A Blog About Blogs

This week we look at the case study of China and how the have effectively the great firewall along with the actual great wall. With this it shows the amount of censorship and lack of what people can actually access within this country, regardless if you are local or not. Through quickly looking at Wikipedia’s short list of what is actually blocked, comparing it to western life it easily shows that we wouldn’t be going about life as we normally do. We wouldn’t be able to show what we had on Instagram, rant at a company on Twitter or even draw into the easy conversations we do on Facebook. 

Among these few social media sites there are so many more, even aspects of Google are blocked. Something that is potentially an everyday aspect of life, where the common phrase “let me google that for you” came from, our actual way of getting the answers to the questions that pain us the most. More importantly where would our memes and cat gifs come from? It would be a whole different way of interacting online, but don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean that people in China don’t have access to social websites. From the typical sites we use, there has been Chinese branch offs that they are easily able to use such as Weibo, QQ and Baidu.

In this respect of making websites to continue being able to interact really draws back to crowd sourcing in times of need and creating things that are needed. As technology grows, it is evidently more difficult to censor people online and limit what we can do online. Especially when we grow with the amount of proxys there are to get to a website we want or even ways to access content from other countries. Although in Australia we don’t directly see this issue of websites being blocked, our struggle is gaining access to full libraries of content on websites such as Netflix and Hulu.

Social gaming, easily thought about games that we would play on Facebook or even games that we play against people online. Looking at games where there is a social aspect, branches far and wide, especially because of the internet becoming more entwined in our lives every day. Any game that you can play and interact with someone else online is considered a form of social gaming, may it be a simple card game or raiding a boss dungeon.

Gaming itself isn’t just something that is strictly stuck to online, we have been gaming in different ways for so many years, and just the online aspect has made it easier. Looking at things like Pokémon, where you can play on your own and then connect with others to trade of battle can even hold onto a bit of social gaming. Even with games on portable devices there is always an aspect that you can get better things or even progress quicker by involving or connecting with other people. Things like street pass on the Nintendo DS shows this really well. Simply by carrying around ones DS can meet others who are doing the same to collect puzzle pieces and battle bosses to save the king/queen.

Drawing back it can be quite easy to see that any game where you can connect with others have some sort of aspect of sociality to it. One could even say the way that we collect stamps for a free coffee or buy nine boost juices and get one free could be considered a social game. Through this we actively go about out day joining in on loyalty programs and even coming together with others to grab a juice or a coffee. Loyalty programs themselves draw from the idea of Gamification (apply game mechanics to real life to motivate people to achieve/collect things for rewards) where one needs to get ‘x’ amount of things before they are rewarded or can go to the next exclusive level (easily seen in virgin’s velocity frequent flyers.)

Although these things don’t directly or easily seem like a social game, or even a game. It is a way for individuals to be motivated and to effectively play the game and collect things to get exclusive rewards or access to better things. This sort of idea can be looked at in a way where people are competing against each other to get the best rewards, while going about their normal social lives.

Through the vast ways that we access the internet, there is always the chance for awareness to be raised (as easily seen through the ice bucket challenge) and even by posts of what are good for you. Even the rise of what could be considered the super food movement or even looking at paleo diets, it’s easy to see what the health trends are. Although these are the most dominant things seen through social media there are other things out that could be consider more so a hidden health community.

Looking at websites such as petmd (for animals of course) and webmd, it becomes clearer that there is a community on its own of health. On these sorts of sites you can simply put symptoms in and it easily comes up with what you could have, a simply cold or even something much worse. From this it can easily lead to someone thinking that they have something they quite easily might not.

Although it’s not really a community that interacts with each other, it’s a silent one that does exist. It even goes to the extent of articles such as Women’s Top 5 Health Concerns, which to some degree can actually be useful, by bringing awareness of what potentially could happen or be of concern. Overall though the biggest risk of this can actually be people self-diagnosing, which in turn could actually lead to their health worsening. On the flip side, this could even bring up more of an awareness for self-care.

Something like this is definitely hard to prove either way, but the awareness of oneself is definitely something that can improve health. Even in these situations of being sick, branching out to others in a forum can lead to better support and an actual creation of a community where one can seek help to get better. Many cases where one does self-diagnose, they do actually seek help from peers to confirm this. However this itself could be a problem of labeling and could even lead to this person holding onto this and thinking that they actually have something they don’t. For a case like this one could look at autism and how self diagnosis or even a real diagnosis can cause issues in life. (explore by Melanie Yergeau through her article Dx*this*)

All in all, overall the way that we interact with others and look at our own health is really guided by the community that we immerse our self in. May it be an online forum, seeing an actual doctor or even just by talking to friends. There are both positives and negatives of these interactions, but at times also needed to have this to better understand yourself and grow.

Facebook has changed the way that we are able to interact in times of need. May it be related to natural disasters or even something on a smaller scale, like a missing person. It doesn’t have to be a large scale disaster to be able to grab help from the wider community. 

Following large scale natural disasters, it’s easy to see how people can crowdfund support or even send their love to help those in need. At times, this can lead back to the sense of the lazy user - slacktivism itself. Sometimes the small like, click and share doesn’t realistically do anything, especially if it is trying to get help for someone on the other side of the world.

Through this, looking at the more localised and missing person aspects, crowd sourcing really goes above and beyond for emergency services being able to scale up and grab help for to locate the individual. Looking at crowd sourcing in this way, you can easily look at Facebook pages such as Victoria Police or Australian Missing Persons. Victoria Police’s Facebook page regularly posts media released related to missing persons, which give information of where they were last seen, what they look like and much more. As it is an easily shareable post, this allows Facebook users to easily spread the word, and in some cases, there are searches that people join in and assist in the search for the missing person. Looking at a missing toddler a few weeks ago (10th of April) you can easily see how effective crowd-sourcing was. With this case a toddler was kidnapped straight from a mother’s arms, through sharing details on Facebook with the community, this actually resulted in a few families coming along and searching all night, as a similar situation had happened previously to them. The assistance rendered by these additional families was invaluable and resulted in the toddler being located. Not only does the ability of sharing on Facebook spread the word but in real life it allows individuals to come by and help out as well.

By looking at situations like this it is easily shown how social media can be used to crowd source in times of crisis, not only in the obvious ways during natural disasters, but also in ways that help the community and missing people.

As trolling is based on either trying to aggravate or deliberately put someone down on the internet. Through looking at trolling it’s clear that it can be at times more abusive or threatening. There are many different forms that trolling can take, from angry tweets at someone to actually sending death threats to someone. In this sort of case we can look at Anita Sarkeesian and her issues when she started speaking out about games objectifying women and then being victimised by many male gamers across the world.

Sarkeesian’s channel Feminist Frequency has gotten huge amounts of trolls flock to her videos and has actually resulted in times that she has had her real life threatened. In this sort of case what she has been on the receiving end of, should not be called trolling but more so called abuse or harassment. All of the sorts of abuse that Sarkeesian has been on the end of it’s not only limited to angry tweets, it has more so turned into a game for her trolls, as they have even made a game where you get to click a photograph of her and it punches her in the face making it bloody.  Trolls have always been in some cases extreme but it’s really something that should be stopped at this level.

In these sorts of cases, what are trolls trying to get? Usually it goes on the principle of ‘don’t feed the trolls’, but when you’re simply speaking out about gender inequality in gaming and objectification of women, how is that actually feeding them? For many of Sarkeesian’s Youtube videos, she has blocked comments and in a lot of cases she simply ignores her trolls and blocks them as well. In simple ways of dealing with trolls this should stop them, but in her case they have drawn to real life threats as well, such as turning up at her talks and threatening to start a mass shooting. Usually something like should easily be prevented and not able to happen but at some of her events they have had to be cancelled, so not only in this case she tried to stop the online trolling, the offline world was against her and couldn’t really stop it.

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