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.