COFA 1002 CONCEPTUAL PROCESS

FOR ASSESSMENT 2 FINAL RESULT

After spending hours examining human behaviour on another world in their own pocket, I have collected some data (seen on previous entries) and similar patterns between people. One thing in common is the gaze. I have came up with a set of photography of visualisation those connection. 

  Virtual Gazing is a set of photography envisioning the invisible connection emitted between a gaze and the screen. This piece demonstrate how the human eyes are directed and forced to focus on the object in front of them, making it difficult to be attentive to their surroundings. This connection also indicates the emotional interdependence of people and their virtual world through the screens. 

Not only this device disregard people from linking with the surroundings, it also act as the easiest access to your storage of memories. Different people conduct oneself to their phone differently. Some people treat it as a friend or a reminder. Phones hold all their calls history, photos, calendar, past text messages, that they have unlimited access to. People store memories in their phone unknowingly that is why there will always be an emotional connection between a person and his/her phone. 

link: Bus windows : making people think about life since 1956 It is a shame that less people are bus-window-gazing nowadays. The moment they enter the bus and&

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link: Bus windows : making people think about life since 1956

It is a shame that less people are bus-window-gazing nowadays. The moment they enter the bus and take a seat, they pull out their phones and become absorbed in their own virtual world again. Instead of using the time on the ride from point A to point B to think and reflect back to oneself or read a book, they spend it staring and processing data through the screen. It is not a smartphone's fault to be 'more entertaining' than the view outside the vehicle. It is obviously not 'immortal' to choose to do something over another. It is just the matter of thought processing. Our choice of action determines the data we input into our mind. We now have less time to think about our own current being because we are obsessing over our virtual self, the profile we're creating, and the person we want others to perceive us as. 

For research purposes, I took random buses, back and forth, to Bondi Beach and took the liberty to record clips of people's phone gazing. Of all the clips I've collected, this is the most significant one that can demonstrate my point. 

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(continued from the last entry) When you actually have your phone up in front of your face, it is natural for human eyes to shift focus to the object in front of them. This is the reverse perspective of how a person gazing at the screen will encounter. Background would only be defocused if the eyes are on the screen. Try. 

FOR ASSESSMENT 2 PROCESS

FOR ASSESSMENT 2 PROCESS

FOR ASSESSMENT 2 PROCESS

Smartphone addicts are starting to curb the habit.

Seems to me like people see being connected as some kind of drugs: somehow addictive and irresistible. Deep down, we recognise that the act is "inappropriate", but by some means we can't seem to stop the habit. 

What I found memorable from this article : 

      "As smartphones continue to burrow their way into our lives ...."  

      “Disconnecting is a luxury that we all need.” 

     "The rule was instituted in January, after a vacation in Honduras where the couple found themselves without Internet access and ultimately happy about it."

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Rebecca Ann Sedwick, 12, leaped to her death from a platform at an abandoned cement plant near her home in Florida, in a case that highlights the growing use of cellphone apps for cyberbullying.

MIAMI — The clues were buried in her bedroom. Before leaving for school on Monday morning, Rebecca Ann Sedwick had hidden her schoolbooks under a pile of clothes and left her cellphone behind, a rare lapse for a 12-year-old girl.

Inside her phone’s virtual world, she had changed her user name on Kik Messenger, a cellphone application, to “That Dead Girl” and delivered a message to two friends, saying goodbye forever. Then she climbed a platform at an abandoned cement plant near her home in the Central Florida city of Lakeland and leaped to the ground, the Polk County sheriff said.

In jumping, Rebecca became one of the youngest members of a growing list of children and teenagers apparently driven to suicide, at least in part, after being maligned, threatened and taunted online, mostly through a new collection of texting and photo-sharing cellphone applications. Her suicide raises new questions about the proliferation and popularity of these applications and Web sites among children and the ability of parents to keep up with their children’s online relationships.

For more than a year, Rebecca, pretty and smart, was cyberbullied by a coterie of 15 middle-school children who urged her to kill herself, her mother said. The Polk County sheriff’s office is investigating the role of cyberbullying in the suicide and considering filing charges against the middle-school students who apparently barraged Rebecca with hostile text messages. Florida passed a law this year making it easier to bring felony charges in online bullying cases.

Rebecca was “absolutely terrorized on social media,” Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County said at a news conference this week.

Along with her grief, Rebecca’s mother, Tricia Norman, faces the frustration of wondering what else she could have done. She complained to school officials for several months about the bullying, and when little changed, she pulled Rebecca out of school. She closed down her daughter’s Facebook page and took her cellphone away. She changed her number. Rebecca was so distraught in December that she began to cut herself, so her mother had her hospitalized and got her counseling. As best she could, Ms. Norman said, she kept tabs on Rebecca’s social media footprint.

It all seemed to be working, she said. Rebecca appeared content at her new school as a seventh grader. She was gearing up to audition for chorus and was considering slipping into her cheerleading uniform once again. But unknown to her mother, Rebecca had recently signed on to new applications — ask.fm, and Kik and Voxer — which kick-started the messaging and bullying once again.

“I had never even heard of them; I did go through her phone but didn’t even know,” said Ms. Norman, 42, who works in customer service. “I had no reason to even think that anything was going on. She was laughing and joking.”

Sheriff Judd said Rebecca had been using these messaging applications to send and receive texts and photographs. His office showed Ms. Norman the messages and photos, including one of Rebecca with razor blades on her arms and cuts on her body. The texts were full of hate, her mother said: “Why are you still alive?” “You’re ugly.”

One said, “Can u die please?” To which Rebecca responded, with a flash of resilience, “Nope but I can live.” Her family said the bullying began with a dispute over a boy Rebecca dated for a while. But Rebecca had stopped seeing him, they said.

Rebecca was not nearly as resilient as she was letting on. Not long before her death, she had clicked on questions online that explored suicide. “How many Advil do you have to take to die?”

In hindsight, Ms. Norman wonders whether Rebecca kept her distress from her family because she feared her mother might take away her cellphone again.

“Maybe she thought she could handle it on her own,” Ms. Norman said.

It is impossible to be certain what role the online abuse may have played in her death. But cyberbullying experts said cellphone messaging applications are proliferating so quickly that it is increasingly difficult for parents to keep pace with their children’s complex digital lives.

“It’s a whole new culture, and the thing is that as adults, we don’t know anything about it because it’s changing every single day,” said Denise Marzullo, the chief executive of Mental Health America of Northeast Florida in Jacksonville, who works with the schools there on bullying issues.

No sooner has a parent deciphered Facebook or Twitter or Instagram than his or her children have migrated to the latest frontier. “It’s all of these small ones where all this is happening,” Ms. Marzullo said.

In Britain, a number of suicides by young people have been linked to ask.fm, and online petitions have been started there and here to make the site more responsive to bullying. The company ultimately responded this year by introducing an easy-to-see button to report bullying and saying it would hire more moderators.

“You hear about this all the time,” Ms. Norman said of cyberbullying. “I never, ever thought it would happen to me or my daughter.”

Questions have also been raised about whether Rebecca’s old school, Crystal Lake Middle School, did enough last year to help stop the bullying; some of it, including pushing and hitting, took place on school grounds. The same students also appear to be involved in sending out the hate-filled online messages away from school, something schools can also address.

Nancy Woolcock, the assistant superintendent in charge of antibullying programs for Polk County Schools, said the school received one bullying complaint from Rebecca and her mother in December about traditional bullying, not cyberbullying. After law enforcement investigated, Rebecca’s class schedule was changed. Ms. Woolcock said the school also has an extensive antibullying campaign and takes reports seriously.

But Ms. Norman said the school should have done more. Officials told her that Rebecca would receive an escort as she switched classes, but that did not happen, she said.

Rebecca never boarded her school bus on Monday morning. She made her way to the abandoned Cemex plant about 10 minutes away from her modest mobile home; the plant was a place she had used as a getaway a few times when she wanted to vanish. Somehow, she got past the high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, which is now a memorial, with teddy bears, candles and balloons. She climbed a tower and then jumped.

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Screen capturing 'almost' every recent conversations (up to 3 days) from my own phone allows me to realise just how much of an extravert I really am. In one day, I have (in average) 10 conversations in the form of alphabets with 10 different people around the world, given the fact that all my friends are either back home or they are doing their own studies with different countries. There are quite a few numbers of characters that I keep in touch 'everyday' and still play big roles in my life even if they are not physically here. By only constructing letters of not more than 8, a simple "wassup" every morning to people I still want to know about their well-being, I managed to keep this invisible friendship bond over the years. Certainly because one, I do care for them and two, to not feel alone. 

Because I tend to tell different person about different aspects of my life, by going through these screen captures, you can actually tell what I have been through this pass few days, especially now that I am going through probably the most stressful phase I've ever been over 4 years, conversations with my parents are all showered with dont-worry-be-happy messages in Thai; aunt and sister trying to help out by sending pic of some quote and flower. (How would a flower help me cope with stress anyway.)

With social network, I managed to have this weird on-going digital so-called relationship with a guy I met in California. We met once and still keep in touch almost everyday after that. Its been 3 and a half years. 

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Independent filmmaker Casey Neistat made a great short film about this weird subculture.

There’s a range of people who do it. Some are there professionally (they’re paid by people who want the iPhone first, but don’t have the time). Some are gadget obsessed.

And some seem completely reckless, like this person below who was sleeping on the sidewalk, using a plastic bag (what!?) to shield themselves from the elements.