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
