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.