Collaborating for ET

This is sadly the last post that I am going to have on this blog. I have enjoyed the time that I have had to blog since this has been an outlet for one of my college classes. Since this is my last blog post here I wanted to look back at what I had posted this semester and see what my two favorite posts are, my favorite blogger, and a couple comments that I felt were meaningful to me. First my two favorite blog posts were “My Opinion on Clay Shirky on Love” and “Online Movements” both posts describe me very well, going against the grain and not always believing what is taught. Both were assigned to me in the class as material and I had to post my opinions on it. It is straight brash and to the point, just like me. My favorite blogger is a woman in my class named Shannon Washington who talks about similar issues but puts her personal spin on it. Honestly really good content and love to see differing opinions on issues. Lastly the couple of comments that I felt were important to sh

This week with an assignment from one of my classes I returned to Wikipedia to edit once again. This time it wasn’t for malicious purposes or to troll the largest online encyclopedia but instead to improve the site. I honestly wasn’t expecting much seeing the last time I had edited the ban hammer had come down on me quick. Me and three other group members looked for a page to edit that could use some of our previous knowledge. Fortunately and unfortunately, we chose a topic that is not the lightest subject which is “ Modern Slavery .” I know, I know, kind of a sensitive topic but we had good points we wanted to add about Chinese exploitation of Africans, Saudi Arabia’s exploitation of Egypt and Indonesia, and slavery due to technology. The post had citations and everything yet within 10 minutes the content was taken down. I guess four college students really shouldn’t be qualified to talk about such a sensitive issue but to be taken down in 10 minutes was surprising. All I can sa

Photo from Pixabay under  CC0 Creative Commons Wikipedia is one of the sites that I have been involved in for most of my life. I first joined Wikipedia in 2006 when a lot of the scrutiny about its legitimacy was all over the news. I also used to not be the best for internet etiquette and would participate in a lot of internet debauchery. Due to the news that Wikipedia was being trolled I decided to join in on the fun. It was really easy back then because their community wasn’t as tightly knit as it is now. I would spoof account (which you could do back then) because it would give your edits more credibility and then change the smallest details in hundreds of Wikipedia pages. Wikipedia finally caught on and started banning IP addresses that were known for doing it (including me). The only problem was that I had a VPN at that time so I just used that and could continue to troll. Wikipedia then created a counter troll movement which created the climate which we see today. I st

From Pixabay under  CC0 Creative Commons Weirdly enough memes have been a part of most of my life. I have been on the internet for a good 70% of my life and it seems like to me memes have been there the entire time. I remember back on my mom’s Dell Dinosaur that dual booted DOS and Windows 95 laughing at “ All Your Base are Belong to Us ” and “ Badger Badger Badger .” The thing was I didn’t even know that they were called memes until the 2010s. We called them funny pictures or cool videos. Now though I feel like they are everywhere and relate to every aspect of life you could imagine. Instead where in the early days there were a few you could choose from a year I feel like now you could have an archive of all the types of memes that happen in a month. This leads me to believe that we are in what could be called the golden age of memes, where everything has a meme about it. It is also my feeling though that this may start to be the downslope of memes seeing oversaturation is be

Pixabay under  CC0 Creative Commons This week I was reading part of a textbook that I had to read for one of my classes I’m taking. It talks about how online movements share five things in common with each other: visual content, performances, speed, inclusiveness, and masked organizers. Then it gave two examples of the Zapatistas , a Mexican farmer’s rights movement which was later organized online and Black Lives Matter , a black movement focused on equal rights which found its members online. Though I was thinking that not all online movements share all of these points. For instance, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge didn’t have masked organizers and in fact every participant was videotaped and the creator of the tread is well known as Peter Frates. Another example how not all online movements share all these points is Occupy Wall Street movement . They were not going to leave Wall Street till they got their message thru spending months on in tent cities on Wall Street which is n

Pixabay under  CC0 Creative Commons Today I am going to talk about Reddit and Reddit Culture. I have used Reddit off and on for about 5 years now and it is now my number one social media aggregator. So, before anyone says, “wait Reddit is a social media site”, it depends on how you use it. The way that I use it is so that I can see what news is happening in the world, what cool things people are doing, and to see some of the best and worst that the internet has to offer. I got into the site because Digg.com wasn’t doing it for me and 4chan had gotten way too weird and cult like. I felt like there had to be a better alternative. I had heard of Reddit before but was always warned about how awful it looked and that if you could get past the looks it was a great site. Though after the first time I saw how communities were setup I made an account that day. After that I really haven’t looked back since. Most of my teen life and all my adult life I have been on Reddit. Pixabay und

Pixabay under  CC0 Creative Commons To start off Net Neutrality is something that I have a bit of a background with personally. I’ve worked with a couple group that are fighting for the rights of Net Neutrality so I do have bias on the subject. Net Neutrality is a ploy for ISP’s to get money out of internet companies in the way the mob said that they could offer small mom and pop shops protection. Though I feel like everyone at this point has been beaten over the head with how bad getting rid of Net Neutrality is which means I’m not going to talk about it. Instead I’m going to talk about why people should care now more than ever. Since there have been so many bills that have come up in congress addressing Net Neutrality it has caused an almost staleness where people don’t care. This is the time that the ISP’s are waiting for, people are focused on other issues and people just don’t care anymore. There will be just one time where we didn’t say enough and the internet as we know i

Pixabay Image under  CC0 Creative Commons This week I am going to talk about the great time I have had working together in a team for a group presentation. This is a group presentation for the class I am writing this blog for to let others know ahead of time. I have had mixed experiences with group projects, from doing the entire thing myself to having other people monopolies the work to egos being played but sometimes the right group is formed that just meshes. This group project was like that, everyone participated and ended up coming together to laugh and have fun. The point though that I am going to make today though isn’t about my great experience in this group project. I’m instead going to voice my opinion that schools need to rely less on them. I understand they are supposed to teach us that life is one big group project and that in our future jobs we will be filled with them but that just isn’t true. In group projects in a work environment there is recourse for a poor per

Photo from Pixabay under  CC0 Creative Commons I’m sorry that I missed posting last week guys. It totally slipped my mind. This week I’m going to talk about Fair Use, specifically on YouTube. Back in the day, I was one of the first adopters of YouTube. Starting my first YouTube account when they had a star rating system and the most popular video on the site was of a baby biting Charlie's finger. A lot has changed since then, they got bought by google, celebrities joined the site, and creators started making livable wages for uploading content. This brought problems though since some people were uploading content from other creators and even ripping off movies and TV. Some were using these copyrighted materials in the correct way of following the FCC guidelines and other straight up stole content. This brought about the takedown system of YouTube which still rules today. Anyone can take down anyone else content for any reason, ligament or not. One of the channels that was hi

Photo by Pixabay using  CC0 Creative Commons Reddit.com I have had a Reddit subscription for two years but have used the site since 2012. Reddit has a very interesting place in the history of the internet because of it prominence and its users. I have seen everything from Gamergate to Tracking the Boston Bombers to Ellen Pao resigning. Though I still view it as the front page of the internet. Reddit to me is where I can find the news with links to sources, where I can find the latest memes, and where I share my photography hobby to the world. However, I do recognize that there are bad parts of Reddit that are filled with hatred and bigotry I still love that they have the right to voice their opinions on the platform. Reddit is Reddit because of it whole as a community and it sub-communities under them. Reddit really is for me the front page of the internet.

  Pictures by Pixabay under  CC0 Creative Commons To start off I already have a bias that I am not a fan of Linux. That being said I am going to talk about what was said in the video “Clay Shirky on Love, Internet Style” which we watched in class today. Skipping past Mr. Shirky’s bazar correlation from Ise Shrine in Japan to the Perl programing language he talks about a story of when he worked for AT&T. He said that the software engineers where horrified that they were using Perl for programing but specifically how Perl had no “commercial support.” Mr. Shirky’s point was that the internet was his support and he didn’t need commercial support. This made AT&T leave the deal with Mr. Shirky concluding he was the victor and look at how awful AT&T is doing know because of its corporate attitude. Well the video came out in 2007 right as the big crash for Perl hit. Today the only Perl programmers out there are converting Perl to Python and Java. The downfall of Perl…

From Pixabay  CC0 Creative Commons Rick and Morty is the new science fiction phenomenon that combines the new worlds and creatures of Star Trek with the science of Back to the Future all being held by modern philosophy. Rick and Morty touch on a lot of issues but I think the episode “Auto Erotic Assimilation” shows the problems with hive minds and collective intelligence. In the episode, Rick finds his ex-girlfriend Unity who is a hive mind with his two grandkids. Unity then takes Rick and his grandkids down to the planet that she’s “assimilated” where Rick goes off to have sex with Unity and the grandkids explore what Unity has done for the planet. With the collective intelligence of the world Unity as said in the show has achieved world peace, made prostitutes scientists, made sex offenders not sex offenders, even achieve great feats like carving a mountain into the shapes of Morty and Summer, the grandkids. Though Summer objects to the way that Unity has achieved these

There are many forms of collaboration that many of us contribute to on a daily basis. I have participated in many kinds thru my life from working with my sports team to defeat another or collaborating in school for a project to get good grades. Though not all collaboration techniques are the same. Some of the worst collaboration techniques that I have seen are when people try to force collaboration. The example that always sticks out in my head are group assignments where grade isn’t even a good enough motivator to complete the assignment or the people in the group aren’t cohesive enough to care. The worst example that I have seen of this happen to be the same situation. The teacher assigned a 20-paged paper that was split between 4 people meaning that each person did 5 pages. In addition to this bizarre homework assignment the teacher put a group of two guys and two girls. The problem with this was that both girls had dated both boys resulting in two bad break ups each. The only col