I found Helen Wagner’s presentation “National Geographic and the Photographic Gaze: The Commodification of Indigenous Peoples in Consumer Culture” very interesting. She took on a critical view towards how the magazine National Geographic represents indigenous peoples in their photographs. She stated that the magazine is made for consumers, and therefore is inclined to present its subjects in a way that attract society and provide to their expectations. However, this means that much of the time its subjects get misrepresented. They tend to be represented in stereotypical ways, their cultural heritage is objectified, and they are not rightly acknowledged. For example, a recent photo on the cover of National Geographic was of an indigenous girl wearing “traditional” clothing and makeup from some kind of celebration. However, her name was not provided, and the focus of the picture was on her garb and makeup with the picture accentuating its “primitiveness,” objectifying the girl into simply a “thing” to look at in awe. This begins to make you wonder what National Geographic’s goal is in providing these photos about these indigenous people. Is it to learn about them in a personal way? Can one truly see and understand these people if they are not even personified with at least their names? These are questions such as those that Helen asked during her research.

Unidentified indigenous girl from recent NG issue.

However, this issue has been around for decades and is hard to break, especially if the aim of the provider is to cater to public views in order to make money. I found an article online (http://www.academia.edu/6050265/Decolonizing_cultural_heritage_of_Indigenous_people_and_their_knowledge_from_images_in_global_films) which took a critical view of film studies of indigenous tribes which tend to include many ideologies, stereotypes and biases about indigenous people, and “objectify indigenous people as commodities of a global culture.” This viewpoint is what Helen examined in her research on National Geographic as well. The article describes how scholars from Western cultures are the ones “who have held the political, social, and economic power to study, interpret, write, and teach about Indigenous pasts, viewing them from within a Western framework or “lens,” to create knowledge for consumption by Western public and scholarly audiences.” This is a very good reason for why National Geographic still chooses to cater to media misrepresentations–it is embedded in our Western culture to do so. The article goes on to describe the Western society’s way of purposely differentiating cultures, deliberately representing indigenous cultures as foreign, leading to the exaggeration of differences. This, the article says, is what has “created the division we see in the world today.” The question is, should we let this continue to happen? Why do we want to be given falsified information that just builds on our past stereotypes? Just because National Geographic is a commodity that is made mostly to make money, the magazine is there to educate, not fake what is already imagined. National Geographic needs to finally represent the full, true, personified indigenous tribes so  that the world does not keep getting divided, but instead bring us together in an understanding that we really are not all that different from each other.

This week we have been discussing G.T. Couser’s chapter of his book “Signifying Bodies” titled Rhetoric and Self-Representation in Disability Memoir. I found the analysis of “conventional” (33) versus the “counter-hegemonic” (31) or “post-colonial” (46) kinds of rhetorics of disability memoir really interesting. I had never thought of disability memoirs as having so many different ways of writing or story-telling. I, like many other people, always saw disability memoirs as what they are traditional thought of as—triumph over a “depressing” disability. It is seen as a kind of “inspiring” (33) story that many readers would be able to relate to in its sense of overcoming an obstacle. This made me think if Helen Keller’s story, which is probably one of, if not the most, famous American disability memoir, and is written in this traditional way. In all the different summaries I read of her memoir, which is titled The Story of My Life, all of them mention how it is a “triumph” over her disabilities, or an “overcoming.” For example, the summary on Amazon.com says it is “a remarkable account of overcoming the debilitating challenges of being both deaf and blind.” http://www.amazon.ca/The-Story-My-Life-Restored/dp/0812968867

Curious to know more about Helen’s memoirs, I came across this article (http://www.biographile.com/a-life-beyond-miracles-what-you-dont-know-about-helen-keller/20025/) which reveals that there is much more that encompassed Helen’s life than her famous memoir of “overcoming” her difficulties. The article mentions that Helen’s life is documented by a number of memoirs and biographies. One of her other lesser-known memoirs, The World I Live In, is a much more personal, “intellectually ambitious” and philosophical memoir. In it, she reflects on the “larger human condition,” looking at her disability in a group sense, instead of separating herself from others to show her personal success. Even though this memoir was more true to her life experience than her more famous The Story of My Life, it was out of print for almost one hundred years.

These two versions of memoir are perfect examples of the rhetorics that Couser discusses. The Story of My Life is an example of rhetoric of triumph, and shows its limitations as usually being misrepresentative of the individuals’ actual experience, and “removing” the stigma only from the individual, not others who share the condition (Couser 34). The World I Live In can be seen as an example of rhetoric of emancipation. It shows that disability is not an individual flaw, but a concept that is socially constructed by a normative culture and forced on disabled people (Couser 38). It is more “physiological,” with a focus on a group mindset.

You may then ask, why was The Story of My Life much more popular and readily published than her other memoir? This just goes to show that society has this set group mentality that a disability is something that one must work hard to overcome, and that you have not worked hard enough if you were not able to “overcome” it. I think that a memoir based on triumph is also more relatable to a broader audience, and it is therefore more popular to read. This is a bias that needs to be changed if we ever want to end this marginalization and societal framing of disabled people.

As I have always had an interest in the background life stories of Olympians, I decided to do some research on interesting media coverage of the Sochi 2014 Olympians’ personal lives. What I found were some heart-touching stories of brothers skiing for another sibling who cannot participate in the Olympics due to a disease, or skater who suffered through injuries and trained hard to be able to participate this year. However, I also found a number of articles that talked about how many of these stories were over exaggerated or blown out of proportion only for the media, many TV channels using it in perhaps an “exploitative” way. However, people seem to thrive off the media playing with their emotions, and these (relatively) true-life stories of talented athletes give the media an easy way to take advantage of this.

In one popular article (http://www.salon.com/2014/02/11/sochi_olympics_a_skiers_tearful_win_a_skaters_shocking_loss/), it describes how NBC concentrated its show on one skier, Alex Bilodeau, who was aiming for a 2nd gold medal, but also focused in on his deep care for his brother who suffers from cerebral palsy. NBC shows the skier making his way down the ski run for the win, and then immediately hugging his brother and crying. However, the show ignores every other participant in the race, including those others who placed, and simply concentrates on the emotional celebrations of the two brothers. One must question at these kinds of situations (as the article also brings up) if the brother’s disability is being overly exaggerated and the scene overly emotional, made more for the media than being actually genuine. It is sometimes hard to say, but it is interesting to think about how these life stories can be tweaked in order to attract attention.

The Olympics also seems to misrepresent the personal feelings of the Olympic participants, such as when NBC introduced the famous snowboarder Shawn White and announced that he will compete in the half-pipe on Tuesday night. The commentator speaks for him, saying he is a bit nervous about the competition, due to his recent injury and unfavorable snow conditions from the warm weather in Sochi. However, this can also be seen as simply a way to try to convince to audiences to watch on their showing that night and make the event more suspenseful.

In another article (http://www.salon.com/2014/02/14/sochi_olympics_a_skater_recovers_a_skier_drops_his_pants/), it talks about the introduction by NBC of the Russian figure skater Evgeni Plushenko, which completely ignores his past back damage and surgery, only talking about him being one of Russia’s most “spectacular skaters.” However, when the skater came on the ice and took a fall, lifting his shirt to expose the surgery scar and looking deeply in pain, it did seem a bit “faked,” but apparently he was in enough pain to withdraw himself from the competition for good. That said, the lack of exposure of Plushenko’s injury and high chance of taking a spill on the ice, made his fall and his dramatic exit of the competition even more surprising to NBC’s audience. This just shows another way the media plays around with Olympic player’s life stories in order to entertain their audience.

Reading these articles, I found it interesting how these different tactics of “faking it”, by both over-exaggerating a situation and leaving important information out about Olympians and their life stories are both used in the media. It just further exemplifies the uses of life narratives and how they can be manipulated.

While doing some research online about Wah’s idea of “faking it” and thinking about what it could mean, I came across a Wikipedia page defining the word passing (in terms of racial identity). You can see the Wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(racial_identity). Digging deeper, I focused my search on this concept, and came up with a number of interesting articles, ranging from the use of racial passing by mixed-race black people in the U.S. from the late 18^th century to today. I was surprised at first that I had never really heard of the term “passing” used in this way, until I read that “racial passing is one of America’s deeply hidden traditions,” according to a booked review titled “Shade of White” in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/books/review/Arsenault-t.html?_r=0). Another article describing the research done by a Stanford historian on the racial passing topic began with a story about a man, Dr. Albert Johnston, who grew up in Chicago and attended medical school there, marrying a black woman and then applying to an internship. He hid his black ancestry and told everyone that he and his wife were of white descent in order to be accepted to the internship. This went on for 20 years, and everyone believed it. Then, when he applied for the Navy during World War II, he suddenly decided to reveal the truth and applied with his true racial background—mixed-raced black. He was rejected by the Navy, and the truth spread to his neighbors and job at the hospital, from which he was fired. The article explains that the motivation of the research by the historian, Prof. Allyson Hobbs, was not to study what the person was gaining by pretending to be white, but actually what they were losing by not being black. He admits that when “racial passing” was looked at in the past, it was usually considered “an individualistic and opportunistic practice, a tool for getting ahead.” However, Hobbs believes that there were other people who passed, but felt wrong and like they were betraying their culture for doing it, or as he puts it, they crossed over “with a heavy conscience.” Here is the article: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/december/passing-as-white-121713.html.

I feel that this relates to how Wah felt throughout his life when he struggled with the hyphen between passing as a “white” Canadian and being Chinese. His metaphor with the kitchen door being a symbol of the hyphen, and him always kicking it and abusing it, shows that he struggled with the separation of both racial backgrounds. Also, one could tell that he always felt a little sad or like he was betraying his family and the Chinese culture when he acted “white.” Especially when he was debating whether to go into his friend’s Chinese restaurant (King’s Family Restaurant) because he doesn’t know his place and feels a bit like he doesn’t belong there. Even though he is able to get over this feeling and enter the restaurant, when he leaves he feels once again as if he is betraying something as the white racist feeling comes over him.

Interested in seeing how racial passing plays a role in American culture today, I searched for current articles referencing the term. I came across one on an American news and entertainment website made for the black community called Atlanta BlackStar. The article is titled “10 Black Celebs Who Successfully Pass for White.”( http://atlantablackstar.com/2013/08/13/10-black-actors-who-are-successfully-passing-for-white/).

Wentworth Miller

It is mostly pictures of different biracial celebrities, and the article’s writer “revealing” their heritage as partially black. One of the actresses, Melissa Gorga, told everyone that she had no black in her whatsoever, but the article seems to disagree, as they post a picture of her as a child before she went under cosmetic surgery, where she has the coarse black hair and facial features of a person of black decent. Above the picture the article states, “You be the judge.”

Melissa Gorga today

Melissa Gorga as a child

The article seems as if it is criticizing celebrities who can’t pass for white, and making it seem like by passing, they are doing something good or “successful.” Reading the comments on the page, many of them are heated and angry about the way the post seems to be assuming that these actors had always tried to hide their black side, as if they were not proud of it and didn’t want fans to know. The article treats the situation as a kind of “reveal.” Many commenters disagree, saying that many of the actors listed are not denying their black ancestry and not trying to “pass” per say. One commenter brings up an interesting point about the difference between “passing” and “presenting.” This relates to the research article I discussed earlier, and the idea that many mixed-race black people are not actively trying to pass as black but going along with it because it helps them with their job and acceptance in society. Presenting refers to other people just assuming the person is of a certain race, without the person actually telling them. Passing, on the other hand, refers to actively trying to portray oneself as a different race.

In The Diamond Grill, it seems to me that Wah has a lot of difficulty between whether he should actively try to “pass” as white (or “fake it”) or just go along with whatever people think of him. He obviously has a deep connection to his Chinese heritage, and this shows in the large number of recipes, loving descriptions of the grill and stories of Chinese culture in the book. However, he also describes how when he goes outside to the “white world,” this force of a want to fit back into the majority and keep passing as white takes over him, partially because it just happens and he is able to, and partially because it makes life easier for himself. For example, in the one part of the book when he has gone fishing with an old Chinaman and someone starts singing a rude racial song, Wah says “I try to become as white as I can” (98). But on the other hand, Wah does not always try to be white. Most of the time, people just see him as white because he looks like it from the outside. It seems to me that as Wah grew older, he became more accepting of being Chinese, going from actively passing ( or “faking it”) to passively presenting himself for others to interpret.

After watching Between and reading Diamond Grill, I have been very interested in finding out more about the status of mixed race peoples in North America and their experiences in society both in the past and today. After doing a bit of research on the internet, I came across an interesting article on the National Geographic website called “The Changing Face of America” written by Lise Funderburg with portrait photos taken by Martin Schoeller. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/10/changing-faces/funderburg-text

The article discusses how the acceptance of interracial marriage and adaptation to the increasing number of mixed race people has changed just over the past 10-14 years. For example, it mentions how it was only in the year 2000 when the U.S. Census Bureau allowed multiracial people to check off more than one race on their form. When they finally allowed this, 6.8 million people utilized this new option. To me, that is a large number of people who were not being catered to, and were initially forced to choose one race over another, making many of them feeling as if they were betraying one part of their identity by having to choose one. It amazes me that this change to forms was made only 14 years ago.

The webpage also provides a link to a photo gallery of portraits taken by Martin Schoeller, which was put together as a representation of the “melting pot” quality of the U.S.

Here is a link to the gallery:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/10/changing-faces/schoeller-photography

I was intrigued by his photos, and especially his purpose behind his artwork, which he explains as: “I like building catalogs of faces that invite people to compare them. I want to challenge the way we use appearance to shape identity.” As we discussed in class, and also relating back to Diamond Grill, identity is made up of many parts, of which appearance is only one. But, for some reason, people have gotten into the habit of judging other people’s identities by the way they look, or even just by the hue of their skin. An interesting scientific experiment was discussed in this National Geographic article as well. It is called the “eyeball test” and basically showed, using brain reaction testing, that people identify race in around one-tenth of a second. This is even faster than identifying gender.

As mentioned in the article, as well as demonstrated in Between and Diamond Grill, other factors such as politics, religion, history and geography all influence a person’s identity. For example, in Diamond Grill, the politics behind how Chinese would be allowed into Canada and the head tax affected how they identified themselves and how they were treated in society. Your family history also affects your identity, and is closely related to race.

In another National Geographic article (http://proof.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/17/visualizing-change/), a woman by the name of Michele Norris started a project called the Race Card Project, which reminds me very much of the Six Word Memoirs website we looked at last term. For the Race Card Project, people are invited to send in short stories of only 6 words, to express their feelings and experiences with race and cultural identity.  Many of them, although short, pack in a lot of power and emotion.

“I am only Asian when it’s convenient”—Heather Brown, Seattle, Washington

“My mixed background means ‘White Enough’”—Maximilian Willson, Olympia, Washington

These two are interesting in that they show how mixed race people can sometimes have a “choice” at how they want to be identified. They can choose, for example, if they want to emphasize their Asian part when it could benefit them, or choose white in anther situation. These race cards remind me of the situation in Between when Fred Wah is at first put on a 5 year waiting list for Chinese people getting a visa to allow him to work in the U.S. However, when he shows up to the office and they see his face and see he is not fully Chinese, they immediately allow him to obtain a visa. It fascinates me how some rules like that can change, just because someone looks different.

by Chad Oiastad of Madison, Wisconsin: “My grandfather would hate my children.”

This one is very powerful, as it identifies how people’s views of interracial marriage have changed over the past few decades. It also reminded me of the similar situation in Diamond Grill, when Wah talks about how his grandparents did not really accept the interracial marriage between his Swedish mother and Chinese father, but when they saw how Wah looked very “white” they were more accepting of it.

Similar to the effect of Six Word Memories, The Race Card Project has given people who struggle with their race and identity to let go and express themselves and many of them include pictures and artwork in addition to their six words.

This project just shows that with the increase in interracial marriage, there comes a growing acceptance. Hopefully this acceptance will keep growing and becomes at least “less prickly than it’s been in the past.”

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.