My new media obsession has to do with a new adblocker I installed called ghostery. I downloaded it after we talked about it in class. I’ve never used an adblocker before, so I didn’t know what to expect. Now, whenever I go onto websites, new ones or ones I’ve used before, my eyes are automatically drawn to the little notification number next to the ghost icon. This number tells you how many trackers and ads the app is blocking from any given website. Websites I’d been on plenty of times before have trackers that have been storing my information. It’s become kind of a bad habit, constantly checking how much I’m being monitored. But I guess this should come as no surprise.

This week I decided to do my observe on this game I found in the app store called “Make it Rain: Love of Money”. I was recommended to get it from a friend, who said it was very addicting. While I’m still confused about the actual point of the game, users were supposed to collect money in order to buy properties or invest in businesses, and essentially move up the rankings of the game. I don’t know if there was any actual reward at the end or money reward but there was rumored to be one, which is why the game appealed to many people. The main screen was a stake of money, and by swiping on the screen, you mimicked the “make it rain” action, which is a play on a trend that was once popular – the more money you swipe, the more money you earn and that’s how you initially get money to invest and buy virtual businesses and properties. THe game was highly addictive because basically all you had to do was swipe the screen to make money. And by users swiping on the screen, the application was able to increase their revenue bc users were engaging with the app. Such a smart idea in terms of capitalizing on users, not so much for a game. However, apparently within the first week of it’s release it made a crap ton of money and was number one in the app store. I played it for a few days and admittedly I became a little obsessed, but once the initial interest wore off and i realized i was using my own time to not win actual money, my obsession faded.

So recently I have noticed on Youtube that under certain news organization videos they have added a little disclaimer on the bottom of every one of their videos describing how they are publicly funded or funded by the government.  Each one of these disclaimers contains a link to a wikipedia article on the respective news organizations.  According to Youtube, these disclaimers are only seen by U.S. residents and are to help against the problem of fake news and propaganda in the media and also to give viewers additional information so they know more about their news sources.  Personally, I think this is one of the most absurd ideas ever.  If they wanted to specifically target fake news, they would include a report button on videos for that, and once there are a significant amount of fake news reports add a tag on the video stating it may be fake news.  Currently this disclaimer is attached to every video say the BBC or PBS uploads, regardless of whether the information they post is legitimate or not.  Also, in regards to these disclaimers all they provide is one wikipedia article on the news page, some of which provide more positive information on the organizations than negative.  Lastly, these disclaimers are only being attached to news organizations that are publicly funded or funded by the government.  However, many organizations that have been known to report misinformation in the past have absolutely no disclaimers at all such as Fox News or InfoWars.  These disclaimers just seem very bizarre to me and feel like Youtube is trying to influence their users to watch certain videos over other ones.

I was going through my emails and unsubscribing from a bunch of different websites.  For the most part, I would receive messages such as “We are sad to see you go!”  or “Thank you for your feedback” but with this website, they immediately wanted me to opt back in.  I thought this was super strange since I had literally just unsubscribed from the emails, so why would they offer me to opt back in ten seconds after I said I wanted to opt out.

Also going with this, many websites said it could take up to ten days for you to stop receiving their emails but they instantly send you emails when you do sign up.

i’m finding myself continuing to obsess over this idea of screen space and the interruptions that i endure as a user of things, this time with snapchat. i can’t say whether or not the app was actually capable of being aware that i was looking at my phone for the first time that day (my alarm had just gone off, i grabbed by phone and turned it off, saw the notification and took a screenshot). i was sleepy and not completely coherent so i’m having a hard time remembering how/why the interface looked the way it does, with the app zoomed out and the notification at the bottom? it’s like when you double-tap home to quit apps, but i haven’t been able to recreate or repeat the scenario exactly. i don’t really use snapchat that much these days, and now that they’ve changed the main screen to include stories it feels worse — too needy? desperate? inconsequential?. update: deleted snapchat from my phone

When playing doom I find myself more immersed than usual in a video game. I play the campaign mode, not the multiplayer so it’s just me playing. I often get bored of these types of games because the complicated story and such, but doom changed that for me. It is very fast paced with a lot of game, and basically no cut scenes. I feel that the reason that I get so into this game is because of the speed of it, all ur doing is running around at a very fast pace and killing monsters from hell… but it’s difficult and when there’s a lot going on it makes the experience more chaotic. In my opinion an entertaining gaming experience is something that throws a lot at you and really pulls you in with the diversity of the content. There’s different kind of enemies to kill and you have to mix up your strategy often. That keeps the game fresh and doesn’t get you bored of it.

So recently I have been playing an online game called amq or anime music quiz. Basically, you can play with up to 8 other people and connect your myanimelist account (essentially like an imdb for anime) to the quiz. The quiz will then choose opening, ending, and/or insert songs from shows you and the other players have watched. Based on just the song alone you have to guess what series the song is from. There is a timer countdown that you can control, as well as how many songs per round, difficulty, etc. It’s a lot of fun to play with online friends cause you get to learn about their show preferences and also learn about new shows and some good music. It’s also competitive in that you get points for guessing correctly, though the only thing points get you is the ability to change your character avatar. The only major negative is that it can have some buffering and player issues, where a song will take too long to buffer or will be silent for some players. Or if you’re playing with someone with bad internet connection their game can check out and they’d be forced to leave the game which is what happens a lot below with some of the players from places like Australia.

They saw me, and then they told me they saw me. We all know by now that all of our actions online are tracked, but this graphic seemed like they were mocking me. Yeah they see me, but what am I really going to do about it?

I don’t know if this is supposed to be a friendly gesture, like a friend shopping with you and giving you a nudge about a deal on something you saw, but it creeped me out. This is definitely making me rethink my browsing habits. All in all, they’re inadvertently causing me to not want to use the internet (read: their services) anymore.

In an email sent out to the school grad, staff, and faculty populations, the current contract negotiations, and the threat of a strike were addressed. The graduate contact negotiations have been technically public record but many graduate student’s nor the union have shared weekly information until now. This has lead to a separation of knowns by parties occupying physical space together for many hours of the day. This has called to my attention the way Massmail is best way for admin to contact all parties on campus, but the infrastructure for other parties to send massmail takes much more labor and coordination. Lines of internet communication are there for limited even between individuals such as faculty, graduate students, and undergrad students who will interact in person on a daily basis.

This communication breakdown is not a recent phenomena but is exaggerated do to the contrasting speeds of person-to-person conversation and internet one-way communication. The internet communication resembles the authority of the news (one-way communication of facts). Its a complicated form of communication.

I was interested in snaphat over the weekend because it updated and changed how information was presented in a very major way that was surprising to me. The first thing I noticed was when updating the app it doesn’t have a good rating, which doesn’t cause us to act in any particular way, I just thought it was something really strange because it’s so popular and is even #1 in photo and video. Why do we all use it if we don’t appear to like it?

Onto the update functions I noticed, the first change I noticed was the screen to select who you want to send a snap to. It is broken into more clearly separated groups of people which are stories, best friends, recents, groups, and friends. This constructs the user by making it easier to send snaps to certain people. The way it’s organized makes it so you want to post a story or send it to the people you are already sending messages to because those are the top categories. It isn’t much different than before other than it looks nicer, but the group button was what really caught my attention. Because I don’t have any groups on snapchat I was presented with the message “You don’t have any groups yet! 🙃” The upside down smiley face always reads as really passive aggressive to me, so this constructs the user in a way that tries to make you feel bad for not using this function. It’s saying “oh you don’t have groups yet. ok it’s fine it’s whatever even though you should totally do it i’m not mad about it it’s cool your loss.”

Finally, the biggest change and the one I’m least happy with is in the way stories are presented. I follow Cr1tikal on snapchat who is a pretty popular youtuber, and he posted a story on snapchat. Later in the day when I got the update, I noticed that in the section where stories used to be, his looked like one of the weird articles that snapchat tries to push it’s users into reading. None of my other friends stories were there, his was only there because he is a popular person. It even says popular story on his image. I kept scrolling down to find people I knew in this section, only to see a bunch of random people’s stories or articles about something or I don’t even know what. Like who is the user “Chunky?” I don’t know her. I don’t want to see her story. To find my friend’s stories, they were moved to the list of friends. If you swipe left, they are now there and if you swipe right is where all the articles and random people are located. This constructs users by separating who you know into a private location and eveyone else into another location, which I guess makes it more organized? But it’s just confusing and unnecessary. I think it’s also pushing the idea that you should care about these people. They’re popular, so you should care. Your friends lives don’t matter as much and their stories are presented in a less obvious way now because of that.

This week I thought I’d focus on the snapchat update. The new update is absolutely horrifying; in the old version, the snapchats you received and snapchat stories were in separate windows, making it very easy to avoid watching snap stories if you didn’t care about what others were doing. Now, the snapchat stories are on the same page as the snapchats you receive, essentially promoting stories and trying to get you to engage with the application more. It is more confusing, and a less attractive set up. It makes me not want to open snapchats because then I feel almost compelled to watch stories, especially when the feature is on the same screen. And it’s not just me that hates this update; people all over twitter and facebook are freaking out about how terrible it is and how everyone wants the old version back.

Option 1: Sephora. How dare you. You think this is a game? My wallet is not a fan of this. I became a Sephora member recently and this has been on the emails and in the app I downloaded. I started treating this like a game unintentionally, like I want more points, gotta get more points. I want a better status. Are there even better statuses? I thought about this for days, when I get my next pay check, what I want to buy, how many points those items are worth, it’s just like a mobile game but with real money and a lot of real money because nothing is cheap there. Well played, Sephora, well played. The points do mean something, they get you items, generally trial sized stuff to get you to buy more. However, to get points, I don’t get to play a game for free, I have to pay with my hard earned money. I may be more likely to buy things I don’t need to get more points. I feel more attached and I’m more likely to go to Sephora for my beauty needs rather than any other story because I don’t want to miss out on points. A lot of stores do this now but I only really noticed it here. With something like Walgreens, I don’t care about it as much. I need to go there for medication and such, CVS is dead to me now, why go anywhere else? Sephora… I just have feelings. I avoided it, it’s useful, and the sales associates are very, very good at their job. I should be more careful.

As I was scrolling through Facebook on my desktop this very subtle, unassuming post showed up between the normal posts on my feed. At first I skimmed right over it, but then I went back to take a closer look. Introducing new features over a colorless post on my feed vs. though an email or through the brightly colored pinned feature posts at the very top of my feed seems like an odd way for Facebook to showcase this kind of information. It made me think that Facebook is required to update me on changes to their service but they’re almost hoping for me to miss it.  Their language seems intentionally worded to scare me or guilt me into not turning off this feature. “Oh don’t worry, you are totally in control of everything on this website — at Facebook, we put the user in control….buuuuuut…….here’s why you should still do what we want anyway: if you turn this off people will steal your identity, you’ll be hurting disabled people, and what if you miss out on the next cool feature??” The Learn More page gives no more information about features using facial recognition (it’s the same message but with pretty illustrations of happy people) except it includes detailed steps on how to turn it off (and makes it seem a lot more complicated then it is).

It made me start thinking about how much Facebook knows what I look like. What “features” are they using this data for that they aren’t telling me about? Who else has access to this kind of information? Why do they want to be able to identify my face so badly? I decided to turn off the facial recognition feature, and I’m interested to see if it impacts my experience using Facebook in any way.

I think it’s interesting that you can choose to see fewer informational posts from Facebook or report their own post back to them.

Three posts later this article showed up on my feed…coincidence??

So for this post I wanted to write about a mobile game I have been addicted to for quite a while, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp.  Animal Crossing has always been good at keeping players playing by creating various new events through out the year and including new clothes and furniture.  I feel like the Mobile game, perhaps thanks to it being more accessible on phone as opposed to on a console, is far more addicting.  So, to get more items in the game the player must talk to villagers and give them various items they can acquire at different items.  Each villager has three requests and every 3 hours the 4 villagers at the 4 different islands are resetted.  Thus, the game has significant amount of replayability as there is always a new request to accomplish.  There are some mobile game trappings in this game. For one, the leaf tickets on the top middle of the screen can be awarded if the player achieves enough goals, but to get a substantial amount of those tickets one must buy them through the store.  The game has numerous limited time events such as the one being stated in the top left corner about a rose festival that has items that can only be acquired during that time period.  For completionists, having such limited time events causes players to continuosly be playing to make sure they get all the items.  If they are running out of time though for certain events they could just buy the items instead with leaf tickets, with the rose festival that is not the case though.  Another time aspect is that many items take a lot of time to build, such as the amenity in the second picture.  To speed up time one can also use leaf tickets.  And though for the rose festival a player can’t buy the awards, they can buy the means to the awards buy paying a character in leaf tickets to make sure they capture the items needed.  Overall though I like how often the game is updated and that the notice board constantly updates players on future events and known issues.  And though the game does have the pay-to-win aspect to it, it has enough resets throughout the day that so long as you are playing enough you can reasonably expect to be able to finish the event and get all the items.

A couple months ago, I found this app called Seek; it is an application that is sponsored by companies, and it is essentially a treasure hunt. There are “treasure chests” in places all over the world, almost on every other street, and the application tries to get you to open chests– in these chests you can win coins or fragments of prizes (example: fragment 1 out of 4 for a $50 Amazon gift card). The chests with better prizes require keys to open the chests, and you can earn keys by using the coins you find to purchase them in the store located inside the application, or you can use real money to buy them. Essentially the more you play, the more coins and keys you’ll earn for a better chance at prizes; the chests occur in the same places and refresh every 6 hours or so, but the less frequently you have opened a specific chest, the better chance you have at earning a prize fragment instead of just coins. I find this concept very interesting because this application is sort of driving you to get out and “explore” and go to new places and you are rewarded for it— and as long as you consistently play, you’ll have enough coins to buy keys for chests and you don’t have to spend any real money. I have only used it for a couple months and I have only opened chests in the same exact places (my apartment, art and design building, and my walk home), but I have already earned a few gift cards.

My obsession lately has been with Soundcloud. I generally use Spotify and Soundcloud for listening to music. And the reason I don’t switch over to one platform like Spotify is because the benefits of the interface. Soundcloud’s interface is very effective and displaying all types of music that you’d like on your feed. For example as you see in the screenshots, for each new song you like or share, it’ll show similar sound to that particular song. Apple Music,, Spotify, and Google Play do not have algorithms that specific. Also Soundcloud allows you to make account and upload your own sounds, and you can make playlists as well.

One of my favorite things to do to pass time is online shopping, and what I mean by that is filling my cart up with all the things I want and then closing the window out.

While doing this on beautybakerie.com I reached the 50 dollar free shipping minimum and then this popped up on my screen.

This is only a still of the pop up.  The sprinkles were falling like confetti and the ice cream was animated as well.  This made me super excited and I almost forgot that I wasn’t actually purchasing anything and I actually felt bad about not going through with my purchase because this graphic was so fun and encouraging.

For this project 0 it is of how Amazon phone app and how takes advantage of an upcoming holiday for them to advertise products that a user would maybe want. I think a key component in this is the word “deal” saying that they are better off purchasing from their site than any other location and they just kinda put it there at the top of your feed for you to see

Also, I find it no coincidence that all the top results and a lot of the ones that are under the ones that are in the screenshot are all amazon prime items. This is Amazon’s way of trying to put up how convenient Prime is right in the user’s face and probably take advantage of how some people might have forgotten to buy their SO something and need a way to get something delivered very quickly. Sneaky sneaky prime people.

When scrolling through instagram I noticed this “Popular Hashtags” post placed in between the posts of people that I actually follow. One thing that I think is interesting about this project is that I am paying more attention to everything that pops up on every piece of social media that I use, and I don’t think I’ve ever noticed this popular hashtag post in my feed before. Next, the phrasing of it itself stands out to me because it says that these searches are popular, and although they might be popular for a very specific audience, it’s clearly just searches directed at me rather than what is actually popular. For example, #nofilter has 216,267,715 posts and what I am being shown (#igbulldogs) has 588,442 posts. If I was really being recommended hashtags that are popular I would be seeing completely different images. This shows how instagram is keeping track of who I follow and what I search, like other sites and advertisements. Finally the follow button catches my attention because I have never followed a hashtag before. Instagram has recommended users show up all the time that they want me to follow, but I’ve never seen recommended hashtags to follow. I don’t even know what this would do, would I just see every single post that shows up in the tag on my feed? Why would I want to do that?