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Week 9: Gaming Communities

In the modern days, it can not be denied how video games shaped the minds of a lot of generations, from the days of the 8-bit consoles to the modern era with mobile gaming becoming common. And from that alone, a lot of gaming related communities are emerged and some of them would become important in the world of gaming.

Generally, anyone who are considered gamers, in the context that they play video games regularly are welcomed in the community, though in some communities, non-gamers could be a member of the group (Mäyrä, 2015). There are so many gaming related communities, and many of them are parents/childrens of other communities. Most of those are all about sharing experiences on the game that they are playing, as well as providing knowledges about the core basic of the game itself. Those communities provided a space where people can interact with other people with the same gaming desire and could help build the gaming culture better (Seay et al., 2004).

For years, many communities have grown to be a huge impact on the culture (e.g. communities of games that still have following years later), and newer communities are still continue to emerge, had a lot of younger generation fans following. That said, the youth are not fully grown-up, and as a result the gaming community may face issues regarding the problem with the youths. Some communities for violent titles such as Free Fire, a game that are known to be harmful among youth (Febriady et al., 2022), attract a lot of teenagers and children, and this could be a problem as they can not control themselves as good as adults on social media. Having too many young people in the gaming community can lose the loyalty and quality of the community hard, since if any child in the community have done something wrong like low test score, then the game community are to blame for the bad results (Beavis et al., 2015). The photo below showed how younger Free Fire fans are destroying the image of the community by hacking the school's LED display.

(photo: Examples of young Free Fire fans in Vietnam expressing their love to the game by hacking the school's LED display to show Free Fire related content, which caused a lot of trouble for the community in general)

At the end of the day, it cannot be denied how important gaming communities can be for people who were interested in gaming in general. By building and maintaining the community, it would help people with the same gaming interest connect to each other and

REFERENCES:

BEAVIS, C., WYNN, J. & CAHILL, H. 2015. Young people, online gaming culture, and education. Handbook of children and youth studies, 815-827.

FEBRIADY, D., PEBRIANA, P. H., ALIM, M. L. & ANANDA, R. 2022. The Impact of Free Fire Online Games on Students' Social Behavior at Elementary School. JIP (Jurnal Ilmiah PGMI), 8, 140-150.

MÄYRÄ, F. 2015. Exploring gaming communities. The Video Game Debate. Routledge.

SEAY, A. F., JEROME, W. J., LEE, K. S. & KRAUT, R. E. Project Massive: A study of online gaming communities.  CHI'04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, 2004. 1421-1424.

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Week 10: Digital Citizenship and Conflict: Bullying in the digital age

Since the birth of the social media, it can not be denied how impactful most communities there can be on people’s lives. However, conflicts on social media are unavoidable and sometimes would ended up in tragic incidents. In many cases, conflicts usually occurs when people in the same community get into argument and most conflicts are about the individual’s rights.

In the community, when an argument occurs, it could be either related to power or related over the usage of goods such as resources, properties, speeches, platforms and even commercial interests. The way that most community conflicts happen are by enabling a type of bullying on the digital media, called online harassment. This can includes calling out names that are offensive, threating online both physically and mentally, impersonating to discredit their trueself, and some even suffered from sexual harassment (Marwick and Caplan, 2018). Most of the victims were the younger generations that are vulnerable of everything they see online (Alim, 2016). The bullies often had a goal of making sure they are entertained to see the other person ashamed, embarassed and angry, even though sometimes the bully wanted serious motives to drive the goal around (Dahlberg, 2001). This is especially dangerous on online platforms since social media users have higher chances to get into conflicts with others, and those can have serious concequences.

To combat with the situation, social media platforms have put up community guildlines to decrease the cyberbully tolls. Some country like Vietnam came up with the solution of governing social media platforms as a whole, in order to maintain a safe place for everyone to communicate, and would give legal punishment to the individuals who tried to harass other people on media platforms, ranging from fine to period in prisons. Users who were members of the community should know how the community works and follow the rules that the community leaders gave out. When being faced with the conflict, users should calm down and try to make the problem less negative.

REFERENCES:

ALIM, S. 2016. Cyberbullying in the world of teenagers and social media: A literature review. International Journal of Cyber Behavior, Psychology and Learning (IJCBPL), 6, 68-95.

DAHLBERG, L. 2001. Computer-mediated communication and the public sphere: A critical analysis. Journal of Computer-mediated communication, 7, JCMC714.

MARWICK, A. E. & CAPLAN, R. 2018. Drinking male tears: Language, the manosphere, and networked harassment. Feminist media studies, 18, 543-559.

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Week 8: Digital Citizenship and Software literacy: Instagram Filters

Filters - an investigation barrier for law enforcers?

Filter in the modern context can be described as a method for people to hide their trueself in and made their looks better for people to look at. It is really common to see people, especially young women applying filters when they post photos or videos about themselves on social media sites such as Instagram or Snapchat (Rettberg, 2014). Despite the obvious advantage that filters can bring to people, the way filter works and the uncontrollable usage of filters by some users can potentially harm them in a negative way.

Many filter users are seen as trying to hide themselves from their true identity, regardless if their real face is beautiful or not. This is a serious problem, as hiding their true self can cause future confusion if that person goes on job training or having his paper work checked. In cases when they go missing or they are being wanted by the legal representative, it could take a lot of time to find since filter made the search harder if the provided pictures to the police were all creations of filters. There were many cases in which the criminal escaped the police search by leaving behind photos that had filters applied. Many teenagers who used social media only posted photos of themselves with the filters applied, and as the result if they had any issues, then their family members would have to resort in using filtered photos and this faced a big challenge since it can be harder for people to recognize the true identity of that missing person. According to one research, most of these “filtered” photos are handed in by family members of the criminal or the missing individual, and most are for girls under 18, the age where using filters on their photos is really common (Carneiro, 2019).

Filters had created a great threat for the law enforcers, as they are some of the worst barriers that they came across and it would make the search meaningless. Still, law enforcers are coming up with the solution to remove the filters and therefore it could help the investigation to be faster.

Carneiro, A. (2019). How Instagram, Facebook photo filters are creating challenges for police when people go missing. [online] Saskatoon. Available at: https://saskatoon.ctvnews.ca/how-instagram-facebook-photo-filters-are-creating-challenges-for-police-when-people-go-missing-1.4663436?cache=%3FclipId%3D104070 [Accessed 17 Mar. 2024].

Rettberg, J.W. (2014). Filtered Reality. Seeing Ourselves Through Technology, pp.20–32. doi:https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137476661_2.

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Week 7: Digital Citizenship and Health Education: Body Modification on Visual Social Media

Young people are unsafe when reaching this type of content on social media, and solutions to it.

In general, social media contents had a lot of diverse contents, and for some of them, they tend to be a bit dirty. Body modification is perhaps one of the more popular examples of this. The topic itself was all about the change of the actual human body image for reasons regarding to religions, cultures, as well as personal reasons. One study mentioned that any modification of parts or all of the human body presented in either individual or collective actions could be considered “body modification” (Rolle and Galliot, 2022). As the social media become part of the daily lives, the body modification content becomes somewhat popular among users, with some disclaimers (Tiggemann, 2022). However, this popularity can cause a lot of issues to the users, especially the younger audiences.

Children and teenagers contributed a high number in the social media users, and as this type of content become mainstream, this causes the problem regarding those young citizens trying to immitate whatever they see on the screen, regardless of the danger that they may face in exchange for their different gender expression that they may receive (Murphy, 2019). For example, the videos about cutting the tongue on TikTok is extremely popular among, surprisingly, most youth. This is dangerous since younger people are starting to interact with the world, and seeing these videos would potentially make them believed that those can be done in real life. There have been numerous cases of children injured or even died from these body modification copycats.

There were many solutions to this particular issue regarding this type of content. To begin with, this type of content should be available only to registered users from 18 and up. Children should also be taught about how dangerous some of the act on the social media, especially in the body modification field, to prevent further accidents related to this trend. Not only that, there should be some legal steps to ensure children are distracted from any of the dangers that these body modification trends may cause them.

MURPHY, T. F. 2019. Adolescents and body modification for gender identity expression. Medical Law Review, 27, 623-639.

ROLLE, V. & GALLIOT, S. 2022. Body Modification. The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology.

TIGGEMANN, M. 2022. Digital modification and body image on social media: Disclaimer labels, captions, hashtags, and comments. Body Image, 41, 172-180.

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Week 6: Slow fashion movement and social media relation

Slow fashion is often thought out as a movement and approach in the way the fashion is designed, and affected the production and consumption of the product. Slow fashion makers often put quality over quantity, the sustainability of the products as well as the ethical practices. Products from this movement are often produced from organic and reusable materials, and people making those are paying higher than those who worked in the fast fashion’s industry (Domingos et al., 2022). People often misunderstood the concept as a slow manufacturing process, as the concept was intended to give attention to how fashion production could impact peoples and the environment. Therefore, people who follows the slow fashion movement tends to start a new strategy on products and brands that uses durable materials, stayed in classic modes and contributed to the long heritage (Fletcher, 2013).

Social media is a perfect place for slow fashion manufacturers to promote their product. It is said that the way manufacturers can use social network sites to spread the slow fashion movemnt can help change the mind of consumers easier. Not only that, social media sites can also provide a place for influencers and slow fashion supporters to say their opinion and to look at how the movement can help improve their lives (Vladimirova et al., 2023). To begin with, there have been some trends in slow fashion that are popular on social media, such as the general hashtags #SlowFashion, #SustainableStyle, as well as hashtags dedicated to the reuse path of the movement, like #secondhandfashion, # ThriftFlip and #SecondHandHaul. Those hashtags became popular when TikTok came by and becomes one of the most successful tags on the site, encouraging users to buy used clothes as part of the slow fashion movement, as well as to buy clothes that are sustainable and more environmet-friendly.

REFERENCES USED:

DOMINGOS, M., VALE, V. T. & FARIA, S. 2022. Slow fashion consumer behavior: A literature review. Sustainability, 14, 2860.

FLETCHER, K. 2013. Sustainable fashion. The Handbook of Design for Sustainability, 283.

VLADIMIROVA, K., HENNINGER, C., ALOSAIMI, S., BRYDGES, T., CHOOPANI, H., HANLON, M., IRAN, S., MCCORMICK, H. & ZHOU, S. 2023. Exploring the influence of social media on sustainable fashion consumption: A systematic literature review and future research agenda. Journal of Global Fashion Marketing, 1-22.

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Week 5: Platformisation

To give a short context. platformisation can be described the transformation of social network sites into social media platforms, which came into the rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web and its consequences (Nieborg et al., 2020). People also considered platformisation as a method to describe many aspects of several digital platforms, which could be either business models, infrastructures or even algorithms,... In short, it is basically a change from Web 1.0 (which were one-way communication only) to Web 2.0 (the interactive interface). 

In terms of people benefited from the platformisation, there were two main types of people affected. Normal media consumers can now have an easier time accessing the article online, and they had the ability to interact with the articles by expressing their opinion and have conversation with others about the content that are on the site at that time.

Consumers are not the only one benefited, as publishers and developers can also benefit from the platformization process. And the method of making any progress of that is to make their product able to reach out to new audiences and had a strong relationship with the customers (Spjeldnæs, 2022).

Of the example of platformisation, the most significant one may have been online news outlets, in which they intergrated some of the social network features into their outlets. By doing so, they let themselves open for everyone to interact and share the information in the web page on to their favourite social network site. Not only that, people can also discuss and communicate with others about the article, and thus can help people behind the article know the reaction of the consumer to the said article. This reaction would help publishers and writers to understand more about the audience that they are trying to reach out to.

REFERENCES USED:

Nieborg, D.B., Poell, T. and van Dijck, J., 2022. Platforms and platformization. The Sage handbook of the digital media economy, pp.29-49.

Spjeldnæs, K., 2022. Platformization and publishing: changes in literary publishing. Publishing Research Quarterly, 38(4), pp.782-794.

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Week 4: Reality TV

Reality television can be described as a type of television programme that showed how the normal life from normal people is reflected, or… at least it was intended to be. These days, people seem to only remember the reality television genre as a programme where people had to deal with the situations that the show director came up with (Hill, 2014). There are actually a lot of shows that can be classified as “reality television”, notably the “Idol” franchise and other popular imports such as “Big Brother” and “The Amazing Race”. There are actually a lot of small genres in this big type of television programme, namely the dating shows, talent shows, lifestyle shows, just to name a few.

In many country, especially in Asian nations, reality television did make an impact and many shows even have a lot of followings in that region (McCarthy, 2007). There were times when reality television came up top on the Vietnamese chart. However, most of the so-called “top reality shows” became popular due to scandals. Some shows even have a lot of scandals to the point that people only remember a couple of reality shows for its scandals (Brenner, 2004).

As the time goes on, social media had since become a major media forum for everyone, and reality TV are losing its popularity rapidly. However, the genre lives on with older clips from previously concluded series becoming popular on social networking sites such as Facebook in recent years. This is done to grow the following for newer fans of the show or maintaining the popularity that the show used to have back then. Not only that, former reality show participants may also use their footage of their reality TV appearances to reflect on themselves online, as well as to maintain their popularity status.

BRENNER, T. 2004. A Quizzical Look into the Need for Reality Television Show Regulation. Cardozo Arts & Ent. LJ, 22, 873.

HILL, A. 2014. Reality tv, Routledge.

MCCARTHY, A. 2007. Reality television: A neoliberal theater of suffering. Social text, 25, 17-42.

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Week 3: How does Tumblr function as a digital community?

How can Tumblr work as a digital community?

As many people know, Tumblr is a social networking site founded in 2007. The way that the social media works is that it allows user to post contents in a short blog and users can also add multimedia materials into it. Tumblr proves to be a strong competitor to other social networking sites like Facebook and Youtube, with nearly 50% of users younger than 25 came across the site, much lower than Facebook or Twitter, but it is still a huge number. Tumblr had been a safe place for a lot of communities on the Internet when they felt unsafe on other social media, especially the LGBT+ community.

For LGBT+ community, Tumblr is shown as a safe place for younger teens to explore their real gender for the first time. Tumblr is actually the first social media where people in the LGBT+ group are not just simply tolerated but are fully recognized as an actual gender. This is a huge win for them since other social media sites would only recognize the gender as male or female only. The reason why Tumblr had been the house of the LGBT community is fairly obvious, it’s because Tumblr allows users to be anonymous. Unlike many other sites, Tumblr had never been tied to the so-called “real name internet”, which let Tumblr users to be anonymous, without having to use their own legal name and their identification credentials. It is not the only reason though, as Tumblr posts despite being public, no one would tell when and where people are online, as well as the date and time is not prioritised (Carrasco and Kerne, 2018).

In conclusion, it could be said that Tumblr with a anonymity design that looks relatively public but had strong secure behind it, and this contributed a lot to the continuing growth of the LGBT+ community now.

CARRASCO, M. & KERNE, A. Queer visibility: Supporting LGBT+ selective visibility on social media.  Proceedings of the 2018 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, 2018. 1-12.