Exercise 3

Parodies are one of the most entertaining and popular forms of network culture.  They are inspired by mass popular culture, such as movies, t.v. shows, and music, and they represent the creativity of multiple individuals and portray multiple meanings for each audience.  The fact that the original structured media can be manipulated to have other meanings than what the original owner intended and the popularity and interest that it draws from a large audience shows the importance of participatory culture and the effectiveness it has in generating interest.  This is imperative for our group in generating the interest of an audience for our short term goals.  Of course the idea of the parody is to be a hilarious misinterpretation of existing popular media, and our topic is one where a humorous approach would be inappropriate.  However, the pull that participatory culture has on people would prove an important factor in our project.

My specific parody youtube video is a voice over of the popular Disney song “Let it Go”, and the audience being those who have heard or know of this song.  The original song is massively popular and so the author of the parody chose that song knowing that people would be interested in their version since the original is so well known.  The message of the parody concerns studying for finals and also the crude title of the parody all serves to target a younger audience, an audience which is most likely to be on youtube the most.  The author therefore displays Ka-knowledge in basing their digital rhetoric on their target audience.  This goes to show that our group needs to consider the audience we are trying to reach out to.  Parodies and humor are probably not the best way for us to reach out considering the sensitivity of our topic.  Instead we should try for ways to evoke sympathy through somber emotions and heartfelt stories so that our audience truly sees our issue as something that affects them as well.

That transition from saturation to occupation is also key and seen in my parody example.  By viewing the video you can also see that other people have taken the parody and continued to make their own parodies of the same song, granted with a lot less viewing success but they are there nonetheless.  In showing the possibility of what can be created using a combination of existing media and original creativity, the author has inspired other people to try making something of their own.  That’s exactly what we want to accomplish in our project which is to inspire people to just think about how our issue effects their lives and recognize that there is a problem.  The daily challenges we present are an attempt to get people inspired to think about about the issue of mental illness and connect it with their day to day lives.

The point of the parody video is just to convey the author’s personal thoughts and ideas through existing media, so one sees the effects of Clicktivism in the “likes” section of Youtube but overall there is no negative effect since the fact that many people are viewing the video is what matters.  However, the interaction that my group is looking for for our project requires us to stay away from simply asking for people “like” our efforts.  Interaction is key, so every video we post or every challenge we present is an attempt at inspiring more sacrifice from our audience instead of just clicktivism.

Network/Participatory Culture Example

Networked Activism

John Jones’s Article argues that networks are less effective than hierarchal power.  Malcolm Gladwell explains that the without centralized power and guidelines of authority networking fails to set clear goals and “reaching consensus” and therefore prove generally ineffective at campaigning.  I can see this to be true when compared to actual campaigns in person where risk is involved and that attracts people to invest more than a simple click on a website.  Networks are too prone to turn to clicktivism and attract people with too mild opinions of the cause to actually be effective in changing the real world.  Networks make communication within a campaigning group extremely easy and large in scope, but when networks are relied on to change the minds of strangers, they fall short.  Hierarchal power relies on risk and draws people to it on a personal level.  In the end strangers will feel more affected by an issue when presented it through hierarchal power.  An experience through something that involves real risk, power, and a sense of control will stick more than an experience through the safety that networks provide.  Identity, thoughts, and sacrifice are used minimally online and create a safer feeling environment, and safety makes us believe and feel affected by things a lot less than if we felt truly impacted by the issue.

NAMI Not That Helpful

A major organization that is actively seeking exposure and pursuing campaigns in aiding and spreading awareness of mental illness, both online and not, is the National Alliance on Mental Illness.  Their website provides a plethora of information concerning mental illness facts and opportunities to support the cause and organization.  Their website contains many different pages for facts, donations, locations, and support groups for victims.  This is a fantastic website for long term goals and is specially effective since it has the backing of a large organization that has multiple options for revenue and income.  However, since our project has to be short term and done without much financial support, this does little to help us formulate a plan for our project.  Since this organization’s goals are long-term, they focus more on discussion pages, donations, locations and events and not so much on grabbing the attention of as many people as they can in a short amount of time.  The website has no attention grabbers so people are more likely to not associate themselves with the issues presented and therefore care little about sacrificing more time to find out.  We on the other hand require a way to immediately grab the reader’s attention and make them care about the issues we’re presenting so that looking further into the material doesn’t seem like a sacrifice but more like a duty or obligation to themselves, and yet stay away from clicktivism.  NAMI provides little help for us in reaching our goal but it would be useful to keep in mind if we should ever want to expand on our project.

Networks and Algorithms

Being a computer science major, I deal with algorithms more than most.  We rely on these to predict behavior and outcomes of hardware and software alike.  Algorithms are the true step towards developing a more complexly connected and therefore smarter and powerful computer system.  The system of online social networking seems much closer to this than I believe most people think when specifically looking at human interaction.  Connectivity and the ways we connect to other people is a key characteristic of human life.  Ideas are generated and constantly being changed due to the instant access to our peer’s ideas due to tools such as the internet.  In creating mass media sharing platforms such as Facebook, we have in fact created a sort of algorithm for the sharing of ideas and the connection of human communities.  And what is a computer but a combination of complex and simple algorithms designed to connect different systems?  What these network platforms actually are doing is taking the complex characteristics of the human mind and developing these thoughts through a simpler system that is designed to connect to other humans and share data.  Of course this is still far from saying we have begun turning ourselves and society into hardware, but as we rely more on online social connections we see more and more similarities between us and the machines we use to network.

Parody Blogging

While discussing this week’s topics, I found I couldn’t really grasp the idea of “parody blogging”.  I’d seen many examples of parodies on the web, usually through youtube and gif sites, but I have never seen a parody blog.  What I’ve found that defines them is distinguishing arguments from argumentation.  Roberts-Miller talks more about it in his article “Parody Blogging and Call of the Real”.  It explains that argumentation in blogs is used as a persuasive method which is in contrast to arguments, as they are opinions of misinterpretation.  This applies to all blogs and is what separates them from other forms of social online media.  In this way actually I see parody blogs connecting the rhetoric of blogs to that of other social online media since they use both elements of misinterpretation and persuasion.  However I think this depends on the author of the blog in whether the “parody” is an example of argumentation or arguments.  One parody blog I looked up contained content that had video games as a subject.  What I saw as argumentation was the author wrote from the perspective of a game designer within a game company who was responsible for design decisions.  However I saw a political parody blog who’s author used “silly” arguments in his writing and used no or little clear elements of argumentation.  In this way I see that parody blogs can lean from either argumentation to arguments but nonetheless are still the most rhetorically similar to other online social media out of weblogs.

Exercise 1

An app I’ve found myself using on my phone a lot when I’m bored is a computer mediated communication platform called Ifunny. Basically to an outside user, the app is a watered down version of the popular site Reddit. It’s an app where, using the tools the creator of the site provides, one can created and upload posts about virtually anything. The app’s purpose is to provide a space where people can post original humorous posts but there is no monitoring of the subject material so people really can post about whatever they want. As an incentive to post for the original purpose of the app, the creator searches the submitted posts and places a chosen few on a part of the app called “featured” where they are given special exposure.

The ideas that I can apply to this app are electracy and participatory culture. The posts that people put on the app are scrolled through by other users and can also be “liked” and commented on. Gathering more likes and comments makes the post more noticeable to the creator and therefore their chances of being on “featured” increases. This satisfies Jenkin’s definition of participatory culture since there is nothing stopping other users from viewing the material and interacting with it. A post on Ifunny is subject to viewing, “liking”, and commenting from anyone. Also since the status of content of certain posts can be “elevated” by reaching the “featured” category, this puts a new spin on the role of participatory culture. Now people who create the content somewhat rely on the participation of strangers to elevate the status of their content. This doesn’t change the fact that the purpose of the app is to promote creativity and not the social politics of trying to squeeze out more “likes”. The lack of an actual prize for being in “featured” other than the exposure is small enough of an award to preserve that.

The idea of Electracy applies to Ifunny as well. In order to post anything on Ifunny, one needs to be familiar with the tools the creator provides so that posts will actually make it on the app. And because the app is a form of social networking, the need to recognize online acronyms is required. The commenting section has no organization to it, so the posts are just listed from newest to oldest so being able to navigate and keep track of conversations within the comments section is on the user.   The navigating of posts is not difficult, scrolling over to the right gets the user to the next post but this also presents a problem. Because new content comes in on the general space at random intervals and quantities, it’s easy to lose track of your spot and therefore it’s possible to miss posts and never know you missed them. Being able to manually search for them by providing information on the content you wish to view is another necessary skill. This does not provide much of a problem in the “featured” category since there is a set number who make it there every day.

Electronic Monuments Intro

Our community today has grown to what is now seen as a global community.  Natural boundaries and state and nation lines are no longer substantial barriers keeping people from one another.  This mostly has to do with the existence of the internet.  The internet certainly can be a cause of travesty and hardship for the global community, but most today would agree that the internet is a necessity in modern society.  The major source of this success is the internet’s ability to connect individuals with the overall collective that is the modern global community.  Ideas, beliefs, and thoughts are now able to be shared globally, making the individual aware, and sometimes painfully, of the many other individuals of the global community.  This can also be a negative thing as smaller communities within the global community have disputes over disagreeing ideas.  I have seen the negative effects that the sharing of information has on a community, specifically a school community.  Adolescents that have yet to fully understand that communicating ideas over the internet can be even more destructive than saying them in person are an example of how easily it is to misinterpret the purpose and power the internet has, and only shows a situation with minor consequence compared to that of a   an issue within the global community.  EmerAgency does attempt to increase awareness and concern over the issue of expression over the internet but we must be aware that internet is always changing and advancing with new technology.  It will take far more supervision if we are to truly see a “safer” internet.