Today, we’re reading Caitlin Dewey’s article “The Other Side of the Infamous ‘Auschwitz Selfie’ ” from The Washington Post. Before we dig into the reading, let’s develop some shared knowledge: What do you associate with Auschwitz? You can provide a list of bullets. Next, what do you think of the selfie Breanna posted of herself… Read More Auschwitz Selfie
Today, we’re looking at the Wired Magazine article,“Social Media Helps Black Lives Matter Fight the Power” by Bijan Stephen with photos by Philip Montgomery. As you read through the article and look closely at the images, take notes about what you see. Create a two-minute response video in which you answer the following questions or… Read More Social Media and #BLM
Twitter censors content from certain countries. They creatively call this “country withheld content.” So, if you’re from China and want to post a dissenting tweet, Twitter will delete it and post something like this: This started in 2012, so I am admittedly a little behind the times (I blame my dissertation). I bring this up… Read More 140 Characters – Censored
When my mother died five or so years ago, I didn’t know how to tell people. I wanted to avoid talking about it, about why I missed a week of classes, about why I went social media silent. Instead of posting about it, I shared the eulogy I delivered at her funeral as a Note on… Read More Communicating Loss
Recently, I’ve posted a lot about how social media shames people. In class, my students mentioned that social media creates and perpetuates drama – sometimes in really poisonous ways. In fact, one student is writing her Multimodal Advocacy Project about cyber bulling. And yet, I see ways in which social media and collaborative writing spaces… Read More What reddit Does Right
This week a friend of mine posted about her experience on a dating website. In doing so, she posted screenshots of her interactions with an extremely crude individual on Facebook. She is not alone; see the Instagram account, Bye Felipe. After posting the screenshots, one friend called the guy a “Douche.” My friend responded thusly, “Yeah. It’s a… Read More Social Media Pillory
The news is full of stories about young people being bullied to the point of self-harm and suicide. Unfortunately, bullying isn’t a new phenomenon. For example, John Hughes‘s movies (Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club) rely on the tension of the bullied vs. the popular. The big difference today is the constant presences of the interwebs. While… Read More Bullying Has No Boundaries
A few days ago, the news blew up with a story about a chapter of ΣAE at the University of Oklahoma. The fraternity members were recorded singing an obviously racist song about not admitting African Americans. What strikes me most about this story is the power of an individual with a cellphone. The individual must have… Read More Greetings from the Panopticon
This week, we talked about what genres do. We had some great conversations about the function of Twitter and other social media. What makes an exemplary tweet? What makes an exemplary Facebook status? I think we realized that a lot of the ways we measure successful rhetoric may not work for something like Facebook because… Read More Facebook and Social Action
Like this article in The Onion, we tend to anthropomorphize technology. Like the woman in the article, I talk about how my computer hates me or about how my phone seems to know exactly when to run out of battery power. We give machines human emotions and motives. But for how complex these machines are,… Read More Computers Aren’t People
