Monday, January 30, 2017

Week 4: Youth activism and social media in new administration

In By any media necessary: The new youth activism, Jenkins and his colleagues discussed the relatedness of young Americans’ social involvement and media. The authors argued that everything is political. Moreover, they suggest engaging and participating in a social activity, and trying to make a change for the society to be a better place is all a political activity. According to the authors, the new media play a big part in youth’s political activity due to its characteristics of connecting likeminded people from time and space.

Political activity on online media is especially beneficial to the precarious public, namely discussed on the article as Muslim Americans and nonimmigrants without citizenship, which is threatened on the risk of exposure. Authors suggest that the young perceived to be a dangerous public actively creates content and shares stories on media to better their unfair treatment in the United States. The risk of sharing their identity online is a possible surveillance and privacy infringement. The writers added sometimes popular activists could avoid investigation from the immigration office. Given the current political circumstances, however, such young activists may not escape the eyes of immigration office now.

During Trump administration, young activists on social media may have a hard time to openly act upon their political thoughts. President Donald Trump won the campaign for U.S. presidency with his slogan “Make America great again.” He plans to build a border wall between United States and Mexico to decrease the number of illegal immigrants. Trump is carrying out a closed-door policy, isolating United States from other countries. Not only is he showing hatred toward other countries. Trump shows clear discrimination against gender, race, and religion. His discrimination will persecute Muslim Americans and undocumented immigrants even more intense during his time. Youth activists may prepare for more harsh surveillance, privacy invasion, and being treated as possible criminal. The authors argued that youth activists make political stance by sharing stories on social media. If social media becomes a limited space for youth activists, their political activities are limited as well.

Trump’s policy of seclusion is a contrary concept with the purpose of social media that connects everyone. He may be able to lock up the doors to other countries by changing trade rules and accepting fewer immigrants, but he cannot surely stop his citizens from connecting to the outside world through social media. As the leaders of many countries recently elected are extreme rightist and show strong nationalism, it is difficult to tell the future of social media. Instead of going global, the social media may do its part locally or domestically. As the discussion we had earlier, it is debatable if people use social media to connect with friends whom they actually make contact offline, or to connect with strangers. If prior argument were correct, social media being local wouldn’t be much trouble to the public. However, youth activists who are trying to connect with diverse public would lose many audiences.

It is always hard to balance privacy and security. As much as I want diverse youths of America to express and share their thoughts to make an ideal America, there is always a risk of safety. Due to social media’s capability to connect with likeminded people from far away, it is possible that some extreme activists may plan a terror with someone they met online. It is so hard to figure out where the line between privacy and security should be drawn to protect both the rights of youth activists and the national security.


Monday, January 23, 2017

Week 3: Privacy and bullying

Difficulty with privacy research
Since privacy is an important topic in an emerging media, a lot of studies on new media have tried to relate their study to privacy. The owners of emerging media, however, also have a huge concern for their user privacy. Usually, academic papers come later than magazines or articles that study new technology or phenomenon because of it publication process. The publication process may take up to almost a year for an academic article to go through a peer review and to have it revised. This may not have caused a lot of trouble in the past with traditional media research, but it has now become a sort of a barrier for the new media research because of its rapidly changing nature.

A few months ago, a professor showed me a paper he was working on about privacy on Facebook. It had only been a couple of years since he collected data, but I could tell the data was already outdated because Facebook already changed a lot of features regarding privacy. Now Facebook users can place their friends in different groups that a user can modify a level of privacy. Users can separate their family members, teachers, professors, or people from work by creating a group for them, and putting their close friends in a different group. Users can modify each post to be visible or invisible to a certain group. Through a bit of modification, now people can make connections on the Facebook with fewer worries for privacy. However, was this change included in the research the professor was working on, which hasn’t been published yet? No. The years of work and collected data have become archaic even before it was published. Even Danah boyd’s work, which was published only a few years ago doesn’t capture this change. The fast changing nature of new media makes it harder for researchers to publish their observation and analysis. May be its time for new media research journals to consider modifying their publication process.

Bullying and privacy
Cyber bullying is significantly intertwined with privacy. It is difficult for adults to figure out bullying problem because of the unique culture teens have. Teens use slang, and sometimes what doesn’t seem embarrassing to adults’ eyes might cause a severe trouble to some teenagers. Slangs are made for privacy purposes. With the help of new media, such as inviting certain people into a group and keeping others out, teen privacy is stronger as before. Dana boyd and some researchers argued teen privacy has become weaker than before. But in fact, they are actually adopting new media quicker than adults and are doing a good job in protecting their culture confidential. Unlike before when parents could open up a drawer to find their teenaged children’s secrets, now it is locked and protected by passwords. Some SNS provide anonymity. Cyber bullying can become way worse with anonymity, and users may post malicious comments about anyone. It would be interesting to compare severity of cyber bullying in media that provide anonymous feature and ones that doesn't to see anonymity produces courage to post hate speeches. (It would it easy to collect data from Twitter, but there will be some limitations for SNS such as Facebook, where stronger privacy settings take place.)

Additional things to think about privacy
Another perspective of looking at teen privacy is regarding parents. Now that people of all age are using Facebook, parents and grandparents post a lot of things regarding their family. Some parents post pictures of their child without the child’s consent. It can be an embarrassing picture for the kids, especially when they are trying to create a certain persona to get an approval of their peer group. Sometimes, a picture a parent has uploaded on a web becomes popular after some unknown user creates it into a meme. Parents think they have right to post picture of their babies, but it could be a violation of the child’s portrait right. Regarding this matter, there should be a discussion on privacy concern within family members.


Monday, January 16, 2017

Week 2: Communication on SNS and research methods

Different communication views and New Media

James W. Carey, in a Cultural Approach to Communication (2009), introduces two ways to look at communication with reference to John Dewey: A transmission view and a ritual view. The transmission view focuses on transmitting information across time and space, while the ritual view emphasizes on representing shared beliefs.

Social Network Sites (SNSs) are newly emerged media but the way people use it to communicate doesn’t go beyond Carey’s observation. People primarily use SNS to share information and to bond with family and friends. Using SNS to share news articles and multimedia contents coincides with a transmission view. Some, on the other hand, use SNS to play a certain role. Teenagers creating a fake persona on SNS to seek approval of the peer groups can be a good example of the dramatic ritual view.

Traditional media such as television and newspapers also had two use of communication, to inform people and to give them a world of drama. In the eyes of the beholder, television and newspaper contents became mere information or a dramatic show that invites views and readers as an active player. SNS is based on different set of technology but the essence of communication still remains. The platforms and technology of medium change, but the way people use it to communicate will not change, even when another medium emerges after SNS.


Different communication views and Research Method

If SNSs were just an information imparting media like the transmission view argues, researching SNS would be fairly easy. The quantitative method will be frequently used in the study of SNS to analyze the number of shared content, the number of users and the types of content. To approach SNS and its participants in the perspective of the ritual view, however, is very complex. Under ritual view, everyone is an active leader of his or her reality, and the numbers of such realities are uncountable. Thus, as with Danah Boyd did in her research of teen life and SNS (2013), qualitative research method such as in-depth interview is significant.

In Carey’s article, he argued American culture is mostly based on transmission view but other cultures may have ritual view as their founding stone. Carey’s two views are later developed into rational and emotional approach, and are practiced intercultural settings. The transmission view, which is the rational approach, is common in the western culture like Carey argued. The ritual view, which is the emotional approach, is usually practiced in eastern culture where long history of communal experience has set a shared belief for the people in the community. As a person born and raised in the eastern country where communitarian thought prevails, I agree with the ritual view of communication and argue that SNS research should go beyond collecting numbers. Especially the SNS users in the groups of different race, gender, religion and teens, which may share an unique set of common beliefs, need more thorough qualitative research.

SNS research, with questions of fake persona, users of different culture and beliefs, and colliding contexts, is such a difficult task. Quantitative research is significant, but because of such complexity SNS environment has, qualitative research must take place to genuinely understand SNS and its participants. 



Reference:

Boyd, D. (2013). Making sense of teen life: Strategies for capturing ethnographic data in a networked era. Digital Research Confidential: The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online. Cambridge Ma: the Mit Press, viewed, 5.


Carey, J. (2002). A cultural approach to communication. McQuail’s reader in mass communication theory, 36-45.