Linguistic characteristics Week 5

For this week, we have analyzed a conversation on a forum, about the new Iphone 6 entitled "IPhone 6 bending in pocket" from this url: https://teksyndicate.com/comment/1758533

This topic aimed everybody: the people who want to buy a new phone, those who have already purchased, those interested in new technologies ... So a lot of people! The conversation start from someone who put a topic and after everybody login on the blog can answer. Here the first post was this one: 

On this conversation, people participate with pictures and pseudo like NJM1112, DerKrieger, Zibob… Each choose his nickname when they had register to the blog.

Here are some linguistic characters that we found from the chosen forum.

On lexical level we could find articulated laughter (”hahaha” “hehe” “OMG” “LOL” “WTF”) and some informal word choices (”shitstorm”), while on syntactic level there is informal grammar (lack of dots, commas and capital letters) and short sentences without proper argumentation.

On textual level we could find quite a lot of multimodality (videos, links to other websites) and the use of nicknames when commenting. Also humor (sarcasm and joking) in the conversation is similar to spoken communication.

There is also some emoticons like J :p 

N.R.

Second Life 

After exploring that world of Second life : http://secondlife.com/ we have to answer to this questions:
     1.What kind of ”place” does it seem to be? 

     2.Who are its inhabitants? 

     3.What do they look like? What do they do?
    4.What kind of a community does it seem to be? 

      First of all, after having exploring this kind of digital world, I would say that it tries to copy our real world by using the typical places where people usually meet and talk. I mean: pubs, beaches, malls, crowded streets, etc. Actually, you can create new spaces and change their appearance, but, anyway, it looks like our world. 

    Secondly, its inhabitants are avatars with human being appearance (any genre and young and adults). These vitual characters can get along and stablish friendships and relationships between them, since this game is at the same time a social network. 

     Thirdly, they can do whatever you would like to do in the real world, but the difference is that your purposes are easier to get that in real life. The possibilities are infinite: you can become an artist, a politician or simply you can have there the weddings of your dreams. 

     And, finally, the kind of community depends on your behaviour and how you socialise with the rest of people, just like real life, because, actually, this game imitate in a very similar way our communities.

All image come from Google Image

M-L.Y

About http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together#t-72747

Alone Together, Sherry Turkle, Google image

       The meaning of "Alone Together" is that we are alone but all connected due to social network like Facebook & Twitter. "People want to be with each others but also elsewhere. Connected to all the different places they want to be". Like explain by the pictures of her daughter with friends "be together and not together"

       The second point is if we have noticed symptoms of this in our daily life or surroundings. For me yes for certain points I felt particularly concerned as "receiving a sms is like receiving a cuddle", "send mail, message, or go on Facebook during meeting, courses".

For the same question, Sanna-Maria say "not that much actually, at least not in the same sense as in the video. When I'm meeting up with my friends, we might check our phones, but we do that just a few times and therefore we're not "alone together", we're together. However, I have seen students using their phones while listening to a lecture or a presentation"

Utopia or Dystopia, Google image

       This vision is definitely dystopian. She talks mainly negatively about how technology might affect us in the future: she, for example, mentions robot companions. In my opinion, she's too negative towards technology. I think that technology will never replace face-to-face interaction with other humans simply because we have an inner need for relationships with other people. You can talk to and see other people through technology, but it's impossible to use technology to touch, hug, kiss etc them. Furthermore, I think that technology is a very good thing. For example, I met my best friend of over seven years through internet and have also met other amazing people the same way - it is definitely possible to learn about other people through technology. One does not need face-to-face conversation for it. Technology helps families, friends and couples to stay in touch. My two years as an au pair abroad would have been a lot harder if it wasn't for Skype.

When she described the woman who had lost a child talking to the social robot, I don't agree what she said about it not being amazing. Maybe the woman felt very lonely because she probably had no family and just needed somebody to listen to her? Talking to a robot doesn't mean that she was trying to make sense of her life. Writing and telling about your feelings has been proven to have many positive effects, such as feeling less stress. In addition, there have always been people who do not like to be alone - nowadays they just have a different way of coping.

I do think though that it is wrong that parents focus on their cellphones or laptops rather than on their children. I also don't deny the fact that technology can be harmful in the ways that she describes, such as kids not knowing how to have a conversation.

       We can summarize the video so: Technology affects us in many ways – mainly negative ways according to Turkle. She says that “we are letting technology take us places we don’t wanna go”. According to her, being “alone together” is harmful because it’s affecting how we relate to each other and ourselves. People do that because they want to control where they put their attention, but she thinks it’s not a good thing as people can end up hiding from each other – they would rather do things on their phone.

Technology can cause other problems too such as the Goldilocks effect which means not getting enough of people but “only if they can have each other at distance and in amounts they can control” and adolescents not knowing how to have a conversation. In addition, texts and tweets etc. don’t replace having a conversation as they don’t work for learning, getting to know and understanding each other, according to Turkle.

She believes that the “No one is listening to me” feeling is a very important reason why we are using technology: it’s appealing to write statuses and tweets because there are many automatic listeners there. The same feeling also “makes us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us”. Turkle then mentions social robots that are designed to be companions to us. In addition, she claims that technology appeals to us most when we are most vulnerable and that we’re lonely but also afraid of intimacy. In other words, we turn to technology in order to not feel lonely and in ways we can control. Turkle sums up three gratifying fantasies that phones offer us: we can put our attention wherever we want it to be, we will always be heard, and we will never have to be alone. She says then that we now see being alone as a problem that needs to be solved and that having connections through technology can lead to isolation which can have a negative effect especially on children because they don’t know how to be lonely. In addition, she says that we should talk more about our relationship with technology: we should see that we are vulnerable and have time to think and talk about things that really matter and listen to each other. She finishes off her speech by saying that technology has gone to the wrong direction and we therefore need to “can use digital technology, the technology of our dreams, to make this life the life we can love”...

N.R. & S-M.R

Last week we had to come up with a communication plan that would work well for our company in the network society. We decided that our company sells and manufactures smartwatches, that are good for outdoors-y people that want to have all their smart device needs on the go.

For a company specialized in a smart product, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are obviously the most vital advertising resources, and therefore also the most obvious ones. What we thought was also very much worth looking into was partnership deals with livestream companies that provide sports-related content. Such deals would cover for example advertisement on websites that cater to the audience we are most trying to make aware of our product. Also, partnership with YouTubers that review and/or showcase sports products would help us reach our more couch-minded ('sunday athlete') potential customers, that prefer doing it self to watching others do it.

As we also plan to sell our product directly to the consumer online, crowdsourcing will be used on our website.

Have a nice tuesday,

Joel

Rhetoric and power (week 9)

The group assignment for this week was to find one trustworthy and one less trustworthy website related to our theme, which is technology. After that we were supposed to discuss and analyse further the websites we had chosen. I guess everyone else is currently visiting Lapland, since the conversation was not flowing.

MIT Technology Review's logo.

 The website that I chose to be the trustworthy one is MIT Technology Review (http://www.technologyreview.com/). The purpose of the website is to give information of the newest technology to the audience in six languages and 13 regions worldwide. This is how the website itself defines its purpose: ”The mission of MIT Technology Review is to equip its audiences with the intelligence to understand a world shaped by technology.” The website looks professional: it is founded at Massachusettes Institute of Technology and it has an ethics statement that can be found in the bottom of the site. The argumentation is done with numbers of the statistics and by interviewing experts if the issue. The most used mean of persuation is logos (reason). Since MIT Technology Review is all about reliable technological news, there is no need to appeal to the reader's emotions or the moral character of the rethor in the articles.

Gizmodo's logo.

Then there had to be another website, untrustworthy compared to the first one. I chose ”Gizmodo – Everything is Technology” (http://gizmodo.com/). It is a technology website based on blog texts and promoted posts. The trustworthiness varies a lot through the articles, depending on the author and the topic. The referenced researches have been overly popularised, causing a lack of scientific argumentation on the website. Gizmodo does not give that much information after all. The most commonly used persuative means are ethos and pathos. Since Gizmodo is supposed to be a web media about technology, it would appear more trustworthy with the persuative means of logos. Too often the author only tells the facts based on his or her own experiences or thoughts and tries to reach the audience with some jokes.

MIT Technology Review is also published as a magazine.

MIT Technology Review is trustworthy, because the website has professional appearance. Also, the organisation behind the website is academic. In the bottom of the page can be found links to the website's different social media accounts. Users can join the conversation by logging in with their social media profile and writing sidenotes to the articles. There are always scientific references mentioned as links in the text, which makes the website seem trustworthy to me.

One of the ads on Gizmodo's website.

 Gizmodo is untrustworthy, because there is too much stuff on the website, and therefore it is difficult to navigate. The organisation behind the website is non-academic and there is no link to the website's social media profiles. The commercial posts and obvious ads (some even non-technology related) between regular articles are making the website seem even more untrustworthy to me. The website seems to make big promises without relevant argumentation.

Google knew exactly what I was looking for.

 That was the discussion for this week. Feel free to comment below if you have any aspects on this.

Have a nice weekend!

J.W.

Valentine's Day 

          This week for the Valentine's Day we do a invitation card on Evitew website. This topic is absolutely perfect for our which name is Valentine Group.

Fisrt of all we decide to choose a invitation who the sender and the receiver will be two man because Since nowadays more we talk, especially because it was in the news because in some countries they can now get married because they have more rights. A card of this type therefore changes the classic mode.

Choosing an invitation card for valentine's where the transmitter and receiver are a male couple, shows that such technology, the world is changing and mentalities and rights.

However we keep the desired color rather a classic valentine card by choosing pink and red, and a heart-shaped course.

          About the form, we decide to choose the nicest, we would love to receive. Then writing was chosen because it was that it corresponded to the theme and was morderne, not classic.

          Once the card is chosen, it was time for me to design a text. So I put in the skin of the character imagineant a story between two men, Bryan and John, who have been together for over 5 years and is celebrating their fifth valentine together. But this year is different because they have been able to marry and therefore spend their first valentine between married men.

Through this working group we wanted to insert photos and cupids effects, however, it proved more complicated than expected, so we were unable to. We would wish to write "I Love You" with pleasant forms of technology or make a message consisting of a photo montage photoshop but despite our knowledge, this was complicated.

Here is our Valentine's Day card from Evite Website that we have achieved :

          Despite the fact that we do not puissons make a map as we imagined. We posed the question "How to say I love you, thanks to the technology that surrounds us today?"

Following this question we found several ideas such as: how to say thanks to the internets as we have done now; order a gift online and have it delivered the same day to the place we want our love; send a video so he stumbles on it and they look at it: using a video there are thousands of ways to be creative ...

Here is a beautiful week ending hoping that on February 14 gave you the opportunity to prove your love, finding love, or share a good time with friends.

NR

Pinterest

       This week we created a Pinterest account and pinned pictures that related to our theme. You can find our pinned pictures here.

      Our theme is technology, so I started to find pictures that I could pin by going through the technology tag. I found several interesting pictures and created three boards and therefore sorted the pictures into three categories: phones, computers and technology (pictures that were not about phones or computers were pinned to the technology board). Then I also started to go through the phone and computer tags. I chose to pin pictures that I simply liked: they were, in my opinion, interesting, cool, awesome, funny etc. In other words, they were pictures that made me feel something positive and therefore were worth pinning. One member of our group also pinned a few pictures and said that he pinned them because they were related to our theme and the article that they were taken from interested him. All in all, 44 pictures were pinned.

(Source)

For example, I pinned this picture because it made me smile.

 

 (Source)

And this picture (or article actually) I pinned because it made me think "WOW!" as I have not heard of technology like this before.

       The pinned pictures have - obviously - at least one thing in common: they all are pretty clearly related to technology. Also, as I mentioned previously, at least to me they all were interesting. They are different in a way that they are pictures of different kind of technology: some are just gadgets, like The Smooth Trip Teleport Charger, and some are revolutionary inventions that could change lives, such as masks that give you superhuman sight and hearing, and some of them you are able to buy already, whereas some of them are just concepts, like a flying car.

Probably because our theme was technology, most of the pictures originate from articles, such as dailymail.co.uk, latimes.com, mashable.com and futuristicnews.com, but the origins of a couple of them were "Funny Technology" Google+ group, amazon.com and tumblr, to name a few.

Assuming that I have understood re-/decontextualization correctly, most of the pictures' contexts have not changed very much. There are just a few pictures that have been removed from their original context and have a new context now. One of them is this picture:

                                                               (Source)

In this picture, as you can see, two pictures that are perhaps taken by two different people and maybe even years apart from each other, have been edited together and are now in a new context that compares old and new technology to each other. The picture wants to show how technology has changed.

A couple of other pinned pictures have gotten a new context in the form of list, of which one is 31 Reasons Pinterest Is The New SkyMall. The original context of the inventions which the article lists were probably articles that were written about the invention or online stores.

See you next week!

S-M.R. 

Week 4

       When we as a group started discussing which "interesting phenomenon of digital communication which does not yet have a name" to choose, social networking sites almost immediately entered the picture. We also decided that techonology should be our theme as these things came up first and it seemed natural.

     The phenomenon we found the most interesting was the fact that sites like Facebook and Instragam have adopted this autoplay-feature that starts playing the videos immediately without the user clicking play. We found out that feature, intended to save trouble from the user, can sometimes be frustrating. Let's imagine for example that you are afraid of spiders and when you're just casually scrolling down the feed, a video with a bunch of spiders starts to autoplay. Not pleasent, I can imagine.

The only name we could come up for it was "autohorror", which at least in my opinion isn't really that catchy to really become widely spread.

All in all I think that this first assignment was fairly easy yet required just enough thinking to keep it interesting.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=autohorror

-MM