Portfolio Assignment #7

From Cooper’s lecture, I learned about Bitcoin mining. I had no idea that there were data centers full of Bitmain Antminer S9s. Also, Posner (2018) wrote that if supply chains were to become “more transparent”, it may lead to “assimilating a lot of information that companies have become very good at disavowing — a term that, in its Freudian sense, means refusing to see something that might traumatize us” (p. 229). Could knowing the full truth about supply chains help consumers make better decisions or would they just continue doing what they are doing perhaps with added guilt? Furthermore, from Maughan’s (2015) article, I learned about environmental consequences that the production of electronics can have. What was especially fascinating to me was when Maughan (2015) wrote the following about the Baotou lake: “this was the byproduct not just of the consumer electronics in my pocket, but also green technologies like wind turbines and electric cars that we get so smugly excited about in the West.” This relates to my own experience because I did not think that any environmental damage went into the production of “green technologies” (Maughan, 2015). It is very contradictory. This also changes the way that I think about the relationship between digital media and society because I see how greatly the production of digital media devices can damage the physical world that society is a part of.

From the reading that Gressitt-Diaz assigned, “‘Live Through This’: Feminist Care of the Self 2.0”, I learned about the website, Rookie. I thought it was interesting how the fact that Rookie allows users to be anonymous makes it “a space to disclose personal experiences without fear of identification” (Ouellette & Arcy, 2015, p. 120). This reminded me of when we discussed anonymity on the internet in class and how it is not inherently good or bad. I think that anonymity on the internet is often assumed to be negative, but with examples such as this one discussed in Ouellette and Arcy’s reading, it is clear that that is not always true. Additionally, in Riepma’s (2020) article, she discussed ways that people have been adjusting at home during the pandemic. She noted how some have been communicating through digital media (Riepman, 2020). This relates to my own experience because I have had to communicate with friends strictly through digital media during this time. The pandemic, in general, has changed how I think about the relationship between digital media and society because society is only really existent digitally right now. Finally, Kelly’s (2020) article discussed “virtual happy hours” that people have been participating in due to social distancing. Again, this reiterates the idea to me that digital media has made it possible for society to go on despite essentially being physically isolated.