This week brings forward the new concept of the modern world. The topic ““NetSpeak, Memes, Emoji’s & Participatory Culture”. The given material was quite interesting and also filled with the true facts.

Starting from the article “Breaking up isn’t hard as it used to be on (Facebook)”, the author put light on an important issue that how Facebook makes it difficult to breakup even if you did so. No one knows why a relation gets to an end and how hard it is to move on from that painful phase. Then a year later, one day you login your Facebook and the very first thing you get to see is the picture of yours with your ex-partner. How? Because it is one of the feature of the Facebook to show the memories year after on the exact same date. And how hard it will become for you to pass that.

The next article “If It Doesn’t Spread, its Dead”, the author has made discussion about the fact that in this modern world how memes have become so important and as part of the entertainment life. The author said that “Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication — that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture.”

In another article, “Emoji Don’t Mean What They Use to do” has given us the fact to understand that how we have changed our way of interaction with other people. There are thousands of known emoji in our cell phones and now we are so dependent upon the emoji to express our feelings. The author said: “The awkwardness of the interfaces used to access emoji amplify that change. Overwhelmed by choice, we’ve become more tempted to type in a word and have the device offer matches, as some emoji interfaces allow. That’s also how some text-entry systems for no alphabetic languages work.”

The episode of The Black Mirror: “White Christmas” Three interconnected tales of technology run amok during the Christmas season are told by two men at a remote outpost in a frozen wilderness. Joe Potter wakes up on the Christmas Day and finds his talkative co-worker Matt Trent preparing the Christmas dinner. Matt asks what happened to Beth’s daughter, and although Joe initially claims he does not know, he remembers a police officer telling him she found her grandfather dead in the kitchen and went outside into the heavy snow to get help, but froze to death under a tree in the garden. Joe breaks down, admitting he was responsible for the deaths of two innocent people. Matt seems relieved that he has succeeded in getting a “confession” out of Joe, who cannot remember coming to the outpost or what he and Matt do there. Joe suddenly sees the outpost’s interior turning into a replica of Gordon’s kitchen, and Matt disappears. “Joe” is actually a digital copy similar to Greta’s, as the real Joe refused to confess to his role in the deaths, so the police brought in Matt to draw a confession from his copy. The outpost was a five-year-long simulated environment within a Cookie that lasted only 70 minutes in real time.

Keeping in mind the above discussion, I feel like we are so much involved with the digital world right now that even our love lives are also part of it. We are so dependent upon the emoji and on the memes for our entertainment.

For this week’s news post I have selected this article in order to let you understand how vast the Facebook world is now even in the relationship aspect. https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/facebook-dating-expands-to-europe/

This week of our Social Media class we discussed and were introduced to topics that are a bit more controversial. First I read an article on called The Atlantic: Emoji Don’t Mean What They Used To and then viewed a Black Mirror episode which are always very interesting to watch; the viewing was called Black Mirror: White Christmas with Jon Hamm, Rafe Spall, and Natalia Tena starring in the episode.

In the article The Atlantic: Emoji Don’t Mean What They Used To, it talks about the original emoji and how it was created. The Japanese took first on the creation of them from the telecom NTT Docomo in 1999, and ever since then emojis are always being added and used with smartphones and other technology across the world. With the addition of more and more it can be an easy way to communicate without words which back then would almost seem as something that wasn’t intended to happen. But with specific meanings people are communicating with ease and the use of them are going to continue to skyrocket, especially with the newer generations like the Millennials and Gen Z.

The Black Mirror episode starts on Christmas morning with Matt cooking and drinking in the morning, where Matt opened up to Joe about his hobby of hooking up with awkward singles, which did not go as planned. After we see how Matt and his colleagues used Zed Technology to start conversations and keep them going, but one of the colleagues went to get a woman who ended up having mental issues. The woman mistook what Zed Technology and thinks that it means they will both be taking their lives together. After hearing this Matt is quick to cover up and erase the evidence, but in the meantime this makes his partner end their relationship with him. He also goes one to explain about the digital clones and what they can do.

The next we see Matt is further in the future and where these clones are breaking their programming and wanting to feel and be “themselves” as an individual. Then we see Joe opening up about his past and his relationship with Beth. With an unexpected pregnancy she thought about an abortion and hates Joe, blocks him, and then leaves him. This makes Joe uneasy and hurting because of her leaving with no trace and no way to get into contact with her. Joe ended up going to Beth’s father’s house every Christmas Eve to see his child from a distance, but after a few years Beth passes away and he sees this as a way to meet his child and give her a gift from him from himself. About to give the gift to his daughter he realizes that he is actually not the father and that Beth had an affair with his best friend, which Joe ended up hitting Beth’s father with a snow globe that ended up killing him. Joe fled from the scene and the young girl sought for help in the cold snowy winter and froze to death. Joe did end up confessing to what happened and then Matt leaves a cookie with Joe’s clone, and ended up making a deal with the police to not get prison time, but he is now a registered sex offender and is blocked from everyone not allowing contact to anybody.

News Article: Evolving Emojis: Designing for the New Face of Messaging

This article talks about the usage and how emojis are always changing.

https://www.toptal.com/designers/ui/emoji-evolution

Emojis are so unbelievably overrated. I literally think I use about 15 of them, max. We’re gonna test something- I’m writing this on my phone right now and I’m going to put my most recent emojis here, and when I email this to myself to finish on my laptop, we’re gonna see what happens and if they stay copy and pasted into WordPress. 

😂🤬👍🏻😁😌🤮😊🙃👏😬🤷🏻‍♀️☹️❤️🙄😍🔥🤦🏻‍♀️😩❤️➡️👋🥰😫😚🙁🥺🌚🥂😭😉

The funny part is I changed some contact names in my phone, and half of these are from the ones I used on peoples names.

They were originally for easier communication and quick texts since we used to have flip phones and have you ever tried to text a sent ace on a flip phone? It takes forever. So it makes sense that this was a plausible fix in 1999. However, I think now it’s almost faster just to type whatever the hell you want to say rather than literally going through hundreds to chose from. There’s 8 pages on iPhones of emojis, and that’s not even counting the new “Animoji’s” that they have now too. We could literally go on forever and put every single thing on every single phone. BUT WHY? Lord have mercy we don’t have good communication now as it is let alone if we start to use pictures for everything, and what’s the saying? A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS, so yep, let’s leave more room for interpretation. 

“Facebook official” has become such a milestone in any relationship. It’s always something that gets brought up in the beginning and ponder if you want the world to know yet, and then the inevitable post and all your friends comment giving you shit. Social media has become too engrained into relationships but that’s for another day. Alas, things eventually change and you leave, and one of the first things I do is rip it off of Facebook and delete all the pictures like some form of passage. And the last time I did it, a break was still relatively new, and I did go through the steps for it but you’ve all heard my story from class and it didn’t mean shit. But, taking a break is a brilliant thing Facebook has developed and it helps a lot of people. And you don’t even have to break off a relationship on facebook to access it, you can take a break from anyone at any time. I’ve had a few people just come out of breaks since the election has ceased. And I recently had a falling out with a friend and it really helped me recover from that. It’s a small thing, but it’s something they really did for the people

White Christmas is crazy. This poor guy is just wrong place wrong time trying to get a date and this seemingly schizophrenic girl mistakingly judges him for being the same and they end up dead. This is the wildest episode ever. This little programmable self “cookie” is a neat and useful idea. It’s such a toss up of ethics. It’s stretches exactly what “reality is” because for the “cookie” it is real, she is trapped and lives for nothing but to control the house. But really, her “real life self” is okay. The two men barely touch over this over their conversation before getting to the blocking. The blocking is RIDICULOUS. These woman do NOT have good enough reasons to just block them and go about their business, they are abusing their power. And blocks their kids too? For lack of a better term, it’s super fucked up. Plain and simple. Genuinely makes me angry. And then the little girl ended up not being his anyway, this is so sad. He did make some questionable choices though…

Weekly News: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/world/middleeast/al-masri-abdullah-qaeda-dead.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

This is pretty sweet, I’m surprised nobody has acknowledged it

Has anyone watched Emogenius? All I could think about was that stupid show lol

This week I wanted to speak on two pieces of material. One we had to watch and the other we had to read. Of course by the title of my post it is the White Christmas episode in the British television series “Black Mirror” a show we have been watching throughout the semester and the “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead” article in the weblog of Henry Jenkins. I feel both these two materials took us away from the usual themes of social media and societal issues and focused more on technology and its impact on humanity which I enjoyed because it was something new.

First I would like to begin with the “Black Mirror” episode. This Christmas special type episode is composed of 3 different story lines and all of them leave you on your feet until the very end. All three of these stories reach a common theme in my opinion that is technology is making us change how we view the world. It is also apparent in the episode technology is the worst gift you could have during this holiday season. Technology in the episode is destroying the lives of all of its users. It is clear that morals of everyone in this show has shifted to doing whatever they need to get what they want with no concern for humanity. They allowed for technology to take over their lives. The “Z-Eye” is a device that becomes the center of this episode. It allows individuals to block someone completely from their life. The main character Matt embodies this theme the most. He has no care for anyone else and uses these technologies to justify his actions. It is made clear when he is the only character that sticks around throughout this episode because he makes sure of this. I think the title of this episode means how Christmas is supposed to be about gathering together with the people closest to you, but in this instance cutting yourself off from close ones is easier than having to live with the consequences of what you have done. Just like “Black Mirror” is known for doing this far fetched life makes us reevaluate real life. Our own habits with technology could be the same. Blocking someone is easy to do as shown in this episode, but what we can’t do is hide from what we did. We are turning the power and helpfulness technology is giving us and turning it into something destructive.

Second, the article by Henry Jenkins. This ties into the “Black Mirror” episode in my opinion because in the article he speaks about fidelity, fecundity, and longevity. Three things that are shown in the cookies Matt develops in the White Christmas episode. Although in the article Jenkins is talking about memes if we bring it on a broader scale like “Black Mirror” we can bring this upon technology itself. Just like memes people play the crucial role of how viral something gets. It is on humans to change the motives of what is worth spreading. It is easy for someone to be influenced by what is going on around them, but what we do is our own choice.

WEEKLY NEWS: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/we-blew-it-us-reaches-explosive-covid-19-spread-as-virus-is-nearly-impossible-to-control-experts-say-210948870.html

My questions for the class are: What were your takeaways from this week?

What is your thought on how COVID-19 is getting out of control as stated in my weekly news post?

The twelfth week of Social Media & Society has introduced more interesting and controversial topics. We viewed another fascinating Black Mirror episode: White Christmas and read an article from The Atlantic: Emoji Don’t Mean What They Used To. The Black Mirror episode started Jon Hamm as Matt Trent, Rafe Spall as Joe Potter and Natalia Tena as Jennifer.

The episode began on Christmas morning, as Joe awoke to Matt cooking potatoes and drinking scotch or brandy in the cabin’s kitchen. Matt confronted Joe about his silence over the last five years in their shared living quarters. Matt opened up and shared how his hobby, hooking up awkward singles, went terrible wrong. Matt and his colleagues would use the “Zed Technology” to break the ice and keep the conversation flowing. One of Matt’s clients pursued a women who turned out to be mentally ill. After returning to her place, she mistook his conversations through the Zed Technology as a symbol to take both their lives. Matt quickly disposed of the evidence, but inevitably destroyed his relationship with his significant other. Matt also discussed his occupation of implanting and training cookies for people in this advanced era. The digital clones monitored and assisted with daily tasks for their “real self”. Matt can also fast forward the clones timeline; effectively breaking their will with boredom and slaving for their “real self”.

Joe eventually starts to open up about his uncomfortable and unfortunate past. He considered his relationship with Beth to be happy and healthy. However in Beths eyes, an unexpected pregnancy has pushed her far away from Joe. She considered abortion and can’t stand to be in Joe’s presence. After a fight, Beth blocks Joe and flees their house. Joe was distraught and lost without his pregnant fiancée. She vanished from his life and with the block in effect, Joe has no way to communicate or contact her. On Christmas Eve, Joe made it a tradition and travelled to Beth’s father’s house to spy on his child. Years later, Beth tragically dies and the block is removed. Joe sees this an an opportunity to final meet his daughter and deliver his gift directly. As he enter his fathers house he discovers that Beth had an affair with their best friend and work colleague; he was not the child’s father. In a confrontation with Beth’s father, Joe struck him with a snow globe, killing him, and drove away from the murder scene. The little girl found her grandfather and set off into the snowy wilderness to get help. She froze to death and died shortly after.

After Joe confesses to the murder, the dramatic scene ends with Matt leaving a cookie with Joe’s clone. Matt made a deal with law enforcement to avoid imprisonment for his role in the death of his “dating client”. However he is a registered sex offender and permanently blocked by everyone.

The originally emoji, was created by the Japanese for cellphones by the telecom NTT Docomo in 1999. Sense then, emojis have taken new forms and representation across the globe. Emojis are continuing to grow and become more specific. These emojis can also symbolize and take on new ideas or meanings. The Atlantic stated, “The That power continues with today’s higher-resolution versions. A skull (💀) almost never means that the speaker has a braincase in hand, Hamlet-like, but rather offers an ashen reaction or a lol, I’m dead sentiment”. I found this quote particularly relevant to my generation and culture today. These emojis honestly can take on several different identities and impacts.

Published by: Samuel Erickson

Weekly News Article: My Domain and Gabrielle Savoie published an interesting article on the amount and affects of social media on our love lives.

https://www.mydomaine.com/how-social-media-affects-relationships

This week was a very interesting one where we covered my favorite episode of Black Mirror which is titled White Christmas. I watched this episode way back when that season came out, but it was very nice to sit down and watch it again. Black Mirror is really good at tying us into the storyline, and making us believe that this has something to do with ur own life. This one I think does a very nice job in doing this because they bring in the family aspect with this episode. I bet a lot of parents could feel the pain of not being able to see their own child like that and a lot of us can relate to not being able to see anyone that you love period because of that blocking machine. I think we might be even closer to reality than we imagine. There has been scientists for years the are working on technological advancements, so I think we have to me somewhat close to this technology where we can block people in real life. I think that it could get real scary real quick with people getting these implants in their heads, and before you know it it could be just as normal as having a smartphone in your pocket.

This can tie into what we read this week where it is a lot easier to break up with people now more than ever. These new features in the app are almost like you are blocking them in real life. this is really good for people that were in an abusive relationship because those can be very hard to over come while you are just seeing their life unfold in front of your eyes on the timeline of your account.

The last thing I am going to talk about is the evolution of the emoji. I really enjoyed this discussion and reading this article because I really didn’t tie together how many of the ideas of emojis might have come from early pre historic pictures that were in a sense emojies. There are many many of these little pictures that pop up on your phone, in fact there is over three thousand of them which you have to choose from, with more and more being brought to the table every day for approval from apple or android. This article was written last year, so some of the things stated were a little off, because they did add red heads to the spectrum of the emoji library. But they are right in saying there are some things that aren’t represented in the library at all. I do think that if the creators of these operating systems such as android and apple would embrace third party companies, which apple is starting to do, they could create wild things that would embody the users that all use their phones. it seems like not a significant change but I think it could make the use more enjoyable for everyone.

My question to you is, did you like this Black Mirror?

Check out this election article: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54939212

This week we got to watch an absolutely thrilling episode of black mirror called White Christmas. Now I have to admit this episode really reminded me of the entire history of you with the eye technology that they had, but this was definitely a whole different ball game. So basically two people Matt and Potter are in a house simulation and they both tell each other why they are each there. Matt goes first and tells potter that he’s there because he illegally gave people advice to get romantic lovers play by play and also he didn’t report the murder of one of his clients getting killed by the person he was trying to pursue. Matt then explains that his real job is getting these things inside peoples minds for a week to develop another conscience for them to console everything around them and basically make there life perfect.

Then we get to potter. Potter appears to be a very kind and innocent man in the start of his story. He had a girlfriend named Beth and he finds out that Beth is pregnant through the garbage can where she through out the test. They then get into an argument and Beth blocks potter. Blocking someone means you can’t see or hear hem and vice versa back to you. So after she blocks him,Beth completely disappears, known knows where or who she’s with until potter finds out that she always used to go to her dads on Christmas Eve. So he goes to see her in a very stalking way every year and discovers that she actually kept the baby.

Years and years after visiting, he discovers through very close watching that its a baby girl, and potter is. explaining this all to Matt while they’re sitting and talking about it and why they are there. Blocking a person also means that they can’t see your offspring by the way too so that’s why he couldn’t see his kid. After a couple more years of watching potter discovers the death of his once known lover Beth through the tv and it was a train crash.Since she’s dead, the block died with her and he can see his daughter now.

Once he goes to see his daughter he discovers that his wife cheated on him and the kid wasn’t his and he loses it, killing Beths dad and letting the little girl go outside and die. little do we know, Potter really isn’t speaking to Matt, its his sub conscious talking to him and confessing everything because the real potter will not say a word. Once they get the confession its all over. But in actuality Matt did those terrible things so now everyone is blocked from him inches life now.

Reflecting on this episode I absolutely loved the suspense and the characters too. It was a mix of all of my favorite things. This was definitely my favorite black mirror episode to watch so far and can’t wait to watch more.

Check out this article: https://theweek.com/articles/948800/3-ways-bidens-covid19-task-force-control-pandemic

This day and age we are turning to having more digital relationships than in person relationships which is affecting the human interaction for the upcoming future. People are able to block, mute, and get notified by a person’s posts on social media. What’s most disturbing is that even though we’ve enhanced our ways of communicating, we’ve also been less constant with communication limited by technology. The multiple technologies converging and showing us that the “better” ways to communicate in some ways we’re taking backwards steps.

In the Black Mirror episode “White Christmas” it dived into a futuristic reality where a chip can be inserted into your head in order to gather information about yourself which can be used for advanced technical devices similar to Amazon’s Alexa or gather evidence from someone for a court case. This episode dealt with the case of a bad breakup that led to the main character, Joe, being blocked from his girlfriend. he found a pregnancy stick and wanted to congratulate his girlfriend and get ready for their family together but she claimed she did not want to keep the baby. after  this interaction he was not able to see her but months later she could see her block silhouette with a pregnant stomach. He became obsessed with checking on her and the child’s growth from a distance every Christmas. Until she passed away in a car crash which lifted the block restrictions on the child. When he went to confront the child, it turned out that she was not his biological daughter. This left him distraught asking “Where is my daughter?” towards her grandfather. Eventually kills the grandfather with a blow to the head with a snow globe and the child dies days later after going out in the cold to search for help for her grandfather. The fact that the girlfriend wasn’t upfront about her actions of infidelity during the relationship caused him to harper on and stalk her til the truth drove him to insanity. The act of ghosting a person is real in today’s day, but being able to mute and blur out a whole person’s existence from a person’s ocular lens is phenomenally frightening.

The whole episode was mainly set in the grandfather’s home based on the chip that the government implanted into his head when he was arrested for the deaths of the grandpa and child. He was manipulated to seem as 5 years had passed from the incident and was able to confess his doings. The man who was manipulating him, Matt, was the creator of the chip and also confessed some parts of his past to Joe to get him to feel like he could trust him with his truth. But once the confession was out of Joe and Matt’s job was done, the government could not ignore his confession as well and was free to go but blocked by everyone in the world. The government in this episode showed that although you may have a gift pertaining to technology they will use you and still give you a repercussion for your actions that they deem as unjust. This virus of social control in which people believe they can block and ghost people is  already prominent, but if this lens and chip is implemented into the reality of the world things will get beyond crazy.

What do you think you’d do if we have these lenses or even the chip put into us? Would you allow it or what if it were mandatory?

Implementation of Social Media Regulations??? : https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54901083 

This week’s class consisted of three articles, three videos, and one Black Mirror episode. In our Black Mirror episode, White Christmas, we see three short stories. Matthew coaches Harry to use a device to reach Jenifer at a party, which helps Matthew to see, hear, and speak to Harry as he makes a move on her. In the beginning, we see how in practical terms, this kind of technology can come to be used, similar to the Google Glass we have today. But in the end, the twist, which depicts Jenifer as mentally ill, also takes a turn in the way this scene should be perceived. Taking the story to the road of madness helps the spectator to concentrate his attention on the difference between the two characters, on how their feelings come to mind, and how they vary in that respect.

 A thought experiment that is ancient as the practice of philosophy itself in the second story where Greta tries to literally split her mind from her body. In this scene, there are a lot of elements that display the inconsistencies that come to mind about the probability of this kind of separation, and moreover, whether this kind of distinction is even possible between mind and body. Nevertheless, I like how this scene shows how not only social affairs and physical desires such as sex, tiredness, and hunger inflict human suffering, but even if you take all of this away, and only sit in a state of thought, this alone can cause great misery. With respect to the moment that Mathew prefers to drift the time in the subjective sense of being of Greta. You can’t help feel deep empathy for the agony that Greta the electronic egg is going through when Matthew presses the button to advance in time for six months.

It can be shown how Joe creates the gender and character of his child by imagination alone, only to find out he is incorrect, and the child he was watching is not even his. In addition, Joe confesses his wrong act of attacking Beth’s father at the end of the episode, but as in the case of Greta, the audience knows that the whole confession took place only in the mind of Joe. The following scene indicates that this sort of confession copied from the original Joe from a “cookie mind” is adequate to convict him in court.

In one of our articles, If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead, we read about culture. The word culture comes from agricultural metaphors: the analogy was to cultivate the human mind just like one cultivates the land. The assertion of human will and agency over nature is thus reflected by culture. As such, cultures are not something that happens to us but we collectively build cultures. Certainly, every person can be affected by the culture around them by the fashion, media, speech and ideas that fill their everyday lives, but by the choices they make, individuals make their own contributions to their cultures.

We must ask ourselves questions everyday, who are we and want do we stand for. What did you get out of this episode? Which part was your favorite? How do you feel with your identity?

Weekly news: