This weeks lesson has been virtual worlds. These worlds allow users to create connections with users who they may have never meet and users who create a new identity for themselves. When stumbling around on my virtual world, I began to draw connections to my new standard social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. While I know the majority of my Facebook friends in real life, I follow plenty of Twitter handles of people I have never (and properly never will). Some of the handles like @drunkhulk are of imaginary characters. While celebrities tweet in character and are only a few shades away from being imaginary.

Twitter encourages interactions not only person to person but person to institution or president to people. These interactions couldn’t happen outside of the sphere of social media. This impossibility creates it’s own virtual world, where peasants can talk to kings and people can masquerade under a different twitter handle. I was recently messaged by @stealthmountian who has over 267,000 tweets to their name. All of which are correcting others for incorrectly spelling “sneak peak”. This might not be my ideal way to spend my free time but, I can appreciate that twitter provides a platform for doing so.

This isn’t to say that Twitter can’t create severe real world consequences. Tech blogger Adria Richards, made international headlines today  when she was fired for posting a photo of two men on Twitter who she claimed were making sexist remarks. It appears we can be anyone we wish on Twitter. Even the subject of international media attention.

There were a few summers in life where I spent hours and hours on Google Reader. Sites that I would once have glanced at in passing I now read every single article their staff put out. As I was browsing reviews of food carts in Baltimore I would wonder,  why am I wasting time with this? I’m going to be honest. A large reason I was reading all of those articles was kill time but the other reasons where that Google Reader must have tapped into some OCD of mine. I had to stay up to date, keeping my head above water in the information flood which was my blog aggregation. I haven’t thought about Google Reader in quite a few years. The latest announcement surprised me, not that the reader was ending but that I still had loyal fan. Who uses aggregating tools anymore? Then I realized that one billions of us. It’s called Facebook.

A few years ago Google Plus tried to create it’s own social network were you could divided up your social groups into circles. Family, high school friends and co-workers would all be separated into different circles. It turns out that very few of us wanted to make the switch. Sure we might have our Grandmother see the same posts as our best-friends but who can take all that time to switch over contacts. Why force people into categorical relationships when Facebook does such a great job of aggregating them all into one long news feed.

I find aggregation tools fascinating because they create a even playing ground which isn’t found in the real world. They place an amateur review of a movie about a piece about international relations by the New York Times. Facebook lets me know what my sister is doing as well as the guy who sat in my high school chem class ten years ago.

Reading is perhaps one of the few activities that are truly antisocial. You sit alone, absorbed into a different place. Sure, you can share your impressions of this place with others but the fact remains that when you are there, you’re alone.

I recently signed up for the social networking site “Goodreads” before this I had been writing down the books I have read in a journal. I know… so analog. When I finished this most recent book I was gave it my traditional mark (between one and ten) and then I logged onto Goodreads to assign a similar score to the novel online.Once I got to the profile page of this book I started reading others reviews as well as looking at the profile of the author herself. The author turns out to be from my hometown. I go from site to site until I end up on her personal blog. I enjoy reading her rants and observations and in the end, I feel like we could be friends. I discover that my opinion of her book, which was originally lukewarm has been adapted by learning about her as a person. I grew to identify with this name on a cover. I rated the book much higher online than I did in my own journal.

Social media has the power to connect strangers. To unite us with celebrities in ways we never could before. The question I have about social media is why do studies continue to reveal that humans feel lonelier after the rise social media than they have before? I imagine it’s because the connections it creates are superficial and fleeting rather the personal and lasting. I don’t really know that author. I might have some shared memories of places but we’ve never had a conversation. In fact she doesn’t even know I exist. She is to me another character to read about. I know she exists independently of me but the connection can still be bridged with a couple of clicks.

Social media can help us connect on a superficial level after all, the book wasn’t that good anyway.

We are all familiar with vlogging. Some comical, some serious, vloggers create short YouTube videos which consist of them looking into the camera and chatting about a particular topic. One of the first viral vlogger was “lonelygirl15” who had a wildly popular vlog in 2006. She was vlog about her quirky day to day life and it was eventually revealed that all of the videos had been scripted. The scandal only added to the video popularity and proved that YouTube can create stars as well as host them.

I did not expect YouTube fame and fortune while creating this YouTube video; just a chance to practice using screencast software and premiere. I worked with a team of two other students to create this and it was much trickery than I expected. Editing clips and adding icons is a slow time consuming process. I also struggled with delivering the script. I originally wanted to write down bullet points and then deliver the lines of the cuff. This proved more difficult than I imagined and resulted in copy sentences and awkward pauses. The next step was to write the entire script word for word and read it on screen while looking into the laptop camera. This was a huge improvement but didn’t fix everything. Instead I combined bullets points and reading off of the screen to achieve the final style. It’s still needs work. How do famous youtubers make it look so easy?!

I am thankful for social media for providing an outlet to create and share. Even if it is just about social media. The wonderful thing about creation on the internet is the variety of audience members a need creation can find. Some people might enjoy our video and other may find it dull. Please let me know what you thought of the video (or Facebook graph search) in the comments.

Thanks for watching!

In 2008 Danish academic Anders Albrechtslund wrote this warning about the nature of internet surveillance, “The practice of online social networking can be seen as empowering, as it is a way to voluntarily engage with other people and construct identities, and it can thus be described as participatory. It is important to not automatically assume that the personal information and communication, which online social networking is based on, is only a commodity for trading. Implicit in this interpretation is that to be under surveillance is undesirable. However, to participate in online social networking is also about the act of sharing yourself – or your constructed identity – with others.” *

Anders writes that power can be derived from sharing your information and options online while attaching this information to your identity. While many people share aspects of their real life, others flourish in what they believe to be anonymity.  These people often want to be under surveillance as long as their anonymous internet identities can not be tied back to their actual ones.

Enter contemporary philosopher and media expert, Jimmy Kimmel. His wildly popular segment “Celebrities read mean Tweets” is just a comical example about how the hate which is spewed out into the internet rarely loses it’s sting and often finds it’s mark.

Internet giant Google is trying to convince users to use their real names as their Youtube ID. This attempt to cut down on the blind hate and trolling that comes along with anonymous surveillance is an important first step in creating consequences for those who don’t “play fair” online.

The idea of doxxing users real identities creates backlash and many internet users say that it disrupts the right to free speech.  What many people don’t understand is that the multiple identities of the average user are already connected. For example an American  Congresswoman was subject to political attacks over her gaming hobby of playing World of Warcraft.  No online identity can be completely hidden. Like the celebrities reading mean tweets, individuals need to understand that the internet is very much like a elementary playground- teachers can always tell where the spitballs came from. This might become much easier, much sooner with Google’s help.

Wired Magazine writes that internet users may in the future use one device like a “smartphone or something like a Yubico key — and then use that almost like a car key, to fire up your web mail and online accounts.” This would compile all of my personal identities into one secure identity which  I could literally hold the key too. The convinence  of one identity online would force users to think before they acted and would break down the larges myth about the internet, the illusion of Anonymity

*Anders Albrechtslund, “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance”. First Monday, March, 2008.  13(3).

I created my first blog in seventh grade. It was a Livejournal full of angst and images of my favorite movie characters. It was also a mistake. What I didn’t know then was that blogs are an opportunity to create a digital identity for oneself.   Blogs provide us free advertising for our passions, thoughts and ideals. The important thing to remember is that blogs can be linked back to our offline identities (unless you choose to write anonymously).  If some one would have looked up “Katie Kalk” in 1999, they would have discovered my true feelings about my math class and other embarrassing facts.

Thankfully my livejournal has long since been deleted. Although my Xanga continues to haunt me.  I picked up blogging again when I started traveling and living aboard. Blogging is a tool perfectly adapted to keeping in contact with large numbers of people. When I moved to Daegu, South Korea I started my blog to keep in touch with my family. Two years later my blog had been chosen by the Korean Department of Tourism as an exemplary expat blog with over 13,000 views. This was far from internet fame but I was hooked nevertheless.

Now that I am studying for my professional development I am trying to create a more academic blogging presence. I still enjoying blogging my travels and I’m hooked on micro-blogging like twitter and tumblr.  I hope to link my work with this class with that of my work position with the Digital Tattoo Project. The Digital Tattoo Project is UBC funded and run through the learning commons. I work with content creation both on the blog, website and wiki. The topics covered by my blogs have little in common with that of my seventh grade self. My enjoyment with writing and sharing has remained unchanged.