EME6414 Journal

I've spent the weekend wrapping up the produsage assignment and spent much of last week struggling with choosing a hashtag for my community of practice on Twitter. First, I tried to choose one that we would 'own' and that hadn't been used before. I originally wanted to use #IPPA, but after searching that, learned that's that is a tag for something currently in the political spectrum (I got out of there fast). Secondly, I had to consider length, as I don't want the tag taking up too much of the 140 character limit. So #IPProgramAssistants was out because it seems simply too long. After much consideration, I wound up with #IPprogramassts. I still think it looks a little funny, but it gets the job done. I hadn't previously realized how much thought goes into tags! Social bookmarking is no joke!

I wrote in an earlier blog post this week about a freshman orientation my office hosted recently. At this event, we decided to make our own Snapchat filter and event story. (If you can't beat 'em, join 'em). We decided to create our own filter for both marketing purposes and to embrace the trends (and to maybe address the issue of students constantly looking at their phones by incorporating social media into our orientation presentations). Our decision was similar to the points brought up in this NPR article about teachers are using Snapchat in the classroom. A psychology professor takes snaps of real life applications of what he teaches so that students can view them as they study for tests. He also records videos with narration about concepts he's teaching about in the classroom.  In our presentations, we encouraged students take photos with each other during the event as well as pull out their phones to snap videos and photos of moments they thought provided ...

We've spoken in class lately about disconnecting and the value it can have. I've been thinking about how disconnecting is really an art form these days (it's so tricky sometimes). For me, the hardest part is in thinking I'm being rude if I miss a message or a post someone has tagged me in. Rationally, I know it's not a big deal if I respond to something a few days later if I want to disconnect, but I feel weird sort of anxiety about it (largely over someone having the perception that I'm ignoring them when in fact I'm ignoring everyone [but I'm not sure that makes it much better!]) I like Snapchat recently because it's the one social media where I feel I can interact and "be" with others without the pressure to respond, which is handy if I need a break from technology. If I want someone to know I'm thinking of them on twitter or Facebook, I might write a post on their wall or tag them in a tweet. But I'd then generally expect th...

My office hosted an orientation last week for about 100 students who are going abroad in the fall. It was an event run by my office and mirrored the typical orientation that students go through, with informational sessions throughout the day followed by evening teambuilding activities and a night in one of the campus residence halls. I worked closely with the group of students who will be studying in London. I led several sessions regarding their future academics, living, and cultural activities. Most of these sessions also included their parents. After spending two full days interacting with these students and parents, many of them sent me friend requests on Facebook. I'm not entirely sure how they found me on there, as I use my first and middle name on my personal profile in order to avoid such happenings. Regardless, I try to keep my work and personal lives separate to an extent on social media. I'm friends with my colleagues on my personal page, as I'm also friends ...

Let me preface this by saying that I love social journalism. I think it's an incredible way for those who are passionate about writing or about a specific topic to get their voice out there and for those who hope to become traditional journalists to hone their skills. Many of my fellow journalism interns got their start on social journalism platforms and many more will spend free time 'freelancing' on social journalism platforms as they try to make the pursuit into a career. I've seen and heard discussion praising social journalism for many of the reasons I listed above. I agree with the praise - it's a great platform for getting one's voice heard, especially on positions/topics that are often marginalized. But I read quite a bit of social journalism and have spent a bit of time perusing Medium, which can offer great content and incredible writing. But it's a wide spectrum and I'd argue that much of it should not be considered journalism. (I think ther...

Just like diamonds... the internet is forever. Ed Sheeran certainly found that out this week when his tweets from 5-6 years ago expressing opinions some would consider problematic came to light in a Buzzfeed article  after he deleted his Twitter account and then re-instated it minus these tweets. (There's a swear word or two in there, fair warning.) It's becoming more and more common while scrolling Twitter or Facebook to see links to Buzzfeed or HuffPo posts calling out celebrities or politicians for misguided/cringeworthy tweets. I've seen a barrage of them in the last six months. I think there are pros and cons to that sort of article. Accountability can be a great way to keep people in line and I do think it's important to foster discussions about political correctness, mutual respect, and general human kindness and empathy, but I'm not sure that the point of a call-out article is to serve as anything more than clickbait in the way that some radio hosts are ...

One of my favorite websites is Longform.org , a curation site for longform journalism. I love reading narrative non-fiction and Longform is a great resource for finding curated pieces that are judged to be the cream of the crop. I've become even more appreciative of websites/apps integrating other Web 2.0 tools into their product and I was excited to see that not only can I easily add Longform articles into my Pocket app, but the Longform website has its own built-in option from which you can click a Read Later button and articles will save into your Pocket account. Generally when surfing Longform, you click a headline of an article, which is linked to the source of where the article is housed. From there, I could easily add the article into my Pocket with the web extension, but it saves me a step to simply click the Pocket button on Longform's site. I think it's incredibly smart for websites to integrate tools like this into their sites, as it helps make web surfing ...

I'm officially a Pocket convert! Convert is probably not the correct word, as I didn't have a good bookmarking method before, but I am newly obsessed with Pocket. I wasn't sure it was something I would actually use/find useful at first, but I'm happy to report that I was wrong wrong wrong. I played around with it a little last week, but I managed to catch some kind of bug over the weekend that put me out of commission, so I got a chance to poke around the web more than usual, which allowed me to utilize Pocket more. I'm a huge fan of narrative non-fiction and longform journalism and Pocket has saved me from myself - I no longer need to have 40+ tabs open on Safari on my iPhone. But I also don't worry about losing articles I find on Twitter but want to save for later in order to keep scrolling through my feed. (I'm so stoked not to have to shuffle through 30 tabs of Safari articles to find a particular piece I want to read!) I especially like that all o...

After reading the Mason & Suri piece and commenting on this week's discussion board thread about crowdsourcing, I got to thinking/doing some research about it from a more in-depth journalism perspective and how it can be used in the field.  One of the most interesting ways I found was that of the Guardian's crowdsourcing experiment in 2009. The Guardian is one the United Kingdom's most respected and well-read national newspapers. It prints daily and has a website similar in scale to that of the New York Times. In 2009, the Guardian digitally published 700,00 receipts from Members of Parliament, many of which were evidence of wide-scale political corruption and expense fraud.  In an attempt to quickly gather information and to determine which receipts/which expenses held promise of scandal, the Guardian asked its readers to digitally comb through the 700,000 documents. They asked users to comment, highlight, provide notes, and analyze any expenses of interest and...

This isn't strictly Web 2.0/social media related, but this article features a fascinating merge between art and technology in a really incredible way and is too cool not to share. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has more than 34,000 works in its collection, of which it can only display 5% of at any given time. (Viewing the entire collection would involve walking 121 miles.) In order to reach as many people as possible with its collection, the museum has set up an on-demand art gallery via text message. To receive a piece of art via text, send a message reading "send me" followed by a word, a color, or an emoji to 57251. All works of the collection have been archived digitally with keywords/colors and the text with your unique keyword will trigger a piece of art be sent to you matching your keyword. I tried it with the word "potatoes" (I was eating a potato at the time) and within 20 seconds received a portrait of potatoes and a piece of bacon done ...

After viewing/listening to this week's Voice Thread on intellectual property, I got to thinking about attribution on the web and how claims over intellectual property are often met with a shrug (or worse). When I interned in the journalism field, I would often log on to Twitter or Facebook to monitor social media for work and find that a user had either quoted an article by me/my colleagues or posted a photo of ours without any attribution. This became so common that it would happen more multiple times per day. In the beginning it didn't bother me. I was a rookie in the field and still thought it impossibly cool that someone on the internet thought enough of words I had written or a photo I took to post it on their social media. But as I learned and grew and eventually began to take more pride and ownership of the content I created, it started to bug me. I had no problem with users posting quotes to my story if they also linked to the story (same goes for photos). What I had ...

I've found that working in higher education often is an interesting contrast where sometimes I find my office (and myself) to be 'up' on the latest tech/social media trends and sometimes I find us stuck in the past. I have a near-constant shuffle of students in and out of my office, which usually helps me stay informed, but also sometimes makes me realize how we continue to hold on to what we're used to as college students are surging forward. Despite how old it sometimes makes me feel, I actually enjoy this dichotomy. It's fascinating to me see how processes in daily life have progressed due to social media and technology and how students deal with being faced with a process that is more 'antiquated' than they expect. For instance, it can sometimes be a hoot to watch students' confusion as we tell them they cannot use Venmo/Paypal/Apple Pay/Google Wallet to pay their program fees and/or passport fees. We tell them that the Department of State requires...

I was struck by the class' discussion about social learning networks this week and the conversation about trust online. It made me think about grandfather. My grandfather spent nearly all of his adult life without using computers, and, by proxy, social media. He is still not much of social media user, though he does pop on to Facebook from time to time to wish old friends a happy a birthday. His major internet use involves an email subscription to a newsletter relating to woodworking for senior citizens. He was an active woodworker for much of his life and now finds a great amount of joy in receiving this newsletter. He has recently found a niche subset of the newsletter (which is associated with a small forum) of woodworkers who also enjoy painting rocks. Yes, painting rocks. They paint landscape scenes, animals, portraits, what have you, on rocks big and small. My grandfather finds rock-painting soothing and creative, especially when he isn't feeling up to woodworking. This...

As I dig deeper into Twitter lurking and general social media prowess, including the conversation about Free Riders, content creation, and social media exchanges, I find myself thinking about the prevalence of brands/companies on social media and how it affects the genuineness of interactions and content consumption. One of my previous blog posts was about the automated future of content creation and how artificial intelligence and computer software will play the majority role in the future of press releases, scheduled social media posts, and the future of digital marketing. The main focus of the article was about digital marketing and brands on social media. I continued to think about things from that lens as I played around with Twitter this week. As a former sports writer, what really caught my eye (and has done so for the last year plus) is the interaction between the official account of teams and fans/journalists. Official accounts for teams often have hundreds of thousands of...

I posted last week about the new feature called Snap Map on Snapchat, which allows users to see the locations of their followers on a map of the world at all times (unless a specific user opts to go into 'ghost mode'). Because we're talking a little more about Snapchat and Snap stories this week, I've been exploring the Snap map a little bit more and noticed that it's fairly interesting to play around with the map and view stories from other locations around the world. For instance, in the screenshots below, a big focus of today's domestic stories are cities celebrating the fourth of July. Internationally, you can check out videos and stories from the Milan Cathedral and the Pompeii Ruins. There are pros and cons to Snapchat, (especially in a classroom setting), but I think in a monitored environment with private accounts only accessible for a class, this international exploration could be a useful tool for interactive 'exhibits' on geography,...

One of the most interesting aspects of social media to me is its capacity for news delivery and how news spreads. This article  focuses on how social media platforms are becoming less common for news sharing in younger generations. Instead, messaging apps like WhatsApp are beginning to take their place. A Reuters report supposes that part of the reason for this shift from social media to messaging apps is due to users wanting to 'cut through the noise of social media.' More than 54% of users noted they use social media as a news source, but that number is ever-decreasing. Of the 70,000 Reuters respondents, only 24% think social media appropriately separates fact from fiction. Additionally, besides just the desire to cut through the noise of social media, the author also writes that users are wanting to share news in a less public setting (privately with peers). This desire to be less public about one's news/opinions is one of the most interesting parts of the article ...

I wanted to share this article  because it struck me as an interesting addition to the prosumer culture of Web 2.0. The article touches on the ever-automating web and improving algorithms of artificial intelligence as it affects content on social media platforms. The article is written with a focus on digital marketing and brand content creation, but affects all of us as we are the consumers of that info. The author writes that with the creation of software and AI that recognizes nuances in content creation, brands will be able to write one draft of an ad or an article or whatever content they are creating and have computer software translate that piece of content so that it best fits the layouts and content stipulations of any and all social media platforms. This takes the labor-intensive nature of digital marketing out of the equation (though it obviously also removes much of the human factor). The computer software continually learns with each new piece of content published ...

Snapchat is inherently a different kind of social network from Twitter and Facebook and even Instagram, though both the platforms are photo/video focused. But, like with many other social networks at one time or another, it has been in the news lately due to a new feature that many feel violates user privacy. Snapchat recently unveiled a new feature 'Snap Map' that lets users see where their snap friends are at all times on a map of the world. It isn't optional. All user locations went live when the app updated. I didn't even know the feature had been added to my app until seeing an article about it on Twitter. I immediately googled how to turn the feature off, using what Snapchat calls 'Ghost Mode'. Even in Ghost Mode I am still able to see where my friends are who have not entered Ghost Mode. I messaged a few of them asking if they were aware of this new location sharing feature and they were not. They all promptly entered Ghost Mode. I've seen a numbe...