Exploring a New Tool - The Knot

For our exploring a new tool project I focused on the website and application The Knot. The Knot is a bridal website and application that serves to assist throughout the entire wedding planning process. While I found that the website had more information than the application, both serve with countless of ideas to plan weddings. After Dr. Zamora’s suggestion for me to explore the bridal digital world due to my recent engagement, I found that The Knot was an appropriate tool to explore for this project.

As I started to explore The Knot, I remembered how as a very young teenager I would actually say to myself that I was never going to get married. I was going to move out on my own when I was old enough and didn’t fantasize about wearing a big puffy princess white dress. As I got older, that mentality changed. Thinking about what I used to think, makes me believe that the fact that my dad passed away when I was four-years-old and my mom decided to never remarried, lead me to believe that marriage was not something to fantasize about. I also think that growing up seeing a hardworking widowed mother perhaps encouraged me to say that I was never going to get married. So while I didn’t dream my entire life about the day I would get married, my mentality has changed since my very young teenage years and I now cannot wait until the day I say “I do”. Exploring the bridal digital world and particularly The Knot was definitely a fun, exciting and interesting adventure for me.

In the initial stage of signing up to the website I found that it was pretty easy to get your information on there. When I joined The Knot, they did not ask me for any other questions other than:

• “Your name”
• “Fiancé’s name”
• “Address and phone number”
• “Wedding date and location”
• “Budget amount”

Once I entered this information on the app, I noticed that when I logged into the website it automatically linked all the information to the website. I found this very convenient and found it nice to have all the information I had entered transfer over so that both places would be updated without needing to update anything myself. I noticed that The Knot asked essential questions to help you start the process and personalize your profile for you. I also noticed that these questions had cultural filters embedded in them. For instance, it asked for the name of the person starting the profile and the fiancé’s name without assuming the bride was the one starting the profile and without assuming there was a bride and a groom. After you enter all your information, both the website (left screenshot) and the app (right screenshot) show you a customized profile of your wedding like shown below:

(For the purpose of this project, I entered fictional information for most of the data shown on these particular screenshots)

As I explored both the app and the website, I noticed that a to-do checklist gets generated based on your wedding date and it can be seen in both the app and the website. The checklist includes things you should be getting done for your wedding and it’s broken down by month all the way up until a few months after you say I do. Each month contains items that should get done that month so that everything runs smoothly throughout the wedding planning. In my experience, I found that the app was easier to use when it came to going through all the to-dos whereas the website was easier to use when exploring all kinds of vendors and seeing countless of pictures for everything that has to do with weddings. Within the to-dos checklist in the app, I had the option to sort my to-dos by “Essential”, “Completed To-Dos”, and “Deleted To-Dos”. I found this beneficial because in case I deleted a to-do by mistake, I could always go back and add it again. As I explored the sorting options, I noticed that it was helpful to have to option to delete items in the to-do list rather than only being able to check them off when you complete the item because there are things on the to-do list that not every bride will be doing for their wedding. Some of the items in the to-do list showed cultural aspects as well. For instance, items like: “Create Your Wedding Website” which was marked as “Essential”, “Send Engagement Announcements”, “Plan an Engagement Party”, and “Search for Rehearsal Dinner Venues” are items I deleted immediately because I knew these were things that we were not going to be doing. They didn’t go with our personally or with our culture. Surprisingly, I do have to say that I personally did find most of the items in the never-ending to-do list helpful. Below are screenshots of what the to-do checklist looks like on the app – you can see how everything breaks down by month.

“Change Your Name”, as you can see on the screenshot in the second screenshot above, is marked as “Essential” yet more and more women nowadays are keeping their last names. I have a friend that nearly felt insulted when she would be asked when was she going to change her name after she got married. So, yes, The Knot allows you to easily delete this item from your to-do list if that is something you are not going to be doing. However, seeing this as an “Essential” item made me wonder what are people saying about this topic. So I went online and researched a bit about it and here are the links of some of the articles I found interesting. Click here and here for the articles. I also think that although The Knot tries to keep it neutral in the initial sign up stage where it asks for you to enter your name and fiancé’s name without assuming that the bride is the one opening the account, this “Change Your Name” item assumes the bride is the one checking items off the list and assumes that it is “Essential” for her to change her name.

As I continued exploring the to-do checklist, I found that one of the downfalls of the checklist is that I was not able to add my own to-dos to the checklist. So if there are certain traditions that are not listed in the checklist then you are not able to add them to the checklist The Knot provides. I was not able to think of traditions within my own culture that I needed to add on there – although I’m sure my mom will let me know of some or many, I don’t know, as I move along in my own wedding planning – but I thought about other weddings such as Indian weddings and the app didn’t seem to list some of their traditions in the to-dos checklist. For instance, thinking of Indian weddings, things like booking a vendor for their Mehndi, and a vendor to arrange their Dupatta or Sari, is not listed on the checklist. While the checklist seems to be an extensive one with nearly 200 items in it, it seems to leave out traditions for brides of other cultures. Another downfall is that you can’t add to your to-do list the data that pertains to the item you are checking off as complete. For instance, the option for “Estimating Your Guest Count” was listed but you are not able to actually enter the number on there. So while The Knot sells itself as a lifesaver for wedding planning, you still need other tools to record the data that relates to each checklist item. The checklist feature of The Knot works great for you to remember all you need to do, but you still need other tools outside what The Knot provides for ultimate results.

As I spent more time surfing through The Knot’s website, I found that, as I mentioned, this website serves more for looking for vendors and pictures of ideas for your wedding -- so it’s more visual than the app. You can search for venues around your area, you can see pictures of wedding dresses and vendors where to find them, and they even have a tab that says “Real Weddings” where you can see hairstyles from real brides. Now, this section really caught my eye mainly because I’ve been interested in looking to wear my hair down on my wedding day rather than doing the traditional updo hairstyle. So I thought this section would be helpful for me to look at non-traditional ideas. What I found surprising was that when I searched on their default listings (without filtering in any way) most of the hair styles shown on their list were from brides with blonde highlights or completely blonde hair. It didn’t matter whether they had their hair up or down, most of the pictures were from blonde brides. As I reflected on what I was seeing, I thought that all those pictures of brides with blonde hair were targeted to a particular demographic rather than providing a more diverse listing of hairstyles. Below are pictures of default hairstyles shown on The Knot’s website. 

I don’t particularly have anything against dying my hair or against brides wanting to rock out their natural blonde hair or waiting to go blonde for their wedding day. However, it was stunning for me to see that majority of what The Knot was displaying was not diverse. As a teenager, I dyed my hair light brown and also red. I later had blonde highlights and then finally, when I became exhausted of constantly having to hide my roots, I dyed my hair black and allowed my natural dark brown hair to grow out. Since then, I never dyed my hair again. And I don’t foresee me changing my mind until perhaps when I start getting gray hair. So seeing that The Knot has a great amount of hairstyle ideas with blonde hair is a bit of a bummer because I can’t really picture my natural dark brown hair in most of those hairstyles. As I reflected on this, I also wondered if unintentionally or intentionally there is a cultural filter making you believe that to fit the traditional bride picture you must look like a blonde Barbie. Recently, right when I began this project, I was looking at pictures hairstyles online with my mom and she bluntly asked me if I was going to get highlights for my wedding day. I was stunned by her question since I had started this project and had noticed The Knot’s default pictures. I also realized that my sister, who has a very bold personality, went blonde for her wedding day and then just went back to her natural black hair. Many other brides I’ve seen have done the same thing so I really wonder if we are perhaps being culturally influenced to change our appearance for such an important day.

After seeing how The Knot seemed to be focusing on showing brides with blonde hair, I was curious to see what people were posting on Twitter with the hashtag #TheKnot. I noticed that while there weren’t as many pictures on there, there was definitely more diversity and less blonde brides.

After exploring The Knot, I thought that The Knot was a great tool to start you up with your wedding planning but it is, in a way, limited to a diversity of cultures. I would recommend any bride to try it out and see if it works for them. Throughout the wedding planning process, brides and grooms can always add other tools that can help them in their process to make sure they take care of everything that they want for their special day. So while any bride can find limitations while using The Knot as a tool, they can easily use other sources to assist them in their process.

Netprov Blog Post

So I had quite an experience doing the Air-B-N-Me Netprov. When we were first introduced to the project I felt confused about the process and I was not sure exactly what we had to do. The fact that it was an experimental project, made me feel unease. However, I felt like I slowly got the hang of the overall concept once we extended our conversations about it in class. When it came time to actually start the Netprov I thought I understood what we had to do but once I started to go over all the Google documents shared, I got confused yet again. I think that this was naturally going to happen since this project was experimental and I had never heard of Netprovs before. Part of me was excited about doing something different and new but who likes to feel like they don’t really know what they are doing?

After reading all the Google documents a few times and meeting with my group, I finally understood completely what we had to do. I then decided to make my character one that wouldn’t be too far off from the real me so that I would actually be able to record the videos I needed to upload. When choosing between Periscope and YouTube, I immediately thought it would’ve been most appropriate to use YouTube because I knew I was not going to be able to broadcast at a specific time live due to my crazy busy schedule. Ones I decided what kind of character I was going to be creating and had decided that I was going to use YouTube to upload my videos I was really excited about the Netprov.

The most challenging part came after I had recorded my videos and had created my character’s profile on the Air-B-N-Me page. When I went ahead to create a YouTube account to upload my character’s videos, I created the account with my Kean e-mail but under my character’s name. I did this since I wanted the YouTube account to really match my character so that when Lurfers would swap lives with me they would actually land on my character’s YouTube channel instead of landing on a YouTube channel with my real name in it. I thought that by doing this it would give the Lurfers a more authentic experience.

I was excited to have created a YouTube channel for my character and felt accomplished once I uploaded all her videos. However, when I later logged into my Kean account, I was stunned to see that my name had changed to my character’s name on my Kean’s e-mail account. This happened because I created my character’s YouTube channel with my Kean e-mail and I guess that since YouTube is linked to Google and Kean to Google then everything linked and changed my name! When this happened I felt like I was having a true swappertunity with my character and while it was kind of funny at first, when I noticed that Kean would not allow me to change my name back to my real name under their setting, I quickly became annoyed and frustrated with that situation. I could not believe that had happened. How in the world could YouTube link to my e-mail and change my name! I thought. Well it did it and it was CRAZY!! I spent like an hour or more trying to figure out what had happened and I felt like I kept hitting walls when Kean would just not allow me to change my name back. I ended up having to take my character’s videos down, changing the YouTube channel to my real name so that Kean would change my name back – it finally did! Thank God… so frustrating! Then, I created an e-mail for my character using Outlook only to find out that you can ONLY use a Gmail account to log into YouTube – another frustration. So then I had to create an entire different Gmail e-mail for my character to get into YouTube then FINALLY be able to upload my character’s video. If I would’ve known all that was going to happen I would’ve just used my name on YouTube. But then again, I was really trying for things to match for my character. Throughout that whole experience I felt like I had a true swappertunity.


After I was able to straighten things out with my e-mail and my character’s YouTube channel, I uploaded all her videos again to her channel and was able to complete the Netprov. Other than that issue, I had a fun time doing the Netprov. I think it was nice to have experienced something new. It was fun and creative. I am also glad that I decided to use YouTube because although it was a frustration, after hearing my classmates’ Periscope stories, I think I would’ve been terrified to have used Periscope for my character.

Blog #9 - Participatory Culture in a Networked Era by Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito, danah boyd

Chapters 4 & 5

In these chapters, Jenkins, Ito, and boyd talked about learning and literacy and commercial culture. When it comes to any topic, I find it fascinating when statistics are able to define so well what it’s really happening. The chapter stated that “according to YouTube’s statistics page, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to the site each minute.” Talk about information overload. I’m pretty sure that many other sites have the same amount or more information being shared through their sites. I agree completely with boyd when she says that it’s not remotely possible to be able to consume all the data that’s available for us. Statistics like this allow me to understand more why so many people spend hours and hours online jumping from one site to another. I’m guilty of it myself. Whether I’m doing work, homework, or personal research/entertainment, a day does not go by where I don’t engage with the online world.

The chapter also talked about multitasking and when I read this section, I was reminded of a comment a professor made while he was lecturing several years ago. He said that there was no such thing as multitasking. Then he said there is no way your brain is capable of doing two things effectively at the same time. For some reason, I never forgot his comment. He went off saying how bad it was to try to multitask and so on – I cannot remember any other claims he made regarding the topic. I just know he had a very negative perspective about it. Up to that point, I had always heard that multitasking was something positive; something employers look for you to be able to do. I thought employers needed you to do many things at once and loved when you wrote on your resume or said at the interview that you were skilled in multitasking. But there are actually people that think otherwise. “Commenters like Linda Stone (n.d.) argue that there is no such thing as multitasking: there is only continuous partial attention, and it’s physiologically and socially costly.” Have you ever been out with friends or worse out with family and suddenly someone grabs their phone and that’s it, you’ve lost them for a few minutes? The worse is not only that they grabbed their phone but when they claim “I’m listening… I am paying attention…” but they really aren’t. They are trying to multitask but they can’t do that effectively. They can give you partial attention but not complete attention. 

Later on, Jenkins talks about the fact that this is not the first time that we experience such thing as a society. He reminds of the turn of the twentieth century, “when an exposition of mass media was impacting American life, urban areas were experiencing the introduction of electric lights, signs and billboards cluttered the landscape for the first time, millions were moving from the farm to the city, blacks were moving from the South to the North, and waves of immigrants were bringing new peoples to America.” While all these examples were massive changes and perhaps as a society we are still trying to accept these changes I have to agree with him saying that we have survived all of this. As humans we have adapted to all these changes and we’ve been able to deal and work around all these changes. Perhaps it’s true what Ito says that we have to remember that information abundance is a good thing. And social connection is a good thing as well.

BLog #8 - Participatory Culture in a Networked Era by Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito, danah boyd Chapters 2 & 3

Reading the chapters for this week made me think about how there is a never ending conversation about what youth should or should not do while using the internet. Jenkins shares that his son’s teachers and principal struggled with how much they should allow youth an autonomous space of free expression online and to what degree they should police what occurred there for liability reasons. I think that this struggle is something that not only teachers and principals experience but also parents. I think that often parents feel liable for what youth experience online or what youth may encounter while being online. I’ve heard from teachers and parents how they don’t really trust youth to make good decisions while being online. I’ve seen how parents and teachers try to control how involved teens are online because they fear youth getting in trouble or getting expose to inappropriate content. 

Later in the chapter, Jenkins also shares how adults historically could not monitor what children did down by the playground or while they were walking home from school. The difference now is that now it’s much easier to monitor what youth is doing online while adults are not around. There are also ways to limit what youth get into while they are online. As I was reading this section of the chapter I thought about my teen nieces and while I don’t know all the details about how their moms are monitoring what they do online, I can say that the girls have, for instance, social media accounts where they are friends with their moms as well. They also have other social networks similar to blogs (from what I understand) where their mom’s also have access. So there are some ways to monitor what the teens are doing online. 

But what about what boyd says regarding youth maintaining their privacy even while being public online. Then how are adults really monitoring what youth is doing if they may not be able to decipher youth’s codes? For instance, boyd says that youth have develop sophisticated techniques for being private in public. They use song lyrics, pronouns, and in-jokes to have conversations that can technically be accessed but whose meaning is rendered invisible. So, I wonder, how do my sister and sister-in-law deal with this? And how do all the rest of parents deal with this as well? I think that it’s important to give youth the opportunity to express and interact online and trust plays a big role in this process. I think that parents would also have to trust how they are raising their kids, if they taught them well, there is a big chance teens won’t make poor choices. 

I sensed as I was reading the chapters like there was a strong focus on advocating for youth to be able to participate online but the chapters focused a bit too much in making the adults seem like they were over reacting. I think there needs to be a nice balance as to how much does youth interact online. Yes, they need to participate and interact online, if that’s what the teen is interested in but there needs to be a balance in what the parents monitor. Teens need to be monitor in a moderate way. After all, they are still learning how to make the best choices and they will make mistakes in the process. 

I also sensed in the chapters like the authors were advocating to close the participation gap, and to an extent, I’m all for it. But is it really possible? boyd says it very well when she asks “but what would it mean to close the participation gap? How do we grapple with the fact that people learn different things through their different experiences?” then she says “I can’t imagine either of you would argue for homogenizing people’s experiences… The notion of truly equal opportunity is a fantasy”. I totally agree with her on this. I think that the thought behind closing the participation gap is great and all but it is nearly impossible to do.

Blog #7 - Jill Walker Rettberg

Seeing Ourselves through Technology by Jill Walker Rettberg

Chapter 2 – Filtered Reality

After reading this chapter I thought it is just fascinating how filters can be so much more than the physical ones like coffee or cigarette filters. The chapter starts by stating “filters can be technological, cultural or cognitive, or they can be a combination of these.” It was interesting to read that Instagram was one of the first sites that popularized filters and now they are everywhere. While by definition filters seem to be a way to remove unwanted data or materials, filters are also used to add certain things like color into an image or flavor like in the case of a coffee filter. This chapter explains that technological filters are those we are able to apply to social media feeds or to blogs. Cultural filters are those norms, rules, or expectations that guide us to express ourselves in different ways. Cognitive filters are those when our body and mind is able to perceive certain things and not others. Often we see a combination of all of these happening or being used all at once.

While technological filters can be seen as a way to enhance the way we express ourselves, these filters also have their limitations. Early on in the chapter we read about baby journals and how these are preformatted to let us know what we are supposed to put into our baby’s journal. These journals can be seen as technological filters. I’ve seen baby journals before and I think they are the cutest thing but since I’m not a mom yet, I never thought deeply about them. The chapter indicates that these baby journals have clear rules as to what should go in them but if we wanted, we could put pictures over the prompts we don’t want to use or we could glue more pages to it. But how can we do this with the many baby journal apps that exist today? Sprout Baby is an app that allows parents to insert pictures of when they are bringing home the baby, baby’s first smile, baby’s first bath amongst others. The app has even clearer rules embedded in it that shows you what is it that you are supposed to add. In this app, you can also track feedings and nap times but like the chapter says, it can streamline and limit your options for expression. You simply can’t tear out or add a page in the digital world of an app.

Twitter and Facebook are some of the social media platforms mentioned in the chapter where we see filters limiting the user in certain ways but not in others. Twitter limits the user in the sense that only 140 characters are allowed to be posted per tweet. Therefore, the user must deliver their message only using that many characters. I think this can be useful because it helps you share what’s really important about what you want to say. But at the same time, it limits you because you have to leave out information that perhaps was not as important but you wanted to share it anyway. I found interesting how all these filters are often combinations of technological, cultural and cognitive filters. Facebook is limited when it comes to the default list of life events they have available for the user to share on their timeline. The chapter points out how they have the option for you to share weight loss as an event but it does not have weight gain in their list. I see this as a cultural and cognitive filter assumption showing that no one wants to share that they have gained weight. It is simply not the norm for someone to announce that they have gained weight. I think that society often advertises skinniness as the best option for your physical appearance and Facebook seems to be aware of that.

SkinneePix is an app that is also aware of the cultural filter related to weight or the preference for appearing skinny. This chapter indicates that technological filters are influenced by cultural filters and whether we like the way our cultural filters are influencing our technological filters or not, I have to agree with the fact that it does influence it. The SkinneePix app is an example presented of this. The app allows you to take pictures of yourself and make you appear skinnier than what you really are. The app was created based on the “use the skinny lens” comments from people. While I don’t think that using this app is the solution for looking skinnier, if that’s what you would prefer to look like, this is a filter people have the option to use if they are comfortable doing so.

The chapter moved on to talk about how early camera film was calibrated to provide good detail for people with lighter skin tones rather than for people with darker skin tone. This is an example of how filters can be both technological and cultural. When I read about this I thought that this showed the lack of importance there is towards darker skin tone people – very much a cultural filter. I was stunned to see how Kodak decided to do something about this only when companies selling dark woods and dark chocolates complained about the lack of quality they were getting for pictures of their products. So products were more important than parents complaining over their children’s school pictures quality? This was an example to see how this skin tone bias is a technological filter yet very much so a cultural filter as well.

The overall topic regarding filters was fascinating to read about. We are constantly running all kinds of information through filters and I think it is just amazing how many of these times we are doing this very much unconsciously. I also think that most of the times we are mostly using a combination of technological, cultural, and cognitive filters rather than using these completely separately.

Chapter 3 – Serial Selfies

This chapter focused more directly on the idea of visual self-representation online – selfies, time-lapse videos, and profile photos. The term selfie is so popular today that it makes you think that it is a thing that people do now that was never done before. However, there is a very high chance that we have all taken a selfie before they were called selfies. Suzanne Szucs is for sure a great example of someone that was taking selfies way before they were called selfies. She took pictures every day for 15 years. She used polaroids then and she exhibits the photos in various configurations. I cannot fully comprehend why selfies are so popular now although people have been taking selfies for a long time. But perhaps the media that we have today has helped them increase their popularity.

Time-lapse videos are another way of self-representation and this chapter does a great job in showing a number of examples of people who have done time-lapse videos. I found all these examples interesting because at times they were so similar to each other and yet so different. Ahree Lee’s video Me and Noah Kalina’s video Everyday were two time-lapse videos uploaded to YouTube in the same month and year. They both went viral but Kalina’s video became even more popular than Lee’s video. The chapter indicated that it seems like race and gender had to do with the difference in commenters’ reception. Commenters assumed that she didn’t smile because she was Asian by commenting ‘lol she’s Asian so she looked the same for the whole thing’. Commenters on Noah’s video instead said ‘y so sad’ or ‘Pocker face’. I think that based in the examples presented in the chapter, commenters in these videos were quick in associating their perception with stereotypes. I was curious to see more of these comments for myself and went ahead and searched these videos. I spent quite some time reading through these comments and noticed that there were a lot of comments on Kalina’s video asking which frame was the one showing his picture taken on 9/11 but there weren’t any clear comments referencing race. When I read over the comments on Lee’s video, what I noticed was that there was a strong attention towards the blonde wig that she wears for one of her pictures. I also noticed other race related comments like ‘so um, this proves that Asians don't age at al’ and ‘Japanese?’. This showing that race and gender did seem to have to do with commenters’ reception towards these videos.

Karl Baden’s time-lapse video was interesting to watch as well. I thought that watching this video was softer on the eyes since it is just a black and white frame and Baden uses the same plain background all throughout the video. Rebecca Brown’s video was the complete opposite to Baden’s. Brown’s video is full of color and the background is constantly changing. She also adds caption to her video where she shares overwhelming things she is going through. What impressed me the most about her video was the way she ended it. She speaks briefly at the end, introducing herself, and saying ‘that was 6.5 years of my life. Woohoo!. Pretty scary stuff.’ She then directs you to choose if you would like to go to her personal channel to see her aside from taking pictures of herself or if you would like to learn more about her hair condition, Trichotillomania, by clicking on a different link. I found her time-lapse video to be the most powerful one because she shared a deep self-representation of what she is going through in different aspects of her life with the world watching her video.

Profile photos was another section this chapter talked about and it connects to our self-representation. This chapter explains it this way ‘a profile picture is a visual expression of identity, and our choice of profile picture photos is clearly a form of visual self-representation.’ As I read through this section, I thought about my profile pictures and I realized that they don’t connect deeply with my identity. In fact, the profile pictures I’ve chosen, I’ve chosen purposely to protect my identity and to avoid self-representing who I really am. But I guess that if I think again, in some way, although I have a hydendria as a profile picture, it is a picture I chose because I thought it was a pretty flower. So in some way it connects to who I am, my likes, my taste. I have also had pictures of landscapes of places where I’ve been, places I love to be at. I would never put a profile picture of something I don’t like at all or a picture of something I can’t relate to.

I think that whether we decide to put a selfie, a picture of a flag or a picture of us with a loved one as our profile picture, in some way, we are self-representing a piece (small or big) of who we are. The idea of self-representation is a broad one and there are many ways we can decide to do this. We could choose to do something like Suzanne Szucs or Rebecca Brown which were two people that really put themselves out there or we can do whichever form of self-representation that we feel more comfortable with.

Blog #6 - boyd and Jones

In White Fight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook danah boyd focuses on taking about teens and their engagement with MySpace and Facebook. Throughout her essay, she shares teens’ opinions about why they prefer one social media platform vs. the other one. 

She starts her essay by quoting Kat, a white 14-year-old. Kat shares her opinion about why her friends are moving from MySpace to Facebook and she says that MySpace is just old and boring; but then she adds that MySpace is more like ghetto or whatever. Reading Kat’s opinion about this made me realized that I had never thought about MySpace vs. Facebook in such way. I thought that MySpace simply stopped being as popular around me because a new thing had come out and like anything, when the newer thing comes out, people seem to grow more interest for it simply because it’s new and different. I have never been huge on social media, so perhaps due to that, I had never noticed that teens actually had these kinds of opinions about it. As I reflected on what I’ve heard about MySpace throughout the years, I realized that I have not had many conversations about this. I recall hearing from friends and older family members that MySpace was more for bands and music rather that for you to be friends with your friends and that was their main reason for not having a MySpace account. I also heard from relatives that they no longer used MySpace because it was for younger kids. So, some of the comments I recall, kind of match with some parts that boyd talks about in her essay. Like teens saying that they rather Facebook because their college friends had Facebook and not MySpace.

          

Later in the essay, boyd quotes Tara, a Vietnamese-American 16-years-old saying that Facebook seems safer but that she doesn’t know what exactly makes Facebook safer, that just from what people say Facebook seems safer. Her comment about Facebook vs. MySpace made me think that she prefers Facebook because others around her seems to be saying something positive about it. This makes me wonder if she would prefer MySpace only if people around her think positively about it. Like many teenagers, Tara is not sure as to why Facebook is safer but she thinks it is because that’s what she has heard from others. I feel like nowadays the debate teenagers have is in between Instagram vs, Facebook. Or, are they just having a profile on each social media platform and not really making a choice? I noticed that majority of the teens in boyd’s essay said that they moved from MySpace to Facebook because their friends were on Facebook so they were on Facebook, too. This, in a way, makes sense. In a teenager’s mind, wherever your friends are at is where you’ll be. I don’t know if I’m right about this, but I think that many teenagers now have multiple social media platforms because that’s where their friends are at and they want to be where their friends are at.

Teens in boyd’s essay were also talking about the physical appearance options between MySpace and Facebook. A lot of the teens talked about MySpace having more options for you to personalize your page and really show more of your individuality while Facebook presented a more general look where everyone’s page pretty much looked the same. Some teens liked how MySpace had those features and other teens liked Facebook’s general look.

While the teens’ didn’t say that their preference between MySpace vs. Facebook had anything to do with race, ethnicity or class, boyd’s essay says that their reasons cannot be untangled from them.

         

The second reading for this week was Self-Segregation: Why It’s So Hard for Whites to Understand Ferguson by Robert P. Jones. This article talks about this incident and through the article we were reminded about the fact that since the incident, it was pretty clear that whites saw what happened very differently than blacks in our community. The article presented several statistics showing whites and blacks views about this incident. Some showed that most believed that this issue was part of a boarder pattern while others thought that issue was getting more attention than it deserved. I think that since the article presented several statistics and polls, it made it clearer for the reader to see what the author was showing rather than thinking that the article was written only from the author’s perspective.

As I read through the article, I was overwhelmed by the differences the polls were showing. One of the sections of the article that caught my attention the most was when a black man shared what he was taught by his mother as a young black man. He was told not to run in public, definitely not to run while holding something in his hands. He was told not to talk back to the police and to never, ever leave home without identification. This is just crazy for me to read because I know is true but I just can’t take this as a reality. I see these black males as victims of society because they shouldn’t be concern about this just based on the color of their skin. You would think that we are way over that since I thought America had come a long way regarding racism but this article showed that it is still very present in our society. 

Blog #5 - Losh

Reading through Elizabeth Losh’s blog posts this week was fascinating. There is no doubt in my mind that many think of selfies as a personal thing to do that does not relate to academic work in any way. But Elizabeth does a great job in sharing a different aspect to this stereotype. She dedicates four blog posts to share the different important things scholars are doing when it comes to learning about selfies in the classroom. 

Losh shares that scholar Mariam Posner taught a class recently where her students spent a long time reading about and learning how to write a digital ethnography. Posner shared that there was a wide range of objects of study: “there was a huge range, everything from Yik Yak to a couple of Tinder papers. I also saw papers about women’s physical fitness culture on various social media platforms, along with outliers that focused on a very specific YouTube fan community or Twitter fan community.” All Posner shared sounds so interesting to me. It makes me want to take a course just like that one. It also makes me think about our final project and I’m sure we’ll end up doing something really cool.

Losh also shared that another scholar, Alice E. Marwick, worked on a paper on the duck face. How interesting to know that people are doing this kind of research. When I read about the term ‘the duck face’ and the research that has been done, my memory went back to when I was a child and I remembered taking selfies along with my older sisters with our disposable cameras. We would then run to CVS, a few blocks away from home, to reveal the roll using their one hour photo service. We would go through all that process to then find out, when looking at the pictures, that many of those selfies had half our faces cut off or were blurry. It’s funny to remember that because it was the coolest thing to do back then. How easy it is now to grab our phones, snap a selfie, retake if needed, to then share it with others all done in seconds or maybe few minutes. 





Losh’s blog posts also talked about scholars Terri Senft and Mark Marino. Senft mentioned that selfies in the classroom could be used for illustrating, opposing or complicating “what the text is saying”. Which I found important for her to say because I feel like selfies don’t take away from text or replace the text but they enhance and expand what it’s being communicated. Senft also states “at the end of the day, the object of analysis in my teaching isn’t the selfie. It’s the idea: the idea of identity, the idea of belonging, the idea of surveillance, the idea of the outsider.” Which shows that Senft is not focused on the selfie itself. But rather, in the idea that expands the selfie further.

Marino noted, like some of the other scholars mentioned, the privacy of the students. Which is always a concern for those who do not feel comfortable sharing private information online. I personally always opt to remain as private as possible so it is appreciated when privacy is acknowledge and respected. I remember recently sharing with a classmate from a different class, how we use twitter in this class and how Dr. Zamora has encourage us to use twitter as part of our class. Without letting me finish, she responded immediately that she would not feel comfortable at all having a professor telling her she must create a social media account as part of the class requirements. I then, instantly shared that we weren’t required to expose our identity and that we could maintain our privacy. It was only then that she had a complete different approach to using a social media platform as part of a class. This shows the concern people may feel when they think their privacy is going to be compromised in some kind of way. I found interesting the projects Marino shared that he did in his class with his students. The “know thy selfie” paper, the “specular selfie” which was nearly my favorite one, and how his students participated in two “netprovs”. Which I’m excited about ours coming up soon in this semesters. I enjoyed how Losh did a great job in bringing a total different perspective on what a selfie is and how it has been incorporated into the classroom.

Thoughts regarding the learning outcomes for our class

I’ve been thinking about our final project all week and noticed that I found myself almost confused about what’s old vs. new media. I think that we are in an era where the two are still being used nearly equally (at least in my world) so I had to take a step back and reflect to separate the two from each other. In my reflection, I noticed that I still carry around a planner where I write all the things I have to do but I also constantly use my reminder app on my phone to help me remember all the things I have to do. Another thing I noticed in my reflection was that by working HR I’ve been able to see how we used our LinkedIn page to recruit but we are still paying for our ads to be placed in the Sunday’s paper and this showed me how we are still using old and new media.

So in thinking about what do I want to learn in New Media Studies I think that it would be great to learn new tools that can show me how much better it would really be to use more new media in general as opposed to old media and I would like to learn how much more effective is that if it really is more effective. I hope to learn new skills that I can put into practice with my academic, work, and personal world. More importantly, I would love if what I learn in this class could somehow be incorporated with my thesis work. I’m not sure yet if it’s possible but I would like my thesis to end up being in a digital form rather than just a 30 page paper. So I’ve I can learn new tools here or just expand my knowledge about new media then that would be helpful.

Blog #4 - Chapter 5 and 6 by Rheingold

For this week’s readings we read Rheingold’s chapters 5 & 6. He started chapter 5 by talking about networks and he shared benefits and some guidelines as to basically how to network. As I read his chapter, I thought about how I’ve always heard how important it is to get to know people in person and also connecting with them online via the appropriate platforms based on the type of relationships you are building up with them. After all, it’s always important to build your connections/your networks. It was kind of funny for me to see how he talked about the six degree of separation between us and everyone else in the planet. It was funny because we were actually talking about this last class while we were talking ideas for our class final project. So, as he started his conversation about networks, I thought it was interesting how he touched upon this topic. I also found interesting how he later talked about another study where the following has been said: “according to Fowler and Christakis, friends of friends’ friends have about one-third as much influence as people you know directly.” He also added that the results of this study were tentative until others do more research on this matter. The conversation about the influence people around you have in you made me remember an old Spanish saying I’ve been hearing my entire life: “Mira con quién andas y te diré quién eres” which translates from Spanish to: “Look at who you are hanging out with and I’ll tell you who you are” this saying has the same meaning as the old English saying I recently heard: “birds of the same feather flock together.” I found amazing, based on what Rheingold shared, how people can actually have such influence in us. I think that when networking we should be conscience about this since, to an extent, others are influencing our identities.

Later in his chapter, Rheingold talked about another very important topic and he labeled it ‘Networked Individualism’. In this section, he talked about how parents currently have less control about the interactions and relationships their children have. He quoted a parent he knows saying: “I don’t know my children’s friends anymore. They used to have to talk to me when they called my house, but now they just call or text my son’s or daughter’s mobile phone.” As I read this, I remember when I was growing up because that’s exactly how things were in my home. My friends had to talk to my mom before getting me on the phone. Let alone hanging out with them outside school; my mom had to constantly talk to my friends’ parents before I would go anywhere. I think that it was important for Rheingold to share this because it is something that is definitely happening in today’s society. It’s useful for the parents to analyze what’s happening in their household and to think if they would like to make any changes (if possible) to how their children are building relationships. It is also relevant for those who don’t have any children to think about what they would like to do in these situations, if they are even planning on having children one day. Rheingold touched upon this parenting subject in chapter 6 as well. There, he shared what boyd has to say about this topic. Boyd stated that it is key to communication with our children, this in one of the main ways to be able to find out more about what our children are doing when they are online or using the different technologies to communicate with others. This communication will also help to guide the children into what they should or should not use since you’ll be building a deeper relationship with them.

As I mentioned in prior blog posts, one of the things I appreciated most about Rheingold’s book was the easy how-to details he shares. In chapter 5 he dedicated an entire section to Facebook which is a social media platform that I am not that familiar with. Then, he talked about Facebook again in chapter 6. I liked how he sounded honest about what he was sharing in regards to Facebook. For instance, when he said that we are able to change the privacy settings only up to what Facebook allows us to do I immediately thought, as a non-Facebook user, that Facebook doesn’t really allow you to have a complete private profile. Rheingold shared specifics, which I found necessary, about how to look under places such as “Account”, “Privacy Preferences”, “Customize settings” and so on to give us direction as to where to adjust, if we desired, our privacy settings.

He ended his book with chapter 6 overall saying to watch out for what we post online. He encouraged us to be mindful about what we post and know that people will see our posting. He also mentioned that, while you can, try your best to adjust your privacy settings on your accounts. But to know that you have no control over what your, for example Facebook friends, shows his/her friends about your profile. I totally agree with him when he talked about the publicity of your posts. He mentioned that it has happened that people are actually denied jobs, being demoted or fired over content they have posted online. This really grabbed my attention since I’ve seen how what you post online can jeopardize your job.

Blog #3 - Mozilla’s Teaching How to Read, Write, and Participate on the Web – Web Literacy for Educators

The reading for this week was entertaining and different. At first, I felt like I wasn’t too sure as to where to start but I quickly found my way around the website. I found the website to be full of different activities and useful information we need to know for when reading, writing, and participating on the web. One of the first features that caught my attention from this website was the part where it talked about passwords under the teaching activities. I think this was extremely important to incorporate into such a website since nowadays we are constantly asked to create online accounts that require passwords. I found helpful for this website to have shared data showing the worst passwords created in recent years because this really gives an example about what passwords we shouldn’t be using. I was particularly happy to see that none of my personal passwords were listed in the lists they provided for worst passwords – apparently I have created strong passwords.

Towards the end of the password activity page there were links for you to actually test out passwords and see how weak or strong that password you entered would be. I found this section pretty entertaining because I actually tested a few of the passwords they have listed as weak and they were indeed weak passwords. Before testing them, I thought that some of the passwords were different enough to have as passwords; they seemed to be random words that people probably wouldn’t guess as a password. Then, when I tested them, they were actually coming up as weak passwords. I have to say though, I kind of wanted to test out some of my own personal passwords but I didn’t feel safe enough to enter my own password into that website. I had my crap detector hat on and the website seemed okay to use but my gut feeling was telling me not to enter my personal passwords there. So by only seeing if my passwords had the features needed to be a strong password, like a mixture of symbols and upper and lower case, I feel confident enough that my passwords are most likely strong ones. 

While on the website, I also went through the tools section which I found was fun and welcoming. In that tools section, I found a feature where I was able to alter a picture by what it seemed to be coding. The picture I was able to alter is below. I was able to alter the message in the picture. I always wondered how so many people were coming up with so many different “keep calm and …” fill in the blank messages. It was simple to do and user friendly. I was able to replace the words that show on the actual picture that were embedded into the code and replace them with whatever I wanted to write. The only thing that I couldn’t figure out all the way was how to save the picture that I had actually altered. What I ended up doing was taking a screenshot and saving it in my computer. Overall I found the website helpful and user friendly. Below you can see what the picture I ended up with.

 

Blog #2 - Ch 4 – Social-Digital Know-How: The Arts and Sciences of Collective Intelligence by Rheingold

Reading chapter 4 from Rheingold’s book was very interesting. He started his chapter by sharing how the World Wide Web was invented. I think that it was perfect for him to share in the beginning of his chapter since he then moved on to talk pretty much about online collaboration. I found interesting how he talked about the terms: coordination, cooperation, and collaboration, since I had never thought about these terms the way he talked about them in the chapter. I found fascinating the example he gave from the Canadian person defining these terms. That person put it this way: “you need coordination to dance, cooperation to dance with a partner, and collaboration to dance with a flash mob.” I am no dancer, but reading this explanation really helped me see the difference between these terms. Indeed, when we participate online, we do it in various ways. I see these terms as he explained them as levels in which we start participating online. And to my understanding, they actually happen in the order that he had them. We first coordinate, then we cooperate, and then, when we’re ready, we collaborate.

Rheingold later on talked about the idea of collective intelligence. From what he talked about, it seems to be more powerful when humans put their ideas together to accomplish something. I loved how he said “when all of us can be smarter than any of us.” That said a lot to me because it made me think about all the times I’ve heard that it can be difficult to work in a group together and agree to the same ideas. However, I’ve learned over the years how powerful it can be to collaborate with one another to accomplish something. I’ve seen how the best ideas have come from group meetings. I liked how Rheingold brought in the idea of collective intelligence because it is indeed powerful.

Rheingold ended his chapter by talking about Wiki Collaboration. This section of the chapter was also very interesting to me. Although I’ve been more involved online now than I have in the past years, I still feel like I need a detailed “how-to” when it comes to certain things online. I appreciated how Rheingold took the time to actually go through the details about how to collaborate online. He also makes you feel so confident as he states: “contributing to Wikipedia is simple enough. Here’s how:…” and then he goes on with a detailed yet simple enough list as to how to contribute to Wikipedia. I have to admit, I once was asked by a professor to input information into Wikipedia as one of our class projects, and I have NO IDEA as to how I got that done. I clicked on things and figured it out but I have no recollection as to how I did it, so Rheingold’s list was a helpful reminder for me. Now, I have a go-to list that I can use in the future if I decide to ever post anything on Wikipedia again. 

Blog #1 - Rheingold, Rosenberg, and Postman

In Rheingold’s chapters 2 and 3 we were presented with the idea of Crap Detention and Participation Power while being online. I liked how Rheingold stated in the beginning of the Crap Detection chapter the following: “don’t refuse to believe; refuse to start out believing.” Here, he is referring to the information we find online. I think that what he says is very important to remember because sometimes we can easily fall into thinking that everything we find online in not true. But that is not always the case. There is countless information online that we should never believe but there is also a ton of information online that can be useful and more importantly, true. As Rheingold mentions, nowadays it is our job to figure out what is true and what is not true from the information that we find online. We won’t know how to do this right away though, but with practice, Rheingold says that we will be able to tune our crap detectors.

I agree with Rheingold where he shared from a source that stated that “a search engine is not a human, it is a program that matches the words you give to pages on the web.” I don’t only agree with this but I find helpful how that source went on to say “use the words that are most likely to appear on the page. For example, instead of saying [my head hurts], say [headache], because that’s the term a medical page will use.” It is more likely that by searching with more direct words what you find will lead you to web pages where the information will be trustworthy rather than fake or irrelevant information. This is especially helpful to know since people are searching for all kinds of things, from what movies are playing at the theaters to finding more information about a disease they were just diagnosed with.

Similar to what Rheingold talked about in his chapter 2, Rosenberg and Postman talked about crap detection in their articles. I particularly found helpful how Rosenberg mentioned on the “Is the content original and unique” section that is good to copy and paste the information into other search engines to see if the information we are finding is unique and original. I feel like this can be helpful so that you can check how valid the information you are finding is and also to expand your research sources. From Postman’s article I liked when he said that “Each person's crap-detector is embedded in their value system; if you want to teach the art of crap-detecting, you must help students become aware of their values.” I can agree with this since very much of what we believe to be true from what we find online is connected to our values. Our reactions towards what we find online are also, in a way, connected to our values. So, I think that it was important for Postman to point out this idea.

            In chapter 3, Participation Power, Rheingold talked about how people online are not only there as viewers or consumers but also as participators. I was stunned by some of the statistics Rheingold shared in this chapter. For instance, he shared that “thirty-five hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Flickr reported its five-billionth photo uploaded in 2010.” I think is amazing how this statistics show that as a society we have evolved so rapidly within the online community.  

I particularly liked when Rheingold talked about bloggers and how by starting with commenting work by people whose publications you admire is a good way of interacting with them. Sometimes, I feel like I am not too sure as to how to start sharing more online or interacting with those who seem to be skilled in sharing all kinds of information online so reading this was interesting to me. Maybe I’ll try more of that and see what happens in the future.

Towards the end of his Participation Power chapter he talked about Footprints and Profiles and he shared that boyd (no capitals in her name) said how she feels embarrassed about work she has not only posted foolishly but also embarrassed about some scholarly articles she’s written and published. This makes me see that in a way maybe many have felt like what they are ready to post publicly or publish is such an amazing work but later on they may feel the complete opposite about it and to an extend that’s okay because if we don’t post anything then when will we post. If we don’t start somewhere, we’ll never start.

See you all tomorrow,

-Maria

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