Gabriel Rodgers - Digital Media

 Welcome back, my friends and only droogs. I hope you had an enjoyable spring break - we certainly jumped back in with both feet. Today we're talking about data, and some of the debates involved in privacy. Now, on reading this week's offerings and doing a little digging, I figured out what the angle was here. We're being asked to critique our relationship to our data and what privacy means to us. The TED talk on the guy's experiment with both isolation and hyper-sharing was somewhat eye-opening. ( source ) I found it particularly odd that he stated that the month he spent in overshare, where everyone knew his activity, was the happiest of his life, and yet railed against it, saying that humanity was disappearing into conformity because of digital devices. I find that odd, and uniquely tied to a completely non-digital concept that I'll come back around to here. It's true. We live in a controlled digital ecosystem. This isn't a secret, and it isn't new. T...

 Welcome back on this sunny Saturday, my friends. It was downright warm yesterday and I am deeply displeased - can we not have some spring before summer rears its ugly head? I do hate the weather here. I used to have a friend in New Zealand who, when she did the conversions from Fahrenheit to Celsius, was abjectly appalled by our weather. I share that.  But, here in the air conditioning that we do not quite  yet need, it's time to talk about Media Ministry. This is the final class that I require to complete my Certificate of Media Ministry, and I just finished the Media Ministry class earlier this semester. I am an ordained minister and I feel somewhat qualified to tackle this subject from an original aspect. And in general, this one's a doozy. When I began the path of adding Media Ministry to my education degree, I believed it to be familiarizing one's self with modern tech and exploring how people and churches are integrating the ubiquitous technology into their wo...

Salutations and greetings to you. Today, we're going to try to put aside some of the worries we're all facing - gas prices, wheat shortage, Russia annexing part of Japan, Florida passing a ridiculous "Don't Say Gay" law, and the general malaise of what's going on in the world to address...social media and politics. Which, unfortunately, doesn't depart from any of those topics.  Social media and politics are intrinsically linked in many ways. For every cat meme and R-rated cartoon there is a political board, sometimes a legitimate exchange of ideas and sometimes...it's Reddit. (My apologies to Reddit, but not really.) One of my partners is a communist who personally has 4 Reddit accounts designed solely to discuss politics, and to "troll" others - that is, to intentionally inflame conversation with no real purpose or merit. This is common in the darker reaches of the internet, where extremism unfortunately finds a deep seat. These digital echo...

 Good evening, gentle reader. This week, we were supposed to, quote, "Do some research on new start-up companies that provide user-generated content and write your blog posts about them." Considering I do not know what "new" or "start-up" mean in this context (how new? Pre-launch? Within the last 5 years?), I started to do research anyway, and ended up called to do something else with this topic. It is laid on my heart to talk about the Ukraine, and about what is currently being coined "the TikTok war". User-generated content has never been more important, or more scary. On February 24, 2022, 5 days ago, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, including bombs. The stories so far have been incredible. NPR has been consistently speaking on the war. Currently in technology, without turning this post into link spam, the headlines read: "Apple Pauses Sales in Russia and Stops All Exports"; "Facebook and TikTok Block Russian St...