This is someone else’s story but I think its an important one to share:

My friend “J” no longer lives in a town recently visited by a white supremacist rally. He posted from another facebook page a Nazi Watch image which was being distributed at a  university. In his sharing this image the image was intern shared more times than the number of friends he has and it caught the attention of some of the ppl in the image. His facebook page obviously turned into a long screed of arguing between people.

I was struck most by the number of shares of an image exceeding the number of friends he currently has. I was also shocked by his shock. The result was him having some non-violent discussions via private message with some of the ppl on the flyer…mostly pertaining to their denial of being racist or denial of Nazism.

He has also now ended up with his own image on a crudely pasted into an Antifa Watch flyer.

The internet has created a space in which Antifa and Nazi’s are having continuous back and forth. I can’t tell how thankful I am for a platform for discussion but doubtful as to the productivity. The internet seems to have brought some people of diverse backgrounds close and some people with seemingly identical backgrounds closer. The posting of someone else’s picture does read like a hit list. Police departments fabricate similar flyers and private security companies create them with beautiful avatars: The Intercept

Identity listings like these are meant to keep many of these ppl away through social pressure and intimidation. At this point these seem to mostly create an interesting back and forth between Antifa and Nazi’s. In the defense of such images, groups like Antifa are functioning as a loud watch dog against the fascism which escaped many white liberal’s attentions until the election. I have no idea how to do any of this antifascism work any better at this point.

Some of these individuals I can vet myself but I can not vet that all of them are Nazi’s. This is where trusting your source as an activist and internet user gets pretty hairy. At the end of the day. I am thankful for free speech and hope that people know that the desired result of working towards a better world means maintaining the entire bill of rights. 

Over the spring break, I was in Maryland for the school shooing St. Mary’s county. I was alerted to this shooting by a news notice in the live section of YouTube. The video I first watched was a CNN live interview with a student currently inside the school on lockdown. They were on the phone for a few minutes and then the voices of the police came in over the phone. The student said he had to get off the phone bc the officers were about to escort them out of the school.

The media construction of what I was witnessing was not new to me. News television outlets have always scrambled to get victims statements even while an incident is unfolding. The layers through which I was receiving this experience shocked me.

The live news report was being funneled to me via a phone carrier, via CNN, via Youtube, via my iphone. There triangulation getting this information to me was an uncomfortable collaboration of many different corporations. The formulation of this moment is breathtaking. This collaboration has created incredible technological innovations…but in this circumstance being brought to my phone was a voyeuristic window of someone else’s fear. This was a very short clip amongst my other garbage entertainment clips on youtube. It’s not just the internet’s fault that we don’t know how to tell the difference between real news and fiction…News and fiction have been commingling in television entertainment since the 60’s.

I don’t blame the mediums themselves but I very much blame large companies for this confusion of news and entertainment, serious subjects and spurious subjects.

Also facebook seems to know how pissed I am. I wonder what the programers are thinking right now? Do they feel like they’ve been doing the right thing? That they are not to blame? Does each person operate a piece so small that they feel no responsibility nor ability to regulate anything from within?

I use the website Citation Machine whenever I need to write a bibliography, and I think awhile ago it became a site that could tell when you were using adblock extensions so it would ask you to turn off adblock. I haven’t used Citation Machine in a long time, so when I actually saw ads it was surprising. One thing I think they do is interesting with their ads is that to use the site ad free for 2 days, you have to deal with an interactive ad. Its funny how they don’t give you the option to just deal with the ads and you have to experience the interactive ad as well, because I did not click anything stating that I wanted to remove the ads at all.

While playing a game that offers prizes in exchange for watching an ad, I decided that I didn’t care about the 50 extra gems.  The game, however, had another idea and that idea was to threaten me with the lost of the reward.  The most annoying thing was that the resume video option is a clear box you can click on and the close video option vaguely resembles an option you actively click.

So this first thing is about some kind of life-structuring app that was advertised at me, and I realized that I’m getting more and more sensitive and resistant to attempts at regulating or structuring my time on a minute level. There’s this book “The End of Sleep” by Jonathan Crary that looks at all the ways capitalism is trying to utilize sleep as the last un-tapped human resource, which as someone who loves sleeping, really scared me like 5 years ago. While I agree with the sentiment that we should find ways to suck ourselves out of the rabbit-holes we find ourselves in on the internet, I don’t think intense monitoring/regulation of my daily activity is the right answer. Also “Win The Day” and “GET MORE DONE,” these days all I want to do is lose a day and get nothing done.

ANOTHER ONE!

This may be a bit of a stretch, but my friend curates this telephone pole and I really enjoyed this no-fi reinterpretation of how we find information and become aware of things, along with how we use the web to contextualize ourselves within a specific, local space.

So for my observe I wanted to look into how movies are scored on the popular site Rotten Tomatoes.  I believe both the tomatometer and the audience score to be somewhat flawed.  For audience score this is mostly due to it being divided up by “liked it” and “didn’t like it” and the fact that due to it being an audience or the public scoring just about anyone can vote in that category whether they had seen the movie or not.  Though, tomatometer also has its flaws as pretty much any journalist can claim to be a critic, however it does help to divide it up by top critics and those who are not.  Another problem with the meter is that it essentially just takes the average of scores to come up with the rating.  This can be flawed as the average can skew due to outliers, so a few people rating a movie a 5/5 though most are lower can skew the rating closer towards a fresh rating.

I didn’t have any specific or intentional observation for this week, so here’s a selection of “weird things I noticed on Facebook”:

1. Why is my concert event automatically flagged as a job application? What is Facebook parsing from my event to come up with this flag? Can other people see this or is it just because I’m an admin?
2. Apparently you can save pictures from someone’s profile, just not their cover photo. Good thing I can tell someone I don’t like their abstract image though.
3. Liking a page gave me a weird red error a couple times one day. What’s that about? Facebook get it together.
4. I’m very glad I can turn off this feature (and also, what a weirdly specific feature to be able to turn off). The less I interact with ads on Facebook the better.

EOH Website

This year’s site is pretty, but frustrating due to the lack of information.

This week I was looking at things on the compass 2g website, the website used to consolidate classes, grades, and information for most of the classes at U of I. I had never really paid much attention to this website other than the links to my class pages, but there were a few things I noticed this time. For one, you can customize the page, although the only customization offered is changing the color of the banners (whee). I also saw that there was a tag on the left that said “personal information”. Curious, I clicked on it to see what personal information about me it had.

Apparently you can volunteer information like your name, address, and contact information on here. Although I don’t know why you would want to; as far as I know the only people who can see your compass page are yourself and your teachers. This page just made me think that the people who created compass wanted it to be a bit more of a school social network, having kids connect to each other on here. But as far as I know, it has never been used for that.

This week I’ve been obsessed with the South Park app. Almost every week there is a new event in the PVP mode where they try to draw you in and play against one another more, and you get more cards and money for doing so. This weekend’s event was centered around the idea of being on a team and competing in team battle, which I wasn’t very fond of but found myself enjoying a lot more than any other event I’ve participated in.

I got the first message before the event started, and it says to, “Join an active team, you won’t regret it.” I’d been putting off joining a team because I knew it wouldn’t be with people I knew in real life and I’ve never played an app that had a great multiplayer function anyway, but this app is largely multiplayer where you are fighting against one another to get better. Since I had nothing to lose, I joined “Team Homie” since it was a generic enough name where I didn’t have to really think about it too much. 

You can chat with your team and donate cards requested by your team members after joining a team. Without really thinking about what it did, I would donate cards just to be nice and I ended up in first place for the week for player donations. I’m guessing the week ends on Monday so I still don’t know what that really does, but by donating I was also able to get coins and level up which just makes the whole game experience a lot more fun and easier for you to win.   

When the event started, another news message popped up telling me, “Don’t be a freeloader!” and other encouraging stuff to get me to want to play the event with a team if I hadn’t decided to do so already. When you check the progress of the event, you can see your individual progress or your team progress, which is what I thought was more cool to see. Team progress is also ranked, and I didn’t do as well on this one as I did with just donating cards, but seeing everyone else’s progress made me want to participate more so that it looked like I was helping.

Facebook is constantly telling me my Facebook profile is incomplete. I hate it, the need to fill things out is real. They tell me I’ve had my profile for so long, telling me I should update shit. Leave me alone. Now there’s this. “Answer some questions to help friends get to know you” as if my “friends” didn’t know me well enough. It knows that people friend each other on Facebook while not being actual friends but is trying to make it more personal, so people can get to “know me better”, as if they give a shit about me and talking to me again outside of college. I took a picture during this one moment, but it actually went through a few different options, like favorite color or such, all with emojis because being a millennial means I use emojis all the time. I wonder if they give this option by age or if everyone gets this little pop up on their profiles. Is there some crusty Harvard professor answering the question, “A job I’d be terrible at… :P”? Or is it those in a certain age bracket? I’m glad they have this “Not Now” option, but it just means in a week or so, when I look at my profile again, it will bring this option up again. I don’t need to make my profile any more personal than it is. This isn’t MySpace and I’m not in middle school. Leave me be, Facebook.

For my observe this week, I decided to comment on how SEO and PPC ads show up on my google browser. I typed swimsuit into the search engine and on my SERP there were immediately 4 paid advertisements as well as the shopping feature on the right hand side. The organic search options were obviously below the paid ads but in response to this SERP set up, I watched how I reacted. I actually realize that I generally don’t click on the paid ads because for some reason I feel like if a company is paying for their ads to be at the top of the page then maybe they aren’t as popular or even as reliable as the company’s who have effective SEO techniques (which are often free). Although I’m an advertising major, for some reason the idea of giving into ads irk me.

It was during the first few days of protest that I joked the best way to get my complacent peers to picket was to convince them it would create great numbers on their fit bit. Multitasking at its finest right? It wasn’t until the 4th day of strike that I realized I my own phone was roughly tracking my steps when it was on my body. 

At first I felt a terrible pride in the numbers. They were my numerical evidence of my labor. I had not sought these numbers out but here they were! ready for me to enjoy and bask in. But I did feel gross. I felt myself reducing my work to the numbers and felt I was playing the capital production game of which i’m always trying to work away from. I was enjoying it.

Furthermore: I had never used this app before. I had no idea that it was enabled. when I first turned it on I did not give it access to my location: but it is still tracking movement of some kind even though it is not a GPS related tracking system. Is this data safe within this app? is it just on my phone or is it in a cloud of data without my knowledge. I was further disturbed by this when I realized that I don’t know what half the apps on my phone do. I am currently in the process of evaluating what is useful and what I feel violates my consent bc I had no knowledge of it’s functioning.

This week I noticed that Spotify has started adding animated album cover artwork to play during select songs. I knew that “Sign” by VHS Collection utilized this, but I realized this week that another song — “List of Demands” by The Kills — was doing it as well. This doesn’t seem to be a default setting for a song, and it appears that the artist has to choose to create and upload it. It also doesn’t necessary apply to the whole album; for The Kills’ artwork, the animation didn’t appear for any other song on that album (the VHS song was just a single so I couldn’t tell with that one). You can tell if a song has animated artwork by seeing the green circled icon on the “Now Playing” bar on the bottom of the Spotify app (see below on the left). When you pull up the “Playing From” screen after clicking on the bottom bar, the screen changes from the typical album display (see below on the right) to the full-screen animation (see above on the left). If you click on the animation it shows the song information with the animation dimmed and playing behind it (see above on the right), but this only stays active for a few seconds before reverting back to the animation. It clearly puts the animation front and center for the user.

I would love to see more of these types of animations from Spotify. I think it’s a really unique, eye-catching way of displaying music. It makes me feel more engaged and interested in the song that is playing. I don’t usually leave my phone on display when listening to music but I would probably start doing it if it meant seeing album art like this in a cool new way. I’m surprised more artists don’t do this for their music or why they don’t do it for the whole album. It seems like a very innovative way to incorporate music with the technology behind the streaming service.

Also, I like how much Spotify encourages you to share your screenshots with your friends. I got the blue notification every time I took a screenshot for this post.

So recently I have gotten into playing Pokemon Showdown with friends online.  What makes this game fun is the ease as to how you can competitively battle, in actual Pokemon games you would have to spend a lot of time catching and training Pokemon, On Showdown it is essentially a database of all the Pokemon available and you are able to make any sort of team you wish to create.  The feature I also enjoy is the random battle as well as that is instant gratification since you don’t even need to spend the time to make a team.  Over time you collect and lose points depending on if you win or lose and since there are numerous players online it is unlikely you’d be stuck in limbo during a battle unless the other player is planning to forfeit.

My observe deals with the automatic video playing that I find on facebook and instagram. When scrolling through a feed, the videos begin silently playing. I found that even if I wasn’t pulled in by the static image at first, when it became “moving”, I suddenly became more interested in the story.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but moving pictures tell a story. As I’m scrolling, I only get a second or two in the clip before I potentially scroll past, but I found that this is just enough time to hook me. In just a second or two, the story begins to unfold.

The silent aspect of the video adds to the hook. It makes me think that I get to choose whether to hear the audio or not, but it’s actually about me not being in the know. I can see the kids giggling, I can see people talking, I can see things that need to make sound, but I’m restricted. Facebook says “no, don’t hear this” and my mind says “why not?”.

Initially I thought that the silent video was a nice feature, which surpasses the current auto-loading videos which blast their audio content without concern, but now I’m not so sure. Facebook doesn’t seem to change (or do) anything unless is 1) benefits them and 2) uses psychology against (maybe even for??) us. I’m irritated by auto-loaded videos which blast their audio, but I more than tolerate the silent auto-loaded videos. In fact, I’m more likely to watch a silent auto-load than an audible auto-load. I think facebook (also read: instagram, snapchat, etc) knows that.

This didn’t happen to me, but rather, to someone in a Facebook group as me (I asked for permission to use this photo). There’s so much to take in here, but my all time favorite is the “This is a mistake”. I wish I knew what happened when you clicked that but the wording of that is hilarious to me. OF COURSE it’s a mistake, why on Earth would I choose for them not to see my comment? It almost seem like he was blocked by the original poster but that wasn’t the case. Other people had the same problem in this group. Your only two options are to complain or to accept your fate with “OK”. The wording for the error is also interesting. “You can’t connect with this person”, keeping with Facebook’s “original” goal of connecting people. Rather than, “You can’t post a comment right now”, they have to connect it back to the original poster. “They won’t see your comment” when in the background, no one can see Jason’s comments because they aren’t even “sending”, as if this comment is being sent like a text message rather than being posted like a comment. I would expect that type of wording in the Facebook messenger app, not the normal Facebook app.

THIS WAS A MISTAKE

For my next observe I chose to do this new facebook app update I just so happened to stumble upon when I was going about my day. Recently facebook added a thing when when you watch a video and mid-way through if you swipe downward instead of going away it will be a minimized version of it in the corner of your screen. I was taken aback by this at first because I wasn’t expecting them to do this. The reason why I found this interesting however, is because Youtube has had a feature just like that where you can browse other videos while the one you are watching is minimized in the same fashion you see in the image. With the new Youtube update it has a version where the same thing happens but they changed the look of this minimized screen so it looks like where Youtube goes, facebook is a step behind them. I feel like this relates to an earlier observation I had where I said that Facebook is trying to monopolize the app industry by trying to ripoff features of others apps and I feel like this is a strong example of that again. Facebook is trying to encourage people to watch more videos on facebook by making it more “convenient” for them to watch, pause and do others things and later come back to that video. I feel likes its almost obvious at this point.