Digital Ethics

I think digital ethics is a very important part about research. It is easy to just copy and paste something and call it your own, but that I not ethical. It is important to give credit where credit is due, so to speak. If a sentence is taken from the article, it is important to cite the article, author, etc.

Taking a photo from a site is a bit more tricky, sometimes it’s not possible to find information about a photo to cite it properly, but it is important to do the best that you can. Research as much as possible to find correct information, but if all else fails, at least cite the website where you found it. If a picture requires permission to use, get permission. Ideally you’d be able to get permission for ever photo you use, but unfortunately that is not the case. It is very important, however, to get permission regardless if you are using a photo or text that is copyrighted. This will save you some legal trouble down the road.

Inception: The App!!

One of my favorite movies is Inception directed by Christopher Nolan. There is an iPhone app that caters to the movie. I have it! The app augments the sounds around you. It’s kind of hard to explain so here’s a link explaining the app better than I ever could:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-12/08/inception-app

This hort snippet from the website explains the app:

“The input you’ll notice first is the microphone, where the app turns every sound into bizarre dreamy noises. Footsteps echo, voices distort and your breathing is made distinctively clear. It’s all twisted around ambient music, random noises and Hans Zimmer’s excellent movie soundtrack.”

The app is pretty cool. I wouldn’t have it running all night since it would drain the battery, but I think it would make for a great sleeping experience.

Digital Democracy: Online Forums

Online, I believe forums are a great digital democracy tool. People are able to voice their opinions online which can reach many people. I’ve noticed that even forums that aren’t necessarily catered to politics can lead to political conversation. I find that politics are always a heavily talked about subject. Again, with the anonymity of the internet people are more comfortable with sharing their opinions. Sometimes people have legitimate discussions, but often time people “troll” to get a rise out of others or just say really hateful things.

When people are able to express themselves, whether good or bad, in this case I believe this can help to promote civil society and democracy.

YouTube

I think YouTube is one of the greatest things on the ‘net. There has been so much that I’ve learned from it. One of the best parts is that it’s all free information! I can find makeup tutorials, DIY projects, and even exercise routines on it when before you’d have to pay $19.99 for an exercise DVD. You could even forego a gym membership if you wanted to.

One thing I don’t like about it, however, is how nasty people can get in the comments particularly if the video is about politics or religion. The anonymity of the internet, brings out the crazies!

Philosophical Statement

This class was definitely a positive experience. I liked that the research project was in pieces and not one thing to turn in at one time. I liked that it was built up from the beginning. I also liked that we were able to post blog posts about the various topics. I liked how the class wasn’t completely structured with the assignments so we could come up with our own ideas (like the path of inquiry for example) and write about them.

Cyberculture

One aspect of cyberculture that I find interesting is cyberbullying. This has been a hot topic in recent years. It has been an issue mostly because there have been suicides in conjunction with cyberbullying. It is debatable that cyberbullying is worse than “regular” bullying because it is constant. If the bulliee is removed from the environment (IE. school) they can still be bullied elsewhere (IE. home) because of the internet. It is also easier with the anonymity of the internet. Someone you don’t even know outside of the internet can say awful things about you online.

I am an avid YouTube watcher mainly because of the makeup and beauty tutorials. The women and men that do these kinds of videos are called, “makeup gurus.” They go on YouTube to share tutorials, showing their skills and also bare faces (without makeup). Having no makeup on opens up an ugly can of worms by people who leave comments. I find that most comments are in favor of the guru unless the tutorial is absolutely dreadful (I don’t see that very often though). There is a website called Guru Gossiper where people can talk about different gurus. There is a rave a guru section, but also a trash a guru section which is exactly that! The things people say in that section are absolutely terrible! They say such rude things, you’d think the gurus killed their mothers or something. They spread rumors, obtain personal information, and talk about the women and men in every aspect, from appearance to their children. I really do like social media and the like, but that is one aspect I can’t get behind.

Research Project Outline

Table of Contents

Introduction

History of Microblogging

History of Twitter

Twitter Timeline

Twitter: The Epidemic

Case Study

Conclusion

Introduction

 

The introduction will introduce Twitter, but also my topic on Twitter which is how and why Twitter has so much influence on the world today.

History of Microblogging

 

I will then talk about the history of microblogging. This will be a brief section since microblogging is a fairly new concept, also since this isn’t the basis of my paper I didn’t want to spend too much time talking about it. I just wanted to give a brief history on the evolution of Twitter.

History of Twitter

 

The history of Twitter would be next. Again, I’m not going to spend too much time talking about the history I will talk about the more important events here. The next component, the timeline, will be more in-depth. I will do the timeline in bullet form. I will spend the majority of the paper on point five.

 

Twitter Timeline

 

The timeline will be an in-dept look on the evolution of Twitter from its inception until today.

Twitter: The Epidemic

 

Here I will talk about Twitter’s influence on the world and how/why it is so influencial. This will be the majority of my paper.

 

Case Study

 

I will include a brief case study that I did. Here I explain the data I collected and what it means.

 

Conclusion

 

The conclusion will express my final thoughts on Twitter and what I think it will be like years from now and how it may impact societies future.

Torrents!

There are a number of torrent websites on the internet. Torrents are files that users can share. These files can be anything: movies, music, books, etc. It is illegal to share these files, but to my experience I have not seen much going into stopping it. Millions of people use torrents, but I may hear about only a few cases of people who are prosecuted. I more so hear about the owners of the sites getting prosecuted or getting the site shut down. This was a while ago, about 2002. Now I am hearing about the government cracking down on torrent websites. There are policies in place that doesn’t necessarily go after the average Joe, but making it harder to access these websites or blocking them all together. SOPA and PIPA are two proposed laws against piracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

A lot of social media sites, not just torrent websites, would be affected if these laws were to pass. There is a lot of information on Facebook, Twitter, etc. that would not fly under the radar under this law. About a year ago, the internet was ablaze over these laws and a lot of websites like Wikipedia “blacked out” in protest.

 

Microblogging Platform: Twitter!

Twitter was launched first in 2006. It is a microblogging platform, one of the first of its kind. There really wasn’t anything like it on the market before 2006 except perhaps Facebook allowing status updates. Twitter was the first major microblogging service. Twitter does not have a long history (it is less than 10 years old!), but it has changed quite a bit. The starting numbers, from users to tweets, were low. People were tweeting at 60,000 a day, but since Twitter is more heavily used those numbers have skyrocketed. There are millions of users now and Twitter has surpassed the five billion tweet mark. Twitter doesn’t change its interface as frequently as say, Facebook. They roll out improvements every now and again, sometimes cosmetic-wise, but also performance-wise. I remember a few years back, when Twitter had too many people on their servers at one time, there would be a little whale that told you so. I never see that anymore so that’s one improvement they’ve done.

Tool Exploration – Reddit

I wasn’t sure what I was going to use as my mobile media tool, but I think Reddit is an appropriate one. Reddit is a website, or in this case a tool, where people can submit content as a link or text post. People can vote the submission up or down and that’s how posts get popular. Since people can post a link to something else; I think this a great tool for new media artists because they can post links to anything.  It can be a mixture of all media arts since you can post links to other websites. You can also watch videos and what not on the website as well so you don’t even have to go to another page. There are different categories like science and technology.