Social Media and Politics: the Digital Generation's Combination

My final essay, titled "Social Media and Politics: the Digital Generation's Combination" analyzes the millennial generation's connection and communication abilities via social media, as well as how social media influences American politics. It explores the platforms of Facebook and Twitter, how politicians can communicate with voters through those platforms, as well as how political campaigns are able to manipulate those sites to increase their candidates' popularity.

Low-Tech Digital Poetry and Digital Fringe Art

My final essay, titled "Low-Tech Digital Poetry and Digital Fringe Art," defends the idea that a prospective artist need not have a lot of technical training nor a lot of resources to produce digital art of value.  Digital poems and special artworks resting on the fringes can be made through low-tech means for high-quality returns.  In this essay I write about professional low-tech digital poetry, works on the fringe, and student works from UPJ's Digital Poetry course this semester.

Final Essay

In my final essay for Digital Humanities, I write about what is causing the Increase in Social Media. I focus on three main reasons for this increase that include the need to stay connected, reputation, and the want of expanding their knowledge.

Essay Exhibit

The final essay exhibit is new to the class of Digital Humanities and I believe we can all say it was a hit. It gave everyone some time to make an outline and get some thoughts down for their final essay in a more creative way. Most individuals made a powerpoint or prezi and others were more elaborated. This also gave options for opinions for the writer from multiple different people. The ones I found most interesting were Bailyn and Zack's.

Bailyn was one of many of us that made a prezi presentation. She is writing her final paper on hyperlinks, however, her presentation goes beyond that. She recapped the whole semester of Digital Humanities into one presentation and the work and thought that had to go into that is astonishing. It was cool to look back and realize how much we have learned and cool to see how hyperlinks have played such a big part of it. She picked a topic that accurately describes the field of Digital Humanities.

Zack was ahead of the game and changed up the exhibit by giving us a Google Maps essay to look at. He is writing his paper on the history of Nintendo and it was so crazy to see all the consoles that lead up to all of Nintendo’s famous works, such as the Wii. It was also neat to learn about all the new items Nintendo has created that I had no clue about. Nintendo paved the way for the rest of video games and now video games are part of our everyday culture. I think Zack picked a good topic that relates to digital humanities by bringing in some of the history of video games and how is has come about.

As you can see, this essay exhibit gave all of us a chance to see how people are relating what we learned back to the field of Digital Humanities. It was also an opportunity for us to brainstorm, get ideas, and expand our thinking for our own final papers. My personal favorite part of the essay exhibit was recollecting on the semester and how much knowledge was actually thrown our way.

Friday's Essay Exhibit

Last Friday I went around to four of the essay exhibit pieces in our classroom.  Three of them had something to do with social media, and the fourth dealt with bots.  I gave most of my attention to my tribe members Molly and Morgan.

Morgan's essay exhibit was titled "Increase in Social Media Due to Virtual Identity."  Her exhibit piece was a Prezi consisting of four bubbles.  The first bubble dealt with the concept of F.O.M.O. (Fear of Missing Out).  F.O.M.O. is the anxiety, often fueled by social media, that you are missing out on cool happenings.  Some people use social media to stay in the loop for fun events, parties, etc.  Morgan's second bubble dealt with reputation.  She surmised that users of social media attempted to use those platforms to show off positive traits that they possess or that they hope others will think they possess.  The third bubble of the presentation regarded social media's usefulness.  For instance, beyond the obvious functions, social media can be used to learn new things, such as recipes.  A YouTube video occupied the final bubble of Morgan's presentation.  It pulled the exhibit together well.

Morgan on Facebook

Molly's exhibit also used Prezi to convey its message.  She self-described her presentation as "Dope AF" and "Pro-Millennial."  Molly's Prezi focused on the intersection of social media and politics.  She referenced how political candidates of today use Twitter bots to propagate artificial buzz.  Molly also looked at how generational differences related to social media and politics.  Millennials, for instance, are using social media well to stay informed on political topics of interest to them.  Molly uses several statistics to back up her claims.

Molly politicking on Twitter

It was interesting to see that 75% of the exhibits I looked at were about social media.  They each had a distinct focus, but they still dealt with similar topics.  I think social media is an interesting area for this type of study, and I think these projects could prove to be fruitful for critical inquiry.

Essay Exhibit

The Digital Humanities class recently completed an Essay Exhibit, in which students create multimedia works in order to creatively present their final paper topics. On Wednesday, half of the class presented their multimedia works to the classroom, and in turn, received feedback regarding their papers topics, as well as possible paper outlines.

 The first exhibit I decided to check out was Patrick Stahl’s. Patrick’s paper will focus on the subject of low-technological poetry and fringe art. Patrick’s piece was found in a hyperlink in a blog post, and to present his ideas, Patrick created a five minute video that showed multiple forms of electronic poetry that were created on basic computer applications, such as Microsoft Excel. He included multiple examples in this video; all of his examples were self-made, or came from a person in his digital poetry class. Patrick’s paper topic is interesting, and it is obvious that he has a clear and organized thesis. By using his own and his classmate’s digital poetry as examples, he is making it unique, as well as relatable.

The second exhibit I encountered was Morgan’s, who is completing a research paper on the internet group called Anonymous. Morgan is focusing on the history of Anonymous, some events and uproars the group created, and how the group’s formation and work is technically connected to the digital humanities. She plans on including pictures in her final essay. She used a Prezi to present her information. Morgan’s topic is extremely interesting, and relates to the digital humanities. It is also neat that she has decided to write on a topic that the class never got the chance to discuss.

 Patrick and Morgan have chosen great topics for their final papers; both tie directly to the realm of the “Digital Humanities”, and gives them chances to build upon what they have learned throughout the semester.

Contemporary Media Convergence

As the world becomes ever smaller, the media has condensed itself and diversified too. "Franchises" have emerged, capturing large audiences and dollars by branching into different forms, such as t-shirts plus TV plus CD. Technologies for the transmission of media have been developed to access many different types of streams, like movies plus music plus telecommunication.

One of the larger "franchises" of contemporary culture is Pokémon. The franchise is so large, in fact, that I didn't have to type that accent mark. It autocorrected in straight from Blogger. Pokémon was already huge in the past, with video games, an animated television program, plushies, and trading cards, but now the franchise is even larger.

Pokémon Go is, of course, a video game, but really it's more than that. It's a Virtual Reality game of a kind that the world has yet to see a lot of. The Pokémon franchise seemed to be drying out a bit, even as the big 20th anniversary approached. Then Pokémon Go came around and blew open the flood-gates.

Another example of a successful "franchise" that uses convergence is NBC's The Voice. Not only is The Voice a television program, but it is also a huge money-maker on iTunes with .mp3 downloads.

Media convergence is making our world smaller, perhaps, as the world becomes smaller on its own in different ways. It has tightened some economic standards, but, while it may need to be watched, seems to be making for some very interesting developments.