Tag / internet

by harrietread

My Take on Alternate Realities

When I say alternate realities, I’m not necessarily talking about Narnia, the Matrix, space-time travel or anything like that. I’m talking more about the realities within our minds that are constructed by our experiences and perspectives.

About a week ago, I made a post about how some of the things that Donald Trump says look good on paper, and that people do have reasons for wanting to support him. I’m going to extend that post a little further, thanks to a recent publication by the Wall Street Journal after they did a study on how social media news feeds can affect who people are more aligned to.

What Wall Street Journal’s Jon Keegan has done is set up two feeds which have real conversations and posts that individuals have posted on Facebook, and aligned them into a red ‘conservative’ feed and a blue ‘liberal’ feed. Users who posted all of these uploads, of which there were up to 10.1 million of them, were anonymised but had their political label analysed.

Based on the study’s findings, and the presentation of conservative vs liberal posts on Facebook, one can logically come to the conclusion that as long as you are receiving media texts from entirely one political standing, you are reinforcing your already existing beliefs. It seems fairly logical and simplistic, but at the same time it’s interesting to consider how different the political situation in the US would be if social media were different to how it currently is. It makes a little more sense in the world in terms of exactly how people align themselves to certain ideas or political figures. The reinforcement theory we learned in high school comes into play, as how we tailor what we prefer to see and choose to omit from our feeds reinforces reality as we perceive it.

by harrietread

Donald Trump Isn’t So Bad

So today, I got into an internet fight on the social media platform Yik Yak.

I love Yik Yak because its like Twitter except way more anonymous, and anonymity allows users to share some of their nuttiest, most controversial or spur-of-the-moment thoughts. I decided to post the other morning about a silly little dream I’d had the night before:

‘i dreamed donald trump coached footy and Richmond beat his team, and then all the other coaches told him to get (*censored*) and everyone laughed at his stupid hair’

I was bored, felt like posting a bit of inane silliness, so I did. The thing about Yik Yak is that it only shows posts within your area, and considering I was in a sheltered, very left-wing part of Hawthorn when I posted it, I figured hey, people might get a laugh out of it.

Then along comes a user that we will call Acorn, in consideration of the icon that they were using at the time.

Acorn criticised my post, saying I was only ‘bagging trump because it’s the “cool thing” to do’ and that I essentially ‘wouldn’t know (*expletive*) about American politics except for that Trump is running.’

I was also encouraged to ‘take a look at his policies, the western world genuinely needs some extreme reforms, whether you are willing to accept it or not.’

So I did.

I went onto donaldjtrump.com and had a look at the things that he is advocating for, and despite what I knew of him previously, I was impressed. The website revealed Trump’s plans for affordable healthcare, tax reform that would help fix the wealth distribution in America and better care for war veterans both physically, socially and economically.

These are just a few things that, frankly, could be good things. If I didn’t know anything about Trump, and I say this lightly, I probably would say that I support him except for that thing about the wall: he wasn’t kidding about that.

So I’d like to thank Acorn personally for encouraging me to go and do my research. I learned a valuable lesson from him: an internet fight that winds up in something that’s akin to two people yelling at eachother with their hands covering their ears is not something productive in this world. I was criticised on social media, and instead of screaming bloody murder at my accuser I decided why not get the front foot on this argument and learned far more than I anticipated.

Tl;Dr

Internet fights are good for you and Donald Trump does say he has some good ideas

by harrietread

My Take on Copyright

Discussing copyright in our lectorial today was like a trip down memory lane back to VCE Studio Art. I’m grateful for having listened in those few Studio Theory classes on copyright, because a lot of what I knew came flooding right back: moral rights and obligations, duration of copyright and fair dealings.

We really only scratched the surface in VCE, and my first impression of the lectorial was a fleeting sense of panic: I immediately thought of any original artistic content, whether it was a drawing when I was 12, a photo series or a film that I’d posted online, and its vulnerability in cyberspace. Even further, what about things I had uploaded with copyrighted content? On YouTube, for instance, I tried to upload videos with a song from the 2007 film Hairspray, and about a week later the sound was muted because I wasn’t allowed to use the song. That, I think, was a fairly decisive but relatively appropriate manner in which to deal with the issue of copyrighted music being unlawfully used; I went on with my business, and forgot about the whole thing until now. In other areas of the internet, lack of understanding and the living, breathing environment of cyberspace makes enforcement of copyright laws nigh impossible except for in rare circumstances. But that is a post for another day.

Until this class, I always thought of copyright laws as being arbitrary. I still believe that to some degree, but now I feel I can respect those laws a little more since I have a better understanding of what is and isn’t allowed. For instance:

  • Ideas are not copyrighted, but content is

An idea can be recycled in anyway shape or form. If someone comes up with an idea for a film, and someone else wants to use that idea in their own ways. They may write different scripts or draw up different storyboards; as long as the actual material content of the films contains certain dissimilarities, everything is cool. It’s only if one of these products either takes content from the original, or replicates it until it is substantially similar, does this become an infringement of copyright. The only instance in which substantial similarities stop being grounds for infringement are when the product is made on the grounds of parody, satire, criticism and review or for educational purposes i.e. for an assignment.

  • Duration of Copyright

This got me a little confused. I remembered from VCE and had my thoughts confirmed that generally, copyright lasts for the remainder of the creator’s life plus 70 years afterward. However, the whole shimozzle regarding how to deal with works created before copyright was created in 1968 got me puzzled. The system of how copyrighted works are classified before 1st May 1969, to me, seems complicated and unusual. Then again, I was only able to see the slide for a brief moment before we moved on.

Copyright was a friendly little blast from the past in today’s lectorial, and I felt pleasantly as though I was eased into it having done Studio Art last year.