closing, if you have a message to send, or need to get a good laugh just create or look up memes and you are sure to get a good laugh.
or this lady...
Why are these so popular? I believe they have become a new way to express ourselves, a new way to be parodize what is happening in pop and world culture. Let's take the famous and beautiful Ryan Gosling. Due to his ability to be innocent and play the loving and manly roles in great movies he has become the poster man for all preppy and scholarly memes. If this is a way to gain attention why is academic literature not tapping into this way to make learning fun for adults? Shifman suggests that memes must be imitated, remixed, and rapidly diffused, a perspective we could share and carry further to modify.
Wiggins and Bowers define Internet memes as as the spreadable media that have been remixed or parodied as emergent memes which are then iterated and spread online as memes. These memes progress and persist due to dynamic interaction among members of our participatory digital culture. Clearly these memes have emerged as our new form of SNL, or YouTube channel so why have they been almost banned from academia.
If you take a look at many of the University of South Alabama Sakai sites you will see that there are memes used to "break the ice" between online teachers and their prospective students. Personally I have seen multiple ones about public speaking, award shows, and history. Johnson states that memes use us to alter their environments so that their chances for replication are enhanced. If we as academic students and researchers are trying to spread information and teach others about our chosen subjects, why not use something that spreads like wildfire. Let's be honest, within fifteen minutes of Jameis Winston falling down for no apparent reason in the play-off game there were a multitude of memes and videos created to poke fun at the slip-up.
I am not saying that using memes is altogether the best and most effective way to teach higher education, but I am saying that it doesn't hurt to open up the doors and windows to the coming future or education. In closing, if you have a message to send, or need to get a good laugh just create or look up memes and you are sure to get a good laugh.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
#ZombieLife
We hear all the time that we are a generation of "Zombies," or we are so wrapped up in our technology that we have lost our oral and written skills. But have we? The big question is if our generation is actually the "lost one." Are we the people that have no social interaction skills, no drive, no will to work?
In her book "The Already New," "Lisa Gitelman discusses the reality of media and its ability to be a single entity as well as a thing of history. In the intorduction of the book Gitelman poses the question: "What actually is history?" Gitelman states,"If history is a term that means both what happened in the past and the varied practices of representing that past, then media are historical at several different levels." The teenagers and millennials of today are looked upon as being so consumed, reliant, and enthralled with the latest and greatest technology and social interaction yet how will that look fifty years from now? Now when the newspapers and the televisions or even color televisions were invented and created there was some old-timers shaking his finger and fussing about how the times were changing and nothing would be the same because now children would not play in the yard or get good sunlight anymore. These naysayers did not know the history they were apart of and neither do the people of today.
Gitelman describes it greatly as this: "But media are also historical because they are functionally integral to a sense of pastness. Not only do people regularly learn about the past by means of media representations—books, films, and so on—using media also involves implicit encounters with the past that produced the representations in question. These implicit encounters with the past take many forms. A photograph, for instance, offers a two-dimensional, visual representation of its subject, but it also stands uniquely as evidence, an index, because that photograph was caused in the moment of the past that it represents." Yes media can harm us in a way, it can poison the innocence of children and force them to see adult content at young ages, or it can be a dictator in a way and tell us exactly what we need to be thinking about; however there are upsides to our emerging and highly technological era. Today we can now find photographs and articles at the tip of our fingers instead of taking prolonged trips to the central library to search for hours.
Another interpretation of her book can be taken from the sentence, "When media are new, they offer a look into the different ways that their jobs get constructed as such." I believe this is a sentence that means so much in the definition of what our media today actually entails. If you take a Newspaper 40 years ago they ran everyday and were available for delivery or purchase in the store. No a newspaper, though there is a decline in paper production, has three or four social media sights, a website, and an actual online version of the paper. This shows the evolution of our media and the advances we are taking to rewrite and make history.
The summation of this article and the reality of our world is that yes there are pros and cons to everything in life, there is always a silver lining or a dark cloud but it is if you choose to see that. We are making and marking history with the techological advances made in the 2000s, and to say it has no impact on history or completely ruins history would be foolish. Are we zombies? Possibly...but we are infact interacting socially, but in a different way than those before us.
In her book "The Already New," "Lisa Gitelman discusses the reality of media and its ability to be a single entity as well as a thing of history. In the intorduction of the book Gitelman poses the question: "What actually is history?" Gitelman states,"If history is a term that means both what happened in the past and the varied practices of representing that past, then media are historical at several different levels." The teenagers and millennials of today are looked upon as being so consumed, reliant, and enthralled with the latest and greatest technology and social interaction yet how will that look fifty years from now? Now when the newspapers and the televisions or even color televisions were invented and created there was some old-timers shaking his finger and fussing about how the times were changing and nothing would be the same because now children would not play in the yard or get good sunlight anymore. These naysayers did not know the history they were apart of and neither do the people of today.
Gitelman describes it greatly as this: "But media are also historical because they are functionally integral to a sense of pastness. Not only do people regularly learn about the past by means of media representations—books, films, and so on—using media also involves implicit encounters with the past that produced the representations in question. These implicit encounters with the past take many forms. A photograph, for instance, offers a two-dimensional, visual representation of its subject, but it also stands uniquely as evidence, an index, because that photograph was caused in the moment of the past that it represents." Yes media can harm us in a way, it can poison the innocence of children and force them to see adult content at young ages, or it can be a dictator in a way and tell us exactly what we need to be thinking about; however there are upsides to our emerging and highly technological era. Today we can now find photographs and articles at the tip of our fingers instead of taking prolonged trips to the central library to search for hours.
Another interpretation of her book can be taken from the sentence, "When media are new, they offer a look into the different ways that their jobs get constructed as such." I believe this is a sentence that means so much in the definition of what our media today actually entails. If you take a Newspaper 40 years ago they ran everyday and were available for delivery or purchase in the store. No a newspaper, though there is a decline in paper production, has three or four social media sights, a website, and an actual online version of the paper. This shows the evolution of our media and the advances we are taking to rewrite and make history.
The summation of this article and the reality of our world is that yes there are pros and cons to everything in life, there is always a silver lining or a dark cloud but it is if you choose to see that. We are making and marking history with the techological advances made in the 2000s, and to say it has no impact on history or completely ruins history would be foolish. Are we zombies? Possibly...but we are infact interacting socially, but in a different way than those before us.
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