Gabriel Rodgers - Digital Media

Good evening, my friends. The time has come to encapsulate all we've covered and to say farewell, sadly enough. I'd like to thank you for coming with me on this journey, and we've got one more stop - the reflection and the explanation of my term paper, Psalms Behind the Screen.  Much of what I've taken away from this semester has been minutia, adding to a generalized knowledge with specific facts. I entered this knowing much of the topics, like how the internet has affected this generation, for instance. I've had first hand experience with the generational divide, being an elder millennial and on the cusp of a digital immigrant. Modernizing hasn't been easy for me. For instance, last semester I took Broadcast Graphics, which taught me After Effects, an Adobe product that created moving graphics. This was brand new - I had been using Photoshop CS2 for 15 years, and here's this whole new world. Anyone would have a hard time, and without the dedication and elas...

 Greetings, my friends, and Happy Easter, Ramadan, Passover and Spring Rites! What a great year when all of these things are occurring at the same time. We're rounding the corner of the semester and looking at home plate. Today we're looking at Copyright and Intellectual Property from a digital perspective, so let's dive right in. Ah, Limewire. I, too, joined those who didn't understand what in the world was going on back then. It wasn't until the push to shut down Limewire and Napster that I really became informed about copyright law and how it was beginning to interact in the digital world. The facts are there - the struggle over how to deal with digital download and intellectual property has been around for a while . Both of those articles have been around since 2012 and 2014 respectively. In fact, all the readings are a tad outdated - the other two are from 2012 as well. And ten years has changed the game somewhat. The law still  hasn't appreciably caught u...

 Good rainy afternoon, my friends! So I misspoke last week - the two subjects of A Networked Society were similarly titled. We'll be talking about Copyright next week. This week, we're looking ahead into the future. We're going to look at where we're going digitally. The future is full of a dualistic knowledge - that on the one hand, the UN Assembly declared the internet as a basic human right and that we're moving into a digital age in which every aspect of life could be conducted with a virtual component. On the other hand, there is still a significant portion of the world without access, who may still be in a pre-industrial era. Indeed, even those that do possess access may have very slow access ( source ) or censored access. ( map ) This interrupts the ability of the digital world to evolve, though unfortunately these deficiencies are not surprising.  We look forward into the future of science fiction when it comes to the digital world - working remotely except ...

 Good morning, my friends! I hope you've had a productive week. We're narrowing down towards the end of this semester, and with my Polestari's festival in about three weeks, I'm hoping that the weather calms down. We're looking towards another cold snap, which is unseasonably late. Global warming, am I right? Which leads me (albeit somewhat sideways) towards this week's topic. When we were given this topic, I wasn't sure what it meant. After studying the readings, I have to say I'm fairly certain it deals with Social Networking Sites (SNSs) and their impact on society, which is tangential to other topics we've had, but this time we're going to center in.  I'm an OG internet boi, which isn't quite the dinosaur age, but I remember the early days of Myspace and Live Journal. I wasn't one of the original UseNetters, but some of my friends were. I've watched social networks evolve and change, and their implicit commentary on how societ...

 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...

 Good evening, and I hope you had a lovely week. I had a delicious weekend, full of relaxation and enjoying the company of others. But all good things must change, and that is actually this week's topic. This week we're going to cover the Digital Divide, sometimes in my field called the Homework Gap.  The Digital Divide references the socioeconomic difference in access between the higher-earning households and the lower-earning households. This is unsurprisingly complicated by other marginalizing factors such as race and ethnicity. ( source ) The truth is that poorer households just can't afford to be as connected as wealthier ones - the child of a single mother working 3 jobs to keep a roof over her family's head is not going to be able to afford a high-speed internet bill, 3 cell phones, 2 tablets, a smart TV, and 2 computers. According to the PEW Research Study, 27% of adults in households earning 30k a year or less use their smartphone for all of their internet acce...

 Well, it's a rainy Thursday in February. Peering out the windows, the world is white noise made of water while the tree branches beat a merry tune on the building. And here we are, looking at net neutrality, a particular hot button issue over the last few years.  Let's do this in layman's terms. The internet, at least since Net 2.0, has been a constant. You pay for access to whatever provider worked best for you, but after that you could go anywhere and do anything. Welcome to the Internet, as Bo Burnham would say. But there is a significant threat to this way of doing things.  Net Neutrality is "the principle that the companies who provide access to the internet (so-called “internet service providers”, or ISPs) cannot block or throttle internet traffic, or prioritize their business partners or other favorite web sites or services." ( source ) Comcast or AT&T, for instance, can't partner with Hulu so that it has the highest speeds and then throw Netflix b...

Good Tuesday Morning, if there is such a thing, and welcome back! So I just got back from New Orleans and I have to say, the weather up here is not my favorite comparatively. Speaking of things that are not in my wheelhouse, let's talk about ads. More appropriately, we're talking about online advertising and marketing strategies. Now, I am good at many things. I'm an author, a minister, a crafter, an artist. I can make beautiful things with my hands and my mind. I can sing, play the piano, operate a Class B vehicle, somewhat fly a plane, rewire a house, change the oil in your car, and format a manuscript to look like it was published in New York. I can write poetry, dance, cut your hair, and reassemble machinery. I can even help you do your taxes or pass the ACT. What I cannot do is marketing.  I do not understand it. I am terrible at it. Anyone who's read my novels, whether they knew me or not, have begged me for more. Anyone who's picked up one of my handmade boxe...

 Good evening, and welcome back! So this week, we're supposed to look into social movements and how digital media has played into them of late, and this one is going to be somewhat hard, so buckle in.  When I was in middle school, my TAG teacher delved deeply into the Holocaust and World War II. The ethics of showing real video and media from that era and subject matter to a classroom of 11-year-olds aside, she made an incredibly valuable point. She asked, "Why was this war different? What made it bigger, scarier, and hit harder than any other war before it?" The answer was simple - people could see it. The advent of television being a common household encounter meant that more than picture or video, the average Joe could see the horrors of war. People watched other people suffering and dying in their living room. This technology changed the face of how people interacted with war, because even though wars have always been visceral, terrible events, now it wasn't somet...

     Good evening, and welcome back! So today we're going to cover stress, harassment, and bullying when it comes to the digital space. This is a major topic for today's educators, especially those who are digital immigrants and struggle to understand these problems from the perspective of the digital natives they teach.      Some of the more prevalent thought and chatter has blamed cell phones and other technology for heightened levels of stress and bullying, particularly in students. The popular thought would say, if we don't know what they're doing, they're getting into trouble. While there may be some merit to that, the issue is far more complex than "just turn it off". For instance, digital natives have naturally adapted communication styles that align with faster-paced online presence. The idea of limiting online "screen time" is not actually beneficial to adolescents in any way other than limiting access to them. ( source ) On the other ha...

Good afternoon, and I hope you're staying warm in this frigid cold January. So I reviewed the syllabus, and I suspect it may be that these blogs are slightly more freeform than I previously thought. The blog posts seem to be broken up into the learning objectives listed on the course, with only a few words of a header to guide them. If I'm barking up the wrong tree, I'll change format for the next one. However, we'll go with this this time, and see how it goes.  The topic listed for this week is "Understanding Digital Natives". I learned that term in my education tech classes. Digital natives were born during the information age, metaphorically with an iPad in their hand. For this generation, usually Gen Z or younger Millennial, their literacy skills are tied to a completely different set of schema. They tend to be prone to intaking multiple stimuli at a time for information and understand technology as a part of their world as much as their clothing. Alternat...

 Good Morning, Vietnam and welcome to my blog. I have never in my life managed to keep a blog, so this will be a first. Maybe I should have assigned a letter grade to myself before now.  There didn't seem to be a blog topic anywhere I could find. I thought, perhaps, that the assignment was simply to create a blog, but the syllabus instructed me to write a post. So here we are. We were instructed to take a Digital Knowledge quiz, which was somewhat interesting.  Of course, my inner perfectionist wants to take it again and get it right, even if there's no grade attached. I missed a question regarding "incognito mode" which I have never used in my life and can't really imagine why I would use it to begin with. I suppose lack of exposure is how we don't know things, so I should forgive myself for that. We were assigned 4 articles this week: The Internet and the Pandemic, ( https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/09/01/the-internet-and-the-pandemic/ ) was an over...