Author: g.jorge

Do women even play Basketball?

2k.com

We all love it, Basketball! I played basketball since I was in 5th grade mostly for recreational purposes, but now I could even play it from home. 2k is a very well known video game amogst teenagers that love sports. However, very little the consumer knows the details that goes into the race and gender misrepresentation. Most of the best players in 2k are black, although it does fit into the stereotype of black males being basketball players. It is mostly evident when it comes to NBA 2k,  that the best players are shown in the best of their ability. For example, Stephen Curry unanimous MVP for the year 2016 is a great basketball player and in 2k he plays like so although he is white. However there is a very big gender gap. As some of you guys might know, there are also professional female basketball players, but they are not being represented at all in 2k. Which raises the quesion do women even play basketball?

2k is a perfect exmaple of the research done by Schaap. Although, there are two different leagues; the woman’s league and the man league, 2k only choosed to portray the man’s league. Which proves what Schaap said “that online spaces in many instances are masculine spaces, where expectations of behavior and iden-tity are shaped by traditional notions of heterosexuality and standards of hegemonic 1nasculinity.” This is true because although there is a woman’s league 2k has not developed female characters within their video game. Although, one might argue that there is no reason for a company such as 2k to create female characters since the consumers are mostly male teenagers. Well, that idea feeds into the stereotype that woman are not interested or may not be as good as males in sports, which is not true. Attached is an article that expands on the idea of female basketball athletes being underrespresented.

2k also feeds into Nakamura’s concept of ” the term cybertype to describe the distinctive ways that the Internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism.” Cybertype is clearly evident in 2k. In the game you are allowed to create your own player, which createsa variaty of different players. However the asian and hispanic race is not represented, they only have the white and black race. Feeding more into cybertype, even when a player chooses a white character, the story is told as if the white character comes from a black family. Again supporting the stereotype that only black males are good in basketball.

Here’s a famous basketball player talking about race and basketball:

Questions:

1)Do you think women are underrepresented in sports game?

2)How much importance do you think race and gender underrepresation have in regars to videogames?

Why Bother Reading it ? the Privacy Policy is there to protect you!

Does your information privacy matter?

 

Through out the last decades, many social media platforms have grown in a tremendous exponential rate. Best explanaiton for such growth is the use of algorithms that manipulates and stores all of the information provided by the users for a profit. The documentary mirrors various points, we had previously learned in class. Such as digital enclosure, contextual advertising and interactivity.

Siva Vaidhyananthan, author of “The Googlization of everything” expresses  the idea of digital enclosure. He states that although it seems like” Google is free , which is part of the reason why we like the company, google is not really free- at least not free in a liberty sense”. I can relate this statment to digital enclosure, since it’s the concept of  an interactive platform in which every transaction and move of the user is being recorded. Which then leads to two separate groups; the private organizations controlling the information of the users, and the  users of such platforms. Unfortunatemely this information is not just being used for marketing purposes, our government is also paying search engines, and social media platform for our virtual transactions.

The relation between the economic systems and the system of government control is such of companies like Facebook, Google or instram which purposely make their privacy policy not user friendly to then collect data from users and sell it forward to the government. Because of this the distribution of power is uneven. It connects back to what we learned in class about interactivity. Interactivity is no longer a symmetrical two way street, insted it is an asymmetrical loss of privacy. Users are becoming more and more transparent, not voluntarily but by default. While all the surveillance agencies remain hidden and secretive.

The users well being and freedom are being affected by the asymmetrical interactivity as it is evident in the next three examples from the documentary.

  1. One of the stories that really shocked me was the story of the Law student from Europe. Part of the reason why I found it so interesting is that the story first begins stating how the government of Austria, requires company to be transparent unlike the USA. Because of this the law student was able to request information about all of his virtual transactions from Facebook. Although he had been using Facebook infrequently for only three years, much information was inspired from him to determine many things, such as places he had visit through that period of times, what political party he supports, he was able to find comments and conversations he had made, even more surprisingly he realized that when one of the users delete Facebook, it doesn’t mean that it is deleted, is never gone, the user just never sees it. Although this did not affect his physical well being, I’m sure he felt his freedom was being oppressed. After realizing someone is always watching.
  2. Another scene that i found really interesting was the scene of Carrier IQ. Carrier IQ, according to the documentary, is a piece of software that every smartphone possessed. This software capture every single key stroke. Then the documentary shows a debate in congress where the head of the FBI admits that although information collected for criminal cases was not directly obtained from Carrier IQ, some of the information coming from wireless carrier might come from Carrier IQ. This shows us how developed the world of surveillance is, you no longer have to be involve in social media platforms , or even used search engines to be virtually tracked.
  3. The story of Joe Leopardi was really shocking to me. Joe had made a post on Facebook quoting a movie scene he was currently watching, the quote display some terms of mass destruction weapons. The same day of the status being posted, the police showed up at his house, without a warrant or anything searched through his property. Not only was his freedom violated but that situation could have also affected his physical well being.

Privacy Is Completely And Utterly Dead, And We Killed It is an article written by Jacob Morgan about the same documentary we saw. Different take on what we saw.

1) Will the way you express yourself on social media change, now that you are aware of the relationship between surveillance companies and the government?

2) What do you think will happen, in regards to your online behavior, if average users also had access to all the information you provide by using these platforms?

 

Who’s watching ?

 

As the digital world advances, we have seen many new different industires arise. Digital world and social media has become one of the most rapid growing industires of our time. The internet and cyberspace are the main reasons for such growth. Users have become consumers, as well as producers through the interactivity that cyberspace provides. One that uses facebook or simply uses the search bar on Google Chrome is providing enough information to cyberspace to be consider a producer. I, personally, do not use most of the social media outlets. However I do use Facebook, Snapchat and LinkedIn, and as it is evident by these three social media outlets, all of them do not produce any content instead they allow their users to post pictures, to like, to share ideas and thoughts, basically to create content,  while also allowing each of their followers , friends or connections to be the consumers of the content. Well, it sounds like a dream come true, one no longer has to wait to see their special friend to able to connect with them, or even have to wait to see their friends to show them their amazing time at that awesome vaction trip. Now it is easy to do all those things through the interactivity of cyberspace, but what can possibly go wrong? Well here is the catch as Mark Andrjevic states on his book, “Interactivity is not necessarily a two-way street; more often than not, it amounts to the offer of convenience in exchange for willing or unwitting submission to increasingly detailed forms of information gathering”. Users of cyberspace are not just providing content that their friends can see, they also providing information to these platforms by allowing them to surveilled their actions in exchange of the convenience of using cyberspace. Well, how much information is being obtained and stored by these platforms? Mark provided us with an example of one his close friends, whom currently works with these information storage platform. His friend showed a 25 page long report on just the basic transactions the friend had done. Within these reports, there were so much information including addresses of the person residency, even names of roomates and much more. But where does it stop? It doesn’t, I don’t think it will ever stop. Here’s the reason why. As Mark stated, much of these digital survellience is happening for two reasons prevention of crimes in other words security and also for capitalism. Market survellience has surpass our privacy standards with things such as contextual adverstising, digital enclosure and more. Contextual Advertising might seem appealing to some consumers but I, personally, do not agree with the concept. Mark refers to contextual advertising, as the ability to custome advertising depending on your location, your search history or your recent online transactions. To me this seems a little overboard, and exactly where is not acceptable for my consumer profile to be invade. I look at the bigger picture although, it might seem convenient for someone who’s looking for a future vaction spot to keep getting ads or beautiful places; where will it stop? Next thing that might happen is that these algorithms might control our actions, bombarding us with information of what to buy, what news to see, what to eat, etc.

State Survelliance, is another example how our actions are being monitored and controlled through cyberspace. This technique of disciplinary power affects each and everyone of us. One way that it has affected me is while job searching or simply graduate school searching. As some of us might know, jobs and schools recruiting teams are now looking through social media outlets and sometimes basing their decision on what they might find about the candidate. Some may even argue that the excistance of the electronic panopticon is sufficient to reduce crimes and misdemeanors from oncurring.

http://www.today.com/video/schools-social-media-monitoring-draws-criticism-privacy-concerns-518595139752

This idea is very close to the idea of the panopticon. Focault uses the example of a new form of prison architechture in British, which gave the inmates an illusion that they were constantly being watched. This design was one of the best way to control the inmates behavior. Similarly digital survellience and all these programs are now being the new panopticon. It creates the idea of being watched and also being the one doing the watching. As Foucault states “The major effect of panopticon is to induce in the inmate a state of concious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic funcitioning of power. So to arrange things that surveillance is permanent in its effect, even if its discontinuous in actions.” Personally this concept has stopped from doing certain things  not necessarily illegal. But even the thought of encountoring with your future boss, or simply being on the web looking for a job  and being afraid that they might find that stupid icture of you and your frined from snapchat. Now that we know our actions are being watched, we behave differently. Now my questions to you are: Do you think anyone has privacy in today’s world? If you had access to your future date or lover’s information will you use it to based your decision?

Will the real U please stand up?

The different ways to express ourselves, often times have people wondering what the real us is like? or which of our personas is the real us?

I got the opportunity to interview one of my close friends. Her name is Stephanie Goris. She’s currently in the Real Estate business and agrees that through social media, she has been able to advance her career and express herself in many ways. Here are her ansers:
1. As per social media platform and apps, I am currently using Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. In the past I have used Myspace and Twitter.
2. I use my real name for all my accounts and have never used a fake alias. However, I only use my first name for all my accounts (excluding Facebook because it’s required)
3. I definitely have constructed different personas through my social media platforms mainly due to the audience or “friends/followers” i have. For my Facebook, I constructed a more conservative persona since I have all of my family and co-workers as ‘friends’ on the site. I am most careful of what I share since I want to hold a professional persona. However, on Instagram I have more friends from high school so I will portray a glamorous persona; in that I only post happy and upbeat post to portray a happy lifestyle. While on Snapchat, I only have friends whom I see and interact with outside of social media so I tend to post more day to day personas and it is the most reflective of my daily life. Also, since Snapchat does not hold a digital trail which people can search for like on Facebook and Instagram, I am more keen to post things I wouldn’t post on other sites. 
      This relates to different aspects of life experiences because I will post different experiences depending on the social media platform. For example, if I recently accomplished something at work or had a family event, I will post it on Facebook. If I had a fun night out I will post it on Instagram. If it was something little that happen during the day or if I was bored, I will post it on Snapchat.
4. In my opinion, I feel like the digital personas I constructed does help me cope with problems of privacy. Due to my audience on different social media platforms, it gives me the liberty to to pick and choose who sees my post. On the contrary, it does create new problems because it’s creating different digital personas of the same person (me) and can limit potential interactions with different friends/followers I have. It also portrays a different persona depending on the site which can cause internal conflictions of categorizing or judging my own life experiences to fit the persona I created depending on the platform.
As my friend Stephanie has stated, it’s become easier for everyone to potray a different persona in each of these social media. The driven concept that we are able to express different ideas, thoughts and images in different sites, while not one of them portraying the same persona is fantastic. This is similar to Turkle’s reading and one of the MUDs’ user experience. As he states that “gives people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self, to play with their identity and to try out new ones”. Fortunately for us it hasnt stopped there. Now that we are able to express ourselves in many different ways, technology also gives us the opportunity to experience things in many different ways from on simple source.
In chapter 5, we discovered the world of virtual reality and role-playing games. Technology has “has led to the creation of large-scale virtual worlds where millions of players interact with each other through conventional mouse, keyboard and voice interfaces. Many of these games also allow for the wide-ranging personalization of the game environment in response to the commands of game players.” I myself have witenessed how powerful internet based games have become. I have younger cousins who are in love with the game of basketball, well not the real one the virtual one 2K and they spent most of their time playing and connecting with other players from home. So that, it has become a community of competition and fun, and although in this games he might seem like a really good player, in life he’s not.
1.From your own personal experience, do yout hink the way you potray your personas through social media has helped you build a virtual community?
2.Do you think we will ever just become virtual beings?

Skype Translator

Skype translator is one of the new softwares innovations. Skype one of the most used video-call softwares, came out with a very innovative idea; the skype translator. Clay Dillow, the author, explains the usefulness of the skype translator and its’ biggest purpose which is “to make it possible for any human on Earth to communicte with any other human on Earth, with no linguistic divide”.  Dillow uses images and videos of new users enjoying this new features.

 

The image shows two users speaking in spanish and english through the chat windows. This features translates voice call between different languages in realtime, turning English to Spanish and Spanish back into English on the fly. Clay Dillow’s main argument is all the technocolgical arrangements that make the skype translator work, and how little of awareness and recognizitions users of these features have of the technological arrangements. In this article, he argues that the Skype translator was designed more like the human brain than a classical computer. With the development of Deep neural networks (DNNs), softwares are more capable of building more knowledge about the data sets that they were trained on, in this case, language.  This development reflects Lee Manovich’s media principles of automation. According to Lee, the high level of automation of media creation ” requires a copmuter to understand, to a certain degree, the meanings embedded in the objects being generated, that is, their semantics”. Similarly Dillow argues the automation of the Skype Translator is needed for the translation to be effective. Dillow uses the example of saying ” I like Ice cream”, he states that this is a much easier sentence for the software to understand and translate into another language. But what if the phrase was ” oh, that fumble was the last straw that broke the camel’s back”, much more complicated phrase that will need automation. Automation will look for probablistic matches, selecting the best solution from a number of options phrases based on what it thinks is most likely to be correct.

Another characteristic discussed in Lee’s new media principles is Transcoding, which is also found in Dillow’s article. Transcoding according to Lee, is “how the computerization of media turns into computer data”. Which reflects in all aspects, what DNNs were able to do. By Speech recognition DNNs were able to store certain tones, syntax, structure and meaning of languages, then DNNs went through a statistical matching process to be able to translate at it’s best accuracy. The statistical process shows how DNNs allowed the Skype Translator to perform transcoding. The idea that media, in this case languages’ tone and stucture was converted into computer data for the skype translator then be able to use a statistical procedure to pick the best educated words for translation. While doing research on Skype Translator I came accross opinions of users, this is what they said. The comment of Keval Padia, reminding of one our previous readings. His first paragraph acknowledges how skype has transformed media using speech recognition, automated translation and machine learning. this idea also reflects Couldry’s idea.Couldry states on page 10, “The internet has brought a shift in information production from a limited number of discrete forms”. It is evident by Skype Translator what Couldry’s arguing. The internet has connected more people, creating the production of information, that enable software like Skype Translator to be able to use that information to destroy language barriers.

Dillow  does a really good job stating all the difficulties that arise from using the Skype Translator, which makes his argument, conclusion and finding more valid and convincing to me.  His finding shows us how improved and developed machine learning has become, and also reflects some of the new media principles that Lee argues about. His conclusion make his argument more legitimate, he is aware that the Skype Translator is not perfect, that it still gets stuck on some problems. But he has hope that the technology will advance sufficiently for projects like this to work.

After reading this article, I started thinking what if our Television does the same. I come from a spanish speaking family, who sometimes has difficulty watching movies or shows, more importanlty news  on television were there aren’t any subtitles. What if television companies start using new principles such as the automation and the transcoding principle to able to translate and delivered a well translate message to their non-enlsigh speaking audience? Or what if this principles are used in class for students who hav e ahard time understanding english?

 

photo source

An Hour Train Ride Through a Digital Revolution

As I am sitting down in the subway, I spent the next hour of my commute, not only,  surfing the web for deals on textbooks but also using different apps for music and entertainment. The first thing I did was go on Facebook, I checked my messages, looked over my notifications and I noticed there was a notification from a friend. I was tagged in various pictures  and videos but only one of the videos caught my eye. It was the advertising video of an Ice Cream Shop, which in reality sells cookie dough on an Ice Cream cone. Pretty cool, right? I thought it was a very innovative and delicious idea. Then, I quickly replied to my friend by asking if she wanted to check out the place.  I continued to scroll down through my news feed and came across a news article about a CUNY student whom was able to come back to the United States, following the decision of the Department of Homeland Security to suspend the travel ban. After reading the news article, I was suggested by Facebook to read other articles, which I decided not to read. Some of the titles seemed to refer to the Women’s March, others about political issues that are currently happening. I looked over to my right and noticed the person next to me was communicating with someone through text, that reminded me to ask my friends in the groupchat if they have a PDF file of a specific accounting textbook that I need. One of the members of the groupchat quickly replied to me, saying that she has the scanned copy of my accounting book printed out and that she can provide me with it some time during this week.

I suddenly realized how quickly an hour had passed, then I started to wonder what my train ride would have been like without a phone, or let say without Facebook or access to the internet. I , first, conluded that I probably would have had a harder time getting acces to the accounting textbook, either by having to go the school or local libray and finding a physical copy of the book. Second, I concluded that my friend would’ve probably waited until seeing me to tell me about the Ice Cream Shop. But then I thought, what other way could she had possibly find out about the innovative and delicious Ice Cream Shop without the help of Facebook ?  This made me realize how reliable and effective Social Network Sites can be for marketing strategies or simply to deliver a message. It is evident that not only businesses, but other news outlets are using platforms such as facebook and twitter to deliver their message. Facebook is, in fact, aware of such activities by media outlets, it provided guidance to them. This article is evident of this awarenses, it was posted within the Facebook network for media outlets as guidance on more effecient ways they can use Facebook.

I believe this is all evident to the digital revolution Couldry refers to, and also Athique’s argument that we live in a digital society. Although, this was only an hour of my day, the rest of my day isn’t much different from this specific hour. We, as a society, are constantly living in the digital world. Either by spending time looking for the best deals on textbooks through Google, or liking posts and pictures of our friends new vacation spots or our next ice cream eating adventure. We are constantly being surrounded by new information because of social media platforms and the internet. As Couldry states on page 10, “The internet has brought a shift in information production from a limited number of discrete forms ( books, pamphlets, letters, reports, lists) to information units of any form and size (websites).. The results are an exponential growth in data volume.. ”  This video supports this idea on how quickly the digital revolution has evolved and how quickly it has reached more and more people.

 

The ability to find everything you are searching for, from the next fun adventure with a friend to being able to obtain a physical copy of a text book, in  ONLY one social platform is one of the major benefits of the digital revolution. However, there could be some negative consequences of the use of such social media platforms. Facebook, to use the same example, has been in many controversial arguments over privacy, and their selling off of users data and also credibility checks when it comes to fake news articles. Nonethelss, I personally believe the good overorks the bad. A survey conducted by MUO also supports this idea.

We, as a society, use media as consumers and producers, and interestingly enough most of our most used social platforms ( such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram)  provide few to zero content, allowing us to produce content, and also exposing us to information from other users in the same platform. What do you think will happen if us, as consumers and producers, stop using social media platforms? What will be the next revolution in media after the digital revolution?