10 June 2019
What is Social Media and What Has it Done for Us?
Opportunity comes in all forms today for anyone with a bit of creativity and credibility to rise from obscurity in the world. The tools for this ascent into recognition can be found in various forms, but none more evident than what has come to be known as "social media." Found in any number of forms on the World Wide Web, social media is the interconnection of thoughts, ideas, organizations, events and just plain sharing; of anything from theories, innovations, chat, and even the simplest communication as family photos.
Origin can be traced to various chat sites on the web dating back to the late 1990s but real emergence came in the form of one in particular, Facebook. Founded by a small group of ambitious college students, it became the foremost social interaction device in the world, and still is today. Copycat sites that streamline various processes, such as Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest and Snapchat each offer a different approach to web socializing depending on interest. Foremost in the field of directed communication is Twitter, where for a given number of characters, the individual can follow a hashtag (#), create posts related to immediate events and add images and links to each post. Most of the various social sites also allow for comments, which many times prove to work against the person who supplied the original post.
Politicians and hacks alike have found phenomenal use in Twitter as it allows for instantaneous communication with not just the world, but to immediate followers who wait, sometimes by holding their breath, for the next signal; whether it comes from the White House or from some distant village in Africa where the latest case of ebola has just been reported. Social media has also been used as a tool to promote careers as seen in phenomena known as "You Tube" and "Instagram" stars, but not always to the star's advantage. Too often, the star goes a stunt too far and is fished out of the river at the base of a waterfall or from a canyon where the selfie turned out to be the last one.
Positive or negative use of any technology can only be graded by how beneficial it is to not just the individual, but to society as a whole, after all it is "social."
11 June 2019
Origin and Evolution of Digital Culture.
Information transmission by packets has been around since the invention of symbols painted on walls by Cro-Magnon man. Alphabets were formed by Phoenicians and other ancient more organized societies as they advanced from savagery to some form of civilization. As interaction between these various pre-Hellenic societies in the form of trade developed, numerical systems, also a form of packet transmission, became useful for calculating weights, quantities and cost. Hieroglyphics and other cuneiform pictograms related histories of entire kingdoms, as they rose and fell according to various natural and man made phenomena.
Following the plague that swept across Europe and plunged continental Europe into the Dark Ages in the 14th century, there arose several more advanced cultiral stages that would eventually propel man into modern times. One of the key features that arose out of the first, The Renaissance, was the printing press. The press enabled the church, scholars and intellectuals a new form of cultural exchange, borne from simple pieces of lead or wood block that could be rearranged in sequence to generate text. Yet again, another form of "packet switching" became a cardinal method for communication. As civilization moved to the New World, the colonies rapidly consolidated into what became known as the United States and an entirely new era was born, in several stages, that would be personified by industrial revolutions.
Experimentation with electricity led to the discovery, invention, of the telegraph, utilizing the Morse code. It became the signature packet signalling system of the 19th century and paved the way for a greater understanding of the role electricity would eventually play in what was to come, that being a breakthrough in electronic communication in the form of the telephone, radio and teletype. Still, no one could anticipate the next steps: television, the transistor radio and eventually a global network of communication satellites. However, the system was incomplete.
Beyond the wonders of advanced communication as the 20th century drew to a close was an even more startling discovery, cyberspace. There, beginning with two new advances, personal computers and the cellphone, man advanced quite rapidly into the 21st century and into an entirely new form of civilization, a digital culture. Expansion into cyberspace was paralleled only by that of the expanding universe in which it existed, with hitherto unknown ideas, concepts and communication methods evolved. Keynote amid the advances in banking, education, political and medical breakthroughs was a rather peculiar one that came to be known as "social media."
With it came a completely new host of platforms that allowed people to talk, write and share in ways that were just not possible a decade before, the process still in its early stages. With it, however, has come a Pandora's box of unexpected twists in the form of theft of personal information, cyberbullying and live podcasts of criminal activity. The scale has increased dramatically and not just on a personal level, involving governments, politicians, cybercrooks and intellectual property thieves. Addressing the issues has become a priority for those responsible for internet accountability, not just the federal agencies but the corporations themselves as service providers.
It remains to be seen just how far society will be able to travel into cyberspace and carry with it all the new components, what will survive and what will eventually become obsolete, like the transistor radio and the reel-to-reel tape. And, in a passing note, will text messaging remain the preferred method of contact for students in lecture halls, or will it someday return to just simple passing notes in class?
28 June 2019
False News: Financial, Cultural and Political
Social media is quite often used by those who have clear objectives of deception in mind, making unsubstantiated claims and going unchallenged because they are in a position of trust, authority or influence. That influence can be financial, cultural or political, just to name a few.
At the beginning of summer in 2018, 12 Thai soccer players found themselves trapped along with their coach inside a treacherous flooded cave in what became known as the "Tham Luang cave rescue." (Wikipedia) Various methods were fielded to extract the young boys and one of those was suggested by Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk. It was immediately rejected by one of the divers involved in the successful rescue, Vern Unsworth, who characterized it as a PR stunt.
“He can stick his submarine where it hurts,” (Wyatt, Independent)
It was also officially rejected by the Thai government as "not practical." Musk reacted by posting defamatory comments on his Twitter social media account that Unsworth was a "pedo guy," a pedophile. Musk depended on his financial status for credibility.
Unsworth, in turn, filed a defamatory lawsuit against Musk and the case is now pending in a Los Angeles courtroom for October of this year. In spite of such low-brow accusations being hurled in the ongoing dispute, Twitter itself appears to have stepped away from getting involved one way or another, as can be seen by the hashtag "#vernunsworth" which is still up and running at the social media site. (Twitter) False impressions created by those of financial status are common across the board at Twitter, this being just one example.
Celebrity singer Cher twitter-tiraded the US President following release of the long-anticipated Mueller report involving Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
"I Would *love* 2 See trump Impeached, Brought 2 Trial, *locked* Up In *prison* & Toy Boy Big Bubba!!" (TMZ)
Cher later apologized but the damage had been done, not just to the roller coaster public image of the president, but also self-inflicted harm done to her own through a crude false impression, news in its own right as being misleading. Cher depended on her cultural credibility.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was viciously attacked recently in a doctored video that made her appear slurring words and intoxicated. Facebook was the culprit this time and the company CEO still defends its decision to continually run the disgusting blatantly false clip on its social media site;
“It took a while for our system to flag the video and for our fact checkers to rate it as false... and during that time it got more distribution than our policies should have allowed,” (Reuters)
What the Facebook CEO also failed to report was the number of gullible gossip mongers who viewed it and were victims of an insensitive choreographed clickbait scheme to drive up advertising revenue. Why else was the decision delayed? Zuckerberg relied on his financial-cultural credibility.
This week, Twitter announced it has plans to muzzle those who are paving the way for false reports deemed newsworthy, including ones by US President Trump.
"We may sometimes add a notice to an account or Tweet to give you more context on the actions our systems or teams may take. In some instances, this is because the behavior violates the Twitter Rules. Other times, it may be in response to a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity in a given country." (Twitter)
In response, President Trump labelled big tech companies as "all Democrats;"
"These people are all Democrats; it’s totally biased toward Democrats." (Franck, CNBC)
Keeping in line with his defensive false tweeting profile, the President's allegation is pure fabrication. Checking campaign contributions from Twitter, Inc., #PAC at Open Secrets, the campaign funding organization gave 47% of its money to Democrats and 53% to Republicans in the 2018 election cycle. (Open Secrets) President Trump's assertion is pure poppycock. President Trump depended on his political credibility.
Agenda is the bottom line for all targeted tweets, comments, assertions and reports, true or false, circulating on social media. Sometimes it takes a great deal of effort to ferret out the false, the "fake," news. Otherwise, it is apparent and the motives thinly concealed. To what degree any kind of control by official government agencies will be effective is questionable. It is in the nature of those who run the companies, and those who use social media, to assume responsibility for content. That includes billionaires, celebrities and politicians.
Works Cited
Tham Luang Cave Rescue, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tham_Luang_cave_rescue
Wyatt, T., Court Case, Trial, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/elon-musk-vernon-unsworth-thailand-pedo-paedophile-twitter-defamation-trial-a8909241.html
#vernunsworth, https://twitter.com/hashtag/vernunsworth
Cher, https://www.tmz.com/2019/05/30/cher-impeachment-president-trump-toy-boy-big-bubba-tweet/
Pelosi, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-deepfake/facebook-ceo-says-delay-in-flagging-fake-pelosi-video-was-execution-mistake-idUSKCN1TS023
Twitter Rules, https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/notices-on-twitter
Franck, T. "All Democrats," https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/26/trump-says-big-tech-companies-like-twitter-are-all-democrats-and-purposely-repressing-his-reach.html
Twitter, Inc., #PAC, https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?cycle=2018&strID=C00548065
JOUR304.3001/James L'Angelle/Univ of Nevada, reno/Dr. Paromita Pain
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