29 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2015
    1. What Skyler meant is simply that social acceptance depends on the ability to socialize with one’s peers at the “cool” place. Each cohort of teens has a differ-ent space that it decides is cool.

      That "cool" place is solely becoming different spots on social media in accordance with your friend group. Everyday life is quickly molding into be completely virtual. All basic human necessities may already be achieved by using a computer.

    2. As you read this book, my hope is that you will suspend your assumptions about youth in an effort to understand the social lives of networked teens.

      A valuable exercise. However, it is almost impossible to temporarily sever an adults opinions regarding teen network life. Since they did not live through it, they have no experience and therefore no chance of understanding.

    3. my attempt to describe and explain the net-worked lives of teens to the people who worry about them—parents, teachers, policy makers, journalists, sometimes even other teens.

      Clarifying ambiguities for newcomers to the internet, especially children, is of utmost importance. With little restrictions/censorship in terms of what people may see/do, it is important to explain the possible consequences of one's actions on the web. Heck, nowadays you can even order illegal contraband using bitcoins!

    1. He observed that most of the available tools for collaboration were concerned with complex collections of roles and require­ments-only designated writers could create text, whereas only editors could publish it, but not until proofreaders had ap­proved it, and so on.

      This is a prime example of how peer work is unbeatable. The flawless process behind publishing a book has a high success rate. Why? Because so many educated brains are pouring all of their knowledge and efforts into it.

    2. Perhaps the most famous example of distributed collabora­tion today is Wikipedia, the collaboratively created ency­clopedia that has become one of the most visited web sites in the world.

      It is rather unfortunate how most people take Wikipedia for granted. It is an ingenious system for a database. However, it is struggling to stay afloat because of its nobleness to neglect ads and fund its off of minute donations.

    3. Collaborative production, where people have to coordinate with one another to get anything done, is considerably harder than simple sharing, but the results can be more profound.

      This is the main reason grade schools heavily focus on working in pairs. Especially with someone you don't know, the awkward tension compels the two to perform optimally. It is a trying process to make build off of someone else's thoughts, although highly rewarding.

    1. Use of the terms “viral” and “memes” by those in the marketing, advertising and media industries may be creating more confusion than clarity.

      To clarify things, workers involved in media should have inside and outside terms. This being the same concept of an inside joke. You wouldn't tell an inside joke to someone you just met and expect to get a positive reaction from them.

    2. To some degree, it seemed the strength of a viral message depends on “how easy is it to pass”, suggesting viralness has something to do with the technical properties of the medium, yet quickly we were also told that it had to do with whether the message fit into the ongoing conversations of the community:

      With joining communities, it is of utmost importance to stay relevant and in favor of the central theme. It is very common for a participant to slip and accidentally impose an inappropriate gesture. The only dilemma is the chance of being permanently shunned from a community for doing so. So, be careful!

    3. As the discussion continued, it became clearer and clearer that viral media, like art and pornography, lies in the eye of the beholder

      I feel like this is a concept that many people do not understand. Another reason why many things become so controversial. You can have one person who is entranced by the beauty of something that went viral, but another who wholeheartedly contests why it is being publicized.

    1. Blind faith can justify anything.(7)  If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die -- on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader's sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast.

      These statements help provide me with a clear rationale of why memes are so popular. A lot of people may utilize the same meme image. However, only a few will create them with the same intent.

    2. Consider the idea of God.  We do not know how it arose in the meme pool.  Probably it originated many times by independent `mutation'.  In any case, it is very old indeed.  How does it replicate itself ?  By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art.  Why does it have souch high survival value ?

      Having faith in God is synonymous to participating in memes. It is a community filled with people who are non-judgmental. Additionally, memes will remain in existence because of their simplicity and ability to arouse great amusement.

    3. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

      This analogy served perfectly in making sense of the bonding aspect relating to memes. They are truly a contagious phenomenon. It compels one to contemplate what is next for the future of media.

    1. Turn off the technology and minimize the distractions. You've got to get your idea out of your head and on the wall so you can see it, share it, make it better.

      There exists a great necessity to separate oneself from technology while pondering a focused topic. The internet provides FAR too many distractions. They either procrastinate someone or counter-productively remodel their topic.

  2. Oct 2015
    1. meme culture has provided an outlet for new forms of public conversation and community buildin

      It is interesting how the "meme culture" has come to mean something that is so powerful. Communities of people may finally speak online about controversial topics through the deceptive use of memes. This is a perfect example of how a nation's citizenship will always find a way to fight suppression and censorship.

    2. constant effort to outdo each other’s creativity. Any image of a llama can in fact become a grass mud horse, and, by extension, an outcry against China’s stringent censorship.

      I never fully conceptualized the notion of memes acting in complete relation to politics. I always thought of them as harmless jokes. Things that offer a quick laugh to people browsing through their media.

    3. But càonǐmā(操你妈), written with different characters and pronounced with slightly different tones, is the more familiar colloquial phrase roughly translated as ‘fuck your mother’. And Ma’le Gebi sounds like another Chinese phrase meaning ‘Your mother’s cunt’

      I'm not clear on the correlation between these seemingly different interpretations. How does an arbitrary fictional animal relate to speaking of one's mother with negative connotations. All aspects about this creature are paradoxical... Who comes up with these things?

    1. What’s the top-level domain? Is the page in question on a spammy top-level domain like “.info”? That’s not always a bad sign, but it raises your alert level a bit.

      This principle is questionable because I do see a number of credible sites with this domain. Although, it probably does help to slightly narrow down the process of identifying spam. Constantly going through motions like this seems grueling.

    2. No one of these tests, typically, is conclusive in itself. But together they constitute a kind of sniff test for the quality of any given piece of Web-borne information.

      It must be a strenuous for this guy to constantly be barraged with a myriad of sites. Not only this, he also must check them all for credibility and make an educated guess. Seems like somewhat of a stressful job.

    1. We learn early on that the given rules don’t work for us, and that we have to manipulate them to succeed, even where others might wish us to fail.

      This is an effective summary of why human aspirations should never be suppressed. People will always find a way to conquer those limitations. In the long term, this results in conflict and disruption in society.

    2. Internet technology design increasingly facilitates rather than defeats censorship and control.

      This is evident in many situations like my mother's computer at work. If she attempts to search or click on anything that is slightly irrelevant than she is instantly blocked from viewing it. Where is the liberty here? If someone is consistently getting their work done and providing a quality service they should not be heavily censored.

    3. It’s more regulated. And increasingly it’s less global, and more divided.

      This is a major issue seeing that it affects the ability to connect with other nations through the web. Especially with video games, I always see many different servers to choose from to work with where one is living. This is huge limitation on the progression of building peaceful relations with foreign nations.

    1. the military section of the bulletin board included a conversation about whether Luis was taking sufficient care of the uniform he was wearing in the pictures Sasha had taken.)

      This a prime example of how the web molds communities. Usually, people will visit a thread to become involved in something, but end up indulging in irrelevant topics that they share. This is a quick and easy way for humans to build bonds with others through the comfort of their homes.

    2. Seeing this, he selected a second bulletin board service, but that too crashed under the sudden shock of demand, as did the third.

      The infamous crashing of a popular site is one of the greatest horrors that plagues the web. Without a site's server being supported by a whole team of workers, it becomes vulnerable to issues such as: lag and crashing. Just as Yogi Berra implied, people will stop putting up with the frustration of inconvenience and move on.

    3. Evan also created a bulletin board for his readers, a place online where they could communicate with one another about the attempts to recover Ivanna's phone.

      I cannot believe the amount of power that technology has delivered to the fingertips of many. This story already reveals the inability for someone to hide when they are on the lookout. I am sure this occurrence will deter many people from withholding the possession of another in the future.

    1. The only problem is, when you have that much information, you have to find the good stuff, and that can be incredibly difficult when you're dealing with those volumes.

      Before reading this, I had minor intentions to become a journalists. Now thinking about how much arbitrary text they must look through to find the "good stuff", I am definitely having second thoughts. Also, I wonder how much they money they are prized with once they find that hard-hitting material.

    2. And what that means is just constant, huge volumes of data going up. It's actually staggering. When you look at the numbers, every minute there are 72 more hours of video on YouTube. So that's, every second, more than an hour of video gets uploaded.

      I can only imagine the amount of Youtube workers necessary for watching and possibly flagging every video that gets uploading. What astounds me more is the pay that these workers will accept. Well, at least it produces steady circulation for the economy!

    3. They're helping us find the news. They're helping us figure out what is the best angle to take and what is the stuff that they want to hear. So it's a real-time thing. It's much quicker. It's happening on a constant basis, and the journalist is always playing catch up.

      It is interesting to think that human instincts involuntarily work for the media. When someone posts a tweet or Facebook status about an important event, they are not conceiving of who is actually projecting these claims for the world to see. To me, this sounds like another factor that breaks down how the media is so sneaky.

    1. Multi-tasking is cognitively exhausting — when we do it by choice, being asked to stop can come as a welcome change.

      It is intriguing to conceive how much less work somebody gets done when they are multi-tasking. If all that energy was consistently channeled into one assignment then work would become less stressful. Just get it done! Procrastination is a prevalent trait in MOST humans and it works to destroy our time management skills.

    2. it’s as if someone has let fresh air into the room. The conversation brightens

      As the semester progresses, students grow more and more comfortable with being able to freely roam the web. They feel as though the professor will never call them out for not paying attention. Clay Shirky's exercise is brilliant and gave her reassurance for new classroom standards.