Final Blog Post

I feel like I have learned a lot of important real life information while taking this class this semester. I think that most important thing that I have learned that has helped my growth as a learner and a collaborator has been how our course content is used in the real world. The main thing that continued my growth as a collaborator was what I talked about in one of my blog posts about my friend whose memes went viral. He used Twitter as his main platform for his content and used hashtags to help spread it to more people. The next blog post that I wrote that shows my growth as a learner is my post about spreadable media. Spreadable media is one of the main topics that I learned that I felt had the most meaning in real life situations. Another one of the topics that I wrote about is algorithms that are used by websites to direct specific topics to people so that they see what the algorithms make them see. I also learned a lot about other classmate's blog posts. For example, Noelle's post about the Hydro Flask tasks from the cooperation.org project showed me the assignment from the point of view of another student. Also Caroline's post about Instagram and whether or not to accept a friend request from random people and putting your account on private. It was about how many people on social media are not actually more social than if they were not on social media. Finally, in Emma's post about having friends on Facebook she talks about how people don't have real friends on social media because a lot of the time people haven't actually met some of their Facebook "friends".

11-29 Class Work Tasks

For this blog post I will be talking about what our group accomplished in class today and how we arrived at the different tasks that we brainstormed for our activist goal. Our group is working on the Hydro Flask giving back 5% of all purchases that enter the code that is at the bottom of the water bottle. Our group did not have a hard time at all figuring out our tasks because we knew that Hydro Flask is already a pretty popular water bottle company so we thought that the main goal for our group would be to raise awareness for people to take advantage of the chance to donate money that they already spent on their new water bottle. So, our first task that we created was to make a hashtag that can be used to connect people and set up a center for the spread of awareness of our goal. Another task is since many people are not aware of this opportunity, we want to inform people that all of these water bottles have the code no matter how long ago it was purchased. The next task is to encourage friends and family to consider using Hydro Flask as a gift idea as the holiday season approaches. Another task that our group came up with was to post a picture with your Hydro Flask if you already have one to even further promote purchasing Hydro Flasks as gifts. Finally, the last task that we have developed is encouraging conversations about the product outside of social media in places like class or with friends and family.

I think that the concepts of membership vs ownership are very important in what we worked on in class today. I think that our ability to go to the group that we wanted to go to made this day of the unit 3 project more on the ownership side. The ability for everyone to pick what they wanted to work on makes it more personal for everyone and lets them own what they are working on and make it their own within the group. However, as we move to day 2 we will be doing the tasks of the other group which I believe will make this project more on the membership side. I think that it will be more membership experience because we will be working on achieving a goal that another group came up with. If we work on the other groups project on day 2 then it will be less personal.

For Day 2 of this project we had to complete the tasks of the other group. The gave us four tasks for our group to complete which was made easy because of the Cooperation.org that we all worked on. It put our entire group in one place that showed what we needed to accomplish as a group and made it easier to communicate with each other while we worked together to complete the tasks of the other groups activist work.

Golda Velez In Class Presentation

For this blog post I will be talking about the presentation in class that was given by our guest speaker, Golda Velez. Golda Velez is currently working on a website that will be called cooporation.org in the future when they get it completely set up. For now the website is being tested on goldavelez.com where it is being tweaked to be perfect while the cooporation.org gets finalized. The website is a platform for groups of people to use as a base for their campaigns to achieve many different types of goals. These goals range anywhere from doing one little thing a day to be productive, to spreading awareness about the Hydro Flask donations that I talked about in a previous blog post. I waited to write about this presentation because I wanted to use the website and see what it could do personally before I wrote about it. 


Golda's presentation was very interesting and provided some very good insight into how to achieve your goals. I thought that the biggest topic that Golda discussed with our class about the difference between membership and ownership when you are working on a project to encourage others to participate or join your cause. The importance of ownership can make the difference in creating a successful project. Ownership makes the people working on the project feel a better connection to their work and makes it more personal so that they are inspired to work harder and recruit even more people to join their cause. Membership on the other hand is more of just someone who is willing to participate and help out whenever they can. It is important to have both when you are working on a project like the ones on the future cooporation.org because you need people that are inspired by the cause and people that are inspired by the leaders of the cause.

Principles of Hashtag Publics

This week in class we discussed the topic of the principles of hashtags and the effects of counter publics on social media. The biggest thing that I took away from this discussion was the different ways that a hashtag can either help or harm a group's cause. Hashtags are available for public use which means that they can be used in any form, by anyone. Hashtags are able to be used by the group that goes against the the original group and they are able to flip it to use it against them. Hashtags are used to connect people who are talking about the same subject which means that even if people are talking bad or good about the subject. This is very interesting to me because I have never thought about it in the way that hashtags could go both ways. This is a very important fact to consider when looking at the ways that activist movements and groups interact with each other and how certain topics become a trending topic and gains more views.

Spreadable Media

For this blog post I have decided to write about spreadable media. I've decided to write about this topic right now because recently, I have a small connection with some content that has been spread throughout social media a lot in the last couple of days. A member of my fraternity who graduated last year was the creator of most of the recent Joe Biden memes that have been spread across a bunch of different social media platforms. The content has mostly been on Twitter and Josh's (the creator of the content) Twitter page has blown up. I thought that this related very closely with the "Why Media Spreads" reading from September 20th in our class. The reading talks about how different pieces of content become viral and the "stickiness" of different types of content. "Stickiness" is described in the reading as "media texts that engender deep audience engagement and might motivate to share what they have learned with others"(Why Media Spreads 4). In order for content to become viral it needs to be in a format that is easy to share. The memes that Josh is making are very easy to share on Twitter which is a very big factor in why his content is being spread throughout the internet so rapidly. Another factor that is important for content to be spreadable is the cultural relevance. This fits with that factor because of the recent election results. The election is what most people are talking about on the internet right now and this content has the stage to thrive and become viral because it is easy to share and is a popular topic at this time.

Filter Bubble

For this blog post I am going to talk about the filter bubble. The filter bubble is a personalized search in which a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user. I thought that the most interesting course content that we covered on this topic was the TED Talk by Eli Pariser. The TED Talk Eli compares the exact same search from two of his friends separate Google accounts and they gave them two completely different search results because of the filter bubble that makes each of these search results specific for each person. I thought that the most interesting part of the TED Talk was this quote. "The internet is showing us what it think we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see" (Eli Pariser). These changes are happening without the consent of the people using the internet and I think that there should be regulations on the algorithms that these companies use because there is no way for them to actually anticipate what the users will want to see. Just because a user wants to find specific results one time, it does not mean that they will want to see similar things in the future.

Algorithms

For my next blog post I would like to talk about algorithms and their different uses in online communities. The definition of an algorithm is a process or set of rules to be followed in calculation or other problem solving operations, especially by a computer. For the purpose of this class there are two main uses. First, algorithms help to filter different connections to lead users to topics or products that the algorithm determines that they will want to see. A good example of this use of algorithms is Amazon's use by leading its users to products that are similar to ones that they have purchased in the recent past. The other use of algorithms for the purposes of this class is in platforms such as Twitter and Facebook which is used by making certain stories trending and more available for users to view based on how many people have reacted to the specific stories.

Personally, I do not think that algorithms are the best thing for users of these products and platforms. These algorithms are created by the companies that use them so they are obviously going to set them up so that they are an advantage to themselves and increase the product sales or the platforms use. These social media platforms have the ability to use these algorithms to make whatever stories they want, the top stories on their sites and encourage users to view them and make them the higher viewed topics. This gives more people the opportunity to react to the topics which can influence even more people to believe what is being put out there even if it isn't actually the most talked about subject at the time. A good example of this is the hashtag #HillaryForPrison which had to be changed because the platform and its algorithm determined that it was not appropriate and even though many people were talking about it, it was not featured as a top subject.