5 main concepts I learned in class
In the course “Digital Media and Participatory Citizenship”, we have discussed through many topics surrounding social media. The topics mainly come from Christian Fuchs’ book “Social Media: A Critical Introduction”, accompanied by articles and blog posts from other writers.
One of the first topics main topics that came from Fuchs book is participatory culture. Participatory culture, if I had to explain myself, would be a place where users can input their opinions and facts. When I first learned about this, Wikipedia came to my head first. Wikipedia is a site where anyone who has access to the page can add information. And anyone can also delete or fix any information. Straying away from Wikipedia and more about the concept of participatory culture, we learned that everyone online is influencing each other. Once we log into our social media platforms, everything we read is impacting one another.
This leads to communication. Because we are influencing each other online, this also means that we are communicating with each other. Although, this could be a negative impact on some people, because once we are sit in front of our screens, we feel like we are protected by the screen and are wearing a mask. We feel like because we do not see the other party that we are talking to, we do not have to face consequences. In class, we read a blog about how if we take a normal person and give them a strong opinion or perspective about any topic, then put a computer in front of them, we get a bully. This equation shows that literally anyone can have a totally different persona online from their real-life persona. Now, does this mean that we should start protecting the people who are getting bullied online?
Although this post was intended to be an informative one where I post what I learned, I am going to put a little opinion into it since this is the public sphere where I can input my voice. I personally do not think that we should. If anything, we should start altering people’s media ideologies. Media ideology is a belief about the media that one considers for. For example, if I feel like I must follow everyone who follows me back on Instagram, that is a media ideology. If someone else feels like they do not need to follow me back after I have followed them, that is also a media ideology. There is no right or wrong ideology, just like how there is no right or wrong belief. Now, going back to my initial point with whether we should protect certain people by censoring, I think that if we change the media ideology of people we can help move on from this problem that we have. We can start by changing their belief that not everything online is true and that we should not be taking everything so seriously when it comes to online.
This would also require a lot of communicating because we need to find a way to inform users about the back end of social media. To start, we can tell them about the public sphere versus the private sphere. The public sphere is a common term to describe a platform or place that the public can chime in their voices. The Fuchs added in a new term: the private sphere. Fuchs discussed how the public sphere is predominately filled up with ideas by rich, white men. And where does the rest of the people fall into? The private sphere. This sphere concept is to explain how everything online is monitored by big corporations, or capitalism. These big companies that own everything that exists in this world are filtering out what they want us to see and what they do not want us to see. We watched a film in class called #ChicagoGirl which is about a girl who helps spread awareness and fights for justice in Syria from her computer in her home in Chicago. Sites like YouTube shuts down any content that shows what is happening in Syria, and this results in not getting the word out. The back end of social media is deleting things that they do not want us to see.
However, capitalism is not only doing us bad when it comes to the Internet. What we get from this is a commons-sharing economy. This mainly includes companies like Uber and Airbnb. The way these work is both the consumer and the employee shares either their resource (eg. car or bedroom) and money. This results in cheaper prices and more money without really lifting a finger for the employee. But of course, Fuchs would not end a topic with a positive note. Fuchs argues that commons-sharing economies is basically a legal way to exploit people. These companies hurt local places like hotels and taxi drivers since it is more convenient for many people, we start to ignore the others which are places that include taxes. And not just a taxation problem, we also have legal lawsuits. Lawsuits are coming up more often with companies like these because the employees are basically like third-party sellers, in which many complications can come up.
