Digital environments have a lot of influence on our emotions. It shapes our emotions by first off, putting ourselves out there and making us feel vulnerable. When you put yourself out there on the internet, for example on a dating profile, you are entering a giant pool of potential significant others versus a single person. This is automatically intimidating. When you are on a dating site, it can have pros and cons like anything we do.
The pros of it are that you shielded behind a screen so if something goes wrong you can just log off or block the person and never have to deal with them again. You also have a giant group of people to pick from versus when you date in person you may not have that many people to pick from, especially if you are from a small town. The cons of online dating can be that someone catfishes you. Catfish is when a person makes a fake online account and pretends to be someone they are not. For example, a 40-year-old man pretending to be a 22-year-old girl. This is risky and can even cause harm to a person. The article that Koerner wrote is a prime example of this (click the dark-colored "article" button below to view the article in a new window). When someone catfishes you, it can really play with your emotions because you think that you are in love with this person and trust them, but in the end, they are not the person you thought. This causes people to shield their emotions more on the web. When dating in person you can see who you are interested in. Being in front of the person or having them involved in your before dating such as a classmate, fellow worker, neighbor, etc. helps you determine that the person is who they say they are. When your neighbor Bobby is living his daily life as Bobby for the past 10 years you save to assume that that is his real identity. Unless Bobby is a secret spy or in the witness protection program but that is highly unlikely. This also allows you to go on face to face dates with him rather than texting or messaging. I prefer face to face or in person dating because you are able to see the person’s emotions. You are able to tell if what they are saying is lining up with how they feel. I believe this is an important thing especially in the beginning stages of dating. My boyfriend and I have been dating for five years on this August 31st. I have been in a long-distance relationship with him for four of the five years with him. We dated for a year before I left to go off to college three and a half hours away from him. We have quite a bit of experience now with digital love. It’s hard to only see him for four months out of the year so we had to adapt by using the digital environment. Our secret to making things work is facetime. I talked about earlier in this post about face to face dates. FaceTime allows you to see each other’s emotions and apply it to the conversation for deeper intimacy. Therefore, I have came to the conclusion, that if one were to enter a digital relationship before meeting the person in real life, I think it should be on a FaceTime rather than texting and messaging back and forth.
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Szymielewicz’s article states that social media profiles are like an onion with layers. Those layers start with the inner layer that is what you share. For example, these things would be your friends, gender, blocked contacts, likes, real name, date of birth, and many more personal details about yourself. The middle layer is what your behavior tells the social media site. These behaviors would include ads viewed, ads clicked on, content blocked, content consumed, time zones, typing speeds, shopping patterns, and other behaviors that one doesn’t even realize that social media sites can observe. The outer layer is what the machine thinks about you. The social media site takes the information they have collected about you from the inner layer and middle layer and forms an opinion and observation about you. The social media sites can then add up things about you such as IQ level, places of living, formal places of living, professional relationships, if you’re away from your family or hometown if you’re a compulsive shopper, gay/lesbian, and other inferences about you that are extremely personal. I believe that this break down of the social media site is accurate because I see it happening on my own site. For example, my social media page knows my birthdate is in April. Then I saw an ad pop up for a horoscope reading for Aries that was extremely juicy. I clicked on the ad and then the next thing I know I’m getting pushed more ads for horoscope apps on my profile page.
Many places that are searching for a new employee use the process of looking through your social media sites to see what you are posting. They do this to get a background of what type of person you are outside of a professional setting. Jobs use social media because they think that your social media account is an accurate representation of you as a person. Szymielewicz says that it isn’t true. People aren’t willing to put themselves out there all the way in real life let alone social media where double the number of people you know can see. A person may not post about their disability, disease, or disorder because they may not feel comfortable to. They may not post about how they handled the fight they had with the person that cut them off on their way to the mall last night. On social media pages, people put their best selves forward. What I mean by this is that people try to post what makes them look the best. For example, they may post pictures of them going on a trip that they worked hard to afford or that they went to the local charity benefit three days ago. They also may like certain things on social media to make themselves look better even if they have no interest in the topic such as animal shelters, nonprofit organizations, or even the local newspapers, schools, or businesses. Although I agree with Szymielewicz, I do understand why people do use this method for recruiting for college sports or jobs. They do this because there are some people that don’t understand a majority of places view this as an accurate representation of the future employee or player. I have some friends on social media where I shake my head because I can tell a boss or coach will go to their page see a couple of posts and then be disinterested. Certain posts such as “can’t wait to get drunk tonight”, “life f***ing sucks”, or even a posted argument between their significant other. Immediately the company or school sees this and thinks “what if something goes wrong at work” or “what if something goes wrong on the team”. Then they think if they’re posting about simple setbacks or are so open to talking poorly on the web where everyone can see/access it, they think I don’t what that person representing my company, sports team, or school. The relationship between humor and violence is a touchy subject. There really isn’t a certain way or rules on how to go about humor and violence. People that are directly affected by the violence take the humor a lot differently than people indirectly affected and people who are not affected at all.
Humor and violence don’t go hand and hand, that’s the people’s job to make that connection. People make this connection to cope with or soften the blow of the mindless violence going on in the world. In contrast to this idea, a good point that Heerbrought up in number eleven of his thread of tweets on Nazism was “The whole "joking/not joking" thing is a crucial part of Nazi rhetorical strategy: a way of getting people to acclimatize to shocking and vile ideas. Daily Stormer: "The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not." For example, there are jokes about school shootings. I don’t think that comedians are trying to say that school shootings are okay and “get people to acclimatize” to school shootings. I do think that there are little kids dying for no good reason. The only thoughts of why this may be happening because we don’t have good gun control in the country and a lost, mindless soul feels they have to make other people suffer. This is a hard concept to deal with. A comedian’s job is to make audiences laugh, forget every day’s hardships and make some light of situations. With that being said, when a comedian jokes about shootings it is to lighten the mood of the sorrow clouding over the subject. As I said before, some audience members receive the jokes different than others. People that are directly affected such as classmates, their teachers and the fiercest one of them all, the parents of the deceased may react enraged because that was their friend, student and child that has died from a mindless act. To them, the comedian is making a joke about the deceased or traumatized and that joke sends an automatic stabbing feeling through their chest. This is why they would be enraged and what to take it out on the comedian because they are so blinded by heartbreak they can’t tell the joker is trying to make light of a horrible situation. There are people that are indirectly affected by school shootings, such as parents that have children that attend school, students themselves that attend school or me that wants to be a teacher in a classroom. The classroom is the environment of school shootings and sadly, there is a possibility that I may have to deal with this situation in the future. This is why I am indirectly affected by a school shooting joke. It is not referring to a shooting I have been a part of have or have had someone I know involved with one, but I'm not enraged by the comedians because I know that they are just doing their jobs that I described above as trying to make light of a horrible, inexcusable act. On the other hand, even if it doesn’t pierce through my chest as it would to someone directly affected, it still does sting a little bit. It stings because the jokes do affect my life by making me think of the horrible things that have happened and could possibly happen in the future to me. Then there are people that aren't directly or indirectly affected by the school shootings. They think the jokes are funny because it doesn't dig into them as it does to the other two groups I described. The see it as a joke and only a joke. They may think it is bad but don’t really understand it because that can’t relate to it emotionally. |
AuthorI am Olivia Golay and I attend Saint Bonaventure University. These blog posts are from the class I am currently taking, English 325: Writing in Digital Environments. ArchivesCategories |