Final Blog

    I love social media. I am painfully aware of the impact it has had on my self image and mental health since I first made an Instagram account when I was 11 and bought an iPod Touch with all the money I had saved from holidays over the years. Currently I have a Tumblr, two Instagram accounts, a Facebook, a Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, and four emails not including the one assigned by HPU for student use. That means my name and face are floating around the internet a lot. Googling my name will bring up my mention in obituaries and all of my social media accounts. As a minor I became a victim of online abuse, stalking, and grooming behaviors, the exact same behaviors I'm learning through my generation's use of TikTok that hundreds, if not thousands, of girls my age experienced around middle school age and did not realize were wrong until recently.

    My Instagram account alone will tell people what I look like, what sorority I'm in, where I go to school, what my internship is and the fact I'm a Communication Fellow. After having my entire account wiped about a year ago by a spiteful person I have taken the opportunity to include less information about where my home in California is, because I feel that HPU is more secure than my home, even though if someone really looked that information from my deleted account is still floating around somewhere in cyberspace. 

    I post more liberally on my Snapchat account because it's easier to control who gets to see it, though I refuse to turn on location services for the app. I feel more comfortable posting my thoughts and ranting on my story about things that are frustrating or exciting, while other more visible sites I keep professional because they are easy for future employers to find with a simple google search.

My Facebook account is not nearly as active as all of my other accounts. I have to have it to be part of announcement groups for my youth group back home, my sorority, clubs I'm involved with, and extended family nationwide. Most of my posts are just shared from posts other people wrote and I resonated with. You would find the most personal and public information about my life on my mom's page. Most mothers like to take silly or embarrassing pictures of their kids and write heartfelt posts about their kids' accomplishments or milestones. There you can see where I live, ever place I ever went to school, much of my medical history, how old I am, and my current job as an RA on campus.

EOTO #2

     Those holding information often face a choice of which information to include in their telling of a story to best get their point across, but our human tendency to want to control the narrative to suit our needs causes us to leave out information that doesn't suite our personal needs. The problem with and danger of gatekeeping lies more with which information we choose not to include than with the information that does make the final cut in our stories. This becomes a larger and more damaging problem when the practice is used in media coverage of large scale issues and events that huge amounts of people rely on for their information on current events.

    Looking at the image above, gatekeeping occurs in between the first and second steps. Between the time that a reporter or writer observes the even and then enters editing and production they must choose which information they feel should be included and where in the story it should be, typically the most important information is in the beginning of a story and smaller, more insignificant details come later in the story when many people have tuned out. As we all know every media outlet has a political leaning, however slight or obvious. This can influence the information they choose in include and leave out of coverage of events, causing their viewers, typically with similar political leanings to the media outlets they choose to consume news from, to only have the parts of the story that align with and support their existing opinions on a subject matter.

(The original information came from here but the website seems to have gone down recently)

Blog #8: Privacy

     Privacy has recently jumped to the forefront of concern in people, namely Americans, with any online or social media presence. Privacy policies on websites are often skimmed by users if anything, most of the time people, as I am also guilty of, merely scroll immediately to the bottom of the page and click "accept" in a rush to get to the fun part of being an internet user. Bigger names are beginning to address these concerns and give advice to users.

     In this Ted Talk Juan Enriquez compared your online presence to a tattoo. We all know that tattoos can give everyone we encounter a glimpse of our personality and a way to judge us without even talking to us. Enriquez compared this to the way that new technologies like readily accessible facial recognition allows people to get a whole online profile and background on a person without meeting them or even without seeing them in real life. The example Enriquez used was a picture of a bar full of people, someone could pick one person in the picture and potentially pull up every time that person had been mentioned in a post or been tagged in a picture. Some may have innocent intentions in this situation but this opens up opportunities for serious problems like stalking and publishing private information.

     Darieth Chisolm focused on an extremely dark side of this kind of accessibility in her Ted Talk about the effects of revenge porn, a terrifying trend of angry people obtaining private lewd pictures of others and posting them online in an attempt to get revenge on some wrongdoing. As a victim of revenge porn while underage this is terrifying to know that this is becoming a larger trend. These things are held over peoples', mainly women and girls, heads usually to blackmail them or humiliate them for not complying with demands. Often the pictures are obtained consensually, someone trusts another person enough to willingly send private pictures or videos of themselves only for them to be shared without consent when that relationship ends poorly. There are few protections against this especially if the pictures were sent willingly and the people involved are of age.

Blog #7: Snapchat

  

  In 2011 three Stanford University students Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown, and Bobby Murphy put into place an idea for a social media platform that would appeal to consumers who want whatever they post to disappear after just a few moments. The app, then known as Picaboo, was coded by Brown under the creative leadership of Spiegel and Murphy. After Brown left the project the remaining cofounders relaunched a few months later under the now famous name Snapchat.

    Young people who did not want their social media history to come back to haunt them flocked to the app for a feeling of security. Spiegel claims that his app challenges the idea that deleting something on social media is a bad thing and should only be done if what was posted was embarrassing or could get you in trouble. Snapchat takes away that responsibility by having pictures and videos disappear immediately when sending to specific people and within 24 hours of posting them to a public story.

Once the video feature was added, after beginning with only allowing pictures to be sent or posted, new users took interest in the app wanting to send short videos instead.

Large amounts of users came to the app after their favorite celebrities began using the app to better engage with fans. Some celebrities even boosted their own popularity through use of the app by having "giveaways" where a prize was being added back as a friend on Snapchat instead of only following them like every other fan.

Parents concerned with the app's privacy and not being able to see what their children were sending or posting began to make their own accounts on the app and it slowly lost users because they no longer felt that their posts were as private as they once were.

Many people still have Snapchat accounts, but after Instagram's release of "stories" as a feature almost identical to Snapchat in addition to normal Instagram functions many people choose to use just the one app for all of their social media needs instead of multiple.

https://www.thestreet.com/technology/history-of-snapchat#:~:text=Early%20History,all%20students%20at%20Stanford%20University.&text=The%20duo%20then%20approached%20Bobby,%E2%80%9D%2C%20the%20precursor%20to%20Snapchat.

EOTO:First Camera Phone

In June 2000 the first camera phone was released by Samsung to South Korean consumers, the SCH-V200. It featured an internal camera that was technically separate from the cell phone components, so after taking the pictures you would have to connect the device to a computer to view them. The phone was able to take up to 20 photos before the user would have to hook it up to a computer and export the photos for more space

Some argue, however, that the real first camera phone was the J-SH04 by Sharp in Japan later in November of the same year. The only significant different between the "J-Phone" and its competitor was the ability to send photos directly from the device without connecting it to an external computer. That ability sparked arguments about which phone was the first real camera phone and BBC covered much of the discourse here back in 2001. The comments in the article really show its age and are a fun blast from the past to scroll through. 

For the following years cell phones continued to improve in camera quality and functionality, no longer requiring computers to view, send, or sometimes edit photos and picture quality was improving. Of course cell phones improved in other ways simultaneously, with entire keyboards able to slide out and increased memory among other things. 

Samsung released the first 5 megapixel camera phone, the SCH-S250, and remains one of the leading names in cell phone technology today. The SCH-S250 was announced in South Korea in 2004 and though it was the first of its kind, the most popular and widely known 5 megapixel camera phone is the Nokia N95, a name still associated with early cell phone technology but that has not remained relevant in United States technology media.

                        

Improvement and development of camera cell phones was drastically slowed by the release of smartphones like the iPhone. Smartphones brought focus to the importance of other potential software features and a smaller, sleeker design. As the pictures above all tell, cell phones with any power were chunky and large. Early smartphones had a goal of being slim and attractive to consumers while maintaining the power of a "clunky" device. 

In more recent years we are again seeing a focus on camera quality and capability as a major selling point when deciding between major brands. Maybe we'll even see older designs come back. Only time will tell.

References

Hill, S. (2013, August 11). A Complete History of the Camera Phone. Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/camera-phone-history/

Blog #4: Antiwar Voices

     It is often difficult to find antiwar voices in American media, especially mainstream media. The media highlights the fascist narrative we see our country involved in, with raging wars in the Middle East and tensions across the globe. We always hear and see stories in the news about why we should hate or fear one group of people, typically those we are at war with in the Middle East. Antiwar voices are not interesting enough for mainstream media and don't serve either major political party enough to be in right or left wing media. War and chaos and bloodshed are good stories for nightly news, it's what viewers pay attention to most and viewership it what makes money for media outlets.

https://www.antiwar.com/ is a good source of information on the antiwar platform that is very much alive in the U.S. This site specifically was created to oppose President Clinton intervening in conflict in the Balkans and in favor of keeping Americans out of foreign affairs. The site contains opinion pieces and fact based reports about the involvement of U.S. soldiers overseas and even has a page with a running count of killed or wounded soldiers in Iraq since 2003.

theamericanconservative.com is based on traditional "America first" conservative values, which includes staying out of wars that don't directly affect the American people. The site claims to separate from the Republican party, where most neoconservatives identify, and values ideology over party and "prioritizing American interests" over foreign issues.

Blog #5: 8 Values of Free Expression

    The First Amendment protects dissent and disagreement among citizens and between the government and governed. It is the reason we can't be arrested for calling Donald Trump the new Hitler or for using slurs to refer to Barrack Obama, even if it is offensive and potentially harmful. This does not mean, however, that society has no social rules against these things. We can see in "cancel culture" that, while your hate speech is constitutionally protected, members of society will hold you accountable for your words and your entire career can be over in minutes.

    Recently many celebrities and online personalities have had old tweets and videos resurface, prompting #___isoverparty trends on twitter. Family YouTuber Cole LaBrant is no different, already being controversial before having tweets like the one above resurface. He has the constitutional right so post that and whatever else he wants to say. That does not mean society can't "cancel" him and and stop supporting him because they dislike his words or actions, that is their right and that is protected as well, no one can force people to support a content creator.

    The government can't step in and stop people from posting things like this or from saying them at all, but things get muddled when you consider a privately owned social media platform like Twitter. Our current president prefers to use Twitter to communicate directly with the public. Recently one of his tweets was flagged for inciting violence based on Twitter's policies and he claimed it was violating his freedom of speech and unfairly censoring him and discriminating against him.

    It is important to note that Twitter is not the government and therefore cannot violate any first amendment rights, and that all users must sign a terms and conditions agreement including the website's policies on what is and is not allowed to be posted before creating an account. Further, the tweet was not deleted by the platform but instead was marked with a flag stating it contained violent language that Twitter does not allow on their website.

    The public and private companies can "censor" language however they want, or give backlash to those saying things they don't agree with as long as that "backlash" does not include behavior that breaks another law.