Elizabeth Drescher’s article titled “Five Social Media Trends that are Reshaping Religion” appeared in the online magazine Religious Dispatch.  The magazine focuses on publishing a medley of “expert opinion, in-depth reporting, and provocative updates from the intersection of religion, politics and culture.”

Drescher, who currently teaches religious studies at Santa Clara University, focuses her article on the affect that technology, specifically that having to do with social media, has on our current perceptions of religion.  The main point that I found to be the most interesting was the inclusion of religious apps, or as Drescher terms them “O Holy Apps”, as a means of outreach for ministry services.  However, what struck me as odd, was Drescher’s reference to the Confession App.  Granted, apparently the Vatican has released a statement saying that the confession app is not a substitute for a real face to face confession, but the creation of the app still raises an interesting point.  I personally do not think that a confession app is a viable option to replace a face to face interaction with a priest, but i have a  feeling that as our society becomes more and more technologically saturated that people will eventually have no problem with it.  To me, that seems a little scary.

I guess the main reason why I have reservations about such things as the confession app is because it allows us to retreat into a world were physical interaction with others is not necessary.  We are social creatures and to be cut off from others, I think, would be extremely detrimental to our evolution as a species.  I just don’t see technological advancements such as this app as being beneficial to humanity as a whole.

Read Elizabeth Drescher’s entire article here…

I was interested in finding an app like “Voice Memos” that could turn an android into an audio recorder.  I find this one by Mamoru Tokashiki called “Voice Recorder” that seems to work fairly well.  Not only that but the ratings provided on the Android Market website were above average.

I’ve had one or two projects in which we had to embed an audio file into a power point presentation or some other medium.  That being said, I have never used Audacity before so this should be a new learning experience.  The last project that I had to edit audio and video files for was dedicated to Tracy Chapman in which I compiled a series of videos that highlighted certain concerts, as well as narrated the project myself, hence the editing of the audio.  However we used iMovie and not Audacity to do the editing so I’m looking forward to learning this new program.

The SCU’s California Legacy Project, maintained by SCU English Professor Terry Beers, is a collaboration between the publishing company Heyday and Santa Clara University whose goal is “to raise public awareness and appreciation for our state’s cultural legacy and to encourage faculty and students in their creative and scholarly interest in Californian culture.”  The website dedicated to this project can be found here.

Currently Terry Beers is teaching a seminar class at SCU that has it’s main focus situated around California Landscape Literature, an offshoot of the California Legacy Project.  One of the pieces that Beers chose to discuss was Masumoto’s “Epitaph for a Peach”.  On the California Legacy website, there is a podcast interview with Masumoto about his “Epitaph..” in which he discusses how a person’s environment, pastoral vs. suburban for example, can affect the way one views the world around him or herself.  An example that Masumoto presents is that of the weather.  Masumoto laments that a person in the city isn’t going to have as close of a relationship with the weather unless it affects their life directly. However for someone like Masumoto, a farmer in Northern California, the weather takes on a whole new meaning and rhythm.

In my opinion, The CLP represents a call to preserve, sustain and even amplify a nostalgia for the California landscape and all the history and rich cultural tradition that is present in it.

The aspect of the study highlighted in The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions is the notion that the social network, Twitter, was able to elicit an “information cascade” among it’s users in response to the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions.  From what I understand, the fact that Twitter grants it’s users with a very small space (in terms of characters used)  in which to post their comment, the messages that are presented through this social network are extremely concise with very small room for elaboration.  Therefore, the possibility that the “message” embedded in these tweets is unaltered as it travels from user to user is significantly increased.  This leads to an extremely close proximity between those experiencing the news, and those reading about it.  In other words, Twitter creates a networked news service that rivals most news organizations in terms of audience and quality of information disseminated throughout that audience.  Furthermore, because of the phenomenon of the Hashtag found in Twitter, in which users can immediately label information and tweets that are directly connected to a certain overarching topic, this action of an information is increased even more.

What does his mean for professional news organizations who conduct journalism and such services within a certain code of ethos?  It seems that it is still to early to begin answering this question, but this study attempts to begin dissecting this issue.  This quote from the study seems to sum up the dichotomous views of the kind of research that needs to be examined:

“Studies of mainstream news production can be understood in terms of two broad phases of research. The first focuses on how journalists work within formal news organizations, while the second—a newer body of literature—investigates how news emerges from networked actors who span different professional and organizational identities and contexts.”

The main focus here being the impact of individual citizen journalists being linked together rather than the typical news organization.  It will be extremely interesting to see how our perspective of the news and who should be able to present it will change with the further inclusion of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook into our everyday lives.

Read the whole study HERE.

NPR (or National Public Radio) is a privately and publicly funded, non-profit  Network of public radio stations that stretch across the United States.  One of the aspects of NPR is the exploration of new artists and their music.  Therefore NPR, in order to incorporate this theme into their broadcasting network, has created the “Tiny Desk Concerts” podcast that can be accessed on their website Here.  This podcast, supplemented with videos of the artists’ performances, provides listeners with a space in which they can explore different genres of music and artists that may not be “mainstream.”

One such artist is Thao Nguyen, who performs for a Tiny Desk Concert session.  Thao, who began playing the guitar at age 12, was born in Falls Church, Virginia and is currently a part of the indie band, Get Down Stay Down.  Her performance on the Tiny Desk Podcast was nothing less than spectacular.  Her distinct vocals and catchy melodies provide for an extremely entertaining acoustic session, with the host of the Tiny Desk Concerts describing her as ” raw and infectious, her voice has a distinctive swagger, and she’s a remarkably nimble guitarist.”  Check out her performance at Little Desk Concerts:Thao Nguyen.  You wont be disappointed.

In the blog titled “Nine Propositions Toward a Cultural Theory of YouTube”, Henry Jenkins examines the influence that social media sites like YouTube are having, and potentially will have, on society.  One of these nine propositions that Jenkins investigates is the notion that YouTube functions as an important site for citizen journalists.  With the technology that is present today, the amount of people who can contribute stories and images has significantly increased.  However, that being said, an interesting point to take into account is if because of sites like YouTube, do we need to alter who we define as an actual journalist?  Previously the belief was that Journalism was an actual profession or career.  However with sites like YouTube, where posters literally need no credentials whatsoever and yet who Jenkins still terms “citizen journalists”, this aspect of Journalism as a profession is severely undercut.

You can read Jenkins full article here:

http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/05/9_propositions_towards_a_cultu.html

Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California. Until recently, he served as the co-founder of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More about Henry Jenkins isavailable here.

p.s.  Here is a perfect example of citizen journalism at work:

UC Davis Pepper Spray

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4

After going through a number of potential web designs I have found really prefer Tim Potter’s design the most.  I found Pottter’s website through the sight “Design Bombs” (URL listed as http://www.designbombs.com) and I was immediately drawn to the simplicity of the site and how user friendly it is.  Navigation through this site is pretty straight forward with a navigation bar at the top that suggests links ranging from “What I do” to “My Work”.  Not only that, but the Splash page itself is interactive and aesthetically appealing as there are videos and images.  That being said, TIm still maintains the simplicity of the his site and doesn’t clutter the Home page with unnecessary media.  The Splash page is actually one long web page, however by clicking on the links at the top of the site, you automatically scroll to the correct place on the Splash page itself that holds the information requested.

In order to make navigation of the page even easier, Tim has included a “Top” button that floats on the left side of the screen and stays with you as you scroll down or up.  That way, anytime you need to return to the navigation bar at the top you have an easily accessible means of getting there.  Great Feature.

I really like this idea of making the website one whole page.  However, with the amount of writing that is going to be on my site I will need to include at least a couple of alternate pages that can be accessed from the splash page through links.  That being said, I’m thinking of trying to go Tim’s route and fit as much as I can on the Splash page, without cluttering it up, and have a “Top” button to access it all coupled with a navigation bar at the top. It’s a great design.

Link to Tim’s Page:

http://tejpotter.com/index.php#home

In her ethnographic study titled “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life“, Danah Boyd, also known as Danah Michele Boyd, discusses the forced evolution of “the public” caused by the Internet and how teens are attempting to navigate this new online society.  Boyd suggests that the notion “the public” is beginning to alter itself because of the inclusion of such sites as MySpace and Facebook.  These sites, she argues, present teens with an ability to interact with an enormous, abstract group of peers through the Internet.  Because of this, teens lives today are far more transparent and prone to critic than in the past.

Boyd suggests that the phenomena of social networking has forced teens to include four new categories of social interactions; Persistence, Searchability,  Replicability, and the Invisible Audience.  These interactions, conducted solely on the Internet, are the causes for this increased transparency in teens lives in society today.  Boyd goes on to suggest that these sites are then becoming a new sort of “online public” and that the social interactions previously stated are characteristics of the interactions that occur in these new public domains.  Because humans define themselves by how they interact with others, these social networks are becoming online societies in which users are creating identities for themselves.

Boyd doesn’t suggest that she can extrapolate the ramifications of this new form of social interaction on teens today, but she does state that to try and regulate these new public spaces will effectively ostracize these younger generations from the older.  In her conclusion, Boyd calls for adults to, instead of attempting to police these sites, rather act as guides to the younger generations of users who are interacting with them.  The reason being that this technology is not going away anytime in the near future, so we need to be able to begin coexisting with it now.

“Danah Michele Boyd is an American social media researcher known for her public commentary on the use of social media sites by youth.”

In the book titled, “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture”, the author Andrew Keen, discusses how the saturation of the internet with, what he terms amateur content, has lead to a degradation of our culture. Keen presents his argument through the metaphor of the “infinite monkey theorem” which states that “if you provide infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, some monkey somewhere will eventually create a masterpiece-a play by Shakespeare, a Platonic dialogue, or an economic treatise by Adam Smith.”  Keen takes this theory and applies it to the present day internet, in which the monkeys are Internet users and the typewriters are our computers.

The implications of Keens argument are intriguing.  Some, including myself, have always believed that the internet is a medium by which creativity and originality can flourish.  Because it is so accessible, the ease with which one can present a new idea if significantly increased.  However, that being said, what if, as Keen suggests, those “new ideas” are not so constructive to the cultural and moral fabric of society.  Keen points to websites such as YouTube and Facebook as being web environments where cultural demoralizing ideas take root and expand.  Examples include “The Easter Bunny Hates You Video” which received three million views in a week, as well as videos of dancing stuffed monkeys.  Keen argues that these videos and ideas that are now pervading the Internet, are destroying the legitimacy of what he calls, the “collective intelligence”, or the sum wisdom of search engine and web users.  Essentially, at the core of the matter for Keen is that the internet is creating a generation in which truth and morality are extraneous terms.

In Keen’s TechCrunch TV site, the author conducts a series of interviews with numerous tech savvy individuals.  One such individual is Adam Lashinsky, author of “Inside Apple”.  During the interview in which Lashinsky discusses some of the inner most workings of Apple, he suggests that Apple’s corporate structure is suggestive of that of a terrorist cell in which members do not have a complete understanding of the “business plan” that is being professed by their company or cell.

This notion is connected to Keen’s book through the theme of a lack of understanding.  It seems to me that this corralling of what knowledge is granted to members within Apple is reflected in the users of the Internet as well.  Wikipedia is another example that Keen uses that suggests this continuous theme as well.  The fact that people are able alter any information on Wikipedia, even if its wrong information, suggests that this lack of concrete facts and truths is creating a sense of ignorance that is not only beginning to be represented in society, but which is already present in Apple’s hierarchy as well.

The Huffington Post is an online newspaper that is a part of a greater network of bloggers, journalists, and free lance writers.  The Post recently published an exclusive excerpt from Micah L. Sifry’s new book “WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency”.  The excerpt can be found here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/09/wikileaks-assange-transparency_n_820348.html.

Sifry, who is the cofounder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum as well as a consultant on “how political organizations, campaigns, non-profits and media entities can adapt to and thrive in a networked world”, wrote his book in order to examine the pertinent question of how the internet should/could be used to hold governments accountable for their actions.  He explores this notion through the lens of WikiLeaks, the online network that was and is being used to bring about what Sifry terms, an “Age of Transparency” in regards to open information sharing and whistle blowing; in essence, holding our own governments accountable for their actions.

Sifry makes an intriguing argument that regardless of if WikiLeaks continues to exist or not, the internet has allowed there to be a closer proximity in regards to information sharing between people than ever before.  This proximity suggests that transparency is the new norm and that governments attempting hide and conceal pertinent information from their public will no longer be allowed to do so.

I understand that this “Age of Transparency” has numerous cons, however I believe that the overall affect of this on governments, specifically on the policy and actions taken by those entities, will be beneficial in moving our society toward a more pure form of democracy.