This might be the first week where I almost had no idea what to write for a reflection. The only thing that got my attention from this chapter was the section where Jill Walter Rettberg brought up profile pictures, “Profile pictures don’t always show a person’s face.” (40) From my experience many people believe that a social media account should be of you, and only you. If not than you are a fake account. I disagree with that. I think you can introduce yourself by your interests and obsessions rather than your face. What do I use as a profile picture than? I change it up all the time. I use pictures of architecture, historical figures, characters from cartoons, anime, video games, or random cute animals. I have had many accounts during my time on the internet, most being long gone, but the one thing that has never changed is my choice against using my own face as a profile picture. (It’s not that I don’t have photos of me on social medias but it’s the same ones from 2016.) It’s quite easy for someone to tell what I like and believe from just looking at my Facebook account; from the things I post, from the groups I am in, from the pages I like. Right now it’s probably pretty weird to some that my profile picture is currently a hot purple elf. I think my friends can like me without the need to see a photo of me daily. And If they don’t like that than why would they want to be in my virtual world at all? Anyway, I wonder if others like me have the same reasoning as mine: Are they more proud to show their interests over their face? Do they think that a profile doesn’t need to be professional and realistic if social media itself is a big simulation? Do they think their authentic self is crappy and boring compare to their constructed self? Do they hide their face for security reasons? Do they find it more fun to be something from fantasy? Why be yourself when you could just be a purrty castle.

Works Cited:
Rettberg, Jill Walker. Seeing Ourselves Through Technology. 26 Mar. 2019, 
http://jilltxt.net/books/Seeing-Ourselves-Through-Technology-full-book.pdf

Summary:
The third chapter, Serial Selfies by Jill Walker Rettberg, begins with sharing the authors experience at an exhibit that showed an artist, Suzanne Szucs, who took a picture every day for 15 years. The rest of the article talked about examples of ways we visually represent ourselves. Like time-lapse selfie videos, profile pictures, self-improvement selfies and photobooths. These all predicted our culture around selfies today.

Main Ideas/Key Terms:
Selfie: A photograph that one takes of themselves and is shared on social media.
Time lapse videos: A photographic technique of taking a sequence of frames at set intervals to record changes that take place slowly over time. There’s a bias against different races and genders and we all know how bad youtube comment sections are. It became a youtube genre trend. Facebooks personalised year in review videos.
Profile photos: Are the first photos we want others to identify us by on social media. Some people barely ever update them, while others change them every week. Sometimes they aren’t a persons face but are set as something they identify with or are interested in, like photos representing Kurdish pride. You can add temporary banners on facebook for supporting a sports team, cause or political reasons after a tragedy, like the Utoya massacre.
Photobooth: Automatic portraits that are taken quickly without preparation

This was a harder chapter to understand. But I totally agreed with Jill when she writes, “Selfies can be raw and revealing. They can feel too authentic, too honest.” (27) I hate photos of myself. I hate seeing myself as is but filters and editing fix my appearance. Thing is…filters don’t remove things from existence and sometimes they don’t work at all. We get stuck in needing to see ourselves in this must-be-perfect way.
I wanted to dig deeper into one of Jill’s sources when she sayss, “The photo filter both aestheticises and perhaps, as Sontag wrote of images of war , the filter anesthetises our everyday lives.” (25-26) It’s the quote we went through in class but we glossed over the Susan Sontag part. During wartime governments filter out news that is anti-war or anti-government. They put out what they want you to see. They hype up the need for armies and make it seem like it’s a good thing, an honorable thing, to go out and serve your nation. And after the filters are lifted and pictures of war become available after a while people begin to be so desensitized by the horrors of war. They start to loose empathy. We see war live now but we can still never truly understand. According to my mom, when she was being taught about WW2 they didn’t spend time talking about the people that helped hide Jewish victims, etc. that happened during the Holocaust. So education even was filtering out things about the war.

Key Terms/Main Ideas:
Filter – A process in which something unwanted is removed
Technological filters – let us express ourselves in certain ways but limits us in others. i.e. Twitter’s character count
Cultural filters – rules and conventions that we copy from others that we aren’t completely aware of doing
Aesthetics – makes something look better or more artistically pleasing
Cultural filters can misrepresent people i.e. cameras bias for lighter skin tones, taking your own picture makes it feel more like you
Genre filters – Show progress and self-improvement

Making Connections:
I notice there are a lot of filters in my life. I definitely use filters whenever (very rarely) I take a photo of myself. It’s to hide my acne. And yes, it does help me see myself in a new way, something better than what I’m used too seeing in the mirror. I don’t use any makeup so a filter is my only line of defense of making myself look good. I also filter my Facebook newsfeed by temporarily unfollowing pages or people that I’m not currently in the mood for seeing, like tons of Eurovision group updates. I don’t do a good job of filtering on facebook compared to most people who just share positive things. I sometimes go off in full on sad mode.

Works Cited:
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2F9781137476661.pdf

While reading the article “Imagining the Blogosphere” by Graham Lampa I kept in mind that I actively run a blog. I don’t place myself in the majority of people that use blogs for diary keeping, or for updating my friends about my life and I am not the minority that uses my blog for journalism or activism. I think of my blog on Tumblr, yes that website, as an escape from my uneventful life and the depressing state of our world. I only share about things that make me excited and happy. But I follow a lot of blogs that do talk about social issues and have discussions. It got me thinking…how much impact does this work have? How much changes come from sharing around facts about problems like Islamophobia, police brutality, racism, etc. on a blog? I feel as if it’s not achieving anything. So, I was super surprised when Lampa referenced Scott in the article, “When Lott eventually resigned his post as Senate Minority Leader, bloggers were given credit for keeping the story alive when the traditional media had let it slip through the cracks” (Lampa, 2). We also discussed in class that bloggers keep issues current, viral and uncensored from rating profits. I just never thought that blogging had that big of an influence or that it was taken seriously.

On the flip side, I also believe that some journalist blogging can be harmful. (Just like big name news can be harmful, and especially our current government.) It’s become a thing where if you don’t share the same perspective on a topic you easily become the enemy. I’ve seen terrible things said against people (who haven’t done anything hurtful to anyone) just because they are white, male, Christian or straight. It’s not equality. It’s not what we want in return. I am not dismissing that there are actual crappy people in this world that deserve to be exposed and stopped. Terrible people who threaten death on trans, gays or immigrants, or people who are actual rapists, racists or Nazis. I just think that above all we really need to be aware of the news blogs that we follow because we might start to be completely blinded by everything they say. Some activists might turn out to be just as bad. It’s our nature to use labels and categorize people. But we have the power to not turn around and repeat the same harmful categorizing that crappy people do to others. Not everyone was lucky enough to be like me, full of curiosity and appreciation for the world. It would really help if instead of fighting each other, we all went out and made friends, went out and made an effort to understand things that are new to us. It was a bit embarrassing at first (since I suck at socializing) but I chose to go out of my way to make friends with the international students at my high school. I went multiple times to girls Halaqa (basically Sunday school but it was on Wednesday) at the local Masjid to experience Islam and the Muslim community. Anyway, keep blogging and talking about these problems, because yes they do exist, but know that not everyone is against you and that not everyone is a jerk, that goes for both sides of anything. Just because I am bisexual but that doesn’t make me flawless. Just because I am white and a female doesn’t mean that I want all POC or males to cease existing. Just because I love Germany doesn’t make me a Nazi or agree with any policy that the AfD has. Just because I had a bad father doesn’t mean all men are like him.

Main Ideas/Key Terms:

• 2/3 of blogs are inactive or abandoned and 1.09 million blogs are one-day wonders (Perseus 2003)
• Blogging is like an iceberg analogy. Most blogs are inactive (or underwater) compared to the active blogs (the little that is seen above the water)
• Journalist blogs tells more and sometimes can influence traditional media, Freedom for political commentary because their is no profit motive.
• Online Imagined Communities: Benedict Anderson states that all communities are imagined.
• Mass Ceremony: A community receiving information that is relevant to their lives
• Blogosphere: makes up only 2-7% of internet users
• “Link-commenting style”/Blogging as a discussion: Debating your opinion using sources “where’s yer source, bro???”
• “Meatspace”: an audience that is your in real life friends
• Filtering exists where the blogosphere puts forward news that is most important.
• Mediascape: the world seen by mass media
• Mass-Amatuerization: enables anyone with computer access to publish anything they want. Shirky thinks this is ruining the “intrinsic value” of publishing.
• Object Obscurity: You might never get attention or have anyone reading your work.
• Global Elite: Someone with internet access, computer, time, talent, wealth and is apart of the blogosphere. Blogging is not truly global because not everyone in developing countries has these things.
• English languages domination: English outnumbers blogs 3 to 1. Portuguese being the second.
• Transnational Blogging Community: worldwide bloggers

Summary:
“Imagining the Blogosphere” by Graham Lampa was written to explain the blogosphere. The article states that bloggers are an imagined online community. Just as newspapers built the national imagined community (Anderson) The article states two types of reasons to blog. A majority of blogs are like personal diaries and are shared for just friends. The smaller minority uses their blogs for journalism and sharing news and opinions. These “amateur” journalists have more freedom to share ideas than paid media. Blogging is still not truly globalized due to limits in internet access in developing countries and foreign blogs being overshadowed by English domination.

I wasn’t really sure about reading “Annoying Ways People Use Sources”. I liked that it was definitely shorter than the previous articles that have been assigned. It seemed like it would be full of picky opinions on writing that I wouldn’t agree with. I felt like it was going to be a guide that wouldn’t really help me unless we had practice. Reading something doesn’t help me unless I actually work with it. (We ended up having practice in class but I still felt a bit lost.) In the process of reading it I found out it wasn’t as bad or as boring because his descriptions were really funny.

Something that really resonated with me was when he talked about oversharing information aka “Uncle Barry.” It totally took me back to when I had to write papers for middle school. It took me back to how much I hated it. I hated the process of narrowing down topics, finding numerous sources, using individual note cards for each topic and then putting it all together in a paper, remembering which fact came from which source. It gave me a big headache keeping track of everything. According to this article I was doing it all very wrong. I took too many notes and paraphrased too much information. I had this paper on the Kingdom of Bhutan where I found and used like 12 sources. At that time everything about Bhutan was totally new to me (unlike now, I could be the Ambassador to Bhutan at this point.) I had this drive to include everything, things that didn’t really go into my topic, every single fact I could find. I jam packed my paper with quotes. It must have been a mess and a half. I have to work on taking out what really matters and what I can really grow and expand on. I could have made it far more interesting if I went into more depth of what things signified. I did the same mistakes for my papers on Prussia and Tsar Nicholas II. Just stating hundreds of quotes.

Summary: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/writingspaces2/stedman–annoying-ways.pdf

“Annoying Ways People Use Sources” by Kyle D. Stedman is about how judgmental some people might be towards your way of sourcing things. He describes what bothers him personally. Giving an example for each error. The errors were: using a quotation without first introducing it, placing a quotation at the beginning or the ending of a paragraph and overuse of quotes. His way of fixing things is to, “Prepare, quote, analyze.” Before referencing a quote, you should first expand on why you are mentioning it and then after the quote explain it in your own words. By doing this you will have a better way to connect your writing to your readers.

Key Terms/Main Ideas:

Convention – A way of writing that depends on the purpose or the audience.
Not a set rule.

The spiderman – Quote that just dangles

Uncle Barry – useless information

Paraphrasing/Summarizing – Used to tell a fact but using different words.

[] – Tell you have changed something in a quote

Patchwriting – Using your own words and the words of the authors too closely

Armadillo Roadkill – Make sure the quotes you use fit in with what you are trying to say/have context

Pay attention to the grammar you use around your quotes, don’t change the point of view

Say exactly what part of the information came from what source

Using multiple sources – This is done to reinforce your opinion or findings

Cant find that stupid link – Writing citations (author name, page number, title)  correctly so it matches up

Turn signals/Citation techniques – Both help guide others to your next move

Is this all really important? He understands that, “….what’s annoying varies from person to person….” but if his advice is applied correctly we can create more enjoyable work to a majority of people.

I thought reading this was all easily understandable. It laid out lots of things I already knew about the history of the internet. It made me think about the ways that we have expressed ourselves throughout history and now using social media. It explained why we are attracted to the internet and what we get from it. It’s in our nature to show who we are.

I always wondered why everyone was obsessed with taking selfies. I researched it a long time ago and found out it wasn’t a new thing. This chapter gave me even more references on early photographers.

I use the internet all the time because I can shape my representation into who I’d rather be. I can be seen as interesting and intelligent. I can be seen as a historian of culture, or someone who travels and goes to concerts a lot, or someone who has connections with authors and politicians and royals, when really I’m just a sad lazy potato. I think most people warp their true selves online. It has a downside because you begin to really believe that this is real and this is who you are. You begin to think about how all of these followers and virtual friends would never really care if you didn’t share good content. And most of them don’t even know the real YOU. Anyway, darkness is consuming me.

One thing that I don’t really do is tracking things so that was interesting to see how or why that became popular. I also never knew the stuff about writing about your faith because I’m not religious.