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...

 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...