Social Media?

Social media plays a big role in today’s society and in a lot of people's lives. Everything from Facebook and Twitter to Instagram and Snapchat, it is all something that, especially us millennials, waste a lot of our day interacting with. Even though I am a big social media user, I still have mixed views on whether it impacts us negatively or positively. When you use social media, you are building yourself a virtual identity. I would explain the term ‘virtual identity’ as the character you are made out to be online, which means that your virtual identity can potentially be completely different from your actual identity. I have a virtual identity due to having social media accounts and I would like to think that my virtual identity does not vary much from my actual identity because I do not post on social media sites other than photos and the occasional post, I spend most of my time scrolling to see what others are posting. This is where I think that social media is negatively impacting individuals today. We not only spend so much of our day on social media, but I believe that people are very determined to make their virtual identity look amazing. Coming from a girl’s perspective, social media is something that leads you to compare yourself to others, sometimes resulting in thinking badly about yourself. To further explain my point, read this article. The article is about an individual near my home town, who was both very intelligent and extremely athletic but committed suicide because she would see her friends posting on social media about having fun in college, where as she felt as though she was always studying or playing sports. However, she would post photos as well so that people thought she was doing good in college as well. In this case, her virtual identity and true identity were not the same. This shows how seriously we take social media, and virtual identities. On the other hand, however, I do believe that social media has its benefits as well. Personally, I benefits from social media because it allows me to stay connected with family and friends who do not live by. Social media can either have a positive or negative impact, it all depends on how you use it.

Social Media at it's Finest

Social Media is something we as Millennials interact with every single day. Now, to an older generation this may not be the case, and that is why first I will do some explaining. Social Media can take a number of forms from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat for example. Twitter and Facebook are very similar in the way they operate. Twitter you can post what you are doing in 140 characters or less, this is the main difference from Facebook. I think this is why twitter appeals to a more younger audience than Facebook does. Mostly everyone my age nowadays really does not use Facebook anymore, it has mostly been taken over by our parents. Twitter is home for a lot of millennials, we can get just about anything on Twitter and that is why it is so popular. Instagram is an all picture based social networking site, strickly photos. Snapchat is an interesting one, you can send your friends pictures of whatever for a certain amount of time, then they disappear. Snapchat is also king among millennials. Now that I have explained them a little bit, I will go into depth about my social media.

For me, I am a very big fan of social media. I believe social media is an outlet, and a way to communicate with everyone. For instance I like to follow athletes and see what they are up to along with my peers. I think it is really interesting to follow an athlete and see what they do, on a day in and day out basis. To go along with that, we just had an election in our great country, and i feel as if this was the first election that really used a social media platform. I know from following President Elect Donald Trump, he is very active on social media, and to me that was interesting and also very entertaining, while he was campaigning.

 Instagram is a lot of fun, it is very interactive like twitter, but it is all pictures. I am also on Instagram, and follow about 250 people, and have about 400 people following me. I like to follow people I like to follow people I graduated high school with to see what they are up to, and since I got to college I tend to follow new friends that I have made. I have heard that single men appreciate it, to see if they can slide into someone's DM’s if they do not see a significant other. My favorite form of Social Media by far is Snapchat. Snapchat is just simply the best, it is a great way of communication and everything disappears. So if you were to see me on a social networking site, expect to laugh from the retweets, or the snaps, or the post’s because they are all pretty great.

Virtual Identity

When I think about my ‘virtual identity’, I think about the person that others perceive me to be online. Not only that, but also the virtual identities of my online friends and followers. Personally, my virtual identity does not stray too far from who I am in the real world, simply because I rarely post things on social media. I use social media as a way to occasionally share my opinions about something I am passionate about, interact with friends, and share a few pictures. I will admit that as a younger teenager, I put a lot more emphasis on social media than I do now. I spent hours comparing myself to the pictures of other girls’ looks and lives, and even though I knew that it was not helping me in any way, I had a difficult time keeping myself from doing it. At that age most people naturally compare themselves to others, but social media makes it so much easier to do. Most teenagers nowadays don’t even realize how much social media has taken over their lives because they’ve grown up with technology, so it has become second nature for them to constantly be checking their Facebook feeds and Instagram likes. I didn’t enter into the social media scene until I was about 16, but now I see ten year olds with smartphones and Instagram accounts. I have friends who will spend hours checking out how many likes their latest picture got, and try to figure out the perfect time to post things in order to get the most likes. Sometimes my friends will want to go somewhere just so they can take a picture to post on their Instagram, or immediately scope out the best place for a photo-shoot immediately after arriving at an event (yes, this really happens). Every person I know who does this is a good person, but they still feel like they need validation of their looks and activities through the approval of others.

I will admit that I am just as guilty as anyone else of trying to ‘perfect’ my social media accounts in order to give off the best image of myself that I can.. Even though I said that my virtual identity didn’t stray too far from my real-life identity, it is almost impossible for them to be exactly the same. Social media gives people confidence, but not necessarily the best kind of confidence. It gives us online confidence, which I think can sometimes lower our real-life confidence, because it is nearly impossible to embody the perfect image that we have spent hours crafting online. I think that is where the idea of the loss of confidence comes into play, because even if you’re not comparing yourself to others, you are still probably comparing your real self to the perfect, virtual version of yourself that you have created.

 Just like it says in “The Self in Selfie: Identity in the Age of Social Media”, the majority of online comments are centered around looks, because that is what they mainly focus on. Instagram is an app solely to share pictures, which are many times selfies. When someone I know posts a gorgeous, perfectly angled and edited selfie there are always dozens of comments saying how hot/pretty/beautiful they look. Some days I will scroll through my Instagram and see ten selfies in a row, all edited and airbrushed to perfection. I sometimes wonder what the point of sharing a picture of your face is if you’re just going to change it anyway. The people who are liking it are most likely people who you interact with in person, so they already know that you don’t always have perfect makeup and skin. Then I realize that if I posted a selfie, I would probably want to make it look better than my real self too, because I would want a picture that hundreds of people are going to see to represent the best version of myself that I could create. Social media and virtual identities give people a chance to show off a version of themselves that they would not otherwise get to do. Without it, the person you are in real life is who you are to everybody, but with social media, you can choose every detail that you want to show off, and every detail that you don’t want to show off. In many cases, the identity that you create online is how most people see you, aside from close friends and family. A virtual identity gives you the chance to be whatever version of yourself you want the world to see, without all of the clumsiness or awkwardness that real life interactions entail.

Is that Me?

One of my favorite games to play online is Town of Salem. This game is an online reincarnation of the classic "Mafia" party game. The only people who have established allies are the Mafia. The Mafia is a relatively small group (about 3-4 people) who get the privilege of knowing who their teammates are. Another team is the larger "Town", and the town has no clue about who is who. The Mafia win by obliterating the town, and the town win by eliminating the Mafia and other evil-doers. Sometimes, you have really smart team mates, and other times you have to deal with gigantic idiots! Often times, I have cursed at these players. Here is one such instance: "OMG GUYS WHAT THE F*CK! CAN'T YOU LEARN TO READ THE DOCTOR'S WILL! I DO NOT HAVE F*CK*NG IMMUNITY!! I WAS F*CK*NG HEALED BY THE GOD F*CK*NG DOCTOR THAT F*CK*NG NIGHT!!!"

Would I ever walk up to a person at start flying off the handle like that in real life? No! I admit, I have dropped quite a few four letter words, but I only use like 2 curse words an hour (and to me, that is fairly low).

Have you ever created an online personality or character?

Personalities in my opinion are pretty much your presence, under a pseudonym. These often times are just who you are, with few changes.

I have! In fact, the me writing this blog is one of my characters! I am not totally like this!

Last year, I created a blog for a very similar class, where I took on the personality of a gaming journalist with a tendency to be sarcastic and poke fun at things like "Call of Duty". In fact, part of my midterm took place as a new post to that blog.

For characters, these just need to be fictional versions of you, or just not you. 

As a furry, I currently have one character (Fursona- Furry Persona): Adrennec (A portmanteau of Adrenaline (which is a common theme among my characters) and Fennec (his species). To create his personality, I took the Archer character Slater, and combined them with some of my personality. From Slater, he got the dry wit, the shirt, and his lawfulness. From me, he got a tendency to drop a few curse words, a very excitable personality, his good looks, his hatred for drinking, and his love for playing Battlefield. I even have a fursuit (like a mascot costume, but tailored for one body) of him, which I don't use too often, but is a great way of portraying him. Why? No one can see through his head! In a way like alcohol, it makes me less serious, but in a good way!

If once again, Blogger loses the image, click this link

As a brony ( adult fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic), I have a fan character, Buffalo Chicken. His personality is almost an exact clone of Sterling Archer from "Archer". The only things he got from me are an obsession with rollercoasters and a love of games with emphasis on speedy action, like "Titanfall" and Call of Duty. From Sterling Archer he gets things like having a sarcastic sense of humor, a tendency to often times anger his coworkers, a major profanity vice, optimized skills, and can at times be a bit of a womanizer.  

If this image is also lost by blogger, then you can view it here,

When I am on Reddit, I will occasionally post things to my joke account, with the intention of getting down-voted into oblivion (basically, if Reddit doesn't like what you are saying, they will take away some of your Karma). The only guaranteed methods I know of are being straight up offensive or stupid, with a recent thread noting about Call of Duty servers being down in Pakistan. I retorted that it is probably for the best, as the last thing we need are Pakistani playing terrorist simulators and heading off to America to start a mass murder. Can I hide behind a screen? Someone can easily find my ip address and track me down, so I think it is safe to say that is a nope.

But wait. None of this is close to me!

Those are just 3 of my characters! None of those will ever be who I am! I can not hide within the furs of a stallion or a fennec or behind the screen of a tasteless redditor!

The closest online representations of me are my Facebook and my primary Reddit account. But when you see those 2, all you are seeing is just my honest thoughts!

In fact, some of the things I write on Reddit and Facebook are deceitful, such as how I was so happy for "Call of Duty: Black Ops" to be making a come back on the Xbox One, yet in real life, I harbor nothing but a stony heart and a bad attitude towards Activision. Ask me the next time you see me about my opinions of Call of Duty and I will start ranting about how they are never changed and Activision ripped off their former developers.

By no means do I mean to depress you, Ask me about how I am doing online: I will just be like "Oh everything's cool!" In real life, I might break into tears about how I have let certain grades suffer and how things are so different. Even in real life, you might see a happy person on the outside, but on the inside, you will find depressing thoughts. Today, consider taking a look at your fake identities online and comparing them to you. You will see yourself in your fake identities and you will not see yourself in your fake identities. When I took a look, I realized the computer has taken me and split me into two different people: the good me and the bad me.

Do Games Count Too?

About 9 weeks ago, I would have told you that games do not count and do not deserve the same attention as great literature, art, and film. That was because I am not a gamer, thus have not played many or researched many games. After looking at game pieces such as That Dragon, Cancer, I can now honestly say that I believe that some games should be given that attention. That Dragon, Cancer can be looked at as a journey of hope in the shadow of death. This narrative video game offers an engaging story about a four year old boy, Joel Green, who is fighting cancer. Like several pieces that we looked at, this took a personal story from the author and gave it an interactive layer. The trailer can be found here:

Not all games with Transmedia elements are augmented reality. Take for instance this year’s “Quantum Break”. A live action series was produced in order to help enhance the story. When players play through enough action scenes, they will have to make a decision from the villain’s point of view, a perspective rarely seen in video games. A one hour show will play after each decision is made, showing the consequences of the choices. Halo is a well known game series, and it has expanded its universe to have novels, a direct to dvd film, and even an upcoming Showtime series. When it comes down to looking at interactivity, most games are letting the player “help” the story move on. In games like Battlefield, players are just given a laundry list of objectives, and once the laundry list is completed, the game is finished. Other times, games will actually let the player steer the story. These games will often have multiple endings which can be reached in different ways. A game might choose an ending for the player based off of their choices (Call of Duty Black Ops 2) or based off of a decision making scene at the end of the game (Grand Theft Auto V), typically found in a “who do you want to sacrifice” scene. Games can also interact with players like in the case of Grand Theft Auto V, where the in-game shrink gives you a complimentary evaluation about your in-game behavior. (This was mine)

Either way, I promise you that games play a very big role in digital humanities.

Video Game Meme

Uncreative Writing

For this post, we created uncreative writing by reacting to an exercise in class where our group of four had to simultaneously transcribe what we were hearing from a set of videos into a Google hangout. The videos we transcribed were Shia Labeouf’s original “Just Do It”, a press session with Marshawn Lynch, a selected segment from Oprah Winfrey’s commencement speech at Stanford, and a mash-up of Donald Trump quotes. After we finished with all of the transcriptions, we took the chat and put it into a google doc, removing our names and time stamps. Take a look at our poem, Millennial Force Just Did It, to better understand what this blog is talking about!

To start, I looked at our transcript of the Shia Labeouf speech. Interestingly, it looked a good deal like something that Eminem would rap, especially with how often certain lines were being repeated. After this portion, we transcribed the Marshawn Lynch “interview”, where even the reporters gave up on trying to get him to speak. As several people know, Marshawn Lynch is a notorious recluse around the media. With Lynch being the only speaker, reading this sounded more or less like a toast given after getting out of prison. When we reached Oprah’s speech, we somehow stumbled across her complaining about going bald after a hair perm. This led way to a part where she complains about how she did not want to be reporting, yet she wanted to be helping out instead. The only way I could see these two transitioning smoothly was with Oprah complaining about hate. The last we heard from Oprah was her choice to be a better Oprah. After this, we took a look into a mashup of Donald Trump, which was where things started getting hectic. This started off with Donald Trump’s notorious habit of firing people, and then diving into his presidential campaign with clips bragging about his wealth and how he considers himself to be a nice person. The next portion was a rapid fire of Donald Trump saying China. Since at this point, I was getting completely bored, I decided to spam China into our chat repeatedly (and also later in the video when he stopped saying China I still spammed it in a little). After this, Donald Trump points out how assertive he is, using things such as saying that he personally would be the best for striking fear into ISIS, threatening to sue someone over the phone and then hanging up, and saying how it couldn’t have been any better. If we had to put this all together and give it some sort of storyline or meaning, I would say it was a rap/speech about how a man gets motivated to leave prison, going bald, doing charity work, and suddenly teaming up with China and earning a huge reputation, and then looking back on their life.

Now, the real question is, is our poem considered plagiarized? Our poem consists of lines that other people have spoken, that are in no way original to us. Although we have taken the lines from multiple videos, I don’t think our poem should be considered plagiarized because we only took small fragments from each video. It reads as if the random lines in the poem could have been taken from anywhere, since there is really no context surrounding them. What this unique type of poem does is make for an interesting mashup of popular videos featuring well known cultural figures, which also makes for a very interesting read. Though, the way we acquired the information for this poem might make some wonder if there is really any true meaning in it. Because of the comedic nature of the specific video clips that we selected, I’d say that there really is no deep meaning of this work, other than it’s ability to make you question what you’re reading. However, I do think that if a poem like this would be comprised with of videos with more substance, such as motivational or inspirational videos, readers could be able to individually interpret it. Any poem can be very meaningful or not meaningful it all. The meaningfulness of a poem relies on the reader’s unique mind and opinions, making it possible for different people to find different meaning in anything, even if most people view it as meaningless.