#ducksareamazing

Crowd Sourcing means the community, in this sense, people on social media platforms, contributing to a project, usually in the form of information, advise, opinions and in most cases, money.

Crowd Sourcing, from my point of view can be divided into two simple types, monetary and informative.

Monetary Sourcing

As stated in the name itself, monetary sourcing involves receiving funds from the community to fund their projects be it individually or from a company. There are platforms made specifically for the purposes of crowd funding, which allows users to create and market their ideas, without the monetary constraints. Platforms such as KickStarter and GoFundMe. KickStarter is platform which allows individuals with small funds and big ideas to make their products into a reality by showing the public an idea of their project. GoFundMe on the other hand, markets itself as a more light-hearted platform, for users to obtain funds from the public to celebrate personal occasions or start miniature charities for people in need.

Speaking of charities, ever heard of MrBeast on Youtube?

He started a movement last year called TeamTrees, and this year, he started another one called TeamSeas. TeamTrees started off with Mark Rober (ex-NASA Engineer), and MrBeast (businessman and youtuber) as a small movement with his fans to plant trees for every dollar donated, but after partnering with the Arbor Day Foundation, the movement exploded and celebrities such as Elon Musk donated staggering amounts, up to one million dollars. The duo's initial goal was to raise 20 million dollars and plant 20 million trees, worldwide. As of right now, TeamTrees has raised 23 million dollars in total and the planting is still going on worldwide, while still accepting donations.

TeamTrees video:

TeamSeas is a similar project by the two that started off about a week ago that promises to pick up one pound of trash (0.4kg) from the ocean for every dollar donated. This time, the duo are partnering with the charities Ocean Conservancy and The Ocean Cleanup and their goal is to remove 30 million pounds of trash (14 million kg) by the end of 2021.

TeamSeas video:

(PS, don't know if I am allowed to put links to their charities here but if you want to donate for a good cause, just go to teamseas or teamtrees on google and you'll find em :D)

Informative Sourcing

Informative sourcing consists of users giving feedback or acting as play testers for the website and or application that is being made.

Platforms such as Testlio allows creators to post their creations and receive constructive feedback to better them. There are other websites such as Innocentive and Openideo that promotes themselves as user testing websites, but there are just too many websites out there, all for different purposes. Such as games (EA Playtesting), products (uTest), and even designs (99Designs), obtaining feedback while protecting the rights of the creators.

Risk of Crowd Sourcing

Every good thing has it's risk and crowd sourcing is not all good. Creators are not bounded by contracts in a lot of the more prominent websites, such as KickStarter, Scams are common in these situations where they obtain valuable feedback and money and run away with it, leaving the audience with disappointment. In one of the biggest failures in KickStarters, the Montrex Watch project raised 61 thousand dollars and blamed the backers for their downfall and fail to release the product to the public. In a more open and blatant scam on KickStarter, "It's All Good" was a comedy movie that raised 76 thousand dollars and the crew ran away with the money.

All in all...

There is no denying that crowd sourcing via the internet, and by relation, social media, is good. There are some risks involved certainly, but that's what encourages creators or companies to take risks and go crazy with their ideas. I believe if these websites bind their creators with contracts, people and companies will be scared to be innovative and make new interesting inventions, not available on the market.

Because it's week 9 and if you don't realize our main topic is social media, then I'm glad I told you lmao, anyways. Let me just get this joke out of the way first:

Ok, now that the fan joke is out of the way, let's get back to the actual topic.

What is fandom?

A fandom is a subculture of people that consists of fans. The word fandom itself originated back from an 1896 Washington Post sports column describing "local fandom."

The word fandom can be separated into two parts, "fan" and the suffix "-dom". "Fan" originated from the word "fanatic", which was used as an adjective for "frenzied" or "mad", while the suffix for "-dom" two things, a rank or the rank of a person who controls that place (a kingdom who is controlled by the king, hence the "-dom") at the back, or wisdom, which is a state of being wise.

I'd like to think that the "-dom" in fandom takes a little bit of inspiration from both sides of the meaning. On one side, it could mean a region controlled by fans, which to be honest, that's what most creators/artists end up doing to appeal to more fans; and on the other side, it could mean the fan's wisdom on that particular topic. Ever think that you know more about Justin Bieber than himself? Well, there you go.

The fun stuff

Now that we've got the English out of the way, we can move on to what is inside a fandom. I hope you're ready, cause where we're going, we aren't coming back.

Canon

This is the 'boring stuff', or lore and characters that are written by the author themselves. This is the information given out by the creator and anything that is not written in the creators own personal bible or baptized by them is considered sacrilegious.

For example, if I said that Harry Potter grew up in the France and ate baguette's for breakfast everyday, and chilling under the Eiffel Tower on his free time, picking up chicks called Emma Watson, I'd probably be burnt at the cross by hardcore fans. It's not Canon.

Anything that J.K. Rowling writes and acknowledges to be canon, is canon.

Harry had erectile dysfunction.

Headcanon

Headcanon is when fans basically choose to believe in what they want to, based on previous interactions between characters, or established lore, even if it goes against canon.

For example, Hermione should have ended up with Harry, and that is my personal headcanon.

Shipping

So, this.. this can be either canon or non-canon, sometimes they go from non-canon to canon, sometimes they are never meant to be but the tension between their characters is so strong you just wanna see them fu-

I digress.

Shipping is when you pair up two characters that you really like, imagining and hoping that they'd be a couple. When when you ship someone, you become a shipper and you get to choose a ship name. An example for me would be when I shipped two of the best characters that had some insane chemistry together but the author just WOULD NOT make it canon and ACTUALLY TRIED TO ANGER THE FANS BY SHIPPING THEM WITH ANOTHER PAIR AND THEY END UP GOING BACK TO THEM ANYWAYS JUST BECAUSE FANS KEP-

I digress.

Harry and Hermione's ship name is Harmony and I love it.

Fanfiction

Fanfiction is when fans take writing into their own hands and start writing about the story based on the characters and lore established as canon, creating a Fanon of sorts. Based on personal experience, this usually happens when fans wants to put themselves in their favourite character's perspective and live their lives because of idk, jealously. Or when fans decide that the story that the creator is writing or the ending that the story is going towards is unsatisfactory. Or or, when fans decide that they want Harry to have private lessons with Snape after school to study each other's wands.

Fanfiction can be anything, literally.

There are fanfictions of literally anything from games to even the real world history. I'm 100% sure that there is fanfiction of Leonardo da Vinci meeting up with a time-travelling dog that adopted a child. Oh wai-

Works of fanfiction aren't illegal as well, since they are considered "transformative" work based on the original source material.

Fanworks

Fanworks are stuff that fans make to pay homage to the canon. Stuff is very loosely defined here, it could be artwork, it could be a piece of music or even an entire alternate universe where they rewrite the entire story based on their liking. While talking about this topic, I would like to bring up Undertale and their amazing fandom, with a game built around making choices and decisions, with such colourful and interactive characters and makes every playthrough different, the alternate universes that have spawned from Undertale is, amazing.

The music and fanart made out of the game also tests the boundary of the fan's imagination. Below is a artwork of a character (Sans) from the game itself, compared to a random fanart you can find with a simple google search.

Props goes to Hakki who drew the artwork.

Social Media

How does this all tie back to Social Media?

Well, everything. A fandom would not be a collective group of people if they can't collect themselves and unite. Social Media has allowed creators to reach out with their personal fandom to get feedback and recognition to motivate them or seeing their reaction. Have you ever made something and other people reacted either positively and negatively?

That feeling is amazing.

Seeing other people invested in something you created is what keeps creators going, and social media allows that. People often think of social media as a very specific thing, like Facebook, Instagram, or even Tumblr, but social media is a very loose term used to describe websites that focuses on communication, content-sharing, and collaborations, and that basically describes all the websites that are user interactive.

Fans will always exist, but fans will have trouble uniting to be a fandom, without the help of social media.

Social Media is an effective method for spreading the idea of an activism movement, but it is not effective in evoking change in our current democratic political system.

I summarized my entire blog for you, but if you wanna hear my thoughts on it, keep reading.

Social media as a tool to spread Activism

There is no denying the fact that social media platforms have taken over the world, and we have let it happened. In this majorly democratic world, where freedom of speech is emphasized, what is more dangerous than a place where everyone is able to share their thoughts and connect with other users from the comfort of their house.

Back in 2020 alone, over 3.6 billion people in the world are on one or more social media platforms. With around 7.7 billion in the world, that is roughly half of the entire world's population being connected through the internet having daily conversation, discussions and sharing thoughts and pictures.

The first use of a major hashtag for an activism movement can be traced back to Trayvon Martin, who was an African-American teenager that was shot by a hispanic male. This raised a lot of controversy from the media and the hashtag of #BlackLivesMatter took Twitter and other platforms by storm.

This was the start to social media being a beginning of modern protests and in turn, linking it to political engagements. The government was not spared from this as America was one of the countries that legalized the possession of a firearm, which in turn led to the death of Trayvon Martin.

#BlackLivesMatter is often paired with #MeToo or #MakeAmericaGreatAgain or MAGA. This allows other users who only care about making political changes to also jump onto the trend and bring up underlying issues that finally gain traction due to the spike in #BlackLivesMatter.

How effective was the #BlackLivesMatter at getting people to engage and share it?

Very much so, along with other activism movements that relate all the way back to political engagement as well (funny coincidence).

How effective was movement in enacting change?

Not at all.

Why is there still no change?

Sure, a lot of people are talking about it, but why is there still no change?

Political view

Let's step in the shoes of the people in charge and see how we would handle this situation. People argue that police treat darker skin toned individuals more harshly or are racist towards them, leading to a higher number of arrests and more violence being used against them. Take a look at the picture below:

The black people are not being mistreated, it's just the underlying thought of racism from all the way back in the days of the Civil Right's Movement.

If special privileges were implemented to protect the black people from the law then it would no unfair for the others as well. The polices arrests are justified but the inhumane treatment is just poor training, which is separate kind of issue.

Law changes

Why don't the police just carry less lethal weapons, like tasers?

Well, long story short, civilians in America are allowed to carry guns, therefore the law enforcers, are required to carry guns as their own means of self defense.

Why don't we just ban the gun law altogether?

Now, this is a harder question to answer. America prides itself as a free country, and banning the right to own a gun for protection is going against their own morals and their ego as one of the most powerful nations in the world would not allow that. In addition to beliefs and ego, the backlash they would receive from the citizens would be far exceeding the current BlackLivesMatter movement, along with the confiscation preexisting firearms already in possessions of the citizens, changing the law willy-nilly is not the right way to go out combating this issue.

Where does that leave us?

Social media isn't gonna make changes. It's just going to get people to talk about making changes. In this day an age of the democratic ideology, we all want to fit in and don't want to stand out. We agree to what everyone else thinks is right to get them to vote or to fit in.

Our leaders might espouse manifestos that appeal to the majority, but when they see the amount of work needed, it's often done half ass-ed or forgotten completely. ( Not just talking about Malaysian politics here, the mexican wall was pretty underwhelming ngl). Which is sort of poetic, in a way. Why?

This is exactly what social media is like. If you refer back to the first image of this post, you can see that when there is nothing to talk about, there are barely any hashtags caring for the black individuals, they only talk about it when its trending or it's hot. So in a way, it's not that social media can't make change, us as a community aren't interested in change in the first place, maybe some people, but majority of us just want to have something to talk about.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. References:

~ Anon 2021, Activism in the Social Media Age, viewed 11 October, 2021, <https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/07/11/activism-in-the-social-media-age/>.

Short answer, maybe.

Long answer, maaaaaaaybe?

Let me explain.

Where should I begin?

Right at the start I suppose. The first blog was Links.net, back in 1994 when a fellow student got bored one day and made his first website to publish his writing. This student was Justin Hall, who wanted a place to share this thoughts, his own academic work and some website links that he enjoyed (probably some memes back in the 90's).

But just like content creators nowadays, when they see someone doing a novel thing and is getting a lot of attention, they started doing it too, thus during the age before the term "blogging" was born, these sites were known as "Online Diaries" or "Personal Pages", which makes you wonder why they were shared to the entire internet. In 1997, when the "Online Diaries" formula was worn out and people couldn't find ways to continue innovating, Jorn Barger from his own site called Robot Wisdom referred and coined these sites as "weblog".

Since making a website was a really technical thing to do back in the day, most of the sites were made by programmers that talked about nerdy stuff. But on 1998, Jonathan Dube did the unthinkable and made a blog about something actually fun, an event. He "weblogged" an event called Hurricane Bonnie for the Charlotte Observer. The website looked something like this:

This masterpiece, along with the creation of something called the "Open Diary", which was a platform that allowed people to comment on their writing allowed people with no programming experience to also interact with others. A few tweak and changes were made, including the term "blogging" by Peter Merholz in 1998.

TikTok on the clock, on the clock, but the party won't stop.

As Kesha once famously said, oh whoa, whoa-oh.

TikTok is undeniably a worldwide phenomena, starting as a rival for an app called Musical.ly. It was called Douyin (抖音) at first, but was renamed TikTok to appeal to it's international users. The two apps were fighting in a market that was relatively free of competition, with the posts consisting mainly of music playing in the background and a short video.

This formula was a bit of a hit or miss, as the content was so random, that every single frame of the 15 seconds of content was literally filled to the brim with content and information.

Yes, I said 15 seconds.

Because that is where TikTok is truly unique. For younger generations that grew up with video content, like TV, Youtube and even video games to a certain extent, their attention span is very limited and reading just isn't as interesting or appealing to them anymore.

With that being said, who doesn't like creativity?

When you are only given 15 seconds to prove yourself, what would you do to grab the attention of millions or billions of overstimulated individuals?

No matter how short, simple or straight to the point your blog is, blogs will never be able to do what TikTok does. You can't condense a blog to be a 15 seconds read, while being meaningful or interesting. You can put a lot of pictures in to to make it fancy but where do you go from there?

Everyone and their mothers know what TikTok is.

If you think about it, why are we even pitting TikTok against blogging? Why can we go up to someone, ask them if "TikTok" is killing blogging and assume they know what "TikTok" is?

Because of just good advertising.

Good advertising isn't just important for a platform to be well known, it's essential. Developed by a company in China, ByteDance understood the application that they had, and advertised outside of China, they went international, going so far as to even rebrand themselves from Douyin, to TikTok. They took a risk, they advertised all over, and it paid off. Once they got people to start talking about it, they won't stop talking about it.

Not to beat a dead horse but, after 2010, do you still see people advertising about blogs?

No, and it's not because that it's irrelevant, but it's because all the blogging sites are scattered everywhere. The one prominent blogging site, Tumblr was barely hanging on, but was shot in the head after the ban on pornography on 17 December, 2018. Tumblr was once a 1.1 billion dollar company, bought by Yahoo in an attempt to save it from drowning, but failed soon after and ended up sleeping with the fishes at a value of around 3 million.

But that's not to say that the ban was the only reason that it was bleeding of it's users, we'll get to that later.

The rise of Instagram

I never knew that one day I'd had to actually research and write about Instagram but, the things I do to pass the semester is insane.

On 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger started a video and photo sharing platform called Instagram. 2 years later, it was bought over by Facebook for 1 billion dollars.

Why did Facebook buy Instagram? What was so special about an app that mainly focuses on pictures and videos? Isn't it just the same thing as Facebook but with less features?

Well you see, that's where Instagram caught the world by storm

Instagram does one thing, but does it well

Instagram only practices one kick, but they do it very well.

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger initially made Instagram as a location check-in app, called Burbn. They soon found out that users were mainly using it for the picture sharing function, so they played towards their strength and reduced the app to only picture and video sharing, in addition to renaming it Instagram.

You get a post, you get a post, and you get a post, everyone gets a post!

Instagram is owned by Facebook, and also is in cooperation with Twitter and Tumblr, making sharing images really easy. You can post on Instagram, and simultaneously post on other platforms as well. This allows ease of access for those who just wanna live in the moment while sharing their experiences with others. The unique "story" feature also allows ads to be incorporated without much disruption for the user experience.

While we're on the topic of advertising, Instagram started with only 25,000 users, but some of them were big names, namely Jack Dorsey, who was the co-founder of Twitter, tweeted about it. This made Apple users to flock to Instagram and on a brilliant part on Instagram's part, they released the Android version two years after the original Apple launch. With more than 30 million iPhone users taking pictures on Instagram, they used the Word-Of-Mouth advertising method to keep the none iPhone users craving to be apart of this fad. Due to this, on the Android release 2 years later, there were over 1 million downloads on the first day.

Once again, we see how marketing and good advertising played a crucial role in starting of a social media platform right.

Where does that leave blogging?

Blogging is by no means dead, it just evolving. Instead of writing down their experience and thoughts on a page or site, they are instead sharing it through videos. If you narrow down the meaning of blogging as a form of writing only, then you will be sorrily disappointed.

Blogging is not dead, and it won't be in the foreseeable future. Although, it will be interesting to see where the internet will take blogging from here on out.

Reference list:

Anon 2021, A year after Tumblr's porn ban, some users are still struggling to rebuild their communities and sense of belonging, viewed 4 October, 2021, <https://www.businessinsider.com/tumblr-porn-ban-nsfw-flagged-reactions-fandom-art-erotica-communities-2019-8>.

Anon 2021, The History of Blogging: From 1997 Until Now (With Pictures), viewed 4 October, 2021, <https://themeisle.com/blog/history-of-blogging/>.

Xavier : Ok.

Dr Bertha : Add just a bit of spice to it to keep it interesting okay, but remember, don't panic.

Xavier : Ok...

Dr Bertha : Imma need you to post your posters and your thoughts on the Tumblr page, and I will mark it, but you must remember not to panic, ok?

Xavier : ...ok

Dr Bertha : *JUST A REMINDER, THE BLOG ITSELF IS 50% OF THE UNIT*.

For those that are curious about my picture, feel free to use it. It was made on photoshop.

FYI, my friend made this for me, so please don’t ask me how I did it.