Preparing for Death In Social Media

Posted on by omartayarablog

After Reading the multiple articles assigned for social media after death it made me rethink the way I post in social media. The main focus of The Huffington posts article was what happens to your future post after you die but it didn’t really mention about earlier posts.

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I would describe most of my posts on social media to be silly and filled with satire. Sometimes I even post stuff just to mess with other people. I assume part of morning the dead in social media is visiting their pages and reading through their posts and there are somethings that I do post that i might not be proud of because their either stupid or insensitive. You see a part of mourning the dead is that people would recall the accomplishments that I made, how positively i affected their lives and whatever bad decision I made in life wouldn’t really jump first in mind… At least I hope that’s the case. Looking through social media is a non-filtered view of a person after death. I can see that can be equivalent to trying to be a better person if you knew you were about to die.

Another thing that came to mind was automated messages in Facebook. Some people i know have some add-ons on Facebook that post news stories on their pages. There are also some services that wish people happy birthday or happy anniversary to loved ones. Getting those messages after death can be pretty painful for the people receiving it. This article discusses what happens after death to other social media websites.

 

Why Spread the Lie

Posted on by omartayarablog

So with the spread of social media fake news has been on the rise but it’s not where fake news has originated. Giving the ability to billions of people to simply reach the spotlight has made lots of people thrive to reach it. Anyone’s post can be shared and reach the front pages if it was interesting enough and lets be honest the truth is boring. I’d rather hear a story about someone taking a wrong step and almost dying in a river when in fact they were just jumping from rock to rock in a puddle of water.

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I personally use group texting applications quite a bit and am a part of multiple groups one of which is has my family. From time to time I’ll get this long post about how this kind of food causes cancer or how following a routine everyday might cause amnesia and most of the time its from my parents. I tell them that these stories they share have no validity and that its fake news but their usual response is “you never know” or “better safe than sorry”. So this phenomenon, the countless unbelievable stories I see in social media and Anne’s article on fake news is why is don’t trust the Internets news stories.

So why would people spread these fake stories? (that’s a great question I’m glad you asked it). According to this article there are multiple reasons and here are some. People like to through multiple fake stories in the medium so that a particular story might be true can fall in the mix and be labeled as fake news with the rest. Lots of people spread fake news stories in order to get attention and tell their friends that he shared something interesting and that they should take precautions just so they can have the spotlight. Others actually believe these stories (like my parents) and are just concerned about the well being of others. Here a video of someone just creating fake news to send to the world just for the fun of it:

Now i’m glad that there are some fake news stories that are spread in the internet because that made me look twice into what stories I read and that i shouldn’t take anything at face value. This article on Forbes discusses what’s the silver-lining from fake news that we experience. Now it is sad when an incident like PizzaGate (that The Telegraph highlighted in his article) causes a person to go insane.

Not trusting fake news is one thing but not believing a story without fact checking its origin is dangerous. I tend to shrug off lots of stories but in fact there is more than fake news to report on. Shocking! I really liked this point an article by the Chicago Tribune was making “It’s populism grounded in the belief that things I don’t want to be real aren’t real because I don’t want them to be.”. So its not wise to reject every story only because you don’t want to believe it’s true.

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Now that you read this far here are multiple news stories that were infamously labeled as fake news. enjoy.

Gaming… But not really

Posted on by omartayarablog

Sharing videos throughout the internet has become a common occurrence ever since social media has surfaced. Ever since YouTube was launched multiple kinds of trends have come and gone due to the way YouTube has chosen to monetize its videos. When YouTube first launched revenue from videos was based on views which helped the spread of cat videos, short skits, animated pieces daily vlogs, and music parodies.

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Those types videos tended to be about less than 3 minutes long. But then YouTube noticed that it lead to the success of click-bait videos which not a lot of people actually spent the time to watch and appreciate the effort put into the video. This has lead YouTube to Change it’s formula into time watched which made short videos profit to decline and maybe decrease in popularity because not as much people made them. Animated pieced in my opinion has suffered the most due to its long development process with not as much content produced. With the spread of long compilation videos and background music, some people used those videos in the background to generate revenue. In addition to that, YouTube has had some concerns about bots being programmed to play videos on loop in order to inflate the actual time watched. This has lead YouTube to change their formula once again to factor in amount of likes and comments a video gets and how much traffic is generated. That being said the YouTube formula has been and is changing all the time.

Ever since I read about Lessig’s article about remixing that made me think about the spread of gaming on YouTube. Now there is a lot of gaming videos that basically show people playing through games and showing the story, going through multiplayer and enjoying the game as intended which is considered fair use and can be monetized. But what i’m talking about is completely different. My favorite kind of gaming videos are the ones that take the game and pretty much take as many of the rules out as possible and follow their own narratives. One of my favorite series on YouTube is called Things to Do and it usually takes games that have good physics engines or variable game mechanics and play something completely different in the game. There’s one where they play Frogger in Assassin’s Creed or Pac-man in Halo or Skee ball in GTA V.

There is also another approach to remixing gaming that i noticed which is take a game that has a huge fan base and add narrative that is completely original which has nothing to do with the original game. There’s Red Vs. Blue for example which take Halo (a first person shooter game) and adds voice over with comedic narrative and works as an animated piece that stands alone from the game itself. When I began watched this show I wasn’t really into the game Halo it self and I haven’t played it before. But with all the limitation that the concept has I still found myself to be emotionally attached to the characters even more than lots of movies of tv shows I watched. That made me want to play the game and doing that made me appreciate the show even more due to the little jokes and references they have in the game. Similarly, I found other YouTubers where they assume the character their playing and develop their personality and back story as they progress throughout the game.

Recently, there has been an issue with YouTube and advertisers pulling from using YouTube as a form of advertisement due to the appearance of their adds on offensive videos that featured hate speeches.  CNN has reported earlier this year that three major advertisers have given away their spot in YouTube advertisement. According to the CNN report “YouTube relies heavily on viewers to flag content. With 300 hours of content a minute uploaded, some fall through the cracks.”. Multiple parties have also followed suite which lead Google to automate their demonetization method. This lead to generalization of what topics to demonetized. For example, any mention of guns or violence in videos lead for the videos to get demonetized. A large portion of games have weapons even if they weren’t used in a violent matter which made the YouTube gaming community to suffer greatly. With all of this happening advertisers and game developers have come aware of the power they have upon gaming on YouTube and have become more lenient to taking down videos or issuing DMCA take downs. Seeing how YouTube has changed throughout the years it’s really hard to tell what the next move is. But hopefully they get to come up better solutions so we can still experience the different remixes and people’s creativity in gaming.

Thank you for sticking this far.

Too Tired… Can’t figure out

Posted on by omartayarablog

I can’t count how many times I’ve stayed up all night trying to solve some personal problems, homework, or even wondering what’s the right decision for me to take. So after seeing my 2-year-old niece struggling to stay awake watching cartoons i felt connected to her struggle.

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This GIF represents the countless times I was stuck on a homework problem trying to figure out what’s the right answer after staring for a while at the book reading the two definitions and not being sure which is correct.

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I even sometimes spend my time rolling in bed wondering how a person’s reaction to a comment i made might have affected their day or bothered them. Sometimes social ques are hidden in texts that i don’t understand or it’s just some typing mistake that they didn’t even notice.
gif (2).gifIt can also be about what opinion I have about a certain issue big or small with both sides providing convincing arguments.

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I’ve also wasted lots of time texting people surfing the internet or even watching cartoons just like my niece forcing myself to stay awake and that what ever I’m doing is way more important than sleep.

 

Primary Audience:

Anyone that felt the need to stay awake and accomplish anything or nothing.

Overall Argument:

Pulling all-nighters and staying awake trying to pull every ounce of energy is sometimes not worth it. It’s better to just take your rest however long it is and then try and figure out if its worth thinking about.

Reason for the visual:

I felt extremely connected to my niece watching her struggle and I think lots of other people felt that way.

Also, it’s extremely cute.

Contemporary Moment:

It shows the struggle that people have between staying awake and meeting a deadline, or responding to someone, or even giving yourself an ease of mind to allow yourself to sleep.

Sharing Reason:

As well as this resonated with me I can see people having the same reaction because its a feeling that most humans experience.

Possible Modification:

I can see people using it anyway that prevents sleep. whether it is to catch-up on your social media or emails, try and binge shows after liking them so much, reading about people’s gossip or even staying awake to contemplate life and its meaning.

It can also take a different take where you add it to something that you can’t believe your eyes that your seeing.

Spread Possibility:

This human feeling is felt by almost every person at some point of their lives and people can see the purity of an emotion in children more clearly than others. One of my favorite memes had similar qualities which is the Yes baby meme.

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A Different Kind of Texting

Posted on by omartayarablog

Cell phones have managed to connect people from all over the world by making communication extremely easy and accessible. Even though, they are connecting us together and internet has made it seem like we’re part of the same village, I can still see some differences in texting habits from my hometown due to some cultural differences. Not to say that it’s a completely different language, there were lots of points that were mentioned in Crystals chapter about the oddness of texting that were still valid.

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At first i wanted to point out some differences in texting jargon that are used quite differently from person to person. For example, I’ve seen the hands emoji being used as begging a person for forgiveness, politely presenting something to someone or just praying for something to happen. I’ve also noticed that some people dislike when they receive a text from someone that just contains Hi or Hey. The argument is that you are wasting a text and initiating this formal back n’ forth dance that is not necessary when texting and only applies when talking. On the other hand, I know some people that use it in order to see if the other person is available at the moment in order to ask them a question or a favor.

Due to the slender look of the Arabic language and its alphabet and the variety of intonations that are commonly spoken but not written. I see people commonly using the English language to text. This makes the English language dominant in texting but it doesn’t stop people from using the English letters to write Arabic. There are many limitations to that one of which not all the Arabic letters are included in the English language which lead people to include numbers to replace the missing letters. For example, you can write my name as 3mar to compensate for the harder O sound. This following video shows how you can pronounce some of these letters and gives some examples:

I’ve noticed that when people transition away from using the number they are usually trying to get into an argument. That might be due to the inconvenience of typing the numbers because they are out of the keyboard’s way, or even that they don’t want any room for vagueness.

This difference in culture between Arabic and English made me look into other text jargon for other countries. It seems that each country has their own take to add to the mix. For Example, In Swedish people tend to take out d from some words like det which means it. This can be a point of misunderstanding since that means they. In French, mdr = Mort de rire which is basically LOL in french, In German people use thx to mean either “please” or “you’re welcome”, and in Japanese they Kaomoji’s which are way more elaborate than emoji’s or emoticons.

I hope i haven’t bored you too much…

Thanks for sticking with it.