I enjoyed Jill Rettberg’s chapter on “Filtered Reality” where she examines the word “filter” and relates it to our algorithmic culture, studying technological and cultural filters and what it depicts about modern society’s culture today. She explains how filtering in technology has become a way to “remove certain content [and] alter or distort texts, images, and data” (20).

She explains how Instagram represents a type of filter that adds to the image – through color enhancements, blurring, and other effects. She argues that people subconsciously apply filters that they believe will meet the cultural expectations and norms. She quotes Marwick’s idea that social media favors those who are effective neoliberal subjects, the person who “attends to fashion, is focused on self-improvement, and purchases goods and services to achieve ‘self-realization’” (24).

This quote reminded me of a comical buzzfeed article, “A Day in the Life of a Girl on Instagram Vs. Real Life”. Where it shows typical Instagram posts one would see of an “Outfit of the Day” on Instagram vs. real life. They make fun of many of the typical photos we see, morning coffee, breakfast, lazy Sunday, hangover, working out, etc. This buzzfeed article really embodies what Rettberg claims is occurring on social media especially on Instagram.

All the photos from the Buzzfeed article are enhanced photos with color, crop, placement, and they portray a more luxurious exciting and trendy lifestyle than what may be actually happening. Then the actual life photos are portrayed, showing the disparity between the photos. People who are “instafamous” always have images that are edited with different filters and cropped and placed—following the idea that they are in fact “fashionable” and most of the time they are also focused on “self-improving”. I found it amusing how well the chapter related to the Buzzfeed article, supporting Rettberg’s ideas on social media, filtering, and society.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/laraparker/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-girl-on-instagram-vs-real-life#.pemkMNj7p

Privacy ends where safety begins. I found that phrase several times after googling the words “mom outraged over Snapchat”. While the first three chapters of Danah Boyd’s It’s Complicated offered many fascinating insights on adolescences and their use of social media, the stories of parent and children arguments over Facebook and Live Journal felt dated. I searched for stories about parental fear and anxieties over Snapchat, Tumblr, and Instagram to see if those same emotions felt over Facebook and the like several years ago are handled today, now that the social media sites teens frequent aren’t as accessible to parents. Turns out the fears and anxiety over what their children are doing on social media are obviously the same as before but the methods to deal with them are quite different than peeking in on a Facebook wall.
In my search I found several different products and app aimed at parents to monitor their children’s every move. Each spyware advertised the same sentiments as the parent Christina in Chapter 2: “a good parent is an all knowing parent…I’m the parent and not the friend” (pg. 70 Boyd). I found an app called mSpy, it allows parents to see exactly what their children are sending on Snapchat, as well as who they’re calling, texting, emailing and even where they are. First the parent downloads mSpy onto the child’s phone. I immediately thought of all the kids who got the iPhone 6 for Christmas with a little something extra. Because once mSpy is installed it leaves no trace on the actual phone, not a banner or an icon. All the monitoring messages are seen on the parent’s device only.
I do see products like mSpy as an invasion of privacy but I also see a parents need to feel their child is safe and not participating in behavior that harms themselves like being in dangerous places with questionable people or even sending nudes. I do not however see privacy ending where safety begins. I agree with the concept Boyd offers about parental violations of privacy being an expression of love but essentially constant surveillance is a form of oppression. The affects of excessive snooping and monitoring limits children and negates the formation of trust and understanding. mSpy parents operate under the implication that their child is unable to make informed decisions and ultimately, children have to become adults and will find a way to make all the mistakes their parents prevented them from with much larger consequences than those faced in adolescence. And guess what mom and dad, there’s an mSpy blocker app too.

There were so many points that It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boyd made that really puts into words what we may all be thinking about our identity on the internet. When it comes to our presence online, profiles on any social media platform can give us the opportunity to paint ourselves to be the person we want to be. Like boyd mentioned, that particular identity can change from one platform to another. She gives the example of a girl who is an avid One Direction fan. She shares her love for the band on Twitter, but not necessarily when she’s with her friends. Social media has given us an easier way of expressing ourselves to the world, and it connects us to people we may not know in real life, but fan girl just the same as we do over our favorite bands.

One of the most important aspects of identity online, I believe, is our profile picture (or avatar). What is so important about these photos? Well, it is what instantly identifies us to other people on the internet. If you’re looking for someone on Facebook, they can identify you from all the other “John Doe” profiles based on your photo. It automatically helps someone identify you and say, “Oh yeah, that’s him!”
It isn’t very uncommon to hear nowadays the phrase, “Making it my profile pic!” Millennials, in particular, seem to put a great amount of time and thought into choosing their pictures. We would never make our worst pictures of us profile pictures because it makes us look bad or it gives us a negative online “identity”. I recently came across an article shared by The Washington Post that gave a brief overview of a study done on how people react to certain profile pictures. Turns out, if you’re wearing a hat or have short hair, people will more likely have a negative response to your photo. Isn’t that interesting that we can measure relatively you’ll get more likes on one photo than another? It makes sense as to why many of us (but definitely not all) take time and effort to choose the best photo we want to represent our best self. Because the opportunity to do so is there, I don’t see why we wouldn’t take that chance. I think everyone wants to present their best self because we live in a society where those that do so are rewarded. The reward? Likes and comments full of compliments, of course.

This week, Danah Boyd’s “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” discusses issues stemming from the online personas of today’s youth on social media. One issue she tackles which resonated with me was the issue of “audience” and how teens curate their online identity to fit a certain audience’s expectations. In the text, Boyd argues that “teens often imagine their audience to be those that they’ve chosen to “friend” or “follow,” regardless of who might actually see their profile,” and therefore, curate their social media’s content accordingly, restricting certain content to certain audiences.

Although this is slightly embarrassing that I’m writing my blog on this, this week, the reading reminded me of my own habit of filtering content in order to build an online persona separate from my own. I stumbled across an old Facebook post from one of my friends, where he makes fun of my Instagram account.

My Instagram tells the truth—my life really is dull. With school and work and dance being the only things dominating my schedule, there really isn’t much time for me to go out and socialize as much as I would like; but as he puts it, I curated my social media content to show “pictures of hella friends and adventures.”

The reasoning for this, however, is well put by Boyd; “the intended audience matters, regardless of the actual audience.” I used to have a large follower base on Tumblr and Instagram back in my freshman and sophomore year of college, to the point where people began to recognize me in public from time to time. It was weird, considering all I did was post photos of myself (and my friends, because I’m not a narcissist) and recount my days of schoolwork, dance, and the occasional traveling. Over time, I let pseudo-internet popularity consume me and I began to change my habits online, resulting in the disconnection between my social media activity and my reality. My Instagram account now (because I deleted my Tumblr this past summer) caters to an audience—my Tumblr followers who initially followed me for my “adventures”—as opposed to my friends and family, and as a result, when taken out of context, my life looks a lot more interesting on my Instagram account than it really is.

Aside from problems arising from my friends never knowing my true whereabouts at certain times due to my Instagram’s misleading geotags and occasional #latergram sans the hashtag, Boyd further discusses challenges from how searchable social media accounts can be, acting as a trail of breadcrumbs, so to speak. “Social media introduces additional challenges, particularly because of the persistent and searchable nature of most of these technical systems. Tweets and status updates aren’t just accessible to the audience who happens to be following the thread as it unfolds; they quickly become archived traces, accessible to viewers at a later time.” From this, I fear that one day my Instagram will get me in trouble with my professional life if taken out of context.

It’s a somewhat lame connection, I know, but the reading reminded me of my own social media habits, and I’m glad I’m not alone, to be honest.

Since digital communities hadn’t fully arisen until the early 2000s, their formation and popularity has divided the population into two distinct groups: those who understand the nuances and subtleties of the way the communities operate and those who do not. This split in understanding can be thought of, more generally represented, as a division in age. A division between young individuals who grew up with and incorporated these digital communities into their social life, and the older population whose adolescence was not predicated on the existence and use of digital social platforms. In Danah Boyd’s “It’s Complicated”, she discusses reasons as to why digital communities inevitably become grounds on which younger individuals escape parental supervision and create more nuanced social techniques and understandings to “properly” interact with one another, a disconnect that Danah Boyd believes propagates misunderstanding and misinterpretation. It is this disconnect between the younger and older individuals, usually understood as being the children and adults, that engenders this misunderstanding. But where does this misunderstanding stem, and what ideas does it concern? In what I’ve gathered from the reading I believe that this misunderstanding between younger and older individuals is a result of differing ideas and concerns regarding context and perceptions of private and public space. Though an adult may view an online social community as a single interactive entity operating under a single set of rules, this is not the case for the adolescent individual. For the teen, a single digital space or community can be more accurately translated into multiple distinct physical spaces that lend themselves to a variety of rules. For instance, Danah Boyd tells of a younger boy who voices his frustration with his sister who continually abuses her ability to comment on posts that he thinks shouldn’t include her. Though he understands the conversation as being more of a private one between individuals that he views as being relevant, his sister understands the posts as a public interaction, and an invitation to join in. Here Danah points out the complex way in which individuals perceive the various spaces that digital communities provide. Individual ideas concerning private and public space dictate the ways in which actions within social digital communities are read. For some, digital communities represent a private space composed of family and friends, a place in which anything can be shared. For others, digital communities remain a part of the bigger structural system of the Internet, an incredibly public space where all information is accessible and shareable.

Because of the inhuman qualities of the Internet, the process of composing an identity, for the adolescent, has become more abstract. Instead of having one’s identity tied to a sort of physical being, it is constructed through the use of digital devices that produce nontangible extensions of the self. It is the sort of peer-to-peer driven nature of these online communities that creates an identity for the individual. No matter how the teen views his/her digitally fabricated self, whether it is in a serious or joking manner, that version of the self becomes an indicator of how that individual aspires to be understood in a specific social context. However, as the lines distinguishing between the real and digital self become more and more blurred, one must be careful not to become too heavily invested in any form of online socializing. Since the structural apparatus supporting these communities are rigid, an individual obviously cannot interact socially with something that is, utterly, non-human. An affordance that comes with social digital communities, which must be recognized, is their inherent non-human structural qualities and restrictions that ultimately shape the way users interact with one another and form any semblance of an “identity”. What I’m trying to say is that Identity shouldn’t be confined or attributed to a digital, non-real space, but rather something that permeates all realms of “existence”. A perspective that I believe would allow for a more healthy understanding of the self.

This week, I had company (for the record, my work friend Chelsea) while doing my Digital Humanities reading and I found myself constantly sharing points that I found interesting or surprising. Most of my fascination was with danah boyd’s discussion of different social contexts as determined by specific social media platforms. I was just really intrigued that the conventions of each community, from the choice of username to the perceived audience could be analyzed so accurately. Although my surprise was repeatedly met with a “Yeah, Jordan, that’s hardly a secret,” I do not think it is exactly general knowledge that humor fuels much of a millenial’s social media presence or that young people will switch between modes of communication based on the content of their conversations rather than convenience.

I later realized my surprise was due to the fact that many conventions on social media do not come naturally and require a lot of exposure to the platform before they can be understood, so it’s interesting that boyd managed to figure out so many as someone operating (assumedly) from outside. However, she is not the first person to demonstrate an unexpected amount of knowledge about the use of each social network. Last week, I discussed some unfortunate social media campaigns, but my focus this week is on one quite unassuming brand and their strangely successful Tumblr account. Denny’s does not have an exactly youthful image, but the brand’s approach to social media has won them plenty of exposure with millenials. Where many public figures end up troubled by the weird interactions they have on social media, Denny’s, with the direction of 23-year-old consultant Amber Gordon, has managed to embrace the weird energy of the blogging platform by establishing three goals: capitalizing on trending topics, engaging with humor, and community interaction.”

Although a lot of the brand’s content appears campy, especially when viewed altogether, it clearly demonstrates some knowledge about what young people are doing online and specifically how that activity differs by platform.

In Danah Boyd’s Its Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, the author examines youth and online use, further exploring topics such as identity, privacy, and addiction. One of the chapters that stood out to me this week was the chapter about internet addiction, “What Make Teens So Obsessed with Social Media?”.

In this chapter, Boyd describes the history of “addiction”, the word itself, and how it has evolved over the years. Boyd explains how years ago “addiction” used to describe an interest or hobby such as gardening, then the meaning of the word began to change to alcohol and substance abuse, and then to impulse-control disorders.

She then explains how nowadays, someone who is “addicted” is described to engage “in a practice in ways that society sees as putting more socially acceptable aspects of their lives in jeopardy” (177). With this definition, parents now label their children as “addicted” to the internet because they may choose to be in an online chat room or lose sleep to be active online.

When reading this chapter, I kept being reminded of an image I had seen before of different social media site names that were written on syringes. This image shows the contrast of what has been seen as “addiction” in the past and how teenagers are being labeled as “addicted” now. When one usually would see a syringe that is displayed in the image, it is associated with serious drug addiction—however in this image, it is being associated with Facebook, Youtube, and Tumblr. I feel like this image is striking because it really shows how blown out of proportion this “youth addicted to social media/internet” has become. I do understand that it can be described as addiction in some cases and that the image is dramatized on purpose, however comparing social media websites to drug abuse like that image does seems unnecessary and over the top. I feel that this image really illustrates the complications that come with constantly labeling youth as “addicted” to social media.