For this week’s blog post, I am choosing to respond to “I’m an Addict” and Other Sensemaking Devices: A Discourse Analysis of Self-Reflections on Lived Experience of Social Media.” By Katrin Tiidenberg, Annette Markham, Gabriel Pereira, Mads Rehder, Ramona Dremljuga. “This reflects a dialectical struggle to make sense of their lived experiences and feelings.” (Tiidenburg,1), this quote sticks out to me because due to social media apps like twitter, instagram and snapchat, people begin to struggle with their own experiences. I often find myself losing myself in these apps, and spend random time just scrolling down the feeds. I would usually stay on twitter just to keep up with what’s going on, that app is the last thing I see at night. “This discourse utilizes the above-mentioned addiction grand narrative, relying on the reified rhetorical elements of narcissism, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) or vanity.” This quote vividly expresses how my meaningless scrolling could actually be a phobia of missing out.

Work Cited

Katrin Tiidenberg, Annette Markham, Gabriel Pereira, Meghan Dougherty, Mads Rehder, Ramona Dremljuga, Jannek Sommer. “I’m an Addict” and Other Sensemaking Devices: A Discourse Analysis of Self-Reflections on Lived Experience of Social Media.”

For this Journal entry, I had chosen to reflect on Defining the Initial Shift by Elizabeth Einstein. In this reading she discusses the evolution from scribal culture to printing culture. The change to printing culture served as a catalyst in many revolutions such as the Renaissance. Print was such an technological advancement that it allowed for more books and information to be spread. I enjoyed this reading because it directly coincides with modern society. We have evolved from the print era into the digital era, publications who have relied heavily on magazines and newspapers are switching to more digital media outlets. It makes me put into perspective of how society has yet again gone through any shift in the way we spread our knowledge and information. Print was once the hot new invention in society, but slowly began getting displaced by more digital advancements. This reading highlights the change from scribal culture to print culture, and that revolutionized society in a meaningful way. The shift from orality to literacy detailed in the reading is the same shift our society faced when switching from print to digital.

Communication has always been the center of our beings- no matter what shape or form it’s in. We have always had a way to communicate with one another. I strongly believe that we’ve lost a sense of what it’s like to truly communicate with one another. Yes there is social media and other sites like LinkdIn to help us network, but what about when it comes to meeting someone and speaking to them in person? On page 11 of James W. Carey’s “Communication as Culture”, he opens up a sentence with something Dewey had said in his book which is “…of all things communication is the most wonderful.” I couldn’t agree more. In a way I feel that we kind of take the fact that we can communicate with one another for granted because there are some people who can’t. Communication is the key to the most important things in our lives. School, work, friendships, relationships, having to call the MTA customer service line because your transaction for a $32 unlimited failed but it still charged your card… (still bitter and very annoyed cause I haven’t gotten my money back). But when it comes to interactions, we become extremely anxious and don’t know what to do. Instead we freeze up and panic. And it’s because we’ve become so accustomed to talking to one another through these tiny computers. When having to network, you have to build personal relationships with people in order to get somewhere and put your foot in the door. Without communication we become the robots that people have always feared of becoming one day in the very far future (hopefully never- they’ll end us all).

This week I decided to read “Missed Connections” by Safiya Noble.

A quote that stood out to me was:  “Cuts to public education, public libraries, and community resources only exacerbate our reliance on technology, rather than information and education professionals, for learning.”

To me this quote just shows how bad our dependency has become on technology. Future generations will never know how to do things on their own or think for themselves because they are going to be eaten up by the internet. Books will be a joke to them and this will be a proof of just how lazy technology has made us become. Cuts shouldn’t be made to public education. libraries or community resources. Kids should be learning how to get out there and actually work for something, not just go running to the internet for answers that aren’t even always accurate.

I chose to read “I Am an Addict” for this week. While reading it, I did get a bit overwhelmed because all I kept thinking to myself was “wow, here I am reading research when I should be doing my research project which is based off this same topic.” My mind was definitely all over the place but there was one line that stuck out to me- that I just might use for my research project for my Communications Research class.

“Young people’s social media use- its possible effects and implication- persists as one of the most popular areas of scholarly interest surrounding networked technologies. This heightened interest stems from the group’s intense usage habits and the greater public’s anxiety around networked technologies, their benefits and pitfalls.”

This mainly stuck out simply because as I do my research for my other class, I realize just how true this statement is. There are so many researches done about social media and how it’s affected today’s youth, regardless if it’s beneficial to us or not. It also stuck out because the authors write how researchers are mainly interested in this because of the grand anxiety social media has put on the public- the same reason I chose to focus on this for my research for my other class. I find it interesting how social media has created societal norms for us without people even realizing until they come face to face with the actual norm – if that makes sense. Social media definitely has its good, but it also has it’s bad. It’s now a way to network, entertain, educate and even work. People now depend on social media to live and I think it’s incredible how something that means nothing has completely taken over us.

Final for OLCT FALL 18

For this week, I focused on Mark Nunes’ Email, Letters and Post. Both readings were interesting in that fact that they showcased emails in a different light. As someone who grew up with emails being a main form of communication, it is hard to imagine life without the constant use of emails. Today, emails are a common way to interact with professors and apply for job applications, two very important interactions that any person could make. How did people use to do it before emails? Nunes states, “As a mapping of lived space, I would argue that email suggests both a dominant social space that reinforces social relations of modernity’s networks of exchange, as well as a restructuring of these relations through the production of altered spaces of everyday life.” This seems to be true. Before email, one would never imagine doing something as important as talking to a professor or applying for a job interview not face to face. That was the proper and professional way to handle business. Today, it is extremely common to send an email. It makes the most sense for many people. Emails have changed the entire way that people interact with one another.

Miranda Pacheco

Cover Letter

Ever since I can remember my life involved some type of media presence. Like many others I have become accustomed to mindlessly scrolling through Instagram and using its content to simply pass time. When we were introduced to Marshall McLuhan early in the semester, the topic I was most interested by was his statement “the medium is the message”. I felt challenged to view media technology in a new way. I wanted to view it through the lens that a medium itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. For the creative part of my project I attempted to do exactly that. I decided to use my own instagram experiences to visually represent the medium, instagram. Instead of focusing on the content posting I began to walk through moments where Instagram had a social impact on my own life, in addition to revealing the type of access I have through Instagram and how this ability affects us culturally on society.   

Attached below is the creative portion of my project which is slides created into a video. These slides are explained and compared to McLuhan ideas in the paper that was handed in. 

 

“Is Google Making Us Stupid” written by Nicholas Carr talks about how Google is slowing down our ability to think for ourselves. I think it is clear that Google is damaging our thinking because we tend to rely on the Internet rather than actually using our brain. I agree we need slow down the use of technology because it’s not helping us think for ourselves; However, I find it ridiculous not to use Google to search for information. The article doesn’t convince me to stop using Google but it tells me I should use it only if I’m not too sure about something. Carr states, that “even as Google is giving us all that useful information, it’s also encouraging us to think superficially. It’s making us shallow.” (Carr, 2008) For me personally, I think it’s fictitious. It’s not making us shallow; it helps me gain more knowledge on various topics unsure about. For example, I have to do a research paper for my TV Radio class in which I’m picking a country and focusing on the media landscape. In order to do find out about the media in Canada I need to use Google. Despite what Carr says Google is very useful and people would use it by default.

Work Cited
Carr, Nicholas. 2008. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic. July 1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/.

The iPhone is very useful, but they also are incredibly addictive. I spend most of the time on Youtube Instagram, iMessage, and FaceTime. I enjoy watching basketball highlights and watching any type of videos that are recommended for me. When it comes to iMessage I’m in a group chat with my friends where we send random pictures and videos we see on social media. For Instagram, I’m a frequent user I spent most of the time on entertainment on pages like The ShadeRoom and Akademics page finding out news and new music. The app I enjoy the most is FaceTime because I like to see who I’m taking to face reaction. Also, I used this app called Bleacherreport that focuses on sports and sports culture. I used that app every day. It gives me any alerts of my favorite teams in sports. it keeps aware of what’s going on in sports. I think my phone keeps on track of everything I like easily. But still makes me lazy because I depend on my phone so much. Overall, I wouldn’t last a day without my phone because I like to be informed of news and it helps me interact with my family and friends in a faster way.