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Choose your own adventure

For the additional piece of media that I think should be added to this course’s syllabus, I have chosen John Oliver’s clip about Government Surveillance and his interview with Edward Snowden. While this is not a fictional piece, I believe it is vital to understand what the government has the capability of accessing if they wanted to. The main point John Oliver stresses in the video is to understand the depth of the information that the government has so that we are able to have a discussion about where we want to draw the line. In this class, we focused mostly on private companies accessing our information, however, we left out how much information the government has on us too. While it is very scary to know that Facebook knows when you are happy or sad, they could easily sell that information to the government, where more people can access your information. This needs to be talked about. We have some control over our government. If the majority of people spoke out against the government, change can occur, some privacy can be restored, and most likely, more restrictions would be passed on these private companies. While vulgar, John Oliver makes a compelling point as to why the government has gone too far with their surveillance. He uses “dick pics” as his analogy to get the people to understand this complex topic. And when he asked people if the government should have access to dick pics, the answer was overwhelmingly no. However, the government can access it, and Edward Snowden even said it was common for government agencies to look at naked pictures of people without their knowledge. This information is vital to the American public as it strictly pertains to them. Most people lack the complete knowledge of how far government surveillance goes, and this video illustrates the depth of information stored by the government.

This assignment directly relates to the themes of this class, especially to the theme of “Digital Consumer,” because it connects to how we consume what’s on the internet, and how those with power access that information. In this class, we talked a great deal about the algorithms set up by Facebook and Google and how the information they had was scary, however, the government has access to that same information, maybe even more. Edward Snowden was able to leak information fairly easily from the NSA, so just imagine how easy it could be for hackers to access our personal information. We need to have this conversation about how far we want surveillance to go because the majority of people believe that it should be decreased, however, we are not making any strides politically.

For the assignment to go with this video, I would do a discussion because that is the single most important thing we can do to improve our situation. We need the most amount of people to understand what is actually occurring, then have a discussion about what we should do next. This video is funny, but it also gets the point across extremely effectively, despite it being primarily focused on dick pics.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M

Historical Remix: The Great Emu War

The Great Emu War is one of those topics that is just completely obscure when you hear about it for the first time. It’s confusing, makes no sense, and ultimately is shocking for everyone involved. The premise of the Emu War was in Australia in 1932, emus began migrating from the center of the country in search of food and water to support themselves. They eventually found themselves on the land of farmers, and were surprised to see the amount of food that lay ahead of them. They began eating the farmers crops and drinking from their water supplies. This action subsequently pissed off the farmers. They tried to move the emus, but failed, so they called up the Australian Military and asked them to scare or kill the emus away from the farmers land. The WWI veterans ventured their way to the farms and saw the emus camped out on private property. They initially fired some shots to try and scare them away, but that failed. They then tried shooting the emus, but as they quickly figured out, the emus are much smarter and faster than many of them realized, so the majority were able to avoid the bullets, giving the victory of battle number one to the birds. The military returned home with a great idea. Machine guns. The new technology, introduced in World War One, would for sure kill and scare away the emus. They went back out to the farms with their upgraded firepower and tried again. After spraying into the farms, they looked to see the damage they did. They failed again. The emus tricked them again. To add to the that, emus are just built different, being able to take up to 10 bullets and still walk it off. The military tried and tried again to succeed, but did very rarely. They managed to kill just under 1,000 emus. However, they wasted 10,000 bullets trying to kill them. The government ultimately stepped in and put an end to the war, taking the defeat as it was getting too costly and it wasn’t effective. Australia, who has yet to lose a war, lost to some birds. A humiliating defeat. If memes were a thing in 1932, then these would be some of the memes sent to the Australian Government for their failure:

While memes like still exist today about the Emu War, they would definitely be more prevalent in 1932 because of the complete military failure on behalf of the Australian Government.

The memes would impact how others see this event because they are clearly biased against Australia and they do not offer any insight as to why they intervened with emus in the first place. Clearly animals eating crops is never a good thing for a farmer, so it makes sense as to why they would want the emus to be removed. However, the information that we get from social media and in particular memes, which is becoming increasingly more popular these days, can easily be biased or sometimes fake, like the meme about the one emu that was killed.

Sources:

Upton, Emily. 2014. “Emus vs. Humans: The Great Emu War of 1932.” Today I Found Out. January 21, 2014. http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/01/great-emu-war-1932/#:~:text=The%20end%20result%20of%20the.

“The Great Emu War of 1932 | Stranger than Fiction!” 2018. Nomads – Discover Different. September 25, 2018. https://nomadsworld.com/great-emu-war/.

‌https://imgflip.com/memegenerator

https://www.memedroid.com/memes/tag/the+great+emu+war

Gault, Matthew. 2015. “Australia Once Lost a War With the Mighty Emu.” Medium. March 21, 2015. https://medium.com/war-is-boring/australia-once-lost-a-war-to-the-mighty-emu-fd0f07203ca4#:~:text=It%20feeds%20bullets%20from%20a.

 

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Instagram’s Data Privacy Statement

 

Nowadays, it is almost common knowledge that large corporations like Facebook, Google, and Twitter collect and sell our data. However, not many people know the full extents of their collecting. To test this, I decided to interview my roommate to see what he thought without any prior research.

Transcript: “I’m here with my roommate, ok, how much data do you think Instagram and Facebook can collect?” “Umm, let’s see, I think they can see, like I don’t use Facebook, so I don’t know about that, but for Instagram, which I know is a part of Facebook basically, uh, I’m pretty sure they can see all your likes, all your, uh, saved posts, um, all your comments, and then they can analyze those, especially with the likes, and tailor content for you to see.” “Ok, thank you.”

For this blog, I took a deeper look into the privacy statement of Instagram, a subsidiary of Facebook, to see what they admit to doing publicly and how that resides in the laws of the United States, and to inform more people about the extent of the information Big Tech has on us.

 

The first section of Instagram’s Privacy Statement describes what they collect while you are using the app. They collect information about your social network, who you interact with, what posts you interact with, and how they will give you posts to see based on their algorithm, which uses the information they collect about you to cater posts and ads to your liking. Basically, anything you do on the app, like posts you like and what purchases you make in app, they can track and will specify your feed to fit your personality. This is the information that most people realize Facebook and Instagram do to make money. Collecting and selling information about what you do while on the app makes sense, however, it is not where these corporations draw the line on invading in our privacy. If allowed to do so, Instagram can access your location, meaning it tracks where you go at all times, and it does not have to be even when you are using the app. It also has access to all of your photos, as well as where and when you took them. It also can track what you are doing on your device. Instagram openly admits to having access to what apps and tabs are in the foreground while you are on the app. Their collection doesn’t stop. On the device, they can find out your battery level, the strength of your signal, available storage space, and the operating system. While all of their means of collecting data does not seem awful, they have some serious implications. One article, published by The Guardian, talks about how “Facebook Told Advertisers It Can Identify Teens Feeling ‘insecure’ and ‘Worthless.’” Their constant data mining to make a buck is a complete invasion of privacy. Most of the time I don’t even know how I’m feeling, but I should not fear as I may not know, Facebook and Instagram do know and they will give me ads that will help. Instagram claims they collect information to “Provide, personalize and improve our products,” and while they do use our information to tailor our feeds, they also sell all of our information to advertisers so that they can profit. We are their product. And if you think that maybe there are privacy laws to protect us from having our information placed into the wrong hands, it is clear from the New York Times article “Mark Zuckerberg Testimony: Senators Question Facebook’s Commitment to Privacy” that these politicians have absolutely no idea what these big tech companies are doing.

Stalk the Professors!

After some serious digging around on the dark web, I have hoped to uncover some truths about my professors, Mary Abdoney and Elizabeth Anne Teaff. From a quick search of their social media accounts, I was able to attain a great deal of information about them, mostly from their Facebook about tabs and their LinkedIn profiles. These sources allowed me to find the dates of when they attended high school, college, and other jobs they might’ve had throughout the course of their career.

For Mary Abdoney, I learned that she was born in June of 1976, with no information when the exact date of her birthday is. She grew up in Tampa, Florida, going to H.B. Plant High School from 1990-1994. From there, Mary went on to study at the University of Florida from 1995-1999. Go Gators! At Florida, she was apart of the Alpha Xi Delta sorority. She then studied at the University of South Florida from 2000-2001 and received her degree in library and information studies. From there, she went on to become a librarian at Eckerd College in Florida from 2001-2005, which then gave her the credentials to make the move to W&L in 2006. In her personal life, Mary has accomplished so much. When she was younger, Mary was a ballerina, played the violin and cello, and loved to garden. She also has a strong affinity for cats, even naming one after Miles Davis. Mary met her husband, Ned Norland, after some time of searching online. Ned was the perfect guy for Mary as he has all the qualities of a great husband. He’s a computer nerd and was a DJ. He can play many instruments (more than Mary). And he loves bourbon. After driving from Lexington to Chapel Hill every weekend to make the relationship work, they finally bought a house together in Lexington on Myers Street in August 2012. They eventually got married at Castle Rock on September 29, 2012 and have lived happily ever after. Her political views can be found on all social media accounts, as she has no problem saying what she believes online. As a registered democrat, she was a strong Elizabeth Warren supporter in the 2020 Presidential election. She also is a strong ally of the LGBTQ community and feminist movements.

Elizabeth Anne Teaff was born on June 16th, 1974 in Columbus, Ohio. She says Ohio is her home state, however, she graduated high school from Gloversville High school in New York, meaning from some time between the ages of 0-18 she moved to New York. After graduating high school, she attended Fulton-Montgomery Community College and studied art there for 2 years. She then went on to SUNY Potsdam where she attained her bachelors degree in 1996. After some time of doing nothing, at least according to her internet history, she became a librarian at W&L in 2003 and has worked there for the past 17 years. She also got her masters in library and information studies from the University of South Carolina in 2006. In her personal life, there is not much going on. She is single, according to her Facebook relationship status. She does not go on many excursions, or at least does not post about them. She did go see Hamilton on Broadway, but that was a few years ago. Her interests include but are not limited to cats and dying her hair in different shades of red. Her political views are not as outspoken as Mary’s, but it can be inferred that she leans more liberal on some issues. She did vote in 2016.

Online, I was definitely able to find more information about Professor Abdoney than Professor Teaff but most of the information found about Professor Abdoney was on her About Me tab on her wedding website. This little experiment will not change my social media presence as I already keep a low social media profile and I am comfortable with how much everyone can find out about me. However, I will not be creating a website for my wedding as it gives way too much detail and this is not the first time I found out information about my teacher on a wedding website.

A day in the life in the digital age

For my first blog post, I am going to describe how I used the internet yesterday, and what it helped me accomplish. When I first woke up in the morning, the first thing I did was roll over to my side and check my phone for notifications. While on my phone, I texted my friends and checked Instagram, which allowed me to get caught up on all my sports and memes. After about an hour break for breakfast, I decided to multitask, using my laptop for school work and my phone for entertainment and communication. I was using my computer to read while also responding to texts that popped up on my phone. Whenever, I got sick of reading off my computer, I decided go on my phone and spend some time on it, reading Tweets or Instagram captions. After about an hour of this, I FaceTimed a friend from home, which has allowed me to keep in touch while we are separated. After about two hours of this, I thought maybe I should go and do something, and then I did, for about five minutes. I quickly returned to my phone and computer, frantically looking at Canvas and all the syllabuses to see how much work I have to do. After realizing it was a manageable amount, I went on my laptop to play a quick game of Catan while still on my phone texting friends. After my quick stint of game playing, I returned to my phone to try and find the Declaration of Independence as audio on Spotify. For one of my classes, the homework was to read the Declaration, however, my ability to work smarter not harder allowed me to just sit back and listen with my eyes closed. This little achievement was probably the most successful thing I did all day. To reward myself for my accomplishment, I watched some Netflix, which I fell asleep to. After waking up in a panic, I realized that there was an NBA playoff game going on, and seeing that it was a one point game with ten seconds left, I rushed to my computer to watch. The game wound up being a little longer than ten seconds, as it went into overtime, but I still watched all of it. Eventually, I took a break from technology to get dinner and spend some time talking to people face to face, rather than just Snapchat and texting. But when I was done with that, I returned to my phone, and bored, I did a crossword puzzle and played some MarioKart. I then FaceTimed my friend again, then after we hung up, I watched some Youtube and fell asleep. My long day of technology usage had me at some pretty impressive numbers, logging close to twelve hours on my phone and four hours on my computer, meaning more than half of my day was spend online. All of this technology usage was not completely useless, however. Most of the time I spent on technology, I was communicating with friends on different social media platforms, such as texting, Snapchat, and FaceTime. I also used technology to get school work done, using Canvas and Google to help me find and read articles that I had to for class. And when communicating and working was not happening, I was on technology to pass time on social media, usually trying to inform myself about the world around me. Our networked world definitely makes it easy for me to communicate, work, and entertain myself, as those are the main reasons I use technology. It allows me to see my friend’s face and speak in real time, even though we are 700 miles away. I can get information and access to anything in a few seconds. And the variety of games and social media platforms there are make it impossible to not have something to do.

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