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.

Open Source Software

For this week in class we talked about Open Source Software. Open Source Software is software that is available to anyone in the public for free. This allows users to use the software and modify it to change the function of it slightly to adapt it more to the needs of the specific user. I think that this topic that we discussed in class is especially interesting because I am also talking about this topic in another one of my classes. The class is Digital E-commerce so it is more about how people can use the free software to modify it and whether or not is is worth it for the creator of the software to make it available to the world for free. In this class we have discussed how open source software can be used in a collaborative way. People are able to create a software and share it with people to help make it better and take out any of its flaws that it could possibly have. Personally, because I am a finance major, I can see how big of an effect that open source software can have on the online economy and also how allowing people to see it and help improve it can increase the value of the software.

Communities of Practice

This week we spent class time talking about Communities of Practice. A community of practice is groups of people who share a concern, set of problems, or passion about a topic. These groups of people work together to gain more knowledge and make the group better by sharing information and getting everyone to contribute. I found this week's topic to be very interesting because it correlates very closely to a lot of what I do and what everyone does whether they think about it or not. Everyone looks for other people and groups for support and to better themselves. For example I consider the fraternity that I am a part of to be a community of practice because we all share the goal of improving the fraternity and helping the community around us. One of the activities that we are most proud of is helping contribute and offer help in any ways that we can to the kinder garden the is right next door to us. We help by picking up trash near and around their building and on the holidays we like to make crafts for the kids. This last Thanksgiving we made little pipe cleaner turkeys for all the kids at the school and they were all very excited which made our fraternity, or community of practice, feel very good.

Wiki Pages

This week in class we were put into groups and teamed up to create a Group Wiki Pages page. Our assignment was to make a page that describes and provides examples for five different terms from the list of terms about group dynamics. Group dynamics is the processes involved when people in a group interact with each other, or the study of these. The purpose of these five definitions from within the study of group dynamics was to gives us a further insight into what goes into group work and the different forms that it is possible. By understanding how a group functions and what is important to make it successful, we will be able to use this knowledge in our studies of preexisting groups online to see what they have done fundamentally right and what they could possibly do better in the future.

Our group was given five topics to focus on and those topics were; task groups, weak associations, social categories, interactions, and Tuckman's five stages of groups. First I will talk about task groups, a task group is a work group brought together in an employment setting in a variety of non employment situations. An example of this is a group that I worked in for another one of my classes. We used an app called Slack which is a platform for groups of people to collaborate on anything that they want and we used it to schedule meeting times. The next topic that we focused on was weak associations. Weak associations are spontaneous meetings of people for a brief amount of time. A good example of this is snapchat because in snapchat there is a limited amount of time that the picture is available. The next topic that we discussed on our Wiki Page was social categories. Social categories are groups of people that are brought together through similar aspects of their social lives. A good example of this is dating sites where people are matched together based on their similarities. Another topic that we reviewed was interactions. Interactions are when individuals in a group are influenced by each others actions. A good example of this topic is when you react to someone's post in a Facebook group. Finally, the last topic that we discussed on this assignment was Tuckman's five stages of groups. The main point of this topic is that there are five stages of groups such as: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.

Social Media "Friends"

In a time where people can get lost in the vast world of online communities, people are able to have millions of "friends" without even knowing all of them. Silver critiques the modern technology that provides us with social media by saying that it ruins our personal relationships with people and creates false friendships. I think that Silver is correct depending on the person that we focus on. For someone who uses social media more often than interacting with other people, it can absolutely be a viable source for people to create and grow relationships. For example, if you spend most of your time at the gym playing basketball and very little time out on the soccer field then you are going to build better relationships with people at the gym playing basketball, simply because that is where you spend most of your time. This is the same with social media; if you spend most of your time interacting with people online then that is where you are going to build more and better relationships with other people. However, for people who spend very little time online, they will not be able to maintain meaningful relationships with everyone they know online. These people require face-to-face interactions with people in order to sustain these relationships. I think that if a person were to spend a majority of their time on Facebook and updated their profile very often and used it to communicate with people then it would be a good source to build relationships. However, I think that Facebook can also have the opposite effect on people that spend very little time on it and do not check in on their "friends" often.

Introduction

So far this course, Collaborating in Online Communities, has been very interesting. We have spent time in class to discuss our own opinions of what an online community is and where you can find them. We have also spent time in class to discuss three different reading assignments that we had for homework. The first reading assignment was What is Collaboration Anyway? by Adam Hyde et. al.. This reading was mainly about different aspects of collaboration, and talked about the pros and cons it has in online communities. It used Wikipedia as an example of a place where people can collaborate to make everyone more knowledgable and as a place to make people less knowledgable. Stephen Colbert showed how Wikipedia can have its fault if enough people want to post something that is not true. The next reading was Collective Intelligence by Pierre Levy. This reading discussed how important collective intelligence can be. It describes collective intelligence as universally distributed intelligence and a community where everyone acknowledges each others opinions and information that they provide. The last reading was an article titled, Social Network Nextdoor Moves To Block Racial Profiling Online by Aarti Shahani. This article is about the online program Nextdoor that allows its users to post messages about their community anywhere from events to crimes that they witnessed. The articled talked about how the online program is working towards having less racial profiling on their site. They did this by forcing people to give at least two descriptive traits about someone when talking about them. These traits have to be related to things that they were wearing or doing.