#jackroberts

Big data has a few things to thank for its existence, mainly the hashtag which allows for organisations to easily view what conversations are being had about a particular topic that uses a hashtag. The hash tag is available on twitter, Facebook and Instagram to name a few. It has grown partially from a need to predict what consumers want and what to offer them, and to predict what circumstances consumers will be in, in the future thus providing an entry for a product into their lives. Prediction is power (Siegel, 2013), a very good motto for a firm to go by when approaching audiences, as prediction greatly reduces the amount of risk an asset may face (Siegel, 2013).

We can therefore use predictive technology and big data to predict when consumers may want something, we can also find out how many individual users are engaged in something and from that using twitter for example we can also map out their connections to other products using technology such as thematic products and using this we can target advertising based on their own personal interests and interests of people with similar followership and interests in products and solutions. This has good and bad points, for example one point that can be seen as possibly bad and potential good, depending on which way you look at it is the fact that retailers such as Target in America can predict if a woman is pregnant using data from specific customers purchasing habits, from there they can target baby related advertising to that customer (Hill, 2012).

Big data has ethical concerns too, namely the example where predictive technology predicted a teenage girl’s pregnancy before her father had found out (Hill, 2012) and there are similar stories popping up all the time. Marketers, advertisers and communication experts alike are all being faced with concerns about what they ethically can and can’t do. Big data helps marketers greatly increase the effectiveness and efficiency of funds allocated to them, it can be used for great good within the marketing and advertising community but could also possibly interfere with other aspects of life such as democracy within our society.

References

Hill, K. (2012, Feb 16). How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did. Retrieved from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/

One quote of his I found particularly helpful in forming my views on the matter of to what extent new media changes the political atmosphere, activism etc is “The truth is coming.” This definitely backs up the belief that new media increases transparency be it in governmental or in corporate contexts. Admittedly new media does in some ways do damage to democracy as Snowden himself has highlighted in videos himself, talking about government surveillance being made easier which Evgeny Morozov (2011) says empowers the government. Evgeny Morozov also talks about how new media disempowers citizens via “entertainment”. All this aside new media through services such as wikileaks is being pushed in the direction of transparency and accountability, a point which I have notice all activists seem to be eager to point out.

  I noticed also that Clay Shirky (2011) praised new media for the downfall of the former president of the Philippines Joseph Estrada in 2001, citing text messaging as Estrada’s downfall and then comparing that to many other government and other organisations downfalls at the hands of a newly empowered public, with voices amplified by social media and text messaging. These uproars according to Shirky, occur because social media and texting “help loosely coordinated publics demand change.”

  This is the important part when I look at social media’s effect on society. This ability to organise people who otherwise are living in separation from fellow activists while also providing education and enlightenment from systems such as wikileaks helping to fuel citizens claims for a better government as clearly becoming so fundamental in our society and in modern democracy.

  Although there are many great and exciting aspects of new media and activism it has a notable dark side on the basis of citizens and not necessarily governments. New media can create slacktivism and armchair activism, which have obvious meanings. It creates a framework for support and then stops supporting campaigns. It creates the illusion that all of the world’s issues can be fixed by simply pressing a button and this is not beneficial to society.

In order to have a fair and progressive society based on true democracy we need to nurture the good aspects of social activism and cut out the negative and distracting aspects to streamline the effects of new media in the political sphere. New media can help bring those who wish to exploit society to justice and provide society with easily accessible information in order to promote transparency. As Snowden says, "The truth is coming", I agree, but we need to nurture it.

References

Morozov, E. (2011, January 14). First Thoughts on Tunisia and the Role of The Internet. Retrieved from Foreign Policy: http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/14/first_thoughts_on_tunisia_and_the_role_of_the_internet

As a bit of background, The Shefrin article sorts Creator involvement with it’s audience/ fans into two different ends of a spectrum. For instance, Peter Jackson is described as a Creator/ Producer who embraces fan involvement and uses momentum from fan involvement to help fan the flame of fan sharing and co-producing and therefor increase the symbolic capital as well as the economic capital and of course, equity of his media. Conversely, however, George Lucus is shown to be “arrogant” towards fans, and in some ways alienating fans and trying not to allow members of the Star Wars fandom to “co-produce” the Star Wars Universe, using his own prestige and power to make his series economically viable. We can use this spectrum to look at other producers, and their fandoms, such as the recent outburst of Shrek fanfiction.

Although the success of the Shrek Cult and fandom base isn’t a massive spike, one of the main YouTube accounts uploading much of this content, for example has had a consistently slightly bell shaped growth curve of subscribers over the last 6 months. Shrek has exploded through our news feeds and onto YouTube channels, and the way DreamWorks dealt with the situation is reminiscent of Lucus Arts and 20th Century Fox’s reactions towards fan involvement as the custodians of the Star Wars universe (Shefrin, 2004). Specific examples of this are the original upload of Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life ( (YouTube Inc/ AirplaneRandy, 2014) which has been removed for two reasons, alleged copyright infringement, and infringing the community standards of YouTube by being inappropriate because of the sexual references contained in the video. This seems to fit fairly consistently with the “illegal pirates” interpretation of the fan fiction, and to me raises the question of where is the line drawn with consumer co-production (Shefrin, 2004).

Looking at the infrastructure of social media like YouTube, we can see why it is so easy for the line to be crossed in a big way, such as with Shrek is Love. YouTube is an easy way for fans to remix, and recreate media in ways they like, both in ways where the media is changed, and exact replicas of the media. Because YouTube is a great tool to broadcast (Burgess, 2009), it explains why this fan fiction caught fire because of its novelty value. YouTube also changes things because it allows for discussion about the media (in this case the fan fiction) and allows the audience to respond and interact with it by creating more fan fiction of a similar theme i.e. erotic fan fiction (Burgess, 2009).

This combination of factor led to this going viral and a large amount of clutter on our news feeds on Facebook and really raises the question about what extent we can use intellectual property in parody and fan fiction.

REFERENCE LIST

Burgess, l. a. (2009). Chapter Two : YouTube and the Mainstream Media. In l. a. Burgess, Youtube : digital media and society series (p. Cambridge). 15-37: Polity Press.

Shefrin, E. (2004). Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom: Mapping New Congruencies between the Internet and Media Entertainment Culture. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 261–281.

Conversely however, I remember my mother’s first reactions to Facebook. Firstly she doesn’t come close to use it half as much as me, but she does use it to “play [her] games” and secondly she apparently only got it to spy on my brother and I rather than as a tool to communicate with friends and family. Initially she admits she was practically frightened of it which is explained by the way humans initially interact with technology (Baron, 2008). Naturally and with more exposure however she has become more “reliant” (I’m not sure if reliant is the word) on the technology to interact with parts of her family and friends that do not lives within an hour or so radius of where we live.

Back to me, and again trolling through my own Facebook page, I can see why some people dislike people bringing up parts of their past. My posts and images reek of immaturity, terrible spelling, grammar and quite invalid or misplaced opinions. As universal access has increased in the developed world (Baron, 2008) and more people around me in my social circle, friends, family, university peers, work mates etc have gotten Facebook, I have had to incredibly moderate what goes on my social network sites such as photos, statuses (such as drunk selfies etc). In a smaller group of maybe just friends, I would not worry so much about what people can see or I’d do what I do now and pass most of what I post off as satire, sarcasm and facetiousness. Have you ever put something you’re hesitant about people seeing on social networking?

Misunderstanding is become increasingly prevalent through social media as the lack of social cues and non-verbal language are frequently omitted from conversation. Personally I’ve had confusing parts of relationships caused by what I now believe is the lack of vocal tone, facial reactions and other non-verbal features that have failed to properly transcend from face to face to telephone and finally into social networking and text based conversation (Baym, 2010).

Now I see people trying to substitute these lack of non-verbal interactions by ways such as countless emoticons, acronyms and more recently since Facebook has introduced photo commenting and other similar things, actual photos of reaction faces (usually selfies that are meticulously looked over in some cases) which can also be seen on services like Snapchat. Lastly I have also noticed that in my group of friends the general standard of spelling and grammar has also increased, whether because my friends are growing up or because social media culture has brought on the change remains to be seen.

References

Baron, N. (2008). Chapter 1 : Email to Your Brain : Language in an Online and Mobile World . In N. Baron, Always on : language in an online and mobile world (pp. 3-10). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Conversely however, I remember my mother’s first reactions to Facebook. Firstly she doesn’t come close to use it half as much as me, but she does use it to “play [her] games” and secondly she apparently only got it to spy on my brother and I rather than as a tool to communicate with friends and family. Initially she admits she was practically frightened of it which is explained by the way humans initially interact with technology (Baron, 2008). Naturally and with more exposure however she has become more “reliant” (I’m not sure if reliant is the word) on the technology to interact with parts of her family and friends that do not lives within an hour or so radius of where we live.

  Back to me, and again trolling through my own Facebook page, I can see why some people dislike people bringing up parts of their past. My posts and images reek of immaturity, terrible spelling, grammar and quite invalid or misplaced opinions. As universal access has increased in the developed world (Baron, 2008) and more people around me in my social circle, friends, family, university peers, work mates etc have gotten Facebook, I have had to incredibly moderate what goes on my social network sites such as photos, statuses (such as drunk selfies etc). In a smaller group of maybe just friends, I would not worry so much about what people can see or I’d do what I do now and pass most of what I post off as satire, sarcasm and facetiousness. Have you ever put something you’re hesitant about people seeing on social networking?

  Misunderstanding is become increasingly prevalent through social media as the lack of social cues and non-verbal language are frequently omitted from conversation. Personally I’ve had confusing parts of relationships caused by what I now believe is the lack of vocal tone, facial reactions and other non-verbal features that have failed to properly transcend from face to face to telephone and finally into social networking and text based conversation (Baym, 2010).

  Now I see people trying to substitute these lack of non-verbal interactions by ways such as countless emoticons, acronyms and more recently since Facebook has introduced photo commenting and other similar things, actual photos of reaction faces (usually selfies that are meticulously looked over in some cases) which can also be seen on services like Snapchat. Lastly I have also noticed that in my group of friends the general standard of spelling and grammar has also increased, whether because my friends are growing up or because social media culture has brought on the change remains to be seen.

References

Baron, N. (2008). Chapter 1 : Email to Your Brain : Language in an Online and Mobile World . In N. Baron, Always on : language in an online and mobile world (pp. 3-10). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

We can now take part and interact with media more than ever before (Rosen, 2006) , we can create or modify old media to create media as remixes or mashups to redefine them. Richard Dawkin’s term for this, the meme, which is meant to draw comparison the way genes change as they descend through person to person. These memes can be photos video or whatever other form the creator likes. Some of my favourite memes have merged from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series such as the “One does not simply [fill in]” frame of Boromir in the Fellowship of the Ring and Erwin Beekveld’s “They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard” first uploaded to Albino Blacksheep in 2007 along with other hits such as Mashed Taters. Indeed the first internet communities that used flash games and movies as well as other forms of spreadable media (Green & Jenkins, 2011) started in the nineties as communities for people wishing to get their message out and as I was growing up, these sites such as Albino Blacksheep and Newgrounds helped me learn a lot about the world and how to interact online from a young age.

  The internet primarily in this context, helps content to grow in popularity and gain exposure and although this is good for small time Indy developers, doesn’t come without issues and exploitations. Marketing companies have tapped into this with a new strain known as viral marketing, such as the share a coke campaign which received millions of views of exposure perpetuated by our predisposition to share, and thus was able to get tonnes more exposure than it would have using regular media. Regular TV shows such as x has Talent or x Idol etc.  have also recognised this aspect of media culture and in converging technologies using their programs (Green & Jenkins, 2011) have demonstrated how much it can benefit corporations partly due to the increase of consumer/ audience involvement and partly because the audience is now able to watch these shows and be exposed to the advertising at their own behest.

  Lastly, the viral economy as it were has massive potential for profit, in and educational, monetary and cultural sense. It can bring about issues, make us laugh, cry, it can be used to create satire about political or social issues and can be used to help people increase their own skill sets in forms such as sound and film recording, animation and writing.

Bibliography

Albino Balcksheep, 2014. About. [Online] Available at: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/about/ [Accessed 30 March 2014].

Green, J. & Jenkins, H., 2011. Chapter 5 :Spreadable Media: How Audiences Create Value and Meaning in a Networked Economy. In: V. Nightingale, ed. The Handbook of Media Audiences. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell , pp. 109-127.

Know Your Meme, 2014. They're Taking to Isengard. [Online] Available at: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/theyre-taking-the-hobbits-to-isengard [Accessed 23 March 2014].

Newgrounds, 2014. Newgrounds About. [Online] Available at: http://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/about-newgrounds/history [Accessed 29 March 2014].