Keeping Up with Social Media

The idea of Lifestreaming is something Marwick talks about in her book Status Update. It is the concept of broadcasting oneself online for everyone to see. This can be from updating a Facebook status to posting a tweet. What is important to Lifestreaming is the audience that consumes it. With social media it is whoever is your friend or follows you. With reality television it is the viewers on that network. Most Lifestreamers use the internet to broadcast. Through broadcasting oneself you can gain a following. Therefore self-branding (from my previous post) and Lifestreaming go hand in hand. By carefully editing a lifestream to your edited self you can gain a following and in turn generate bigger numbers: views and income.

I think one of the biggest Lifestreamers we can think of is the Kardashian family as a whole. They broadcast their life through their reality television show Keeping Up with the Kardashians and all of its spin offs such as Kourtney and Khloe take Miami. They are also huge on social media such as Instagram and have generated their own personal apps that help you stay up to date with their lives and what they are doing.

Khloe Kardashians Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/khloekardashian/?hl=en

We can see through the Kardashian family how Lifestreaming can create a huge following and a huge income.

But can Lifestreaming be dangerous? Once someone begins to Lifestream can they ever stop if they have a following? Just like actors from a movie, once someone has an audience they have forever lost a part of their private world and must maintain the edited self they portrayed to the world in the first place.

The sedentary lifestyle of the desk worker

“Dharma at the Desk” by Sarah Sharma discusses the effects of introducing corporate wellness into a sedentary lifestyle. While the notion of incorporating wellness activities like yoga in the office is widely accepted as something healthy, Sharma delves deeper in the chapter by stating that corporate yoga is an example of recalibration or another method of social control to ensure that workers stay sedentary and are more motivated to finish their tasks at their desk. There have been a number of segments in the media as well as studies that indicate the toxic nature of sitting and staring at screens all day.

When I did a simple Google search on how to beat a sedentary lifestyle as a desk worker, many results popped up outlining simple “exercises” that can be done at the desk. This article from Medical Daily popped up as one of the first few results: http://www.medicaldaily.com/sedentary-lifestyle-desk-job-exercise-plan-393080. The video outlines exercises like squats, leg raises, and “book curls.” While the solution to a sedentary lifestyle involves just taking more frequent breaks by walking or standing, these exercises still chain the worker at the desk – which Sharma confirms in the chapter is the underlying goal of the corporation.

With the basic understanding that sitting or inactivity for long periods of time is detrimental to physical and mental health, can you think of companies who try to incorporate activity in the workday (in a holistic manner)? An example I can think of is Google, in which they provide different avenues for free time on site – such as video games, parks, etc.

Abstraction and interface on social media sites

In “Architecture and Implementation: Engineering Real (software) Abstractions on Social Media” by Robert Gehl, he discusses the concept of abstractions to compare the success of Facebook and the failure of Myspace. Put simply, Gehl states that Facebook’s clean interface design and control over content won over advertisers and the public while Myspace deemed to be inefficient in producing a real software abstraction, which just means that users and advertisers were essentially turned off from the fact that Myspace allowed its users to completely manipulate the code to their pages (Gehl, 2014, p. 86) making the entire site seem messy which fell below branding standards for advertisers and disabled a sense of community for users.

Since reading this chapter, I’ve realized that most sites nowadays often have a tight control over what can be edited or altered on their site. For example, even blogging platforms like Wordpress offer free and paid themes that can be customized rather than encouraging the user to create their own.

My question is – can you think of or use any social networking platforms that dispel this concept of providing a clean and seamless platform (i.e. facebook/twitter/Instagram) and allow users to interfere with the website interface? If not, do you prefer to have a clean interface layout ready when using social networking sites or do you like the concept of customizing each aspect to your website/profile?

The "New" You

In Status Update, Marwick talks about the idea of self-branding oneself which basically means turning yourself into the brand you are selling. You become the brand, you present the brand, and you make sure to always be projected as the brand. This is what Marwick calls the edited self. The idea of always editing how you look online to look a certain way. It can be whoever you want to be, the only catch is that you have to maintain that edited self all throughout your social media.

So what happens when someone slips up in portraying their edited self? When you gain enough of a following, portraying an edited self becomes much more important. When businesses are relying on you to sell their brand, they are expecting you to sell it through your edited self. For example if a brand targeting children goes to a famous celebrity, who then gets caught doing drugs chances are that brand deal is off. Here are some examples:

Kate Moss lost deals with H&M, Chanel and Burberry because a photograph surfaced of her doing drugs. (Segura, 2011)
Michael Phelps lost a deal with Kellogg's due to a photo of him smoking a bong. (Huffington Post, 2013)
Lance Armstrong also lost his deal with Nike due to drugs. (Huffington Post, 2013)

These are only a few examples but they show what an impact straying from your edited self can cause. Drugs wont always get you cut from a brand deal. We can look at Snoop Dogg who just signed a deal with the Canadian Marijuana company Tweed, as his self-brand includes smoking weed. (Posadzki, 2016)

It all depends on how you self-brand yourself. But the thing with self-branding is you cant change it up every week. You must grow your self-brand like an other brand and endorse products that go with your edited self and vice versa. This is why self-branding in todays world is so important as advertisements rely on it to get their products seen through social media.

Read the whole list of celebrity endorsements gone bad:
http://stylecaster.com/beauty/7-celebrities-who-lost-big-endorsements/slide3#autoplay
OR
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/celebrities-lost-endorsement-deals-paula-deen_n_3505534.html?slideshow=true

Snoop Dogg's deal with Tweed:
https://www.thestar.com/business/2016/02/11/snoop-dogg-and-ontario-marijuana-producer-tweed-strike-business-deal.html

Alice Marwick and the efficiency of producing work

Alice Marwick discusses in Status Update, “Leaders and Followers: Status in the Tech Scene”, two major shifts in the nature of how work happened between the Web 2.0 and Dot-Comm Era. What is significant about these shifts is how relevant they are for internet users today, shaping our social experiences in how and what we produce online when working. Marwick furthers her claim by suggesting that we have what Neff calls ‘entrepreneurial labour’, which encourages the flexibility of work while normalizing the high risks of business. What Marwick essentially says is that “workers are encouraged to adapt an enterprising attitude towards business” (Markwick, 116), suggesting that the success or failure of making a profit solely depends on the decisions of the worker themselves. The second change that was noted was the alterations of the traditional work place itself, discussing how the workers had the freedom to wear, do and act the way they wanted if allowed them to complete their assigned job.

            It seems that Marwick would be talking about the extent of creative freedom workers when they are making money. My overall question for this reading would be: When you are working, do you like to work in more traditional work environments that have elements such as a desk or cubicles OR would you rather work in a less traditional work environment such as Google that are more relaxed with their standards as long as the work is valuable? Do you think one work environment favours efficiency over the other?     

Power in the Network Society

          Manuel Castells article, Power in the Network Society, takes a look at the role and influence of power in society, it more specifically focuses on the use and influence of power in a network society. Power by itself refers to the ability to influence others or the ability to carry out ones will despite opposition or resistance from others. Networks are seen as a collections of individuals who have political, economic, social, or technological influence, Castells notes that these characteristics of traits can be both beneficial and hindering. They are highly adaptable complex structures of communication constructed around a set of goals that ensures unity of purpose and flexibility of execution. He said that networks have 3 major features that they benefited from with the development of new technological environments in the world. These features are Flexibility, Scalability and Survivability. Flexibility refers to being able to reconfigure according to changing environments and retain the same goals while changing their components. Scalability means that the network is able to expand or shrink in size with little or no disruption to productivity or goal attainment. Lastly, survivability refers to the networks ability themselves to stay running and to stay unified, because they can operate in a wide range of configurations. The network society is embodied through 2 social forms: Space of flows and timeless time. These terms in their most simple forms refer to the possibility of asynchronous interactions between networks in a chosen time, and the distance as well as the sequencing or coordination of practices for the network.

I think the networks that control the means of communication in our society today have substantially more power and influence than others because they are able to control or interfere with our practices of socialization and communication. This is something we have gotten so comfortable with over the years since technology's advancement, and something we hold so close to us, if we were to be all of a sudden deprived of this I feel a lot of people would be scrambling and at the hands of these powerful networks to give them what they want/need. What networks do you think have the most amount of power influence? 

Citizen Journalism

Alice Marwick's article on Web 2.0 mentions that the launching of Web 2.0 gave people grassroots tools for citizen journalism. While we often discuss how the increase in online media content and the ability for anybody to become a producer is diluting information and reducing the standard of quality. Although citizen journalism may raise the question of quality and accuracy in the western world, in countries that are facing political unrest and repression of the media, this can be a tool for emancipation and progress.

In a TED talk by Brian Conley, he discusses self made reporters and journalists in places like Benghazi, Libya where many professional journalists fled for their own protection after the attacks. People who did not initially intend to become journalists took it upon themselves to tell their stories and inform not just their countrymen, but the world what was going on. He states that citizen journalism fills in the gaps of stories that are told by mainstream news outlets, and how important this is to the people who are not just reporting as their profession, but because it is directly impacting their lives. Conley also says that citizen journalism is the future and platforms like YouTube are a huge part of this.

Here is the link to Conley's TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY-l9UQpf0Y

 Do you think that YouTube is a sufficient platform for people to report on serious issues, or has it become too diluted by entertainment?