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!