Wow, I can’t believe my first term of university is already over. I’m already 1/8^th done with my undergrad education! And what scares me most about that fact, even if it doesn’t sound like such a big fraction of time, I still have no idea what kind of degree I will be walking out with in the 7/8^ths left of time here. I’m not even sure if it will be a BA, it could be a BS if I decide to switch faculties. I am a very indecisive person, and I realize that life brings about a lot of unexpected events, especially at university. For example, coming to UBC and looking at my course list for first semester, I thought that ASTU would be my “easy A” because it is a writing course and in high school, my writing and English classes were always my highest grades. I was a “strong” writer in high school, but I feel that this made me a bit over confident when I came to UBC. As Laurie demonstrated in class yesterday, over half of the incoming students to UBC expected to receive A’s their first semester. However, only a very small percentage actually ended up receiving an A. This fact made me feel a lot more comfortable about my first term grades, because I was one of those people who thought I would be receive higher grades than I did.

When reading my goal sheet for ASTU from the beginning of the term, I noticed that one of my goals was to learn how to do better scholarly research and write research papers. This is one goal that I feel I achieved this term. First of all, learning how to take gist notes while reading an article was very helpful, especially because it allowed me to write concise summaries, which I always had trouble doing because I would add too many low-level details and they would be too long. Learning about how to find abstractions also helped with this issue, as finding this high-level one-word topic of whatever I was reading helped me focus my summaries or papers and keep them organized. In addition, learning how to orchestrate voices and bring in scholar’s ideas in support of my own claims added to the legitimacy of my writing and made it much more scholarly than what I wrote in high school.

Learning how to write a proper conclusion is another aspect I learned that added to the quality of my papers. In high school, writing a conclusion meant basically to write a summary of the main points made in the paper–kind of a repetition of the introduction. However, when you think about it, this is silly because the person just read through your essay and knows your points that were made. Therefore, a conclusion should add something new, a different perspective on the topic that gives an opportunity for further research. Even though the Academic Writing book is quite dull, it gave lots of good examples and exclamations, and really helped me in learning these helpful strategies for writing at a university level.

During her presentation on what we will be doing in term 2, Laurie talked about how we will go into the archives and do research with articles that some people have never even read before. With our research, we will write a research paper talking about our findings. She explained how some of us will make findings that no other scholar has ever made before, and this fact got me quite excited. I have never done writing that could actually bring new knowledge into the scholarly world. On that note, I look forward to next term and further improving my writing skills!

After writing my research paper on Instagram and its promotion of consumer identity, I decided to further my research and take a peek at how people think Facebook’s purchase of Instagram will effect this consumer identity being formed, especially if Facebook decides to bring in advertisements to Instagram’s feed, as it already does in its own homepage. While doing a quick search on the internet, I came across this article from the CNN Opinion page (http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/11/opinion/mayer-instagram-facebook/) that describes one opinion of Andrew Mayer’s, the creative director of Sojo Studios, a social gaming company. I found his idea very interesting because it closely relates to the issues brought up in my research paper—that user’s posts on the social network are used to advertise products without them even being conscious of it.

He believes that Facebook will use photos posted by Instagram’s users to take advantage of the constant willingness to share our lives with others. Facebook would do this by allowing a user to push their photo posted on Instagram to their Facebook feed, and then, if the photo is promoting a good/brand, Facebook will sneakily turn it into an ad and have it keep popping up on the user’s friend’s news feeds for a longer period of time, so more and more people see it and “like” the photo. This is an important factor, because ads on Facebook only make money if they are clicked on. By making them more “personal” and relatable to people because they are posted by someone these people know, they are more likely willing to check out the ad and click on it. Facebook already does something similar to this with people’s status’ (usually only text), called “Sponsored Stories.” However, by adding images to the mix (from Instagram), the ads have a potential to get even better and more appealing, because everyone knows  that pictures give out a lot more information, and are a lot more engaging, than only words.

Mayer also mentioned that brands have become a large part of our lives, even a part of our identity. This observation interests me because it supports my research of brands on Instagram, and how the many brands on the photo application are easily supporting the consumer culture by promoting users to advertise their products, building their consumer identity. Companies have realized that they can get people to advertise for them without even telling them. Advertising through social network users may become one of the more popular ways of advertising, if it isn’t already. I think that we are so willing to support brands and advertise because we want to be in on the trends. We want to be that person who knows what’s “cool” and promote it. Therefore, even if we don’t realize that we are advertising a brand when we post a picture of ourselves posing with a Starbucks Peppermint Mocha, I am sure we wouldn’t care that much even if we did realize that we were. My question is, do you think people will care if they find out that their Instagram photos posted on Facebook were being remade into ads for their friends to be bothered by on their news feeds? Perhaps the answer is yes, because in that situation, their photo is being manipulated without their consent, and this could bring up some issues.

Instagram, a mobile photo-sharing app, has gained popularity very quickly, especially, according to this demographic chart, in the college student/young adult/age 18-29 range (http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/online/the-demographics-of-instagram-and-snapchat-users-37745/attachment/pew-instagram-user-demos-oct2013/). After using Instagram for about 2 years now, I have noticed some special traits about it. I noticed that it has some unique features that allow people to build pretty much any kind of identity they want, whether it is realistic of how they are outside of the media realm or not. This article (http://mashable.com/2013/11/17/types-instagram-users/) describes 10 stereotypical identities that many users of Instagram fall into, based on the kinds of photos the user normally posts. For example, there are the users who almost always post pictures of their food, seemingly trying to make people’s mouths water over their delicious looking meals. Other people tend to post a lot of “selfies” (pictures of themselves), who probably identify themselves as “good looking.” These identities are interesting, because even though they sound very stereotypical, they are surprisingly quite common on Instagram. This brings up some interesting questions—do people choose to have that as their identity, or does it just happen? And is it a true representation of themselves, or they do it to fit in as part of a certain social media personality? Do they do it in order to improve their popularity on Instagram and get more “likes” on their photos?

Here is what I found:  Instagram is almost like being back in high school, with its ”popular” kids who somehow everyone knew of and gossiped about, and all the cliques with their stereotyped identities—the cheerleaders, the football players, the drama kids, and so on. I realize that these kinds of stereotypes are not really easy to come by in real life, and that they make big, sweeping assumptions about people, but I have noticed it popping up in my own high school years. Going to a big public high school, people formed groups of friends because my grade was too big for everyone to know everyone. Therefore, these kinds of cliques formed with people who had similar interests.

I did a bit more research on these “identities” on Instagram, and come up with this article: http://www.mobiledia.com/news/181440.html.  The article builds on this idea, relating Instagram to the “high school life,” with its stereotyped personalities and people with “edited” identities. And I have found that, in a way, Instagram encourages this. First of all, part of what makes Instagram special is its range of 26 different filters to edit your photo with, enhancing it and giving is a special “look.” This gives users the ability to make their lives look “polished” and more enhanced than they actually are. This is similar to high school students who act a certain way in order to try and make their peers think their life is so much better than theirs. For example, the head cheerleader (which is mostly seen in movies, but it’s still something that relates well to what happens on Instagram). She may get all the boys after her, look naturally pretty and seem happy all the time, but this could just be a cover-up of her life that may not be so “perfect.” She may use make-up to cover up bad skin or a fake smile to hide sadness. This is very similar to what happens quite frequently on Instagram. People choose specific photos that may make their lives look exciting and fun all the time, making them look even better by editing them with special filters, but these pictures usually only represent a small fraction of the experiences, both good and bad, that people go through.  In addition, Instagram encourages a kind of “popularity contest” with its “like” feature, allowing users to like other user’s photos, and all of the photos display how many “likes” they have received. Many people are beginning to judge themselves on how many “likes” they get on their photos or how many followers they have, and that determines how they perceive themselves socially. Even popular hashtags have started to encourage this, such as “like4like” and “follow4follow,” basically telling other users that if they like their photo or begin following them, that person will like or follow them back. I find it sad that we are beginning to perceive ourselves in this way, especially when many users are most likely putting on unrealistic, fake identities that don’t even truly represent their lives.

While conducting research for my term paper, I came across an article about the creation of “social identity” on Facebook, focusing mostly on Iranian users (See article, “Construction of Social Identity in Social Media: An investigation of Iranian Users’ Appearance in Facebook”,http://search.proquest.com/docview/1370189880#). The article talks about the globalization of Facebook and other social media sites, and the cultural differences of users in diverse areas of the world and how these differences affect the use of Facebook and identity display online. It concentrates on how related the “social role” of a user is on Facebook is to their role/identity outside the media world. What I found interesting is that their research showed that half of Iranian Facebook users do not use their full names or change them in some way in order to protect their privacy. It was also found that 40% of them have a second fake account which they use to surf the site undercover, allowing them to post things that they won’t be held accounted for. Many of them also make the access to their profiles very private, limiting it to people they only know very well. When asked why they do this, many users said that they feel their social identity is very much connected to their real identity, and they therefore are more concerned about their image on social media. Many of them think of social media as their “private social space.”

I feel that this deep concern for privacy and many careful steps taken to protect this privacy shows a strong cultural difference from Western users, especially when you look at the rising popularity of “mediated voyeurism”, a term Clay Calvert uses in his book Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture to describe the taking-in of images and information from other’s lives through their sharing and posting over media. We have begun to take on a guilty pleasure of looking into and learning about other people’s lives online, people who we have never met in person and maybe never will. I think this is why social media has become so popular in the last few years. People use it to put themselves out there, and entertain ourselves by looking at other people’s lives shared over the internet. This makes me wonder, when I compare Iranian Facebook users, who many of which only use social media for private purposes to communicate only with close friends and family, to Western users, whom most of which have friends on Facebook whom they don’t know very well, if there is one “right way” to use social media, and how important it is to keep your real identity or to hide it.

When I think about my experience on Facebook and my “friends” on the site, I realize that I am letting go of my privacy more than I thought. I am friends with many people who I don’t know very well and who don’t know me very well in person, but who can still see all my posts, comments, pictures and personal information on my profile. I also realized that I have my privacy settings set so that anyone in the world can search my name on Facebook and see my profile and cover pictures, already giving away my identity to people I don’t even know. I even did an experiment and typed my name into Google search, and was shocked by the results. What came up was all my social media profiles: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, my comments and “likes” on YouTube videos, as well as all of my cross-country and track and field race times—all there for the whole world to see. This can become an issue when I begin searching for jobs and employers look up my name on the internet, and find personal pictures that perhaps are not the kinds that give me the most “professional” identity. However, there is this conflict of simply letting your real identity show through over media, or hiding it.

“Margot Kimmel”Google Search Results

Referring back to the article, it describes how findings have shown that people have started to include social media as an everyday part of their lives, and therefore conduct themselves over social media as they would in real life. Media even has a role in letting our real identities show, as the article suggests: “While the technology or interface determines what kinds of representations people can construct, whatever the limitations of the interface, the interface is still able to mediate identity and reflect the offline identities.” Therefore, our identity is very difficult to contain to ourselves when using social media sites.

My question to you is, how important do you think it is to keep a private identity over the internet? And how private do you think it should be? How much of your identity on the internet should be true?

In the past week, I have noticed an interesting new app that my friends were beginning to use on Facebook. The app is called Bitstrips, and is basically a cartoon status update.  It allows you to make yourself in cartoon form, and gives you templates of different situations or scenes, so that you can express your status through a cartoon strip. The app can be downloaded on your phone, or used over Facebook. When I tried it out, I immediately thought of how Bitstrips is basically a graphic life narrative. The user is describing and sharing a feeling or scene from their life in graphics and words.

How it works is that you first create a cartoon image of yourself, picking face shape, eye-shape, eye color, hair style, body shape and outfit. You can even put make-up on your face if you feel that it expresses yourself more precisely. Basically, the app tries to give you a good amount of freedom to express yourself and how you think you look.

Next, you pick one of the three categories—“moods”, “situations” or “announcements.” Then, from, for example, “moods”, you pick from another few, relatively vague,  categories such as “good”, “bad” , “weird”, “mad” and “miscellaneous.” Within these categories are very random, mostly jokingly funny comics with pre-written scene descriptions on the bottom, which you can change or re-write yourself to make it more personalized to your situation. You can also change your face (such as emotion) and body position in the comic. Baically, Bitstrips is a more detailed status which allows the user to better express their identity through graphics and words, instead of the typical status update. It also gives the user prompts, so perhaps they would think of a new, or more interesting or funnier status than they normally would.

Bitstrips has even created a separate program for education, called Bitstrips for Schools, which is made to be used by teachers in primary schools to educate children in collaboration and creativity. It motivates them to read and write while creating their own expressions and characters. Check out their website here: http://www.bitstripsforschools.com

I find it interesting how comics always seem to be able to relate most to kids or young people. I feel that creating graphics is simply easier than using only words to express identity and feelings at a young age.  When children are still developing their language skills, expressing themselves through art reveals a lot more about their personality and emotions than writing can. Perhaps this is why Marjane Satrapi decided to use the comic form for her autobiography–Persepolis. Since she was writing it in her child-mind’s point of view, a comic strip is most likely the best way a child would be able to express her feelings. And this is shown by the popularity of Bitstrips as an educational tool in schools. Teachers on the website express their satisfaction with Bitstrips, for example, one teacher, Lindsay Porter, said “Bitstrips for Schools is a great motivational tool for reluctant writers. Students who would normally shut down at the thought of a traditional writing assignment end up asking to stay in at recess to work on their comics.” This evidence shows that children strongly react to the ability to express themselves using graphics. It is motivational, and forces them to think deeply about how they want to represent themselves or personal situations. This relates very much to Persepolis, which allows the child’s, Marji’s, identity to come through using artwork.

Last week a group of students in my class gave a presentation about the postcard secret-sharing project called PostSecret. You can check out their website here: http://www.postsecretcommunity.com/

When I first learned about PostSecret, I thought it was just another website encouraging artistic people to send in their work and try to get it posted on the internet. However, after doing a bit more research and taking a closer look at the background story to the site, I realized that it is much more than that, and much more open to everyone. It describes itself almost like a therapy program, to help people who have been suffering from an inner problem and have not yet found a way to effectively cope with it.

In the backstory behind the start of PostSecret, the creator, Frank Warren, describes how it first started with the “reluctant oracle” project, where he artistically generated and sent out a work to be discovered and interpreted by anyone. He did it to give people advice on how to deal with anything that was bothering them, insignificant or life-changing.

Here is an example of one of his “reluctant oracles” he created:

On the last “reluctant oracle” it stated, “you will find your answers in the secrets of strangers,” and that is what started the idea of allowing people to create their own postcards and write their secrets on them, putting them out there to the public world. Now, what I find most interesting about this is that the concept of PostSecret serves two purposes. The first is to serve as a coping mechanism for the person who creates the postcard, forcing them to think deeply about how to artistically represent their secret in a unique way, which will hopefully lead to getting their postcard chosen as one of the few to be posted online. The act of even writing the secret down is, for many people, already a big step in releasing some of the pressure that has been built up inside them from the keeping in of the secret or issue. The second purpose of PostSecret, as expressed in the quote from the last “reluctant oracle” is to serve as a forum of admitted secrets that others can relate to. People find comfort in seeing that others share similar problems or sufferings—that they are not alone. By being able to relate with other people through their secrets, people saw the site as a kind of therapy.

The popularity of PostSecret has been seen by Twitter, who even started SecretTweet, a supposedly anonymous way to tweet secrets about anything you want. You can check out an article about it here: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/02/like-postsecret.html

The popularity of anonymous secret-sharing can be seen by an idea from Calvert, quoted by Miller & Shepard in their scholarly article “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog”– that people’s relationships with each other through media can be described as “mediated voyeurism”, or “the consumption of revealing images of and information about others’ apparently revealed and unguarded lives, often yet not always for purposes of entertainment, through means of the mass media and internet”  (http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_as_social_action.html).  “Mediated voyeurism” has become such an evident part of human obsessions that hundreds of new websites specifically serving this purpose has appeared. One may ask, how many secrets can be anonymously shared until the whole world knows everything about everyone?