Category Archives: r10

r10 Black Thought, No Roots

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Our conversations about social media and how we use it often leads to ideas of convenience, immediacy, and popularity. Both Microstyle and The Digital Divide do well to explore the frequency and form with which we use social media and mobile technology; however, what is missing from their analysis is a more social/anthropological examination of technology that exceeds the generation gap. Enter Duke’s own Black Thought 2.0.

This series of panel discussions, which streamed live, explored how African Americans use social media and mobile technology. Some of the arguments, like those of Mark Anthony Neal, are very thought provoking, and while the focus on the black community’s familiarity with innovative technology is in itself interesting, what makes this conference so thought-provoking is that it continues the discourse of the benefits and detriments of social media and web 2.0

I’m still kicking myself for not going.

Becoming More Human

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As I was searching for a piece to add to our conversation about technology, I came across a TED talk by anthropologist Amber Case. In her lecture, she talks about the implications of having technology so accessible and makes some interesting points. She entitled her talk “We are all cyborgs now” because of our reliance on technology in almost every facet of our lives. The biggest takeaway for me from this talk was the way that technology is making us become more human. Though technology is an exogenous instrument we use to oftentimes facilitate life, it greatly fosters one of the key parts of human life – connections.  The fact that the Internet is helping us communicate with each other more is a development that looks and feels more natural.

Case does point out her concern of our growing dependence of technology. For adolescents, she is concerned about their development because the world is so accessible they may not be accustomed to having to sit still and reflect on self. Her point her adolescent development was a bit reminiscent of Digital Divide. I am still a firm believer that adolescents can set aside time to be alone and turn off the technology when they see fit. Perhaps growing up with constant accessibility to contact people may affect perceptions about self reflection but to answer that question only time will tell.

I think the best part of this talk is the kind of conversations it will spark. Case introduces some interesting points. She suggests that technology is transforming us into us into a new form of homo sapiens. Take it or leave it, it’ll spark discussions that will engender more thought about the effects of technology on us.

r10: Using the Internet in the Job Hunt

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While looking for something interesting and life-changing for r10, I came across this short article about job searches and networking in the digital age.  It talks about several emerging trends in the digital world of job hunting, including video resumes, job finding websites and apps, and starting your own business.

The emergence of video resumes is a relatively new practice, but the article suggests that, for certain career paths, this can be a way to show your creativity while simultaneously putting a face and personality to the standard name-only paper resumes of the past.  They even suggest that the old portfolio-style paper resumes, career objectives, and cover letter may become obsolete.  While I think this may be a stretch for now, who knows if this is really the trend yet, so this could be an interesting topic to keep your eye on down the road.  They also discuss quick-response links (QRs) that are like barcodes, which allow employers, with the click of a button, to find out more about you.  You can set up pages to link to, etc., and make virtually your entire job application digital.

The article also talks about using the internet in your job hunt.  While this has been going on in recent years as well, they cite the emergence of smart phones and tablets as a newer link to this medium, allowing people to have apps which can find them local job openings, as well as others that can track applications, allowing you to actively stay on top of your job hunt and know when you applications have been reviewed or denied, something which often used to go unknown unless you actually got to the job.  Since timing is everything in finding a job, this can cut out a lot of the waiting around, allowing people to give up on waiting for a job if they can already confirm that their application has been denied.

The last topic discussed is that, if finding a job is coming up empty, the digital world has made it easier than ever to start your own business.  It’s so easy now to network yourself and meet potential clients, that many people are now going this route in favor of playing the waiting game in searching for a job.  And while there are still a lot of other things required to start your own business, there’s no doubt that the digital age in which we live has made it a heck of a lot easier.

Lastly, though, they point out that all this digital recruitment is great, but nothing beats a face-to-face meeting (or even a phone call).  So while digital networking and job hunting is great, the personal aspect is still important.  After all the pieces that we’ve read this semester, I’m not surprised that even this article, which talks about some of the radical new job hunting technologies available in the digital world, isn’t completely ready to abandon the more traditional means of job hunting and networking.  After all, is anyone really ready for that?

R10: Social Media and Brands

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Chinny beat me to it, but I love this video and think that it really captures the nearly inconceivable impact of social media. Because Chinny already covered the broad ideas related to this video, I’ll get a little more specific with my post. Last summer, I worked at the ad agency, Hill Holliday in Boston, MA. At first, I thought  that I wanted to work in account management, and interviewed for that position. I was placed in social media though, and thought, “uh oh, do they think I’m not cut out for account management or something?” Actually, they gave me one of the best jobs I could have possibly had out of all the departments as an intern (thankfully! Personally, I think that I might have been miserable in account management). Through this opportunity, I learned the absurd magnitude of the influence of social media on both consumers and brands. This video helps illustrate my point. Consumers are relying on social media outlets to get the real truth about products, as well as dish it out. Programs such as Radian6 are advanced social listening tools that can sort all of the public posts out on the internet about any topic or keyword. You can narrow the search down through various filters, even separating posts by their degree of sentiment- very positive, positive, neutral, negative and very negative. Try out this free website that shows realtime posts- no filters, sorry!

This video talks about the importance of trying to nurture advocacy across social media outlets. If you buy some headphones online and they work just fine, are you going to tweet or post about it? Probably not. If they don’t work at all, are you maybe going to #complaintweet about it? Maybe. Social media really makes brands hustle. I helped out with the Bank of America and Liberty Mutual accounts mainly. Let me tell you, people are rarely tweeting rave reviews about either their bank or their insurance companies. I was surprised that there wasn’t an entirely new set of customer service jobs for people in social media! Bank of America actually did have people who were responding to each of the posts, but only to refer them straight back to the customer service number.

Some brands were actually awesome on their facebook brand pages and twitter handles about getting back to people. If I remember correctly, Travelers Insurance did a great job of getting back to customers via twitter, and for some reason, Burt’s Bees products is sticking out in my mind for doing a great job via facebook. There’s a chance that I might be working as a social media strategist or in content at an agency in the fall, so thanks social media, for providing more jobs for people like me! It was the best possible internship I could have had last summer, hands down.

r10: Digital Culture

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Like many of my classmates, I wasn’t quite sure where to begin with this assignment and I turned to the ever-trusty google. I began on Mashable, a site which we’ve already talked about in class, reading an article about social media, but wasn’t sure I had enough to work with. It linked to the article “How the Internet Gets Inside Us” by Adam Gopnik who writes for the New Yorker, claiming “It’s a fantastic read and should be mandatory for anyone in an online industry.” I decided to check it out, thinking that it would probably be pretty useful for future members of Digital Writing. Once I started reading it, I was hooked! It’s written in a really engaging way and does a beautiful job of explaining how we interact with technology and the internet today. It talks about similar revolutionary technological advances in our society’s history and how those affected culture. It even makes Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings references so you know it’s going to be good.

The part I was particularly drawn and that I think the class will appreciate is its classification of internet users into three main parties: the Better-Nevers, the Never-Betters, and the Ever-Wasers. Essentially, this refers to those who are against the movement, those who are think it’s wonderful and unique, and those who see it as a fairly normal progression. I think it will be useful to draw comparisons between Gopnik’s classifications and the classifications of “Digital Natives” vs. “Digital Immigrants.” His article is rife with examples of what sorts of experiences each of his three classifications have with the internet. I think he sums it all up nicely in his concluding paragraph:

“Thoughts are bigger than the things that deliver them. Our contraptions may shape our consciousness, but it is our consciousness that makes our credos, and we mostly live by those. Toast, as every breakfaster knows, isn’t really about the quality of the bread or how it’s sliced or even the toaster. For man cannot live by toast alone. It’s all about the butter.”

r10: Where we read news?

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There is a lot of speculation about how we receive our news in the digital age. Perhaps we are reading less because we have things like Temple Run, Instagram, and Words with Friends at our fingertips (on our smart phones, tablets, whathaveyou)? Maybe we read the news less because we’re just on Facebook all day?

Well as it turns out, none of that is true. As this article on NPR states, some research by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism suggests that we (as a society of course) may be reading more news because we can read news all the time. As it turns out, “adults” actually use smartphones and tablets more for news than for Zynga. This research has the ability to both support and deny common myths about the effects of technology on our news consumption.

I think this article is important in a discussion about digital media, because it shows the importance of digital interfaces in accessing the news. Laptop and desktop computers are the most used for accessing news, but smart phones and tablets follow closely. Also, as it turns out, very few people actually go to Facebook or Twitter for news. These sources tend to supplement other news sources more than replace them.

My only question is about their definition of an “adult” for which they never state the age range. It would alter the impact of this data to know whether or not it includes college students. We probably do use more Zynga than news apps (hah, I really have no idea about that).

Hybrid Pedagogy: Trading Classroom Authority for Online Community

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After a bit of searching I found this digital journal which focuses on the intersection of education and digital culture. The journal contains pedagogy, anecdotes, and practical tips for educators who seek to incorporate more digital culture into their classrooms.

The post I’d like to focus on centers around an ideological shift in classrooms as a result of digital culture. “ Digital culture has already started affecting dominant cultural epistemology by shifting some focus away from experts and giving it to participants.” We’ve talked in many ways how this is not a new idea, (the author, too, makes a Wild Wild West metaphor) but the author of this journal frames it around the students, writing, “Students in the digital environment, whether in a hybrid or fully online classroom, carry more responsibility for their own progress. To succeed, they have to monitor their own progress more directly, engage with the insights of their peers, and ponder the external relevance of their work. A revolution is growing online that takes this trend to an extreme — digital citizens are building educational communities without institutions. “Learning” no longer means, or needs to mean, “going to school.” It can just mean developing good observation and critical thinking skills.”

Educators have an excellent opportunity before them: build the new generation to be open to sharing ideas publicly and thereby intentionally adding content that can be perused and compared to the “experts’”. In this way we can connect students with other students, with incumbent and emerging leaders in a field, with people around the world. The trick is for educators to abandon (or at least greatly diminish) the “follow the leader” ideology that permeates public schools today. Instead of being repeatedly and incredibly prescriptive in what students can and/or cannot do. we should encourage, not hinder, the kind of independent thinking and increased responsibility that would thrive in the Wild West and will be a boon in the digital future.

R10: Socialnomics

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So, given that my digital essay for this class is going to be a youtube video, I have grown increasingly interested in that form of communication. I think they can be incredibly effective and show the benefits of the Internet. They provide big messages in interactive, visually appealing ways that grab and hold the viewer’s attention—in a world when ADD/ADHD rates are increasing (however accurate these diagnosis may be) and the amount of content we are bombarded with ever growing, this is quite a feat. I would wager a guess and say the reason these kinds of videos are so effective are the way they engage a variety of senses.

This video provides a series of facts about the “fad” of social media and comes to the ultimate conclusion that networking is hardly a fad but rather a communicative revolution that will forever change the way our world interacts. From big businesses to the way children learn, each subset of the population has been affected by this growth of social media. We are as heavily influenced by facebook as we are the people we connect with through facebook. We no longer need to go out searching for information, news or products—they come to us. That is not to say the work we need to do is any easier. In fact, I would venture to say it is even harder to sort through the series of internet-things we are hit with to find what is truly important, useful and relevant to us. It is very easy to get distracted and in a world of competing markets, we are waging constant war with all the brands online (from our University, to favorite store to favorite political blogger) that are each working to divert our attention to what they have to offer. It’s a wild, wild interworld out there and if we don’t watch our fingers, there’s no saying where we will be hyperlinked to.

 

For those who wish to have an internet presence and influence, there are a few take away messages from this video:

1.) Social media, use it. Everyone is and for once, it is definitely a good idea to follow the crowd and jump on this bandwagon.

2.) Make it easy, make it simple, make it cute. Guys, girls, young, old—it is a common misconception that internet-regulars are internet-savvy. No, we are still the generation that refuses to read instruction guides. We know the bear minimum to get by and so anything that is too flashy, too bulky, or too complicated will lose our attention. Take it from Apple, if it looks clean and cool, you’re doing it right.

3.) We live in a visual world so take vis-antage of graphics and interactive features. The Internet is the opposite of boring so if you and your website are not competitively interactive, you will be lost in the black hole of cyber-space.

4.) Make it interesting and relevant. We don’t like learning useless information and so the bulky verbosity of textbooks and thesis and dissertations should be left at the threshold of the Temple of Academia. In the real world, we like bullets and we like one-liners and we like things we can actually use and integrate into our lives.

 

The Internet is a mine of gold but for a poorly constructed website, it can be as destructive for a brand as a landmine.

r10: I can haz interweb meme?

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Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976 as a unit of cultural transmission, or cultural genes so to speak. The rise of the Internet has only spread and intensified the popularity of memes. How many of us have spent endless hours on Reddit or other websites scrolling through massive archives of Internet memes? The fact is that now Internet memes have become an important part of our digital culture.

This 2010 New York Times article notes how easily and unexpectedly memes are developed, and the impact they have on society. The best part of memes is the fact that it’s made popular by the masses. Popular memes become so because they are entertaining or applicable to a wide segment of our population, not because some important figure said so. The people have spoken, and what they are saying now is that some guys are just ridiculously photogenic.

Internet memes are really a testament to how our digital culture has sped up the process through which good ideas single themselves out and are then spread. Memes are so popular because: (a) anyone can make or participate in a meme (b) so many people can relate to the issues they address and (c) the popularity of memes is constantly evolving. Digital media has allowed humans to be more social, meaning that our culture evolves quicker and more dynamically. Memes help facilitate this process.

r10: David Carr

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David Carr is a media expert who writes for The New York Times.  There are a host of timely and interesting articles by him on the NYT to choose from, but I chose this text because it is an interview with Carr, and so offers his direct opinion. The interview with Carr deals with pressing modern uses of the internet.  The interview includes a discussion of:

1. Curator’s Code (unicode icons that you can embed in blogs and articles. E.g. a sideways S means “via” that links you back to original material).  This is a new and interactive form of microstyle.  Not only can you tell your reader something by using shorthand icons, but you can also show them something (e.g. a link). It is also a new way to credit inspiration for an article (to link to someone else’s).

2. Journalism and the web.  The interview includes Carr’s thoughts on whistleblowers such as Wikileaks and whether governments should punish them or not, when information is now so easily available on the web.

3. Crowdsourcing.  Carr seems to think there can sometimes be too much information on the web to use crowdsourcing.

I am certainly no tech-savante, but I found this text easy to digest, and interesting.  Perhaps the most important factor to take away from this article is that it combines a discussion of the web with ethics and politics.  Crediting sources, government action against whistleblowers, the new face of journalism, and crowdsourcing are linked to politics and ethics, and Carr makes this important assertion.