Calahan Steed's Blog

For the meme presentation, my group decided to present about the “Roll Safe” meme. I’m really excited to do this meme because this meme always causes me to laugh. The reason why memes like “Roll Safe” are so popular is because memes are a humorous image, video, or text that is spread throughout the internet. So the more people who think this meme is funny will share it across the internet for other people to see.

“Roll Safe” started on June 1, 2016 from a series called “Hood Documentary.” An actor, Ewumi, points at his head and smiles which became viral. The meme didn’t start spreading until November, but by the time the video reached eight months old, it had over one million views and over a thousand comments. Why the meme became so popular is because it involves poor decision making in critical thinking moments. A lot of people like seeing this meme because we’ve all had moments where we had poor results from trying to make a decision.

One platform that I saw the meme gain popularity from is by being on sports pages. Whenever a team loses, the meme is popular in expressing a poor choice made by one of their players. I’ve used this meme on sports pages whenever a team that I don’t like loses to make fun of them for their poor choices. “Roll Safe” is a popular meme choice because all what users have to do is just share the photo of the actor and write whatever poor thinking decision they think is funny.

We started off the year learning about how new communication technologies aren’t just blogs, social media, and google. Instead, we found out that new communication technologies have been around since the industrial revolution. Technologies have improved to fit the need of humans. Technology was used as a mean to control all areas of production, distribution, and consumption of manufactured goods. We’ve expanded into communication technologies because of humans trying to fulfill their need to socialize with other humans. The difference between these technologies is that communication technologies have coded information being exchanged.  

After learning about the difference between technologies, we learned about how humans crave knowledge. In the previous paragraph, I talked about how communication technologies have information in them. The reason for communication technologies like social media, google, and blogs have taken off is because of humans wanting information. Humans want to learn and share information and those technologies can quickly get humans their information they need. Tools like social media allow for quick information being shared as Facebook and Twitter allow users to share information with other users to spread knowledge.  

The participatory culture that technology creates ties in with spreading knowledge. People share information with each other what we produce for financial reasons or for personal gratification. We share the information because not everybody knows everything and as humans we want to learn about knowledge. For example, when I use social media I try not to share information unless I feel it’s important to me. When I share something, I want people to see that I found a piece of information interesting to share to the world.  

There’s another reason why I don’t share information constantly on social media is because we learned about Cambridge Analytica. We watched the video of the company explaining how they helped Ted Cruz out in the election by using data from Facebook. I don’t have anything to hide, but I don’t want my information being used by advertisers trying to sell me something. Facebook having the information be leaked is part of the participatory culture that I talked about in the last paragraph. Cambridge Analytica understands many people participate in social media and they want to gain information like the rest of us.  

The last thing we learned about in NCT was globalization. After the Berlin Wall fell, people were able to connect to other people a lot easier. Using open-sourcing, outsourcing, offshoring, supply chaining, and insourcing are ways to share information. The reason why globalization has become so popular is how easy it to connect with people around the world. People want to inform other people and globalization has made it easier for people to share knowledge.

For my research project, I plan on looking to see the rise of hate groups on Facebook. When the events in Charlottesville took place, the event was organized on Facebook. Facebook has tried to follow the groups closely and monitor the activity but they’ve been slow in response. I want to figure out why Facebook is the primary target for hate groups and why Facebook is so popular to organize events. I also want to figure out why people harass online. Another thing that I want to figure out is why Facebook is so bad at stopping the spread of the hate groups. Is it because of freedom of speech or would they get attacked by right wing media? Facebook would have to hear that their liberal leaning so I want to figure out why hate groups can be organized.   

One thing that my group struggled with was trying to figure out how to keep bias out of the research paper. With my paper being about hate speech, I have to try and not get offended with people’s belief. If someone in a facebook political group is talking about their political beliefs and I don’t agree with them, I just can’t automatically call it hate speech. There’s hate speech on both sides of the political spectrum and I want to see how bad it can be. This ties in with my bias because I’m liberal and I’d want to find as much information on conservative hate groups. However, if I want this research paper to be unbiased, then I’m going to make sure that both sides get researched.   

What I hope to accomplish is that I get a better understanding of how easy it is for hate groups to be organized. I’ve had a Facebook for almost nine years so I have a general understanding of how to organize events on Facebook. There has to be a name for the event and if the event becomes very popular then people get notifications on about the event. One thing I’m curious to find out is how these groups name their events without Facebook becoming suspicious of the event. The name of the event could get it shut down if Facebook figures what the event is about and it gains controversy. I want to see the event names to see if the group name is the event’s description or if the event has some code name that Facebook won’t notice.

I have a good amount of experience conducting interviews for projects. Back in high school, I was apart of a web series for my school called Hawk Talk. Even though it was mainly used for comedy, I still had to contact people to get interviews from them. I got better at being more professional about asking as I would let people know in advance. This is something that I needed to learn for the real world as people want to have an organized interview where they can prepare and not feel bombarded. The show also helped with my interview and editing skills as it was part of a video production class. I would have to figure out what the important questions so I didn’t waste anybody’s time on non-important questions. I learned how to expand off original questions to see if I could get better answers and give me more content to work with. Even though I could gather more content, I still had to properly edit the interview to the required time length. I didn’t want the interview to be too long because it would make the episode long, and I didn’t want the interview to be too short because then it would leave out a lot of good content. I figured out how to make a successful interview in a short amount of time because of that class.

Getting interviews for New Communication Technology hasn’t been that difficult. I figured out who I wanted to interview and I figured out questions I wanted to ask. The only problem that I’ve encountered is scheduling the interviews. Everyone has different schedules to deal with but what is nice about this assignment is that the interviews aren’t very long. The people that I’ve contacted to interview, I told them that the interviews wouldn’t be very long. That’s what has been helpful in getting people to be interviewed is that I’ve told them I only had a couple of questions to ask them. However, I would expand off their answers to one of my questions and that would get me more content.

Taking the pictures has been tough because I’ve just been taking photos of random people on their phones. I have to take the photos quick because I don’t want to be judge by the people on their phones. With many students using technology, I want to try and not have the photos be all of the students on their phone. However, there have been so many opportunities to capture students on their phones while doing homework.

Our readings for week 4 addressed the way that we get information much quicker. In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Carr makes a great point in that he just quickly looks for information instead of learning the subject. I’ve done the exact thing that’s he done where I know I can just quickly look up information if I have a question. I barely remember the question I answered because I know I can just look up the question again if I forget. We don’t think anymore as a society because we allow the internet to do it for us. That was another point that Carr brought up which I agreed with because we don’t actually do research. Instead we let search engines tell us how to think. Clay Shirky disagrees with Carr by stating in his article, Does the Internet Make You Smarter, by stating that it’s human evolution to get things quicker. However, I think that by slowly researching topics, you’ll learn more about them.

The other readings focused on multitasking. Even though the YouTube article didn’t specifically discuss multitasking, YouTube can be the reason why people multitask. In his article, Henry Jenkins points out that YouTube is the meeting point for everything to come together. However, combining this with the article by Clay Shirky called, Why I just asked to Put Their Laptops Away, shows all of the negative effects of multitasking. One of the reasons why multitasking is so hard is because of all of the distractions that occur and nobody can focus on just one thing. If YouTube is where everything comes together, then how can we focus on all of it at once?

After reading the articles about humans being possibly detached from one another, I believe that we’re more attached to people’s profiles then the actual people themselves. People still care about one another, it’s just we seem to now just look at other people’s profile to see how their doing. In  “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”, Marche argues that we’re getting disconnected from our close friends. This isn’t true because when I see my close friends, we engage in actual conversations and don’t just look at our phones. However, Marche is on to an idea because I only look at someone’s profile to see how their doing instead of just asking them.

Even though I look at their profiles to see how people are doing, that still isn’t the best way to judge someone. People act different online then they do in real life. In the Facebook article with the drag queens, sometimes people want to have a separate profile because them online is different then how they act in real life. I try to use my profile to make my life look appealing to the outside world. However, I don’t want to overshare on Facebook, but some people share more on Facebook then they do in real life. I don’t want to overshare on Facebook because I don’t want to let out information about me that my close friends barely even know about.

There’s not a whole lot of privacy online and that’s why I don’t share very much. I see other people that share way too much information online whether that’s personal information or non personal information. Future employers also look at what’s been said online and I don’t want that to hurt me in the future. People aren’t authentic online which I why I really don’t trust anybody online. We just don’t know who we’re talking to and it’s really easy to scam people. Facebook profiles have been hacked by people all around the world and that’s why I try not to share my information. I don’t want it used by some random person across the world that’s using my information for their personal gain.

 

After reading the article, it’s going to be very tough to escape our past thanks to all of this technology. With how quickly bad press can get out on a company, why would they run the risk of hiring someone with a bad reputation? I think with all of the information out on people, I think its a right amount of information online because I think people should have the right to know things about things that they might not want to tell me. People will have the right to post what they want online, but it doesn’t protect them from the consequences. It gets brought up a lot with freedom of speech which protects people from being thrown in jail by the government. However, people often forget that it still has it’s consequences. With the ability to look at a screen and figure out what exactly to say, people shouldn’t say something that could jeopardize their future. Before people hit send, they should go back and reread what they posted and think, “will this post come back to haunt me in the next 5 years?” However, I understand that times change and so does people’s opinion. People shouldn’t get crucified over a post they made about 5 years ago. People make mistakes and we should learn to forgive for mistakes. We shouldn’t forget their mistakes though, instead we should learn from them. I think this new technology has allowed humans to become better at crafting statements online so that way they can’t get haunted by them. People will just have to stay smart online and don’t do anything that would affect them in the future.

Our readings for week 1 were about how much technology impacts our lives by keeping us connected. In “Love Online,” it’s about two teenagers trying to date across the nation.  In “It Takes a Village to Find a Phone,” it’s about an entire nation together to help a women get her phone back. New technology allows us to come together by just a push of a button. We still have network of groups that allows word to travel around but now with a push of a button, word can spread quicker. With the new age of technology, just pressing one button can help get the information out to different networks of people who might care for the information more than I did. That’s why it’s called the architecture of participation because even doing something so little, can go a long way of building something. I think people get motivated to share information online because it’s so simple to do so. All what people have to do now to get their opinion out is just click some buttons. However, it is easier now to have information get exposed but its the risk of being connected so easy. The most important lesson to take away from the articles is we have to be careful with all of this technology. It can be a blessing, but it can be a curse too.

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