Viral media

On the discussion of war of the worlds in 1938, it got me thinking about how viral media is usually something that seems like something big, but is then replaced and soon forgotten
about. Kony 2012 comes to mind in this instance. When the documentary first hit the internet on the 5^th of March 2012, it hit millions of hits all aro
und the world, becoming the talking point of everyone’s conversation. It was something that you couldn’t escape. However, after the controversy caused by the film maker Jason Russel, the movement was soon forgotten.

The same thing was seen during 2045 with the ALS bucket challenge, it too spread like wild fire as person after person nominated each other, posting videos of themselves having water tipped on their head. However once it was noted that less than 27% of the donations were actually going to what the money was being raised for, the challenge was soon faded out. However despite the criticism the challenge received, many suffers of the disease were happy that Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was being put into the public spotlight.

Boston City Councillor Tito Jackson, left in suit, leads some 200 people in the ice bucket challenge at Boston’s Copley Square, Thursday, Aug. 7, 2014 to raise funds and awareness for ALS.The idea is easy: Take a bucket of ice water, dump it over your head, video it and post it on social media. Then challenge your friends, strangers, even celebrities to do the same within 24 hours or pay up for charity. (AP Photo/Elise Amendolaless

With this in mind it is interesting how new forms of media are criticized for the way they spread information, and whether that information be trusted. It was first seen with radio, then T.V and now internet. Society has a very funny way of always being afraid of the ‘new’ and attempt to shun it, or attempt to censure it.

Nonetheless, the way viral campaigns are easily disposed represents a broader western cultural norm, that everything is replaceable. Every two years, we must update our phones, laptops, T.V’s and thus also viral campaigns.  No longer do we see value something to last, but think of it as something that is big one and never heard of again the next day. Western societies have adopted this form of consumer capitalism with open arms, and this is represented in the way interact with media on a large scale.

Nevertheless, the internet has become a tool to communicate information to one side of the world to another that is received instantly. Thus movements and causes have a platform to now spread like wildfire, faster than ever before, just a tap of finger away from every smartphone mobile user and click away from computer owner.

Network Storytelling

‘The Journal’
My group decided that we wanted to make a split screen film, that followed the journey of a journal being passed around to people various ways and going back to the person who first started passing it around. Each member of the group writes in the journal twice consisting of the journal being passed eight times in the film. The original girl who finds the journal remains on the screen for the majority of the time, as the film starts and ends with her.

Brigitte and Myself made up the the rough storyboard with edits to it happening over the course of filming. The film was shot on a Iphone 6 plus, and while filming, we made sure as a group to film everything two times both landscape and portrait to get the best look when editing. The editing program used for this film was Imovie. The shots consisting of the original girl who finds the journal has a grainy warm texture over it, while the other shots of the journal being passed around just have a warm tone. This was important to distinguish to the viewers where the journal came from and to make sense of the film. The warm vintage feel of the edited footage also pair up with the music, chosen by Caitlin which gave it a enjoyable tone to watch and listen.

Privacy

In light of the recent Ashley and Madison privacy information leaks, it is interesting how much information we provide about ourselves to the internet. Where is that people draw the line on how much is too much? With social websites such as twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, just to name a few, people spend a lot of time updating and refreshing timelines for others to view.

Everything we post is there forever, even after it has been deleted. However, many people never take this into consideration when they post things, and it even becomes more rare for people to read terms and conditions when signing up to different sites. Though, these type of behaviour is usually seen with younger generations of people who didn’t grow up with the concept of privacy in the first place
More so with generation Z then generation Y, however they do also fit into this category, growing up, there was no concept of privacy that we understood as older generations would have been brought up in. Information didn’t travel around like wildfire, and everyone didn’t know what you were doing nearly every second of the day.

The internet has shaped the way people view privacy. People would say now, who cares if people around the world can see what I post. Though many social networking sites provide a private feature, where individuals can select who can consume the contentment they share, it is more likely than not that they are still sharing personal content on a daily basis.

However in the same way the internet has provided a new way that people view privacy, for which many younger people don’t fully understand anyway, it has also created a new way for people to hide activity that would be deemed unpopular if brought into light. An interesting comment made in the lecture, was that of our own google searches. Google won’t lie about your own interests and desires, since you are the one who has provide the information to google by searching for things in the first place. And it are these interests and desires that can affect our future and relationships with others if made public. Should we as consumers be concerned that google sells this type information in the form of Meta data to companies so that they can target their product at us? Probably, but it can become very influential way of controlling the consumer market, in that people see what want to see but never get to see new things.

But as said previously, our interests and desires can be used against us if made public, as seen with the incident of Ashley and Madison leaks, which has led to some men who joined the site to have committed suicide. Which raises the question, if everything we did on the internet was made public, would people still use it the same way? The answer is a confident no, however what people fail to realize, is that our internet activity is always being monitored and sold in the form of metadata which can also be tracked and stored by the government if they wish to. So it is interesting in the way internet culture has covered itself in a false sense of privacy and security just because we believe we can clear our search history on our phones and computers.