Social Networks as Marketing Tools (extra)

           The social networking websites of today have transformed the internet unlike any other web pages.  Recently, people have been using websites like Facebook and Twitter as a special marketing tool.  Social networking makes marketing more than just a message.  It soon becomes a two way conversation between a company and the customer.  For example, everyday on Twitter companies will put out a message via tweet and their customers are able to instant feedback.  Today, the old ways of marketing such as customer letters have been completely pushed aside by these websites.  Social network marketing is efficient because of the large population of people all at one place on the web.  Each day, companies are blessed with more and more potential customers whenever somebody creates a new account.  With this said, companies are often out numbered and often don’t of much control.  This lack of control seems to appeal to many companies because they are able to see what their customers are saying about them.  Marketing on social networks is also efficient in the fact that its free.  The majority of social networking sites don’t cost anything to start or continue.  Social networking is a big part of the internet and it is not going anywhere anytime soon.  Businesses are taking advantage of this tool and they will continue to do so as long as these websites are relevant in society.

Social Media Politics (extra)

         This past April, Barack Obama kicked off is 2012 presidential campaign in a unique fashion.  Rather than making a public appearance in front of thousands of supporters and a throng of media, he did so by making an online video.  By doing this, Obama displays the importance social media in today elections.  Websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr all have becoming a defining force in modern-day politics.  In the 2008 elections, Obama was able to gain an edge by expanding his campaign to MySpace and Facebook.  The core of this political strategy can be found here.  By using this strategy, Obama made it easy for supporters to donate, find local gatherings, and it simply spreads the word of the Obama campaign through mass communication. 

This isn’t the only time we have seen strategies like this during presidential elections.  In 1992, Bill Clinton made an appearance on MTV.  This was unheard of at the time and was a great strategy to gain the vote of the youth population.  This year, the republican party is catching up to the democrats by making sure that they start to use the same social media strategies of the 2008 Obama campaign.  Needless to say, it is inevitable that presidential candidates must use their creative mind and come up with new ideas to spread their good word if they want to win the future elections.

My "New" Phone (Extra)

          Almost two weeks ago, I lost my smart phone after our last football game.  Surprisingly, I went a whole week without a phone.  Over the time of that week, I realized just how much i depended on my phone.  With the new smart phone technologies, people can store almost any information they need in their phone.  Luckily I use my laptop to store the same information aside from all of my contacts.  After my long week of being phoneless, I got a hold of my mom back home and she was able to send me up a replacement phone.  It came up a couple days later and lets just say it was a bit of a downgrade.  But  beggars can’t be choosers and I was just happy to have a phone back, so I have no complains.  But after messing around with my ‘new’ phone for a couple of minutes, I quickly adjusted to a flip phone with 1” by 1” screen and nothing but call and text messaging capabilities.  While many people would be upset, I wasn’t bothered by this.  I had a phone that could text and call with a laptop that could do just about everything else.  I think this experience opened my eyes to just how amazing SMS technology really is.  It is quick, easy to use, and extremely affordable.  In todays society, merely all cell phones have SMS capabilities, even the old junky ones like my new replacement phone.  It doesn’t matter how nice your phone is, as long as you have one.  Around the globe SMS is the most popular form of communication of our generation because of its affordability and efficiency.  Even with all of the new technologies of smart phone, we have yet to see a more efficient technology created since SMS.

RE: Smart Mobs Gone Wild

        Due to the development of SMS messaging, cell phone users have adopted a great sense of power.  People become more connected and gain the ability to organize groups from political advocates to terrorist groups.  These groups are known as Smart Mobs.  As we keep making advances in mobile communication technology, these groups will continue to gain more power.  Smart mobs are a developing threat in todays culture as Howard Rheingold explains in his book Smart mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

SMS technology is an ideal way of communication.  It is efficient, quick, and very affordable.  Because of how cheap text messaging and cell phones are,  even some people in third world countries are able to have a cell phone.  Now I’m not talking about a smart phone, but just a old cell phone that has SMS messaging capabilities.  This quick and easy way of communicating creates a mass communication that often leads to the organization of smart mobs.  Rheingold explains that is important to focus on the mass communication taking place rather than the actual smart mobs that are created.  This mass communication created by text messaging can lead to smart mobs containing political supporters, sports fans, or even terrorists.  Smart mobs are merely uncontrollable and the mass communication will be present as long as there is the efficient way of communicating through SMS.

Some of these smart mobs can potentially be a threat to todays society.  Recently, there was a problem at the Wisconsin State Fair.  It was claimed to be a race based flash mob that led to racial violence.  Alleged racial attacks were said to be taken place outside of the State Fair grounds.  This most likely started out with a good number of teens spreading word of what was going down at the state fair, leading to more and more teens hearing about it which led to more people joining.  This is just one example of how powerful the mass communication created by these smart mobs actually is.  It is often people use this technology to be productive and intelligent, but people who strive to spread hate have the same opportunities to do so with SMS technologies.

RE: MUDs: Good? Bad? Both?

         While I was reading through Sherry Turkle’s, “Aspects of Life”, many questions sifted in and out of my head.  I would continue to read on to find that almost all of them would be answered in the next few paragraphs, but there is still one question I have that is up for debate: Are MUD’s and virtual persona’s more of a positive or negative aspect of our society?  Turkle gives some clear examples on why she thinks MUD’s are a good thing, but overall I disagree with her because Multi User Domains are generally dangerous and overall have many negative affects.

Sherry Turkle explains that MUDs provide an alternate world where people can anonymously interact socially.  Turkle believes that this is a good thing because it is important that people can escape from their everyday lives.  She supports her argument with a solid example of shining a positive light on MUD’s is that of Gordon the software designer.  He uses multiple virtual persona’s in MUD’s to help him socialize easier and he even admitted that he started to adopt certain traits of his characters.  MUD’s are definitely positive when people use them to experiment different characteristics in a social world without having any major consequences, such as Gordon did.  But I argue this position by stating that too many people are moving too far away from reality and carrying out inappropriate and dangerous acts through their life in MUDs.

Personally, I have had a pretty weird experience with people who use a fake virtual personae.  In high school, I accepted a friend request from a girl I didn’t know (that was my first mistake) that claimed she went to my school.  For a couple weeks she wouldn’t stop messaging me and a couple of my friends, so I decided to delete her.  It turns out “she” was some guy that was two years older than me and actually went to my high school.  He was later caught sending nude pictures of himself to a couple of people that I know using that same Facebook account.  This is just a minor case is someone using a virtual persona.

Everyday, there are sexual predators using social networking websites, blogs, chat rooms, ect. to find and seduce children.  For me to agree with Turkle, people must be proactive to protect their privacy on the internet.  Parents must teach their kids to identify dangerous people on the net.  Let them know the internet is no different then real life and they aren’t allowed to talk to strangers.  Monitor what chat rooms and websites they engage in.  As Sherry Turkle states in “Aspects of the Self,” MUDs can positively affect our lives.  In reality, MUDs are a dangerous place for children and to experience MUDs in the positive ways that Turkle explains, it is necessary to take many precautions when engaging in MUDs.

Exposer: The Facebook Factor

Facebook is undoubtedly one of the most popular social networking websites that we have seen since the birth of internet.  It is a great tool to use to get in touch with old childhood friends, touch base with family members, or just keep up with the social realm around you.  When someone activates a new facebook account, they often ignore the self exposer that they are creating.  This lack of privacy has been an aging problem that has come with social networking websites.  People are starting to share more information with more pople and it this has led to people getting fired from their job and even denied by universities.  

Randall Stross of The New York Times gives uses an example of a young woman by the name of Stacy Snider, a 25 year old student, working to get her degree majoring in education.  She was dismissed from the student teaching program at a near by high school and denied her teaching credential after some staff found a photograph on her MySpace profile.  The picture of Stacy at a halloween party dressed as a pirate with a red cup to her lip read the caption “drunken pirate,” which was deemed inappropriate by the school.  The exposer that social networking sites like myspace or facebook allow  employers to search your profile and make sure that you aren’t promoting inappropriate behavior.  This reminds me of when my sisters were student teachers.  They had spent hours upon hours deleting all of their inappropriate facebook pictures they had accumulated throughout their college career.  It may have been annoying, but in the long run it definitely worked out for their best interest.  They were both able to quickly get jobs after they graduated and their newly refreshened image of their facebook account helped without a doubt.

High school teens are also greatly affected when they don’t monitor what they share on their social networking profiles.  I came across a short article on huffington post stating that 80% of college admission officers use facebook while recruiting students.  If a high school student displays an inappropriate image of themselves on their facebook profile, that may alter the chances of them getting into the school that they want.  Problems like these can be easily avoided by untagging yourself from photos and being active with your privacy settings.  Mark Zuckerberg seems to have some obsession of continually updating the privacy, so make sure you check your settings often.  Follow these easy steps and you should be in the clear.  Happy social networking!

Google Knows Everything

         Google is one of the most recognizable brands let alone websites in the world.  The power of Google is unmatched in the world wide web and there is a reason for that.  Google became a public website in 2004, and since then it has made its was to being the most successful website to date.  On November 10, 2010, Google had an estimated net worth of $163.2 billion (ironically, I Googled that).  But what did Google do different than other search engines to gain the top spot?  Siva Vaidhyanathan states it best in his introduction to The Googlization of Everything by saying, “Google was clean. It was pure.... And it offered what seemed to be neutral, democratic rankings: if one site was referred more than another, it was deemed more relevant to users and would be listed above the rest.  And so the biggest, if not the best, search engine was created.”

With Google sitting in pole position of search engines, it has access to collect all website in the digital universe.  By creating a facebook or twitter account, we allow google to collect our personal information, ultimately creating a lack of privacy.  Vaidhyanathan uses an example of the “star wars kid” where a teen uses a school camera to record himself wielding a golf ball retriever as a light saber.  Other kids get a hold of the video and post it on the internet, allowing the video to be one of the most popular internet sensations of our time.  Many remakes were made like the one I posted.  Google made it impossible for the young teen to erase his harmless video and it allowed other websites to host the video.  The surveillance of Google makes it impractical for anyone to go completely invisible.  After class on thursday, I decided to google my name to see what was out there.  To my surprise, there was an old web page that my friend made about an old band that we made as a joke.  It’s weird to think about whenever anyone googles my name in the future, that website will be on the first page of the google search even though it was just a joke when we were in middle school.

Overall, Google makes searching the web much more efficient than it had been in the past.  But with the power that it has gained over the years, it grabs any information floating around in the world wide web.  I understand that It may be hard to focus on what information we are sharing with the world when we are updating our facebook profiles.  But the positive aspects that Google provides to our everyday life outweigh the lack of privacy it comes with.  With that said, we must be aware of what we share with the world wide web and consider power of Google when we do expose ourselves to the web.

Music Pirates

If I were to take a poll in class where everybody answered honestly, I would have to assume that almost every student, if not all students have illegally downloaded music at least one time in their lives.  Does this mean we are stamped with the title “pirates”?  In his book Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig defines the term piracy as “using the creative property of others without their permission”.  So technically, yes we are pirates.  But this seems to be a pretty broad definition of piracy and I would even argue that we (the people casually downloading free music online) aren’t necessarily the pirates in this situation.

Behind all of these innocent, poor, students who are downloading free music illegally are specific websites that encourage online piracy.  These peer-to-peer or P2P networks share a wide variety of media including music, movies, television shows, and even pornography.  These networks allow a free way to get what people would usually have to pay for.  Sounds pretty appealing to a college student paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, doesn’t it?  Some may argue that it is wrong to steal music from artists who are working hard to put out this music, that it is only fair to the musicians if we buy their music.  

Actually, free downloads online benefit the artists if anything.  Janis Ian, a successful recording artists who thrived in the 60s and 70s puts this argument in perspective by saying, “When Napster was running full-tilt, we recieved about 100 hits a month from people who’d downloaded Society’s Child or At seventeen for free, then decided they wanted more information.  Of those 100 people (and these are the only ones who let us know how they’d found the site), 15 bought CDs.  Not huge sales, right? No record company is interested in 180 extra sales a year.  But... that translates to $2700, which is a lot of money in my book.  And that doesn’t include the ones who bought the CDs in stores, or who came to my shows.”  We see this strategy being used more and more in today’s music industry.  Non mainstream hip-hop artists like Curren$y release numerous mixtapes online for free.  In doing this, it expands his fan base by word of mouth and easily accessed music.  Last year, Curren$y made $1,000,000 on his tour alone.  Coincidence? I think not.

On another note, I read an article a couple years back on USA TODAY about college students getting sued for having illegally downloaded music on their computers.  The RIAA was suing students up to $18,000 dollars.  Its not the artists that are concerned about their music getting distributed for free online, but the billion dollar record companies.  These bloodthirsty companies suing students of almost a years tuition.  That seems more harmful than downloading a couple songs a week to me. So ask yourself, who is the real “pirate” here?

The Fantastic World of Flickr

This weeks agenda allowed us to dip our toes into the Flickr community.  I was not sure what to expect during this project, but I was interested to see what Flickr had to offer and it seemed that my group felt the same way.  We had a lot of fun with this project and created a twisted story about a love gone wrong.  We tried to embellish some characteristics of the horror genre, considering halloween is coming up in a couple of weeks.

The story starts out with me and Max enjoying a beautiful day at the river.  A quick change of events takes place when I find out that Max has been cheating on me, and we experience a rough break up.  Shawn is there right away to console me through the tough times and we spark up a fiery relationship quickly.  While I am using Shawn to get over the tough break up, Max uses quite a different strategy.  Max can’t quite cope with the guilt and the happiness I have found, so he decides to buy a murder weapon off the black market from Ben.  Quickly after, Max catches me alone in a secluded area and brutally stabs me to my death.  Shawn then comes to surprise me with a bouquet of flowers to find me lying dead.  As Shawn stands there in shock, you can see Max in the background ready to take out Shawn as well.

This was my first experience with Flickr and I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be.  Uploading our photo stream was easy and quick and the photo tagging was easily accessible.  The tagging is nice because it has the potential to easily share your photos with many people.  We chose just to tag our names based on whether we were in that certain picture or not.  Although thats how we tagged, you can also tag keywords, places, ect.  This allows people to use Flickr as a way to share their photography through many photostreams.  Whether photography is just an interest, a hobby, or a profession, it is a useful tool to share your photos with others.

Thanks to Flickr, people with photography hobbies have the capability to use the website as a virtual art gallery.  Photographers such as Laretta Houston and Daniel Krieger were mentioned in our reading as “Joe Schmo to pro” photographers.  This meaning that they joined Flickr as amateurs and were able to develop the techniques to become talented professional photographers.  Flickr doesn’t only allow you to share your photos on the web, but it “facilitates and speeds up the learning process” of photography by users sharing their knowledge.  Today, we usually see social networking as a waste of time and a bad habit, but Flickr offers a more productive form of networking and that is why I think it will popular website for years to come.

Mutual Respect Piracy

When we first mentioned the term “piracy” in class, the first thing that came to my mind was downloading free music and file sharing.  Considering that the majority of our class has some sort of experience in downloading music online and file sharing, I thought it was an appropriate topic to discuss in this blog.  In Lawrence Lessig’s book, Free Culture, he defines piracy as “using the creative property of others without their permission”.  So necessarily, this term isn’t only directed at the illegal music downloaders, it is also directed at the artists themselves.  This includes industries of film, radio, cable TV, and probably the most prevalent industry of piracy we see today; recorded music.

In Lessig’s chapter titled “Pirates”, he argues that “The Beatles have less control over their creative work than Grisham does.”  Time and time again we can see this exampled in the music industry today.  While authors of books have almost exclusive rights of their work, recording artists face very limited rights to theirs.  For example, the hit hip-hip song of last year “Black and yellow” by Wiz Khalifa http://www.youtube.com/watchv=UePtoxDhJSw&ob=av3e. There were so many remakes of this song using the same beat and almost none of the artists remaking the songs got permission from Wiz Khalifa (the recording artist) or Stargate (the producer).  Although Wiz had virtually no control over this, the remakes were being made faster than you could watch them.    However, even though these artists were using the same beat as the original “Black and yellow, they weren’t breaking the law because they weren’t making any profit.

This is seen on a daily basis in the music industry, especially that of hip-hop.  This lack of control over your creative work in hip-hop can actually be viewed as a good thing.  It allows a gain of popularity of the specific song, artist, or producer.  I can guarantee if you ask Wiz Khalifa how he feels about all of the remakes of “Black and Yellow”, he would say it is a good thing.  “Black and Yellow” was his first big hit and now thanks to some of the remakes (including Lil Wanye’s Packer remix) helped him become one of the biggest stars in the music industry.  artists seem to make the “your song gets popular, my song gets popular” approach. In essence, the lack of control over your songs has turned into a mutual respect piracy.

YouTube: a Digital Billboard

In the past five years or so, YouTube has emerged as one of the most recognizable websites known today.  Not only is it used as an easy way to broadcast yourself, but it is also a giant media outlet.  It is another way for mainstream companies to advertise their products.  Amanda Lotz explains in her book Television will be revolutionized “By late 2006, it remained unclear whether the flurry of amateur video was merely a passing trend or likely to revolutionize television”.  She continued to state that amateur videos have become a part of our culture.

People today can essentially make a small living of posting videos on YouTube.  After talking to my friend who has been paid by YouTube, I realized just how much it was connected with the mainstream media.  He told me that he got a letter from Google offering him a small partnership in YouTube because he had over 200 subscribers and a lot of views on his videos.  This means that he allowed YouTube to post those little advertisements on his videos like you see on a lot of YouTube videos.  He then gets paid (very small amounts) from YouTube, who gets paid from the companies that are advertising their products on the videos.

Although my friend doesn’t make a lot of money off of YouTube, I was wondering how much is it possible to make.  How much to the really popular YouTubers make? After doing some research i found some interesting information.  Rebecca Black has over 43 million views on her “Friday” music video and she has made $30,000 dollars.  Also, out of the top 10 most viewed videos on YouTube, eight are posted by VEVO channels.  So how does VEVO make their money? You guessed it, ads.

MUD's: Good? Bad? Both?

While I was reading through Sherry Turkle’s, “Aspects of Life”, many questions sifted in and out of my head.  I would continue to read on to find that almost all of them would be answered in the next few paragraphs, but there is still one question I have that is up for debate: Are MUD’s and virtual persona’s more of a positive or negative aspect of our society?  Turkle gives some clear examples of why MUD’s are a good thing, but there are also some obvious reasons why they could be considered negative.

In my opinion, Turkle’s best example of shining a positive light on MUD’s is that of Gordon the software designer.  He uses multiple virtual persona’s in MUD’s to help him socialize easier and he even admitted that he started to adopt certain traits of his characters.  MUD’s are definitely positive when people use them to experiment different characteristics in a social world without having any major consequences, such as Gordon did.  But where is the line crossed?

Personally, I have had a pretty weird experience with fake virtual personae’s.  In high school, I accepted a friend request from a girl I didn’t know (that was my first mistake) that claimed she went to my school.  For a couple weeks she wouldn’t stop messaging me and a couple of my friends, so I decided to delete her.  It turns out “she” was some guy that was two years older than me and actually went to my high school.  He was later caught sending nude pictures of himself to a couple of people that I know using that same facebook account.  

After this past week using our AIM accounts, I realized just how easy it is to manipulate somebody to believe you aren’t over the internet.  A lot of the time is can be used for fun, like it was during this project.  But during the project we knew that we were talking to a made up character.  That always isn’t the case in the real world.  There are perverted grown men manipulating children over the internet to fulfill their messed up fantasies and I’m not so sure to whether the positive in MUD’s makes up for the negatives.