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.