User talk:DunkyNG

This is the discussion page for user DunkyNG (discuss • contribs)

Hello, this is my user discussion page which I will be using it to conduct some of my educational assignments. Please feel free to comment on my work here.

Online Freedom of Speech Policies
Marshal McLuhan said that television brought war into our homes and living rooms, I contend that the internet is bringing violence and hate there too, only that this time we have less of a choice about it. Particularly Youtube and various social medias have provided the platform for hate crimes which under their freedom of speech policies go unpunished or are allowed to remain online. Freedom of speech policies are understandable, however a refusal to acknowledge or remove users that are clearly abusing others should not be tolerated. Furthermore these websites force these graphic, perverse and abusive content onto our screens, if one was to "like" something on Facebook to do with a "rape" story supporting a woman's cause, most likely they will be bombarded with links to other articles about the topic for months to come, this creates a toxic atmosphere around social medias as you ultimately do not have full control. This statement comes from the Facebook team itself after concerns were raised by activists groups, "we also work hard to make our platform a safe and respectful place for sharing and connection. This requires us to make difficult decisions and balance concerns about free expression and community respect.  We prohibit content deemed to be directly harmful, but allow content that is offensive or controversial." However in December 2012 an Icelandic lady called Thorlaug Agustsdottir wrote to Facebook after she discovered a page named "Men Are Better Than Women" which hosted pictures of a young lady tied with chains to an oven in a basement bruised and bloodied and wrote a furious post on facebook about them. After a period of time a picture of Thorlaug's face edited to look bloodied was posted on the Men Are Better Than Woman facebook page alongside comments such as “Women are like grass, they need to be beaten/cut regularly.” And, “You just need to be raped.” Consequently she reported them to Facebook however according to Facebook's Community Standards this kind of behaviour is not deemed as "directly harmful" but rather "controversial humour". To me there seems to be a flawed nature to Facebook's guidelines and their indifference to bullying, hate, and perhaps worse organised communities where this hate is cultivated as well as the unwanted and sometimes forced upon access to such images, is it therefore needed for social medias to reconsider the exact terms and conditions which monitor the public's use of their platforms.

--DunkyNG (discuss • contribs) 11:50, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Marker’s Comment

 * very encouraging that you are referring to McLuhan's work (an embedded link or citation would have been useful). You are also critically engaging with some very important issues relating to contemporary social media. I think that explicitly citing work which we have encountered in class and through discussion - disinhibition for example, or online identity - would have greatly improved your mark.


 * A post of this standard roughly corresponds to the following grade descriptor:
 * Satisfactory. Among other things, satisfactory entries may try to relate an idea from the module to an original example, but might not be very convincing. They may waste space on synopsis or description, rather than making a point. They may have spelling or grammatical errors and typos. They might not demonstrate more than a single quick pass at the assignment, informed only by lecture and/or cursory reading. They may suggest reading but not thinking (or indeed the reverse). The wiki markup formatting will need some work.

RE: Comments on others’ work

 * Despite the fact that one of your comments is really very long (!!!) the other one is absent. You have not adhered to the brief, therefore. Remember that your comments on other people's work is weighted as heavily as your own post when it comes to grades. Not completing this part of the exercise means that, effectively you are halving your mark. Clearly though, what you have posted shows really good postential, so stick at it! GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 14:30, 29 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Thank you very much on your constructive feedback, I am unsure what you mean however that I have failed to complete one of my comments on other peoples work as every week I have posted two comments on my peers exercises. Would it be possible to clarify where I have gone wrong? Otherwise, as you say I shall stick at it and up my contributions. Thank you again. --DunkyNG (discuss • contribs) 13:08, 3 March 2016 (UTC)


 * you need to be commenting specifically on two different posts from the same Wiki exercises to complete the portfolio. In relation to Exercise #1, you had done this for one post, and that (on the same day) you commented on somebody's Ex. #2. I notice that you have made a few comments on different posts for Exercise #2, which is formally assessed, so there's no issue. I would, however, ensure that you place as much emphasis on your comments on other people's posts as you do on your own posts - both are given equal weighting, and ensure that you respond on time for each exercise in turn. hope that clarifies GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 16:06, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise 2: Visibility and Online Footprint
I didn't develop a significant online footprint till I was around 15 years old, down to the fact I was a technological degenerate and only had the freedom to use the internet when I bought my first laptop. Since then my presence online has significantly grown and when I say significantly I mean astronomically in comparison, sure it took me a couple years to work out the ins and outs of the web but I am now a fully fledged not so proud owner of several social media accounts and am active upon many social platforms. But I have come to consider that even before I became active on the internet was I still visible online? I have come to the conclusion I must have been: through pictures my step-mum would post on facebook people still knew what i was up to and what I was doing, what I looked like and what my interests were. I was genuinely shocked when I did finally get Facebook in my last year of highschool, more out of necessity than want, when I was bombarded by my friends and families requests to tag me in their pictures. They in a sense, even though I was in technological limbo, had created for me a perfectly constructed online identity, I was made visible without my knowledge. So have I had an online footprint since my childhood?

I cannot answer that concretely, however I sure as hell have one now. My online footprint spans across many websites and I use them all in different ways: Facebook I tend to use little when posting about myself, and hate to post text post about how I am feeling that day as I don't feel the need to rant or tell people about my every little movement, I prefer privacy in that respect. How then do I manage to spend a huge amount of time on the platform everyday, social media has a hook in today's society which is causing a blurring of online and real life identities. Can I really rule out one from the other when thinking of society or identity, for me the answer is no; I don't think I am exactly the same person I am online as offline and on different social media platforms I limit certain aspects of my online visibility, and in turn my personality. Tumblr and Facebook could actually in essence be used in pretty much the same way but their online environments are completely different which causes one to adapt their identity to each platform. I would therefore say our online identity and footprint is constructed by the uses of the webpages almost as much as our own personal identity, we abide by the social etiquette's of every platform we use...more or less. If you want to see the real me find my Snapchat account and judge me from there. I enjoy Snapchat because almost all of the social limitations are removed and you can see people being themselves for the most part and not just the idealized versions we so often see on Facebook.

So the question I am asking today is this: Are we visible online/have an online footprint before we even have the tools or will to use the web and do the platforms we use to covey our visibility alter our online identity from our real life personality? For me, the answer is yes.--DunkyNG (discuss • contribs) 11:49, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

I think the issue of online visibility before one begins use of social media is situational and dependant on who surrounds that person. For instance, As I grew up my parents had virtually zero presence online that wasn't profession related, and I could even go as far to say that they were weary of posting things regarding their children due to an abstract fear of who might see such things. This has, of course, changed over time as their children have grown older, but neither of my parents acquired a Facebook account until well after I had, an event that seemed a milestone to them in their journey into the internet. There may have been some sort of indication of my presence by a relative, and the only true answer to your question is that we are likely never going to know quite how much of a footprint we have before we begin our own browsing, but it is certain that some people will have been significantly less exposed than others simply due to their parent's or guardian's own personal online habits. JacobTheOhioan (discuss • contribs) 05:26, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I can identify with this feeling of not having control over the information and especially pictures of you online. I mainly use facebook for private messages and to know about events around me - most of the pictures or posts I am linked to are posted by facebook friends, rather than myself. In this way, I don't have control over the information other people post of me and therefore no control over the way in which my identity is presented. Of course, you can remove the tag but the picture stays online nevertheless. Thankfully neither of my parents have any social media accounts -as far as I know- and nor does anyone from the older generations of my family. This is why, before I became active online, there was little to no information about me out there. Rosane linde (discuss • contribs) 16:30, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise 3: Information Overload
The term "Information Overload" was first made popular by Alvin Tofler in his book Future Shock has come to define the modern day online experience. Georg Simmel proposed that the vast amount of sensations available in the modern age left people feeling tired and that directly affected the way they could react to new developments. The same principles apply for the modern day web, we find ourselves bombarded with pop ups and a seemingly infinite link from one web page to a next.

The rapid growth of the internet has placed the fears of Simmel in a very worrying context as the sheer amount of ready information on the internet has multiplied out of proportion because more and more people have become what is considered as an active user and as a result online information has become the norm in society, we are therefore in danger of becoming entirely dependent on the internet for our flow of information.

The scale of online users and amount of information available has led to people not checking the validity of their online resources and we can easily become misinformed: for example due to the cut throat way in which information is uploaded onto the internet by news sites, the speed of information has become paramount rather than its overall accuracy. Indeed I have found myself reading the same story with ten different twists from different accounts. But why if I already new the content of the news pieces did I click on the following nine tabs. The answer is because I know I will be presented with different information on each website, I know that a different story will be told and I wish to find the one that sits right with me. This is fundamentally wrong as it does lead to an abundance of misinformation in society yet it appears I have already subconsciously accepted that. Not only that but I have wasted a large amount of time and therefore have been stopped from proceeding productively with my day due to the highly distracting overload of information available on the web.

Dealing with the information overload is very difficult in an online society however there are ways to protect yourself; Cathy Shirky asserts that: "It's not information overload. It's filter failure." and to a certain extent this is true, we can take protective measures whilst online like blocking notifications or banning key words however should the onus be on us to filter out the abundance of inaccurate / distracting information from the mire of the web, or should it be on up loaders themselves to take responsibility for the accuracy of their posts to help create a better informed society? --DunkyNG (discuss • contribs) 09:27, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Comments
This is a very educational and informative post, and I found it very interesting to read. I find myself agreeing with your own personal experience of this type of information overload within online news platforms- I don't seem to trust many platforms that are not 'official', like for instance, the BBC. When something comes up, especially in social media like Facebook, I click the link, read it, and find myself searching it again and reading the same story told by different websites. They might all be different in some way or another, but I seem to find reassurance in using different sources to check on something's accuracy. However at times, this amount of content does seem overwhelming, and you cannot always find a source that you feel is reliable enough, or perhaps the information varies too much too often in between sources. I think it is very interesting to relate this to how people share this in social media. When I find that someone has shared a link to a news story, and they seem to post very strongly-opinionated comments underneath it agreeing with the article, most times I tend to read that article and I don't usually mistrust it, because I trust the person who shared it. However, if the story is big enough, I tend to see many people sharing it through different news websites, and it becomes very hard to find any particular one reliable, which also does become very overwhelming. I think this can link nicely to David Gauntlett's views on 'Web 2.0', which he describes as 'harnessing the collective abilities of the members of an online network, to make an especially powerful resource or service'. --Raquelita96 (discuss • contribs) 11:42, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Collective Intelligence
The Wikibooks project aims to foster a working environment, created so students can academically engage with one another in a professional manner and collectively help/ edit each others work to the betterment of the final project as a whole. As Gauntlett discusses in reference to the Web 2.0

‘''harnessing the collective abilities of the members of an online network, to make an especially powerful resource or service. [...] any collective activity which is enabled by people’s passions and becomes something greater than the sum of its parts.''’.

The same principles should have applied to the Wikibooks project however some peoples 'passion' did not seem to encompass this particular piece of work to its detriment. Additionally there were also problems with the people who did attempt to engage with the project because of the nature of Wikibooks itself; the lack of effective messaging system in comparison to social media made it difficult to communicate as well as people not always being logged on or checking the project, as a result the conversations were disjointed and would take a long time.

The Process
The first obstacle that needed to be addressed was the sharing of the workload, with over twenty people in our group and not everybody immediately participating in the project the workload was at first, one could argue, unevenly shared. However, upon further discussion topics were opened up for collaboration, which was the whole point of the project in the first place, and therefore more sub-sections and topics were created to accommodate the larger group. It seemed a case of balancing self-interest with collaborative public goods. As a large part of the process was collaborative the chaos that ensued whilst trying to claim ones topic took away from the time we could collectively spend on the project as well as creating some friction between different parties. As earlier stated, due to the communication system being limited and relatively anonymous peoples feelings were perhaps not presented as eloquently as they could have been. Unlike a traditional group project where one can meet up with ones group and discuss things face to face, go away and work on their own decided upon topic, the wikibooks did not create a sense of teamwork but an "every man for himself" approach initially. Also as a major part of the project was online contributions it was ironically difficult to communicate them in the project as I live with two of my group members and would verbally discuss our next steps, then have to communicate online.

Finished Result
By the end of the project it is fair to say that the group pulled together and created an extraordinary amount of work, which was not only well researched but also well written, the overall look of the book is impressive and I was content with my own entries in the book. Nevertheless there were some problems with referencing which myself and a few others undertook to correct. However, it would not have been a problem if people, myself included, had uploaded a week or two weeks before hand so the 'collective activity' Gauntlett discusses could be put into praxis more reasonably. Even though the project came to fruition there were a few steps that I think could have improved it i.e a spokesperson for each smaller group, or an ordered division of the projects labor for the smaller parties to further divide among themselves rather than encouraging a culture of personal gain -which I feel was initially the case - but was as a result of the project being individually graded. I do not mean to criticize the way the group arrived at the end result because I do believe it to be a fine piece of collaborative work, and the internal conversations were democratically resolved, I am simply trying to suggest in retrospect some ideas which could improve the project in the future by creating a more ordered system.--DunkyNG (discuss • contribs) 11:19, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

COMMENTS

I completely agree with the majority of your opinions in this post but particularly with the issue of sharing the workload. In my group this was the major issue because some people felt the workload was unfairly shared. This was because a couple of main contributors-who had clearly used wikibooks before- "shotgunned" the big, main topics early on, before some people had even thought about the project. However, because we were split into smaller groups this made it easier for us to discuss amongst ourselves who was doing what. If one person was not happy with something we tried our best to resolve it in our small groups. We also found that by adding a small table just for your group in the main discussion page made it easier for everyone to see exactly what everyone was covering. At the end of the day people just didn't want others doing the same as other people because that would be a waste of time. Overall, I think we could of used a bit more communication but that is mainly down to the fact people were not always logged on to their wiki accounts so made it hard to communicate with everyone. --Amy Wardle (discuss • contribs) 19:59, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

The initial sense of every man for himself was undoubtedly present but most likely, as you said, an unfortunate by-product of the fact that this was not done out of passion for the knowledge as much as it was done to get decent marks for the project. This project was missing much of the passion that might be found among editors not engaged in class activity because of the grading factor and the relative lack of say in the general topics of the project, which might have fuelled the angst some people felt in choosing their topics. I agree with you that more organisation could have led to a more complete project, but I think that also leaves the potential that the sense of democracy involved in creating these articles might erode. The time constraints on this article made it so that a more orderly system was likely the most beneficial method of completing the project, but definitely served to curtail aspects of the democracy that such platforms are supposed to emulate. JacobTheOhioan (discuss • contribs) 01:06, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Marker’s Feedback on Wikibook Project Work
You appear to be the main contributor to the material on sections covering cyberbullying, hacktivism, and digital self-harm on the book chapter – where the work is critical, analytical and very well written. Your work also includes valuable formatting and wikignoming on various aspects of content in the closing stages of the project which gives the chapter a polish it might not otherwise have had. This work in total proved to be pivotal in the development of the chapter as a whole, supported as your contributions were, through independent reading and research.

Wiki Exercises


 * Excellent. Among other things, these entries will probably demonstrate a complex, critical understanding of the themes of the module. They will communicate very effectively, making excellent and creative use of the possibilities of the form (including links, as well as perhaps copyright-free videos and images, linked to from Wiki Commons), and may be written with some skill and flair. They will address the assignment tasks in a thoughtful way. They will make insightful connections between original examples and relevant concepts. They will be informed by serious reading and reflection, are likely to demonstrate originality of thought, and will probably be rewarding and informative for the reader. The wiki markup formatting will be impeccable.

Content (weighted 20%)

 * Your contribution to the book page gives an excellent brief overview of the subject under discussion in your chosen themed chapter. There is an excellent range of concepts associated with your subject, and the effort to deliver critical definitions, drawing from relevant literature and scholarship, and your own critical voice in the building of a robust argument is very much in evidence. The primary and secondary sources you found about the chapter’s themes cover an excellent range and depth of subject matter.

Understanding (weighted 30%)

 * Reading and research:
 * evidence of critical engagement with set materials, featuring discriminating command of a comprehensive  range of relevant materials and analyses
 * evidence of independent reading of appropriate academic and peer-reviewed material to an exemplary level
 * Argument and analysis:
 * well-articulated and well-supported argument through considered judgement relating to key issues, concepts or procedures
 * exemplary evidence of critical thinking (through taking a position in relation to key ideas from the module, and supporting this position);
 * comprehensive evidence of relational thinking (through making connections between key ideas from the module and wider literature, and supporting these connections);
 * considerable evidence of independent critical ability

Engagement (weighted 50%)

 * Evidence from contributions to both editing and discussion of content to an appreciable standard (i.e. volume and breadth of activity as evidenced through contribs)
 * Good engagement with and learning from other Wikipedians about the task of writing/editing content for a Wikibook
 * Reflexive, creative and well-managed use of discussion pages using deployment of judgement relating to key issues, concepts and procedures

Overall Mark % available on Succeed

FMSU9A4marker (discuss • contribs) 15:01, 3 May 2016 (UTC)