Adjourning: Coming to a Close

Hey everyone!

The semester is almost coming to an end, so this will be my last blog post. I feel like I have really learned a lot in my ESOC 211 class about what it means to collaborate in online communities. I have collaborated with many of my classmates on projects such as the Women's March website as well as a recent project about Rape Culture. If I had not collaborated with my peers, I know these projects would not have come out as great as they did. I also became a part of the Wikipedia community which was a great new experience! My favorite topics that I talked about in my blog were the Teamwork and Group Developments, as well as the post on the Culture of Reddit vs Pinterest.

I also interacted quite a bit with my peers in their blogs, as you can see here:

I was influenced by many of my peers in this class, but I particularly enjoyed working with Katie McCready, Miros Jocz and Amanda Delgado. I worked with Katie on both unit projects and we did a really great job! I also think her blog is very detailed and interesting. Then I worked on the Unit 2 project with Miros, along with a couple other students from the class. He had a great attitude the entire time we worked together, and I really enjoyed reading his blog as well! At the beginning of the semester I collaborated a lot with Amanda on in-class activities, and we worked pretty well together too. She has some really great stuff on her blog so be sure to check those out!

Anyway, I hope you have all enjoyed reading my blog as much as I have enjoyed writing it!

Coming Soon...

This week we read part of the introduction to a book called Spreadable Media, which discussed the importance of making all media accessible and sharable. We talked about the spreadability of our unit two project, which is coming up soon. For this project, my group and I would like to focus on rape culture and the social movement that goes along with that. Rape culture is when society has a certain attitude about sexual assault and abuse that causes it to be normalized. This is a large part of our culture because it happens to many times where the victims are viewed as the ones at fault for rape and sexual assault because society says so. People often make comments about what the victim was wearing, what they were doing, etc., and imply that they are at fault for not preventing the event from happening, when in reality, sexual abuse and rape or acts of violence and the perpetrator is the only one who is at fault. 

So for our upcoming project, we would like to create a short parody video that shows just how ridiculous this phenomenon is. Rape culture is especially large problem and universities and colleges, so we know it would create a big impact for the people here at the University of Arizona. The idea for this project came from a post that I saw on Pinterest. 

We would like to make a video of this post and spread it to others to show how harmful these kinds of comments are and how we need to refocus the blame in rape and sexual abuse to the attacker, rather than the victims. We will post this video on Vimeo and add #RapeCulture in the description in the hopes that the spreads. When thinking about how we want our project to be spreadable, we consider this quote from the reading, "What material is produced according to a one-size-fits-all model, it imperfectly fits the needs of any given audience. Instead, audience members have to retrofit it to better serve their interests" (27). We do not want our project to be simply catered to one specific audience, but rather to anyone who is willing to listen. For that reason, we are adding #RapeCulture, #Feminism, #FriendZoning, Etc., in order to reach bigger audiences. By adding these tags, our viewers can spread the video as much as they wish. Anyway, thanks for reading!

Wiki Up Your Life

Hi everyone! Last week we had to do a training in Wikipedia in order to learn how to be able to contribute to that community. The training consists of four main parts: the welcome and introduction section, Wikipedia's core principles, a section on basic editing and communicating skills, and finally a small section on some advanced topics. When going through this training, you have the option of creating a Wiki account that you can then use to make significant edits to any wikipedia entry that exists, or you can even make your own! If you are interested in doing this training, click here!

This training was very beneficial because I always wondered how Wikipedia became what it was. You can a wiki entry on almost anything that has every happened, and they are all pretty informative. This is because it is a collaborative community of people who just want to provide accurate information about different topics. If you happen to know a lot about a certain topic, then you can contribute to it on wikipedia!

I joined with a few of my classmates, and we contributed to a wiki stub in order to get our feet wet. We added information to a page about baby furniture, funny enough. If you want to check out that page, click on the photo (Note: This page was edited by my group in April of 2017 and is subject to change):

Contributing to this page was fun, and we actually felt good because we were a part of something much bigger than us. Wikipedia is a great way to get involved in a collaborative community, and I recommend trying it out! Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed this week's post and here is a cute video to get you through the week:

Exploring A Remix Manifesto

Hey everyone! This week we watched a documentary called "RIP: A Remix Manifesto", and it's a documentary that talks about issues with copyright and fair use laws. The movie argues that it is hard to create music and movies these days because of the amount of copyright laws that there are. I really enjoyed the manifesto that they wrote:

I really like this manifesto because I feel like it captures what creating is all about. The first one states, "Culture always builds on the past", which is true. First came the wheel, and then the wagon, and then the car. And the point here is that the idea of the wheel was not stolen, but rather used in the creation of something new and better. Where would we be now if someone had taken a copyright on the wheel?

That brings me to the second point that states, "The past always tries to control the future". People always have a tendency to want to control the future, and so they take measures in the present in order to do so. The best example of this is when Disney was given the rights to the "Happy Birthday" tune. They didn't even come up with it, but they saw the profit they could make off of it and so they claimed the rights to it. 

This goes along with the third point, "Our future is becoming less free". Since Disney was given the rights to the Happy Birthday song, then anyone who uses it (such as restaurants and literally anyone who sings happy birthday) is legally required to pay royalty fees to Disney. Which is ridiculous in my opinion. 

And finally we have the last point, "To build free societies you must limit the control of the past", which is what we need to start doing. If we want to create a better future, then we need to take the ideas of the present and transform them into new and greater things. But we can't do that if everyone in the present is claiming their rights on every piece of media. Copyright laws need to change and adapt to the present before we move into the future. Anyway, I hope you all have a great week. Until next time!

Women in STEM

Hey everyone! This week we talked about a subject that I am very passionate about: female representation in STEM fields. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, and these fields are usually dominated by males. We also watched a video called CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap. Check out the trailer to this awesome documentary:

Here is a small infographic that illustrates those statistics:

We had a guest speaker come to our class and talk to us about the large under-representation of women in computer science as compared to information technology. It turns out that a few more women graduate from IT than from CS. We were exploring possible reasons as to why that might be, but no one really knows for sure. In light of this topic, I would like to share my own experiences with being a female and a minority in the STEM field. I started out my college career as engineering major but quickly realized it wasn't for me and switched to math. I liked math just fine, but often found myself in classrooms filled with all men, and maybe a handful of women, and hardly any hispanics (my ethnicity). I often felt out of place, and almost never felt comfortable enough to create study groups with my peers. After a while, I decided to switch to Computer Science, and it was the same old song and dance. I was one of a few women in all my classes, and again one of a few hispanics. In fact, in one of my classes of about 40 people, I was the only hispanic woman. This can often be discouraging because you don't have other people to relate to. I even had this situation in one of my CS labs where I was paired with a white male, and he never took my suggestions seriously. I would try and help with our code, and he would brush me off and ask his male friends for advice instead. I knew what I was doing, but he never believed I was capable of coding at his level. After all that, I decided to finally settle in Information Technology, and I am the happiest I have ever been with my major. I feel like I am being taken seriously, and I am still in the STEM field. I hope that one day, this feeling will change, but for now it is our reality. Here is an encouraging photo for STEM women everywhere:

Be your own Rosie and pursue your dreams even if it means going against the odds. Have a great day everyone!

Check Out These Blogs!

This week had been crazy for us U of A students because of

For that reason, we have not really discussed any new material in our ESOC 211 class. So for this week's post, I will be sharing some of my classmates' blogs!

First up is Katie McCready's blog, a junior ISTA major at the UofA. In particular, I wanted to share her third post where she talks about the different types of groups that exist: primary, secondary, planned, emergent, self-organizing, concocted, founded, circumstantial, intimacy, and task groups, as well as weak associations. She provides a really great example for each type of group by using all the different groups that exist in the popular TV show Breaking Bad. So check out her post if you want to learn more about groups!

Next I decided to look at Ryan Sutton's blog; Ryan is a sophomore E-Society major. I especially enjoyed his fourth post about the ways that the internet has empowered different groups around the world. These are the examples he talked about:

Zapatistas used the internet as a "white flag" against the Mexican Government,
calling the public's attention to the issues they were facing.

People contemplating suicide can look to Reddit for help.

Gamers can join online gaming communities to discuss new games and tactics.

Check out Ryan's blog to learn more about our class!

Finally, I looked at Amanda Delgado's blog, a freshman studying Communications and E-Society, specifically her post on February 28. She talked about the website that she and her group members created on the "Free the Nipple" movement. They presented their website in class, and I found the movement very interesting because it really shows the continuing fight for women's equality. To learn more about this movement, check out their awesome website by clicking on the photo:

I hope you all enjoy these blogs as much as I did. I won't be posting next week because it's Spring Break, so have a great next week everyone!

Website Mania

These past couple of weeks have been very busy, filled with a number of fun projects that I have finally completed! The first was a website on an important, recent social movement: The Women's March on Washington! This event, which took place January 21, 2017, was the biggest social march in the history of the United States. If you would like to learn more about this event, check out my team's website by clicking on the image below:

This week I also worked on a blog about virtual reality. If anyone is interested in that topic, take a look at that blog as well:

Anyway, this week in class we talked about the Umbrella Movement of 2014, which began as a protest for fair elections in Hong Kong. The umbrellas were significant because they were often used as protection from tear gas used by law enforcement during their protests. The movement was organized through an online forum called HKGolden, and volunteers, with the help of donations, were able to organize medical care, clean up, and other basic necessities. To learn more about the Umbrella Movement, watch the video below:

I also wanted to comment that Zootopia, the movie I mentioned earlier in my blog, won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film of 2016! 

Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed the content in this week's post. Have a great rest of the week!