The good, the bad and the ugly

When we were assigned a final blog post that would explain the most important thing we learned about media this semester, I had no idea where to begin. We covered many topics, and discussed numerous opinions and sides of each one. Mass media, in many cases, gets a pretty bad rap. Hm, I could talk about all the negative effects of mass media we learned about in class. Then again, people always discuss the ways in which technology has helped them. Okay, I’ll talk about the positive aspects of mass media instead! Wait, I do remember discussing several ways media could be detrimental to a person’s life. Perfect, I’ll talk about the truly ugly side of mass media.

I wanted to encapsulate all of these lessons, while offering the most important point(s) of information I learned in the course. So, without further ado, here is the good, the bad and the ugly of mass media.

Suggested soundtrack for this post: click here.

The good: today’s media allows us to reach a wider audience and connect on various platforms.

My generation is part of a major shift in which big media is losing control. As citizens living in the Digital Age, we have constant access to the content we want. The people are in control of the content being shared as well as the platforms for sharing, and the Internet is a major factor. “The biggest TV station couldn’t reach nearly as many people as the Internet does now.” That’s why we’re seeing a disruption in cable news and the growth of the online platform.

Using Twitter could land you a job writing for Seth Meyers. Gaitry got a job in Disney World thanks to the power of the Internet! Kristin’s story of her stolen identity went viral, and she actually became a local celebrity. Her story was also featured on the local news station, but I can guarantee she reached more people online than has ever been possible through the TV screen.

The present and future of mass media is designed to better connect us with others. Have you heard about the latest Snapchat update? It also allows us to stay connected with our friends and family without saying a spoken word to them. It’s a new kind of communication, and we’re still learning, so there are certainly a few glitches. Overall, media seems to be a giving part of our society. Of course, we still have to feed the beast to get results.

The bad: media consumers are just pawns in the competitive game between mass media giants.

Facebook, for the most part, controls social lives. It’s disrupted many forms of technology, and it will likely continue to do so. Google may or may not be plotting to take over the world (or at least our senses). Comcast just bought Time Warner Cable, not only driving up the prices of cable across the country, but also jacking up the price of our beloved Netflix. Heck, if you want to think of the U.S. government as a corporation in this case, they’ve been attempting to exert some control over the Internet in the future. Do you want to know something else about all of this? We can’t do a damn thing about it.

All of these changes and advancements have direct effects on our lives, and it’s going to have an even larger effect on journalism in the future. Our newspaper is popular online? Let’s build a paywall to make some money. We’re the most popular source of downloadable music? That means we can charge, let’s say, 30 cents more per song. People really hate those annoying ads! I bet they’d pay five dollars a month to get rid of them.

See what I mean? For the most part, these giants are unstoppable. We, the consumers, want the content and they, the providers, set the prices. And that’s the way it will continue until there’s a media disruption that changes the course.

The ugly: media has negatively affected the way we communicate with others and hindered our ability to prosper without technology.

Yes, I realize I’m contradicting myself. Earlier in this post, I said media has allowed us to stay connected throughout our busy lives. This is true, but only in terms of actual communication, like texting throughout the day or messaging someone on Facebook after being apart for a while.

Otherwise, we’re putting ourselves out there to be judged and critiqued. We seek the invisible likes on an Instagram photo or the retweets on a witty tweet. In reality, these aren’t tangible things you can put on a resume or show off to your friends. Society has become so consumed with technology that we choose it over real relationships (I’m talking to you, Tinder). And don’t even get me started on privacy.

In a world where we’re forced to opt out instead of opt in, there are no more secrets. We put information online and offer it freely to marketers and advertisers, a concept I discussed in my “hate letter” to the Internet.

If I took a “best friend” quiz that asked questions like, “what’s your favorite movie?” and “what’s your favorite color?,” I imagine my best friends would earn decent scores. What if the Internet tried to answer these questions? I guarantee it could get 10/10 correct, and that’s a major part of what this semester has taught me.

I’ll leave you with this video, titled “Look Up.” It discusses the way in which our generation uses technology, and it’s worryingly accurate. The overall message is clear: look up from your phones and separate yourself from technology. Otherwise, you’ll miss opportunities in the real world.

In closing, this class has taught me that media has promise and the potential to be good; it’s only bad and ugly when we let it be.

Hospital selfies

I feel like every day there’s a new piece on selfies. One article claimed you could get lice from selfies, while another post accumulated a number of selfies at funerals. Now, there is even a song titled “#SELFIE.” But these photos are more than quick self-portraits. These innocent pictures can also have major effects on a person’s well-being, evident in the expanding realm of trauma selfies. “Like the Funeral Selfie before it, the Hospital Selfie exposes a massive generational divide about the etiquette of self-expression and oversharing, especially in the face of disaster.”

If you search #amputee on Instagram, you’ll see a slew of photos of amputee patients, many of them selfies. There are similar hashtags too, like #amputeelife, #amputeeproblems and even #amputeeswag. All of these categories are filled with selfies of patients, and most of them have suffered major trauma.

“The more I repeat it the less real it becomes. The idea of sharing trauma, at least for me, is not so much to elicit anything back but just to get it out of me.”

Like the woman who live-tweeted the birth of her child, these posts have been met with criticism, but the cancer patients, amputees and other trauma victims don’t mind. They’re not using social media just to put their story out there. Instead, they’re using it to connect with people in the same situation. I may follow someone on Instagram based on a shared clothing style, just like they may connect with someone if they are both working though cancer treatments.

“When I was on Instagram, I would click on different hashtags of #brainsurgery or #craniotomy and see so many other people’s pictures of their scars. It was so cool. Just typing in a Google search on the Internet, that’s kind of what I was looking for. I was looking for affirmation from somebody else.”

The selfies are graphic, but they’re helping patients cope with their situations. In a way, it might even be helping them heal.

“With medical stuff, people don’t know how to talk about it and don’t know how to start the conversation. Putting it out there [on social media] really helps. It’s really hard to, but it really helps.”

Twitter: the new writing sample?

I was already fascinated by the power of social media, but then I read the headline, “How a middle-aged IT guy from Peoria tweeted his way into a writing job on Late Night with Seth Meyers,” and I was stunned. A man named Bryan Donaldson operated a Twitter account with the handle @TheNardvark. It was filled with jokes he couldn’t say around the workplace, and it quickly garnered thousands of followers. One important follower was Alex Baze, the head writer and producer for Late Night with Seth Meyers, but Donaldson wasn’t aware of the opportunity on the horizon. Baze kept a list of his favorite tweeters, so when it came time to hire a new writer for the show, he turned to Twitter.

“If I go to somebody’s Twitter, I can see what he’s been doing the last two years — you get a much more complete sense of how he writes," he says. "It’s like you get to flip through somebody’s comedy notebook.”

"Twitter has democratized the process," Seth Meyers says. "We used to look at smaller samples, now you can look back and see what a person thought was funny for the past calendar year."

In this way, Twitter has become the modern writing sample. Gone are the days when employers would look at a resume and a well-written college paper (Meyers didn’t even know where Donaldson was from or what his job was). Now, employers are looking to social media. I discussed this phenomenon in a previous blog post where I invited future employers to check out my Facebook page and other social media accounts. In my post, I highlighted three criteria that employers look for on social media.

1. If the candidate will be a good fit
2. A candidate’s qualifications
3. Their creativity

Through the Twitter account, Baze thought Donaldson represented these criteria, so he was offered the job.

“He still seems a bit dazed by the rapid, unexpected turn his life has taken. ‘I still don’t understand how this all works yet, this whole business,’ he admits, ‘I’m just starting out. But I gotta believe that the people who are not located in New York or L.A. have an equal voice now on the internet, so they’ll be easier to find.’”

For a long time, the Internet has served as a place for you to find jobs, and now, for the first time ever, it may become a place for jobs to find you.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…Facebook?

As a class, we’ve looked into the process of “unbundling.” Technologies, including websites, will begin dividing into separate programs, giving users the opportunity to select exactly which ones they want to use. This trend has pros and cons; more specialized content could be delivered directly to users without all the “junk” they don’t want attached to it, but they’ll also pay dearly for these individual services. It’s hard to imagine exactly what this will look like, because the unbundling process is still in its early stages. We can, however, apply it to a site that most Americans use daily: Facebook. According to the recent data, mobile apps will continue to play a major role in the mobile revolution, and one of the most popular apps is Mark Zuckerberg’s very own brainchild.

“Despite every hipster prediction otherwise, the company’s user base keeps growing, and nearly a fifth of the time that Americans spend on their smartphones is spent on Facebook. That surpasses the amount of time we spend on any other single service by a wide margin — and beats just about anything else we do on our phones, or perhaps in our lives, period.”

Let’s think about this. If you spend 20% of our mobile time on our Facebook app, where is the other 80% spent? Probably on messenger apps, entertainment apps or news apps. Now, what if Facebook designed apps to meet these needs? Paper, a new app designed by Facebook developers, shares the news you want; each user can select the content they receive. So, if you usually spend 20% of your time looking at mobile news apps, now you'll be devoting 40% of your time to Facebook without even knowing it. Paper is unique for several reasons, but perhaps the biggest one is that is looks very little like the Facebook app.

“In the past, [Zuckerberg] said, Facebook was one big thing, a website or mobile app that let you indulge all of your online social needs. Now, on mobile phones especially, Facebook will begin to splinter into many smaller, more narrowly focused services, some of which won’t even carry Facebook’s branding, and may not require a Facebook account to use.”

What we’ll likely begin to see is a host of apps by Facebook that look nothing like the original design. That way, if we’re spending time using apps other than Facebook, we could still be putting money in Zuckerberg’s pocket.

"What is a hashtag?"

“But, what is a hashtag?” my mom asked me over breakfast this morning. Sometimes, my parents ask me questions about social media and mass communication because they think I’ll know the answer. C’mon, I’m in the J-School and I’m supposed to know these things, right? The answer is complicated. Yes, I know what a hashtag is, but you try explaining it to someone who has no concept of social media. It’s more difficult than you’d think. Now, this discussion goes far beyond adults on Facebook or texts between parents and their kids in which autocorrect got the best of the adults. This is an outright war between adults and technology, and it’s not what you think. I’m going to use my parents as an example.

My dad is an electrical engineer, and he knows technology. I’m sure he even knows about technology that has yet to be developed, but he didn’t know he could take a picture on his phone in black and white. My mom, a paralegal, knows her way around the Internet. She texts, probably as much as me, but she lays her phone down on a flat surface and types with only her index fingers. It’s the wrong way, but it feels right to her. She has a side business where she lists things on eBay, so she knows how to take photos, upload them, shrink their dimensions, import documents and create a listing. But, when she signed up for Facebook three years ago, she typed “how to delete Dana Dean on facebook” into the status bar, thinking it was the search bar. Dana Dean, although I changed the name, was my mom’s high school friend who had added her on Facebook, but my mom no longer wanted to see her posts. (Luckily, I caught the status and frantically called my mom before any damage was done…as far as we know.)

A discrepancy exists between adults and the way in which they use technology. They adopt it, evident in the increase in adults on Facebook, but they use it in their own way. Now, think about the way we react to their attempts to integrate new technologies or networks into their lives. We laugh. In a post on adults writing on a restaurant’s Facebook page, Mary Madison explains her reaction to the posts.

“Technologically challenged parents writing on company's Facebook walls? Man this stuff is golden. Couldn't stop laughing and relating it to my mom's experience on Facebook.”

I am not at all saying it’s wrong to laugh at them (it really is hilarious), but we have to consider that what we were born into, they have to adopt. That’s the reason adults on Facebook are so funny. We know exactly what’s lame and what’s not because we were with it from the get-go and these technologies and advancements are a central part of our lives. For adults, social media and technologies like it are just an addition.

Neither of my parents like social media, so this morning I asked them why. My mom doesn’t like it because she doesn’t understand how to use it. My dad, who doesn’t use any form of social media and likely never will, doesn’t like it because he doesn’t see the practicality of it.

“I will only care what a hashtag is or does when you explain its practical use in my life,” he says.

And for the most part, I couldn’t explain that to him. I don’t know how using a hashtag would affect his daily life. As far as I can tell, there’s no effective way to fix the disconnect between adults and the way they adopt the next big thing. If I signed my mom up for Twitter today, no matter how much time I spent educating her on the dos and don’ts, she would not use the site like I do, or even the way most people do.

So, I will continue to laugh at the man who can build a cell phone battery but can’t figure out how to make a photo vertical, and the woman who runs a small business based entirely online, but will never understand the difference between her Facebook newsfeed and her own page.

Maybe one day I’ll be able to explain the purpose and practicality of a hashtag. For now, I think I’ll continue making up an answer and hoping my mom buys into it, like in the clip below. Most of the time, she will.

Twitter terrorism

Early this morning, a 14-year-old girl tweeted a terrorist threat at the American Airlines account. It was likely a joke, but the airline responded and turned the girl over to airport security and the U.S. FBI. Screenshots of the exchange are below:

I’m not sure why, but many people still don’t understand that they can be held accountable for what they post on social media. Maybe it’s because they feel as if their online persona is separate from their real identity. Regardless of the reason, people need to understand that the content they put on social media has real consequences. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time this has happened. Just two months ago, a woman in Spain was arrested and charged with inciting terror through her tweets.

The use of social media is increasing, so why isn’t online education? We need to have a system in place for new users to learn about what is appropriate and inappropriate to put on these sites. The girl in the tweets above is only 14. Maybe she knew what could happen and just wanted the attention, but it’s also possible she hadn’t been educated about the dangers of making threats such as these online.

As much as we’d like to think that our online personas are separate from our real lives, our words are still binding.

How do you use Twitter?

A recent study suggests around 44% of Twitter accounts have never even sent a tweet. For a site that prides itself on being the most popular social networking site, this is pretty disparaging news, especially considering the percentage equates to over 428 million “dormant” accounts. Now, “dormant” doesn’t necessarily mean “inactive” in this situation. Many Twitter users choose not to tweet, but instead to read. “To be sure, people don’t have to actively tweet to find the service useful. There’s more than enough stuff to read on almost any topic in the world on Twitter to keep users occupied.”

Twitter, like any other social media site, is designed for active participation. Researchers claim passive participation is highly negative and can lead to the downfall of a website, but they rarely highlight the benefits of this kind of involvement. In fact, some say passive users are a necessity to social media sites.

“Unless you can build a firm foundation of people who are engaged with you at a more passive level of watching and sharing, it’s very difficult to create that audience for the people who are commenting and producing content.”

Another startling statistic is that only 13% of Twitter accounts have written at least 100 tweets. Almost every individual user I follow on Twitter has tweeted over 100 times. I don’t tweet nearly as often as some of the accounts I follow, but that’s no indication as to how much time I actually spend on Twitter. I enjoy being a somewhat passive user of social media; I contribute content, but I take in content more often.

That being said, I don’t think Twitter should worry about the survey findings. Sure, most of inactive accounts are permanently inactive, but many are likely just passive readers. If you consider that 127 million users are active tweeters, that’s still a pretty impressive following.

Go home Glass

I remember sitting in JOMC 101 when Professor Robinson showed the class the video below.

I thought, I wonder what it will be like in 20 years when everyone has a pair of these glasses. Google Glass was a high profile venture into wearable technology, but I didn’t expect it to reach the public for many years. Now, just over a year later, Google is selling Glass to the general public. Although the product will only be released for one day to consumers in the U.S., it’s a big step toward the eventual widespread consumer release. I have to admit, I’m surprised Glass became popular this quickly. Around a year ago, I saw the video above as a video from the future, but Google has made it very clear that the future is now.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think Google Glass will catch on. If they’re expecting it to be the next iPhone (in terms of popularity and profits), I think Google is mistaken. The company can do a lot of things, but I don’t think they’ll be able to force the population into purchasing a wearable that’s before its time. When I saw the video, I imagined this product 20 years down the road, so maybe Google should have considered the same. Even supporters of wearables find problems with Glass.

“Wearables are a big bet -- one that will likely result in a lot of early failures. Google Glass, for instance, started as an exciting futuristic product and has become an overhyped niche gadget with a public relations problem (and it's still in beta).”

Google is even working with companies like Ray-Ban and Oakley to make Glass a more wearable design, but I doubt the company will be successful. Smartwatches and fitness trackers have already had a difficult time on the consumer market, with one-third of consumers abandoning them. Remember, these wearables are far less noticeable and less expensive than their sister, Glass. April 15 is the big release day, but I wouldn't mark my calendar.

The future is here, but I don’t think Glass should be quite yet. Take note, Google.

Facebook stalking: the new normal?

This morning, I read this article on the famous Eleven Madison Park restaurant in New York. Prior to the dinner hour, the maître d’ googles the names of every guest, giving him the ability to comment on personal details. With this level of familiarity, he can greet guests with their names or congratulate them on a special occasion. “If I find out a guest is from Montana, and I know we have a server from there, we'll put them together. Same goes for guests who own jazz clubs, who can be paired with a sommelier that happens to be into jazz. In other words, before customers even step through the door, the restaurant's staff has a pretty good idea of the things it can do to specifically blow their minds.”

“All that Googling pays off when the maître d' greets total strangers by name and wishes them a happy tenth anniversary before they've even taken off their coats.”

This attention to detail reportedly makes the guests feel welcomed at the restaurant. Eleven Madison Park takes service just as seriously as the food they serve, evident in the way they carefully stalk every guest before they walk through the door.

When did this become okay to do? Rather, when did online stalking become associated with feeling welcome in an establishment? Let’s be real, we’ve all stalked someone online (probably on Facebook) at some point in time. Of course, I use the term “stalking” loosely here. “Researching” may be a more appropriate term, but it doesn’t quite do justice to the action of this extreme research. Furthermore, since you can discover an abundance of information on a person based on their Facebook, the terms “online stalking” and “Facebook stalking” may sometimes be used interchangeably. Stalking someone on Facebook may include searching their name and attempting to discover as much information about them as possible, for example, their job, interests, photos and opinions. Although motivations for this stalking differ, it’s usually kept a secret from the person you’re stalking. Most people don’t continue this process; once they find out as much information as they can about a person, they move on.

“The art and joy of the Facebook Stalk is unavoidable, even for the most of the “light” Facebook users out there. Just dipping your toe into the shallow end – the News Feed – can result in a bout of creeping so thorough that you feel adequately prepared to give a PowerPoint presentation about the last few years of your victim’s life.”

Is online stalking so normal that we’re now incorporating it into restaurant service? Sure, it could make a guest feel special if they were dining at Eleven Madison Park, but it could also really freak people out. These searches also raise the issue of online privacy. If you Facebook stalk someone prior to meeting them, you probably won’t introduce yourself by letting them know how much you really discovered about them (you may even pretend to not know certain things about them). There is little difference between this scenario and greeting guests based on what Google told you about them.

For a funny (and somewhat far-fetched) representation of “Facebook stalking,” watch this video.

A month of my life

I remember seeing a link on the Rebelmouse site to a counter by Time that could tell you how much of your life you've wasted on Facebook. Now, there's a TV show version. You simply type in a TV show you've watched or are currently watching, enter the number of seasons and the counter will calculate how much time you've spent watching the show. If you continue entering in shows, it will add the values to your total. I stopped when I got to a month. Now, you give it a try. Click here.

People always say watching TV is a waste of time, but one of the biggest arguments is the lack of educational content in the programs. When I watch TV shows, I may not be learning in the traditional way, but I'm certainly learning. Now, this is my opinion, but I'm not wasting time when I watch TV. Even on Netflix, I'm learning. These shows teach us how to act in social situations. Sure, real life isn't exactly how it's depicted on television, but it's similar, and we learn that. You can't say it's a waste of time if we get something out of it.

Do I wish that number was a little lower? Well, yes. I even wish there was a book counter that could tell you how much time you've spent reading, instead. But one thing is for sure, I didn't waste a month of my life. I spent a month of it learning in a new way.