lookingatlanguage-blog

[lookingatlanguage-blog]

Smile, you’re on camera.

A small piece of paper covers the camera on my laptop. Why you might ask? Well, it’s to stop the FBI from spying on me.

Twitter has birthed many a meme, however a personal favourite of mine has to be the FBI agent memes that were floating around about a year ago. The meme was multimodal, sometimes users would use pictures or gifs to depict the idea that the government was spying on citizens. 

It seems crazy that the government would want to spy on twitter users, I guess thats why the memes were funny, because the concept was so ridiculous. If anything, the hair-brained memes made fun of the digital anxieties that so many people experience online. That being said, that little piece of paper is still taped over my camera, despite the banter on twitter. 

At what point does fact become meme? 

The concept of the FBI watching us must��ve started somewhere, the memes didn’t just crop up over night with no cause or explanation. The memes appear to have developed in response to the threats to net neutrality in the U.S. People were no longer understanding the internet as a free and unlimited source of information, but rather as a monitored practice. 

According to this article, https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/38894/1/what-the-fbi-agent-memes-say-about-our-generation-s-digital-anxieties, Jim Killock argues that memes can be reflective of how a group is feeling at a particular moment in time. 

“we should not be surprised that young people are poking fun at the dystopian elements of digital culture, whether that is the isolation that can exist alongside our hyper-connected world, or the banality of ubiquitous surveillance.”

Perhaps memes are powerful tools in determining the stance of a particular group at a particular time. Firstly, for a meme to be successful it must be relatable, shareable, and able to generate engagement. Consequently, if a group of young people are sharing memes about a specific topic, then it can be assumed that the topic of the meme is coherent and relevant to the people sharing and creating them.

This cyber paranoia experienced by twitter users was created into a joke, a simple mockery of the society we live in. The idea that someone might be watching us seems absurd, but is it really that far fetched? Mark Zuckerberg himself was shown to cover his own webcam with tape (although, if I was Zuckerberg I definitely wouldn’t want an FBI agent spying on me).  

Realistically, are we in any danger?

Not from the FBI at least. Truth be told, I highly doubt the FBI will be hacking into any of our computers anytime soon. However, cameras can be compromised and hackers can get access through ‘invasive, targeted form(s) of malware’, as Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology explained. 

Does this happen to people though? 

yes. Hackers have targeted people in the past and will target people again in the future. The horror stories below outline the effect of web cam hacking.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/rat-breeders-meet-the-men-who-spy-on-women-through-their-webcams/

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/09/how-an-omniscient-internet-sextortionist-ruined-lives/

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2521075/pennsylvania-schools-spying-on-students-using-laptop-webcams--claims-lawsuit.html

Sadly, your own personal FBI agent isn't sat there waiting for you to get home, open your laptop and start binge watching a new series on Netflix. Something more sinister could be lurking behind the camera. Although the memes poke fun at the anxious and paranoid delusions that are common of the younger generation, surely taping over your webcam will help you sleep a little easier at night. I know I will.

[lookingatlanguage-blog]

We cannot deny that we live in a capitalist society. A society in which the means of production are owned by private individuals and companies.

But when did people become a ‘means of production’?

Whilst most people know that every computer or smartphone produces data, many users may not realise that their data is being stored, analysed, sold, and bought by companies. Imagine a big brother like system in which every move we make online is tracked and analysed. 

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshana-zuboff-secrets-of-surveillance-capitalism-14103616.html

Have we become little else than algorithms? 

Of the billions of people who access the internet, our browsing habits are reduced to a pattern. Used by people we don’t know to sell us things we don’t need. Nothing we experience online is truly through our own free will. Our online habits are tracked so that we are told what we want to buy, where we want to go, even what music we want to listen to. For some this is fine, easy perhaps. For some, the fact that our data is being sold to big companies to profit from is an unnerving thought.The worst part is that we have no choice in whether or not we want to share our data with these companies, because by using these services, we are allowing companies to profit off of us.

Who profits from this?

As closer-keys explains, we produce data and receive no benefit. No profit, no pay-out. Our personal data is sold to companies and we are none the wiser. We, as users of the internet, are being utilised as puppets to create the capitalist world we live in. We are not a product of capitalism, we create it. We are the people who feed our societies need to make money. We aren’t a part of the system, we are the system. 

surveillance capitalism really does emphasize how the working class generates all profit. the traditional model of capitalism generates wealth through labor of workers, but in a contemporary model (both accounting for vast unemployment and fitting securely in the path to police-state fascism) capitalism expropriates wealth from the populace not only through labor, but also through surveillance data. not just our coerced “productivity” at employment, but literally all our human actions, interactions, movements, emotions, photos, video, voice recording– all of it is collected by those owning the ‘means of production’ as it relates to surveillance tools and algorithms enabling the collection and analysis of Big Data, and this is turned into profit by selling this cleaned data to corporate capitalists and to the state. 

[lookingatlanguage-blog]

Happy? Birthday.

Recently I celebrated my 21st birthday and as you would assume, my Instagram and Facebook accounts were full of pictures from my birthday outings, with plenty of story spam as I welcomed my 21st year of life. The days of celebrating were all well documented over my social media feeds. So why did so many of my cyber pals *forget* to wish me a happy birthday?

They must have seen my posts? I checked my story, over 311 people had seen my story and only a dozen wished me well on my special day. Maybe my followers don’t like me? Or perhaps they simply just don’t care? Maybe I was wrong in thinking some of these people were friends. As I began to get upset, I wondered why I was basing my self-worth on my social media presence.

It seems I had landed myself in a friendship paradox, I found myself to be feeling less popular than my other Instagram friends and consequently, less happy. It’s fair to say my self-esteem took a good knock back that day.

Instead of moping around, I went through my photos, found a picture of myself and uploaded it onto Instagram. The likes came flooding in. I was popular again. My presence online was not futile. I had value in the world of social media. The likes and comments boosted my ego enough to forget how deflated I had felt a few hours before.

 I felt happier. Or did I?

Is happiness really true happiness if it comes at the price of self-esteem? Was I truly forming my self-confidence through the opinions of weak ties on the internet? My obsession with constructing my virtual identity had become a toxic part of my life. I was showing myself online, photos of myself at bars and parties, photos of my social life. In some sense, I was presenting myself. I wasn’t pretending to be in places I’d never visited, or doing things I wasn’t actually doing, it was me. Was it the real me though? Whilst I choose to display my somewhat swanky social life online, I conceal the other sides of myself. Let’s face it, no one wants to see a picture of me doing the dishes, or eating an entire packet of chocolate digestives in one sitting. My online presence is something I carefully curate to depict myself quite literally ‘living my best life’.

But is my depiction of myself online becoming too hard to keep up with? Maybe I can’t always be glamorous and cool. And that’s okay. Sometimes I need to be kinder to myself and remember that our online lives are online for a reason, because they show snapshots of us at our best.

As I realised that I had been vacuumed into a deep dark hole of seeking social satisfaction online, I took the time to sit and read my birthday cards and messages from my real friends. The ones who aren’t behind a screen. The friends who love me whether I’m in heels and hairspray, or trainers and a tracksuit.

https://digitalwellbeing.org/social-media-and-the-happiness-paradox-its-not-you-its-them/

Bollen, J., Gonçalves, B., van de Leemput, I., & Ruan, G. (2017). The happiness paradox: your friends are happier than you. EPJ Data Science, 6(1). doi: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-017-0100-1

https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-the-more-you-use-facebook-the-worse-you-feel

[lookingatlanguage-blog]

“A-S-M-What?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUUAu_aiaVw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbs5RP4cHW0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2VXEiQHgIk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUUAu_aiaVw

https://www.thisisinsider.com/what-is-asmr-autonomous-sensory-meridian-response-2019-2

References

Barratt, E., & Davis, N. (2015). Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR): a flow-like mental state. Peerj, 3, e851. doi: 10.7717/peerj.851

Poerio, G., Blakey, E., Hostler, T., & Veltri, T. (2018). More than a feeling: Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is characterized by reliable changes in affect and physiology. PLOS ONE, 13(6), e0196645. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0196645

[lookingatlanguage-blog]

We’re all guilty sometimes of casting a blind eye to topics and opinions that aren't entirely coherent with our own morals and values, but is this turning us into one dimensional consumers of media? Are filter bubbles simply enabling us to not think? Are we just staring at our screens with blank expressions, allowing our opinions to be formed through the consumption of media that someone else has decided we need to see? Or can we expand our beliefs by engaging with material outside our comfort zone? 

This ted talk explores and encourages listeners to engage with those outside of their own political circles, to create a space for honest and open discussion in which each person has the chance to perhaps understand something new. If you've got 10 minutes to spare I recommend giving it a watch. 10 minutes is all it can take to expand your own beliefs and say no to the excessive filtering of information in this digital age.

[lookingatlanguage-blog]

Let’s face it, breakups suck.

Whether you find yourself as the dumper or dumpee, there is no easy way to deal with heartbreak, but can the separation process be eased by the situation in which it is carried out? Is getting a WhatsApp message from your bae saying that they’ve found someone else easier than a torturous face-to-face monologue about how you’re just not the one? I suppose the answers to these questions rely entirely on personal preference, for some, the affordance of breaking up via text allows for a much less personal breakup, one where the deed can be done in a matter of seconds. For others, mainly the recipients of such texts, receiving an SMS stating the termination of your relationship is a humiliating ending to a supposed fairy tale. It’s a curse of the digital age that a breakup can be orchestrated through an app in a swift moment. How did they break up in the olden days? Via letter? Or maybe they tied notes to pigeons and sent them off? Did ghosting someone even occur back then? 

What about breakups by phone call? Maybe they’re the way to do it. To an extent, they are more personal than a text and they allow an easier medium of communication between the two breakup participants. However, all seems well and good until we realise that the dumper has it easy, they can hang up the call any time they want, they can shirk the responsibility of a respectful breakup by eliminating the face-to-face aspect. Maybe all breakups should happen through the medium of face time, the face-to-face aspect is somewhat there and there are no awkward post-breakup goodbyes. It seems perfect until we remember that the front camera view doesn't provide the most attractive angles of your face. Do you really want your ex-lover’s last memory of you to be that of your tear stained face and double chin? I think not.

It seems that breakups might just be best in person, that’s the most respectful way to end a breakup I reckon. That is until we think about crying in your favourite sushi restaurant because your boyfriend, now ex-boyfriend, decides he doesn’t love you anymore. No want wants to see that whilst they’re trying to eat their spicy tuna rolls.

In this day and age, there are so many options available to utilise in a breakup, with one friend of mine even getting dumped via a gif. I’m serious.Although, one thing that stays constant throughout all kinds of breakup, whether they be digital or not, breakups truly and ultimately suck.