I asked myself what role, if any, did the Internet and social media play in my Thanksgiving dinner celebration this year and was surprised to find that it did play quite a significant role, indeed.
I first used the Internet to search for recipes to add a little spice to the dishes I make every year and found an interesting way to make fruit salad-though I decided to wait until next year to try it, least I add change to tradition-which is rarely encouraged or accepted. Mostly what I found on the Internet is a confirmation that I know exactly what I am doing and that I can certainly throw down with the best of them in the kitchen.
I then used the social media, via Facebook, to connect with the my family and give the details for this years Thanksgiving gathering, since I host Thanksgiving at my house every year. Since I moved, it was necessary to give my new address and because I used the "event" tab on Facebook, I was also able to connect them to a direction link- with map, which showed them exactly where I lived. Not one call was made to ask for directions-nice!
After eating, I took the time to update my FB status and let everyone know I had finished my first plate and how yummy it was- inviting my social net associates into my Thanksgiving celebration -something I have never felt the need to do.Welcome to the family!!
Lastly, I publicly enjoyed compliments of my cooking and pleasures of being in my home and lots of family connectedness, including pictures, all on the Internet.
The Internet and social media has even positioned itself into family gatherings and family traditions. Guess there's nothing left to say- but grab a chair.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Two Black Friday Social Media Campaigns: A Comparison
I've been ill through this week. Aside from Thanksgiving dinner, and an outing to see Skyfall (quite doped up, mind you), I've been in or close to my bed. Damn colds.
Nonetheless, I've spent quite some time online. I've noticed, amongst other things, the organization attempts around the Walmart strike for Black Friday and the Strike Debt campaign (itself an outgrowth of Occupy Wall Street).
The Walmart strike, as I expected, got covered with a pro-corporate bias to all of the mainstream media coverage. The language used, and not used, is what gave the game away; it is well known that few of the actual workforce would walk off the job, as Walmart has a long and vicious history of retaliation--often disproportionate--to all attempts, big and small alike, to unionize.
Most of the people present walking the picket line were either people that did not currently work at Walmart (these were often union organizers) or individuals that worked at stores other than the one picketed (and, wisely, did not reveal where that store was or gave their identity on camera). A minority of picketers, for reasons that varied, did walk off the job (or, at the least, wouldn't cross the line once established). Yet the mainstream media implies that, since the workers themselves--who, I remind you, would be immediately fired once management noticed--were a minority of those on the line that (a) the strike is a put-on, and (b) it's a bust.
I don't think so. The social media build-up in my Facebook stream made this event into this year's "Buy Nothing Day", for all intents and purposes, pushing the idea that not only should you not buy at Walmart on Black Friday, but you should not buy there at all until Walmart ceases its anti-union oppression and pays living wages to all employees regardless of position. The Black Friday action is just one part of a larger campaign, one that is acknowledged to take years before any positive ends will come, despite recent studies supporting a claim that Walmart could easily fix things.
(According to a study at UC Berkley's Center for Labor Research and Education, a raise in minimum wage to $12/hr for its bottom-end employees would result in an average price hike of 46 cents per trip. Yes, that study's been spread around the social networks also.)
The Strike Debt campaign is one that's gotten a far more positive response overall, even if the mainstream media's position is one like that of a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. It's very difficult to paint a group that buys the medical debt of others for pennies on the dollar, and then absolves the debt that it buys, as any kind of threat to society.
The social media presence included spreading the word of a fundraiser, one that raised several thousands of dollars in a day as the word went viral quickly, and the result is that Strike Debt is now accelerating its plans to expand beyond medical debt and into student loan debt; apparently working groups are now looking into doing this.
The interesting thing is that, here and there, now I'm seeing the idea of this being a trap getting pushed; the first is that debt forgiveness counts against you come tax time, and the second is that this has a corrosive social effect as it will just make people be wasteful with money and get back into debt. I'm not yet seeing this in the media, but rather in Facebook posts and commentary threads. Compared to the relative lack of mainstream media reaction, the reactions of social media users are intrigued if not enthusiastic.
What I see here, then, is that social media is having an interesting--if not unexpected--effect. What normally is easily handled by mainstream media (the control of a popular narrative regarding a news event) is increasingly undermined by users of social media as they can link to reliable sources directly, citing them to support the claims for their arguments. (Well, when they deign to do so.) While cat videos remains commonplace, some of us are making more of social media than that; they're the ones that services like Klout attempt to track.
In the years going forward, the social mavens and influencers will start becoming more apparent in social media- and we're going to see celebrity stop being the sole source of that influence in favor of influence being rewarded/reflected with celebrity instead.
Nonetheless, I've spent quite some time online. I've noticed, amongst other things, the organization attempts around the Walmart strike for Black Friday and the Strike Debt campaign (itself an outgrowth of Occupy Wall Street).
The Walmart strike, as I expected, got covered with a pro-corporate bias to all of the mainstream media coverage. The language used, and not used, is what gave the game away; it is well known that few of the actual workforce would walk off the job, as Walmart has a long and vicious history of retaliation--often disproportionate--to all attempts, big and small alike, to unionize.
Most of the people present walking the picket line were either people that did not currently work at Walmart (these were often union organizers) or individuals that worked at stores other than the one picketed (and, wisely, did not reveal where that store was or gave their identity on camera). A minority of picketers, for reasons that varied, did walk off the job (or, at the least, wouldn't cross the line once established). Yet the mainstream media implies that, since the workers themselves--who, I remind you, would be immediately fired once management noticed--were a minority of those on the line that (a) the strike is a put-on, and (b) it's a bust.
I don't think so. The social media build-up in my Facebook stream made this event into this year's "Buy Nothing Day", for all intents and purposes, pushing the idea that not only should you not buy at Walmart on Black Friday, but you should not buy there at all until Walmart ceases its anti-union oppression and pays living wages to all employees regardless of position. The Black Friday action is just one part of a larger campaign, one that is acknowledged to take years before any positive ends will come, despite recent studies supporting a claim that Walmart could easily fix things.
(According to a study at UC Berkley's Center for Labor Research and Education, a raise in minimum wage to $12/hr for its bottom-end employees would result in an average price hike of 46 cents per trip. Yes, that study's been spread around the social networks also.)
The Strike Debt campaign is one that's gotten a far more positive response overall, even if the mainstream media's position is one like that of a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. It's very difficult to paint a group that buys the medical debt of others for pennies on the dollar, and then absolves the debt that it buys, as any kind of threat to society.
The social media presence included spreading the word of a fundraiser, one that raised several thousands of dollars in a day as the word went viral quickly, and the result is that Strike Debt is now accelerating its plans to expand beyond medical debt and into student loan debt; apparently working groups are now looking into doing this.
The interesting thing is that, here and there, now I'm seeing the idea of this being a trap getting pushed; the first is that debt forgiveness counts against you come tax time, and the second is that this has a corrosive social effect as it will just make people be wasteful with money and get back into debt. I'm not yet seeing this in the media, but rather in Facebook posts and commentary threads. Compared to the relative lack of mainstream media reaction, the reactions of social media users are intrigued if not enthusiastic.
What I see here, then, is that social media is having an interesting--if not unexpected--effect. What normally is easily handled by mainstream media (the control of a popular narrative regarding a news event) is increasingly undermined by users of social media as they can link to reliable sources directly, citing them to support the claims for their arguments. (Well, when they deign to do so.) While cat videos remains commonplace, some of us are making more of social media than that; they're the ones that services like Klout attempt to track.
In the years going forward, the social mavens and influencers will start becoming more apparent in social media- and we're going to see celebrity stop being the sole source of that influence in favor of influence being rewarded/reflected with celebrity instead.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Blog post for the week of November 29th
For this week's post you will reflect on the Rheingold Smart Mobs reading (chapter 8).
In chapter 8 of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Rheingold discusses Foucault's concept of social control and the way that knowledge and power are reinforced through surveillance (189). Does our always on, always connected digital culture give more power to those in control, placing us in a Panoptic structure where we have "voluntarily traded privacy for convenience" (186)? Or could connected groups of users "use what we now know about cooperation to drive power/ knowledge to a higher level of democracy (190)"?
If the Internet is changing the knowledge/power dynamic (for better or worse), does that change the way you think about the digital divide - where some groups of people are said to have been left behind by technology? What does all of this say about people who voluntarily "opt out" of a digitally connected life?
Elevation, section and plan of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, drawn by Willey Reveley, 1791 From Wikipedia
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Lost in Blogging
As Thanksgiving, and the end of the semster, is right around the corner, I began wondering just how well I had kept up with blog posts, blog prompts, and the required formats for posts. Fifteen weeks means a total of fifteen blogs and fifteen comments, right? Out of these, four should follow the blogging exercises: the annotated link post, blogging as connected writing, the analytic post, and making a case for a position. Sadly, I feel like that is a lot of blogging but I know it isn't. Alas, bloggers around the world spend much more time on sites just like this and probably have a lot more interesting things to say! While I might find myself, someday, wanting to blog again, as of right now, I can't wait to be done! Anyways, I'm just organizing out loud (or in text, whatever) and thought someone, somewhere, somehow might also find it useful. Now I'm going to go count my previous posts :)
Thursday, November 15, 2012
"Freedooooommmm!"
So, this picture was posted to my FB account recently:
After having read the material for this week, I am still left wondering if this is weak or strong use of internet freedom. I say this because is comes from an U.S. citizen to a U.S. citizen. But who are the people who might benefit the most from this? Other women in Taliban-heavy places who are also struggling for their educational (and other) freedoms. The content for us (the U.S.) is not something we "need" to censor. But that might not be the case in the Middle East.
So what should FB do, were this to make its way to the oppressed/be posted by the oppressed? Would they delete it, as they did in the case of the Moroccan citizen lobbying for separation of religion and education? And what, then, should the U.S. government do: support the post, or support its censure?
I am torn: though I live in a country with freedom of expression, where is the line drawn? I certainly don't support child pornography, and, in my opinion, neither should the US government! But it gets stickier with something like the KKK--though I abhor their rhetoric and motives, do they not also have the right to express their beliefs (something slightly more different than the illegality of "selling" children).
So, it seems the internet is still some type of contested territory, where the boundaries are still being drawn. And, it seems like those lines are going to be continually in flux--and perhaps that is to our benefit, as society and the world changes. Therefore, do we need set, inflexible boundaries? Maybe not...
So what should FB do, were this to make its way to the oppressed/be posted by the oppressed? Would they delete it, as they did in the case of the Moroccan citizen lobbying for separation of religion and education? And what, then, should the U.S. government do: support the post, or support its censure?
I am torn: though I live in a country with freedom of expression, where is the line drawn? I certainly don't support child pornography, and, in my opinion, neither should the US government! But it gets stickier with something like the KKK--though I abhor their rhetoric and motives, do they not also have the right to express their beliefs (something slightly more different than the illegality of "selling" children).
So, it seems the internet is still some type of contested territory, where the boundaries are still being drawn. And, it seems like those lines are going to be continually in flux--and perhaps that is to our benefit, as society and the world changes. Therefore, do we need set, inflexible boundaries? Maybe not...
Technology, Paperweights and Permanency
I’m sure you all remember me trudging into class with my pretty pink Macbook Pro. As a PC user, I had put a lot of time and thought into whether or not to buy a Mac or another PC. I opted for a Mac despite the PC users in my life insisting that I would regret it. Man, were they right. With my purchase date less than two months ago, I have grown extremely attached to my Mac. All of my research, my writing, even my calendar is on it. So of course, it breaks. And being that it was only a month old, I hadn’t backed anything up yet (I know! I know! First rule of being a diligent student). To make matters worse, the Apple store employee I spoke to insists that there is no way to take the documents off of the computer without paying for some mysterious component and a new screen that will run me $750 to fix. This is when I began to wonder why I paid for Apple care when the company can deny manufacturer’s error and insist I damaged my computer. Return policy? Out of the question. So here I am with a $2,000 paperweight and a pile of missed homework that is completed, just out of reach. Isn’t that every student’s nightmare? This made me think of brand loyalty and the iTunes ‘borrowing’ policy. Maybe switching to Mac was a bad idea. After all, PC’s aren’t quite as monopolized as Apple products. Bad customer service is just something that Apple customers have to deal with because there’s not much competition for fixing or refurbishing Apple products as there is for PC’s. Or, perhaps I just had a bad experience and Apple isn’t such a bad company. However, with digital products becoming more common, it’s amazing to think of how big of an effect a broken computer can have on daily life now.
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