Writing Journal 10/16
For this post, I chose the linguistic and visual modes. I chose to use the visual mode because I found the perfect gif to show my audience what the concept of these topics were. I also used linguistic mode because this helped me to present what I had learned and gathered from these two topics. In the reading and video, Sustaining Critical Literacies in the Digital Information Age: The Rhetoric of Sharing, Prosumerism, and Digital Algorithmic Surveillance and the video Dana Boyd on the Spread of Conspiracies and Hate Online, they both talk about the prevalence of social media has today in everyoneâs lives. In the article, itâs about how social media users share information with one another. The article describes the use of âsharingâ on social media websites as invisible capitalism. Prosumerism is everywhere nowadays because people are posting their favorite products and giving customer feedback on the internet. The article provided some examples of prosumerism to help the readers get a better grasp of what the definition entails. Some examples provided within the article for prosumerism was, âIKEAâs build-your-own furniture, self-service gas pumps, automated teller machines(ATMs), store-purchased medical kitsâ (Beck, pg.3). That type of prosumerism is known as the third wave which is the information era. People also might not realize that we are being watched by what we interact with and click on, on websites. This is called Digital algorithmic surveillance which is when websites collect data on their users based off of what they look at and interact with. This is so social media websites can gather information on their users and then personalize what they are seeing based off of what they like.Â
The video by Dana Boyd who is a senior researcher talks about how mass shootings and other events could be a result from the manipulation of the media. Itâs the idea that media spreads false information also known as âfake newsâ. Dana talks about how easy it is to spread false news by producing viral media, creating advertisements that anyone has access to, also to get journalists to write stories based off your claims. Thereâs a conspiracy theory on crisis actors where people who would show up on TV after a shooting had just happened, which the theorist believe the shooting never actually happened. This lead to the theorist wanted journalist to use the phrase âcrisis actorsâ so people can start to look up that word and discover the conspiracy theories behind that phrase. For me, hearing all of this was just a crazy concept to grab that people would really fake these kinds of things.Â
For this post, I chose the linguistic and visual modes. I chose to use the visual mode because I found the perfect gif to show my audience what the concept of these topics were. I also used linguistic mode because this helped me to present what I had learned and gathered from these two topics.Â

















