Class talks

This chapter from Oxford book "The New Generation of Political Advocacy Groups"  was a very long, yet insightful reading. It outlined the key role that internet-mediated advocacy groups play in American politics today. Furthermore, it talks about the two categories of internet politics; one examines new forms of online participation and the other focuses on the savagery of elite political institutions. The term clicktivism is used which implies that researchers have overseen the organizational layer of politics. These things are all very interesting but kind of hard to wrap your head around. It basically states how internet started and operated groups play a role in American politics today. The two sides of internet politics are social participation of the public and the resilience of the current high-ranking politicians. Clicktivism is defined as “the use of social media and other online methods to promote a cause” from the Oxford dictionary. I think this is just another wa...

Apparently, there is a huge issue in the gaming community with gender (as of recent). I had no idea this was a problem and I am decently involved in the gaming community. According to this video, woman feel disregarded and downgraded in both the gaming community and the games themselves. I was baffled by this video and how offended woman are in the gaming world. In my experience, most girls do not want anything to do with gaming. Some, however, do things like live stream and consider it to be one of their hobbies. I personal think this all boils down to woman wanting to be equal in everything men do. I understand that, but this is just dumb. If you want to game, then game. Don't ask the creators of the games to change them because you feel degraded. If you feel this way then don't play that game and find one that appeals to your liking. There was a video we watched in class about girl gamers being targeted by male gamers because of their gender. Threats were have said to have ...

Image by Nikodem Nijaki via Wikimedia In class, we started using the website TopHat. I personally have used this platform before, and honestly, I am not a fan. We would use it in one of my old classes to answer questions we had no idea the answer to because the class was very weird and confusing. However, haven't seen it used like we use it now in my Esoc class. Now, I read a passage or two and answer questions that help me reflect on what I just read. This is very useful for me and makes it easier to retain information. I also find this subject much more interesting than the last class I used TopHat in, so I most likely pay more attention as well. One thing we read about was Civil Inattention. This is the "cultural norm whereby strangers who are in close proximity refrain from imposing on each other, staying out of one another's business to respect privacy and personal boundaries." I never knew there was a name for such a thing. I feel as humans, if we choose to ...

In class, we were assigned a project to focus on collaboration and the formation of groups. Were able to choose our own teams and our task was to create a presentation of a group we found (for the class) We were asked to use Tuckman's five stages to analyze and interpret these groups. There were a lot of good presentations; but my personal favorite was the one some group did about the movie The Longest Yard. Greats videos with accompanying explanations to make a great presentation. My group, however, did the film Rouge One. This was a good example because in all star wars movies there is a group that comes together to try and fight evil. This movie was a little stranger though, especially for the adjourning stage, because this was everyone's death because once they fulfilled their goal, they all were killed. My part was norming and I thought I did a decent job! Videos would've helped and I was a little nervous but it was fun and honestly cool to realize how life is pretty m...

I never new about Fair use . I thought that pretty much everything was copyrighted, yet people use other people's work just because they can. I didn't realize how big of an issue copyright was until this year. I always thought it was something we did in school so we didn't get cited for plagiarism, and that was it. Now I notice how big of a problem it is in many aspects of life and how important it is or it can ruin your, or someone else's, work. Copyright, however, is trumped by Fair Use in some situations. This is the situations in when it is essentially "okay" to uses copyrighted images. Some examples for this are for educational purposes, if you ask the creator for permission and get it, or if you are not harming the creators work and not producing profits from it. In our projects we have upcoming for class, we are able to use copyrighted images due to it being required for an educational purpose and there is no profit being made or harm being done to the ...

Here is a link to the video I will be discussing. I will highlight the beginning and my favorite parts. A Remix Manifesto is a movie long film with everything from the creation of the internet to Disney's infamous ways. The video starts with the introduction of "mash ups" with the artist Girl Talk. This is the start of the debate over you making something your own work through creativity and stealing someone's music. Even back then this was an issue. Now, it is something that is based upon the creator of the music and its genre. The video then goes into the topic of Copyright vs. Copyleft. This is the introduction to the "remix" culture that took over the internet. In EDM music, my personal favorite, DJ's thrive off one another and the community accepts the remixes and reusing of popular songs. There is no copyright issue; it is quite the opposite as there is an encouragement for remakes. This transfers into the culture of remakes, mash ups, and remix...

If you didn't know, Reddit has a Suicide Prevention sub-Reddit that has over 40,000 subscribers. This means that 40,000 people can see posts, post themselves, and comment or thumbs up/down on existing posts that were published on this specific thread.  Here is a link to an article discussed in class today regarding facts and feelings about this page. I never use Reddit so I had no idea this was a thing; let alone a semi-popular thing. To me, this is absolutely ridiculous. There are many more cons than there are pros. The thing I find so wrong is this is just straight up dangerous to mentally unstable people. Other random people who may or may not have the best intentions in what they say or do are allowed to give you a thumbs up or down on your suicidal thought and comment on it using their freedom of speech. I think this is insane that Reddit allows this and there is no way there is more harm than good that comes out of this. If someone decides to give a thumbs down on one of the...