User talk:Mmm00044

FMSU9A4 student using Wikibooks to contribute to a class project on digital media and culture. Mmm00044 (discuss • contribs) 12:16, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #1: Online Visibility and Footprint
A simple way to answer the question, ‘How visible am I online?’ would be to Google yourself. My full name turns up five results when searched in quotations and each result accurately pertains to me. These results, however, do not provide a complete portrait of my online visibility. I have profiles across various social media platforms in addition to email accounts, online shopping accounts and subscriptions to streaming services. My full name is not the name that I use for social networking as a means of controlling my visibility in different contexts. I prefer to use one name for social content and reserve my full name for professional content.

Online Visibility and Privacy
I am selective about what I share with whom online, a choice afforded by the privacy controls on various platforms. Despite this caution, I cannot protect my information from being harvested by the platforms and sold to advertisers. A website titled clickclickclick gives some insight into just how visible online behaviours are to websites and how that information is converted into big data for advertisers.

The only way to control online visibility would be to abstain completely. This is problematic as we have a reached a point where using the internet is culturally "locked-in" and therefore needed to participate in many aspects of society. For many users like myself, the benefits outweighs the privacy concerns, but I wish I had more control over my visibility to advertisers. (Mmm00044 (discuss • contribs) 22:51, 28 February 2019 (UTC))

Links
Instagram Facebook Pinterest ASOS clickclickclick

Instructor Feedback on Wiki Exercise #1
Posts and comments on other people’s work, of this standard, roughly corresponds to the following grade descriptor. Depending on where your actual mark is in relation to the making criteria as outlined in the relevant documentation, it should give you an idea of strengths and weaknesses within the achieved grade band overall:


 * Outstanding. In addition to the criteria for 70%+, entries at this standard demonstrate outstanding critical understanding of the exercise and are able to produce sophisticated lines of argument, and is highly original.


 * This work is at the lower end of this grade band (still brilliant work though!).


 * Re: responses to other people’s posts – none undertaken. This would effectively halve your mark in graded assessments.


 * Presentation: very good use of wiki markup and organisational skills.

GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 11:48, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #2: To what extent are my online & offline identities aligned?


In his novel, Mother Night(1961), Kurt Vonnegut writes: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." This rings true in an age where everyone can be anyone online. In addition, the online self is consumed by other online actors on social networking sites. This creates a ‘glass-house’ society where the self-curative actions of individuals online are shaped politically by the gaze of others (Ibrahim, 2018). In their analysis of self-presentation and social networking sites, Mendelson and Papacharissi explain that people are apt to post content that will stimulate a positive response from their peers: “while people are purportedly presenting themselves, they are presenting a highly selective version of themselves” (2010, p.252). When interacting with others offline or face-to-face, there is less control over perception as the interaction is immediate. One can spend hours crafting the perfect iMessage to send to a peer; however, in person the time constraints are typically governed by the speed of conversation. Images posted online can be edited with filters or FaceTune, but in person physical appearance is much harder to alter. These factors contribute to a split between online and offline personalities. With that in mind, our online selves, whether ‘pretend’ or not, say just as much about who we really are as our offline selves.

Case Study: Instagram
Instagram provides a unique opportunity to curate an image of self through a profile or feed. My personal Instagram consists of selected photos that reflect certain aspects of my personality. I enjoy taking photographs, so the aesthetic of my Instagram feed reflects snapshots of the way I see the world. I also post photos of my friends and myself on my Instagram. I am wary of the dangers of digital narcissism, but I think with a degree of agency, an online photo diary of my life is like an extension of myself rather than a mask. I enjoy sharing posts with friends and seeing what my friends are doing via their posts.

To a certain extent, we are culturally “locked-in” to social media and I often feel that it’s necessary when navigating social situations to be able to connect to people online. Instagram is my preferred platform because to a degree, it can be about sharing your visual perception of the world as much as its about sharing your curated self.

My intentional curation of my Instagram profile reveals a side of me that I cannot necessarily articulate face-to-face. In this way, I believe that understanding someone’s online self gives great insight into their ‘offline’ self. Whether these two identities are aligned or opposing, knowing both provides a solid ground for understanding the complexities of another human being.

Peer Discussion
(In regards to your Wiki #2 post) I find your reflection here to be so interesting, especially your remarks on the ability to communicate abstract concepts through images that you could not otherwise communicate to someone. When I read this, the first thing that struck me was that it is somewhat obvious, a picture is worth a thousand words and all that; and yet I had never conceptualized that thought in relation to what people post on Instagram, or even in relation to what I post myself on Instagram. I think this is very insightful. The quote you begin your entry with is very thought-provoking as well. When I was writing my entry I wanted to communicate how everything someone posts says something about them, whether it is entirely accurate to their behaviour in person or not - I feel that the quote you have selected speaks to this concept. If something is produced by the individual, at least a bit of that individual lives in the product (if that makes sense). I also remember saying something similar many times in our seminars to your comment about the extent to which our online personalities speak to our offline ones in spite of sometimes being inauthentic. We have discussed value as far as relationships on and offline in my seminar on a few occasions, especially in regards to the ability to filter and control one's response. It is a very unique ability we maintain today, that I think stands both to assist and hinder social interaction. For one thing, I do think that being able to filter oneself can be a positive thing - it may even be helpful in progressing towards tolerance and further away from prejudice. For one to filter oneself, there is an implication there that he or she is aware that something they may have said could be misconstrued or hurtful. Being able to edit and remove things like this from messages could possibly function as practice for offline conversation, requiring individuals to think before they speak and be more aware of habits they may have in their responses that could be offensive, even if they are unintentional. Perhaps that is too hopeful of a thought, but I personally believe that this could improve self-awareness and in return social interaction in every day life. That being said, this ability could arguably cause somewhat false relationships, as one may not act as they do online while offline. So even if someone were to communicate with another constantly online, there is a chance the two would be completely incompatible offline due to impulsive differences. I don't necessarily think that this devalues online relationships though. A relationship has value, I believe, if it is valued by those involved. I feel that anyone external to a relationship can hold an opinion as to whether or not another relationship is healthy for instance, but I don't think they have the ability to weigh or deny the value of somebody else's relationship, whether it is on or offline. OutOfBoundsHeather (discuss • contribs) 20:25, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback! I think what you say about people being compatible online and incompatible offline is so true. This seems to happen all the time when people use dating apps like Tinder. It's said so often that it's almost a cliché, "(He/She) looked different online or in photos". I agree with you as well that online relationships have an intrinsic value in their own way for people. There are definitely loose acquaintances I have that I don't hangout with in person per se, but will share the occasional message or meme via social networking sites. I also think this online/offline relationship balance has uncovered some interesting conversations on adultery in modern relationships. In the traditional sense, cheating would involve a physical relationship; however, with the onset of online relationships, people have the ability to 'cheat' (depending on your definition) on their partners with someone they have never met in real life. Mmm00044 (discuss • contribs) 10:21, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

(In response to your Wiki #2 exercise) I think you make some excellent observations about peoples behaviours when creating an online identity for themselves. There's something very interesting in reading about how you yourself view your experience with Instagram and the fact that you are aware of the line between choosing what to share and obsessing over how perfect it looks, I think that there is a danger of slipping into a narcissistic view of social media and it's very easy to do and ultimately I think it comes from peer pressure; because we can edit online, we feel the need to do it, it's commonplace. I also found the opening quote to be very thought provoking and reading on I think that our online identity is built on our unconscious self as much as it is our offline self, that because we live in a world where social media is in everything we do, we often make decisions on what we share without even thinking about what it says about who we are, it's as though we have an autopilot for such platforms. Doctor-Riddler (discuss • contribs) 17:40, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for commenting! The topic also made me reflect on how extra-personal identities have been created throughout history. If you think about it, curating a self image was typically reserved for the rich in the form of commissioned portrait paintings. Now I think that social networking sites, especially Instagram, have had a democratising effect (to a certain extent) in the formation of the self. While there are still access limitations throughout the world, overwhelmingly, the 'selfie' has given people from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to have some control over their image. Mmm00044 (discuss • contribs) 10:25, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

(Response to wiki exercise #2) I like the way that you addressed all of the points with a case study, this was a great read and really shows a depth of knowledge on the topic, I specifically like that you consider an Instagram account a "curated self" in which what you post may or may not be true, but its what you don't see that truly deceives as no matter how similar your real and online life are, you cannot show everything creating a skewed perception. I also enjoyed reading about how your Instagram shows a side of you that you cannot articulate face to face. I would say that I am the opposite to that so I find it interesting reading about it from a flipped perspective. I really enjoyed reading your peace and felt it read very well, especially with all of your points being backed up by sources. LateRawley (discuss • contribs) 15:34, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #3: Annotated Bibliography
Venkatanathan, J., Karapanos, E., Kostakos, V., & Gonçalves, J. (2013). A network science approach to modelling and predicting empathy. Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining - ASONAM 13. doi:10.1145/2492517.2500295

In this article, Venkatanathan et al. use a network science approach to investigate empathy and its implications for online social networks. The authors use data collected from a sample of 93 participants (57 male; average age 28.2) by accessing participants’ Facebook social graphs responding to standard questionnaires of empathy and social capital. The primary interest in the research is identifying ‘structural holes’ as participants who act as bridges between clusters of social networks are exposed to diverse ties. The article is useful to my research as it suggests the ability to predict empathy can be exploited to foster online communities. There are two major limitations of this article, however: it uses a modest sample size of primarily young males and empathy measurements were subjective due to self-reporting. This article is a useful starting point for research on empathy in online communities; however, it does not provide a strong enough argument on which to base my research.

Wiki Exercise #4: What Are Wikis?
A wiki is a type of website that supports the collaborative editing of content from users. Based on ideals of the early web, wikis use simple markup and hyperlinking to promote discussion and collaboration among users. As an information sharing platform, the ideal of a wiki page is to create a resource for information that transcends individual knowledge to form a collaborative super-intelligence.

The term 'wiki' derives from the Hawaiian word for 'quick' and was first invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995 as a means of collaborating with other web designers without being slowed down by formal management or process (Shirky, 2009). Shirky (2009) argues that the meteoric rise of Wikipedia was due to coordination within the community, not the software itself, and thus became a "coordinating resource" (pp.117).

Personal Reflection & Analysis
Recently some friends and I participated in an Escape Room. Escape Rooms are adventure games in which a group of people are trapped in a room and must solve a series of puzzles to ‘escape’. With five big personalities locked in a room together, under the pressure of a ticking clock, chaos ensued. We tried to work together, but we could not help getting heated and shouting over each-other. In the end we made it out before the hour was up, but the time we spent trying to work collaboratively had us heading straight to the pub upon release. This is a micro-scale version of what it was like to work on a collaborative essay with twelve peers, some of whom I never met face-to-face. We all wanted to do well on our assignment; however, every collaborator had his or her own idea of how to achieve this. Our topic of Online Communities was vast and no one member could fully pursue his or her topic interest thoroughly under the constraint of a 3000-word limit. The editing war that ensued before the deadline was not unlike that experienced by some more popular Wikipedia pages (Pluto). Shirky (2009) praises the work of the community behind wikis by explaining how Wikipedia has achieved success over vandals by having enough people care enough about pages that it demoralizes them. He describes Wikipedia as “a Shinto shrine; it exists not as an edifice but as an act of love” (pp.141). This is a very utopian approach to wikis. Lanier (2011) strongly disagrees with this approach, instead suggesting that collective authorship is a "digital flattening of expression into a global mush" (pp.47). He argues for the power of the individual, suggesting that even if every alien in the galaxy contributed a small amount of information to a physics wiki page, they would still not come near the advances of one intelligent individual, Albert Einstein. Much like the escape room concept, our essay was completed on time; however, it is difficult to determine whether the essay would have been better focused if authored by one contributor. Wikis serve their purpose on the internet, but I argue that they should not replace the originality of independent thought.

Question
Hello, can you justify your blanking edit on Talk:Debates in Digital Culture 2019/Online Communities please? thanks. Tomybrz  Bip Bip  15:45, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

hi. We are currently working on a group wiki project and received advice from our lecturer advised us to clean up our discussion page for ease of navigation. We are under the impression that he can view previous posts under the history section of our page. Mmm00044 (discuss • contribs) 15:48, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Hi, thanks for reply. Regards. Tomybrz  Bip Bip  15:49, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

INSTRUCTOR FEEDBACK: ENGAGEMENT ON DISCUSSION PAGES & CONTRIBS
Grade descriptors for Engagement: Engagement on discussion pages, and contribs of this standard attain the following grade descriptor. Whereas not all of the elements here will be directly relevant to your particular response to the brief, this descriptor will give you a clearer idea of how the grade you have been given relates to the
 * Satisfactory. Among other things, satisfactory contributions 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) and will have little justification for ideas offered on Discussion Pages. The wiki markup formatting will need some work. This is at the upper end of the particular grade band.

As instructed in the labs, and outlined in the assessment brief documentation, students should be engaging at least once a day, for the duration of the project. The following points illustrate how this engagement is evaluated.

Evidence from contribs to both editing and discussion of content (i.e. volume and breadth of editorial activity as evidenced through ‘contribs’). These are primarily considered for quality rather than quantity, but as a broad guideline:
 * Each item on a contribs list that are 3000+ characters are deemed “considerable”
 * Each item on a contribs list that are 2000+ characters are deemed “significant”
 * Each item on a contribs list that are 1000+ characters are deemed “substantial”
 * Items on a contribs list that are <1000 characters are important, and are considered in the round when evaluating contribs as a whole because of their aggregate value

Overall:
 * a few substantial, and other contribs throughout the period. I notice a few massive neg. edits in there… were these accidental? Did they get reverted?

Engagement with and learning from the community on Discussion Pages
 * Evidence of peer-assisted learning and collaboration
 * Good
 * Evidence of reading, sharing, and application of research to the essay
 * Excellent
 * Evidence of peer-review of others’ work
 * Good

Reflexive, creative and well-managed use of Discussion Pages
 * Clear delegation of tasks
 * Satisfactory
 * Clearly labelled sections and subsections
 * Good
 * Contributions are all signed
 * Good

Civility. Your conduct is a key component of any collaboration, especially in the context of an online knowledge-building community. Please respect others, as well as observe the rules for civility on wiki projects. All contribs are moderated.
 * Excellent

GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 15:17, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Instructor Feedback on Wiki Exercise Portfolio

 * 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.


 * This work is at the upper end of this grade band, and you have made a real effort to engage the process in attaining this higher mark.


 * Excellent use of the wiki functionality and markup which improved fluidity and functionality of your posts. You became familiar and proficient with the platform quite quickly, and this made a considerable positive difference.


 * Re: responses to other people’s posts – these are all timely and especially good. I like that you have framed some of your responses as questions to solicit discussion (this is, arguably, what discussion pages are all about!) and also that you have engaged in discussion in an open and critical way (that is to say, you've responded to what other people are saying and are contributing meaningfully to discussion - arguably the civic element of wiki that you ought to be thinking about, which you clearly are). Well done.

General:
 * Reading and research: evidence of critical engagement with set materials - excellent; evidence of independent reading of appropriate academic and peer-reviewed material – excellent.


 * Argument and analysis: well-articulated and well-supported argument - excellent; evidence of critical thinking (through taking a position in relation to key ideas from the module, and supporting this position) - excellent; evidence of relational thinking (through making connections between key ideas from the module and wider literature, and supporting these connections) - excellent; evidence of independent critical ability – excellent!


 * Presentation: excellent use of wiki markup and organisational skills generally.

GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 16:16, 1 May 2019 (UTC)