Slut Shaming on Social Media

Earlier this year a 16-year-old girl and "Rookie Reporter" for National Public Radio's website wrote an article about slut shaming that happens on social networking sites. Her main purpose of writing the article was to show that social media can be used in a negative way and that more people have access to these negative posts. More specifically, she is referring to explicit photos and videos being posted to Facebook. She compared it to a modern day Scarlet Letter, saying, "Teenagers aren't necessarily more cruel than they were in the 1600's. It's just that now when we chastise each other, everybody who has access to the internet can see it."

The full article can be found here.

Social Networking Usage Broken Down

The graph below shows a timeline of the percentage of internet users who use social networking sites broken down by age group.

The chart below shows the percentage of internet users who use social networking sites broken down by multiple axes of difference such as age, race, and socioeconomic class.

Gender Balance on Social Networking Sites

The following is a graph of social media sites and which gender tends to dominate in terms of monthly visits to each site. It is easy to see that sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest are dominated by girls in comparison to guys. On the contrary, guys tend to rule sites like YouTube and Google+. Overall, the female population makes approximately 99 million more monthly visits to social media sites than their counterparts.

Feminist revitalization in social media

      This article is an article that is bringing up the idea of a revitalization in feminists (especially in Australia) and explores how they interact online through social media sites. This article pertains not only to our subject of the popularity of social media in todays world but also touches on our class as a whole when referring to feminism. This article shows us that different social media websites like twitter and Facebook are making ways of trying to stop harassment especially to women. I think that this can give us another dynamic of the social media world that you wouldn't think of right away. It is showing us how feminism is having success and struggles in different aspects of social media. It shows us how feminism is still alive and growing through social media just like everything else is growing from social media.

Destroying the joint and dying of shame? New research explores feminist revitalisation in social media and beyond

23 August 2013

A new paper in Geographic Research examines the revitalisation of interest in feminist thought in Australia and around the world, in part through Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech and the ‘Destroy the Joint’ Facebook campaign, inspired by Alan Jones. Through these examples and more, the paper explores the possibility of studying the ‘geography’ of feminist thought on the internet.

Authors Jessica McLean (Macquarie University) and Sophia Maalsen (University of Sydney) have identified that since mid-2012, a feminist revitalisation in Australia has emerged, targeting gender inequality in myriad spaces – both political and public.

“It’s a challenging task to ‘map’ and record this revitalisation,” says McLean, “as the different spaces in new media are constantly changing through their dynamic networks. It is, nevertheless, a task worth doing.”

Destroy the Joint (DTJ) is one focal point of this reinvigorated movement within Australia, a collaborative campaign born on Twitter and growing most sizably on Facebook.   Currently there are nearly 34,000 Facebook likes for this group, and about 8,500 Twitter followers.  The Destroy the Joint campaign grew from tweets by Jane Caro and Jill Tomlinson, lampooning Alan Jones’ criticism that women are destroying the joint in public office around Australia – naming the then Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Christina Nixon and Lord Mayor of Sydney Clover Moore as chief antagonists.

“In analysing the apparent feminist revitalisation over the past year,” said Maalsen, “we found that a multitude of micro-campaigns under the DTJ umbrella have achieved substantive success, in comparison to other campaigns like Kony 2012 – which raised substantial funds but offered limited returns.”

McLean and Maalsen refer to examples of DTJ success stories such as the securing of free access to private phone numbers from Telstra for domestic violence survivors and, most significantly, the withdrawal of advertising support for Alan Jones’ show on commercial radio.

McLean and Maalsen also identify how modern online feminism faces a paradox of continuing to develop and be remade in social media through Facebook and Twitter’s introduction of new regulations to reduce sexist behaviours on their sites.

Feminist action has targeted trolling, and exploitative and violent imagery against women, achieving some success, evident in Facebook’s change to its policies to disallow gender-based hate speech and Twitter’s introduction across all platforms of the report abuse button.

“Indeed, just as such sites can offer a space to enact feminism, they can also be used to perpetuate sexism and misogyny as the recent twitter rape and bomb threats against female journalists, an MP and a feminist campaigner in the UK has demonstrated,” says McLean.

“Gender inequality requires action on diverse fronts, and it is not the only axis of difference that can be renegotiated in cyberspace.  To borrow words spoken by Julia Gillard in her final speech as Prime Minister of Australia, gender ‘doesn’t explain everything, it doesn’t explain nothing, it explains some things,” says McLean.

McLean, J. and Maalsen, S. 2013, ‘Destroying the Joint and Dying of Shame? A geography of revitalised feminism in social media and beyond’, Geographical Research.

Read more: http://mq.edu.au/newsroom/2013/08/23/destroying-the-joint-and-dying-of-shame-new-research-explores-feminist-revitalisation-in-social-media-and-beyond/#ixzz2yvKQwtls

In a Queens School, an Early Start on Preparing ‘Responsible Digital Citizens’

Photo

This is an article from the New York Times about how one teacher in the Bronx is going all out with her teaching of proper use of social media to her fifth graders. In this article there are arguments of both sides of whether what she is doing is right or not. In this day in age, it is understandable to have a child be wary of social media sites because our whole world revolves around the internet. This shows us that it is becoming normal to have people teaching proper internet techniques and the different sides to how people react to kids learning about it. Like we talked about in class during our media section, media can be a large figure in shaping your identity. I think that I can see where she is coming from and since social media is a huge thing in our society these kids can only benefit from what the she is teaching them about social medias. 

 

Janet Elias, a technology teacher, explaining Twitter to fifth graders at P.S. 46 in Queens.

Credit

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Continue reading the main story

Janet Elias refers to her students as digital natives, children who have never known a world without computers. She teaches them to search the Internet and create slide-show presentations, and this year she has also added a theme on social media: its applications, its effect on real-world events and the importance of using it safely.

Ms. Elias’s classes at Public School 46 in Bayside, Queens, are not the only ones that touch on social media, but a spokesman for the city’s Education Department said her curriculum was believed to be more complex, involving more programs and drawing on greater student involvement.

Her classroom is filled with arts and crafts celebrating social media. A cutout of a blue bird bears the message, “follow me.” One wall is devoted to the “#trending hashtag of the week.”

“I want to move forward from what we’ve been doing,” she announced recently to fifth graders in her classroom. “I know we’ve all been hashtagging.” She held up a coffee cup and pointed to the message printed on it.

“Can you read that, kids?” The students kneeling before her started nodding.

She read it aloud: “#mydunkin’ ” The children echoed her.

“That’s right!” she replied. “So if I had wanted to, on my way to work this morning, I could have said that I had the best coffee ever, by using this hashtag.”

She was lecturing about Twitter, and the symbol that its users can employ to categorize their tweets, which must be 140 or fewer characters.

All of the school’s classes, from grades one through five, meet with Ms. Elias, the technology teacher, once a week to learn about sites and apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. In the recent class, she talked about the way social media had played a part in President Obama’s campaign and had become a primary source for news during the Winter Olympics, instantly informing people about stray dogs in Sochi, Russia, and a light malfunction in the opening ceremony.

Homework can include composing a tweet in the voice of a book character or successfully posting something to Edmodo, a form of social media, used in classrooms, that Ms. Elias describes as “Facebook with training wheels.” Soon, Ms. Elias said, she would take students outside to take photographs of budding leaves for posting on the school’s Instagram account.

The class presents a possible glimpse into the future, when such lessons may become as commonplace as sex education. It also raises questions — as some parents have pondered — about the appropriate age to introduce a child’s supple mind to the instantaneous universe of social media.

“I don’t approve of social media with kids this young,” said Hong Buist, who has a child in fifth grade. “It’s not necessary.” She suggested that seventh or eighth grade was more appropriate.

“I think they need the skills,” she said, “but I’m not sure they need them that early on.”

Marsha Goldberg, the school’s principal, said she was aware of Ms. Elias’s position in relatively uncharted territory. Other schools may teach social media, she said. “But I don’t think people are doing it to the extent she is. I think she’s on the forefront.” Ms. Goldberg stressed her faith in Ms. Elias’s judgment, but added: “I’m not a hundred percent in favor but I’m also realistic to know it’s there, and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

The city’s Education Department supports the classes, calling them in a statement “a great step forward in helping students acquire the skills and knowledge they need to become responsible digital citizens.”

Ms. Elias said that in her lessons, she emphasizes online safety. “We want them to have a good digital footprint, and we’re starting them young,” she said.

The number 13 looms large in her teaching. “Before you know it, they’re going to be 13, and they’re going to reach that social media milestone,” she said. “They’re going to be able to sign up for Facebook.”

Kathryn Starace-Saban, who has children in second and fifth grades, said the guidance was important. “Like it or not, it’s going to be part of their daily lives,” she said. “I kind of compare it to sex ed or drug ed. To me it’s the same concept: Get the correct information out there.”

In the classroom, Ms. Elias asked the students to compose a Twitter post, as practice, making a suggestion to the principal. The boys and girls sat at computer stations and started moving their fingers across the monitor screens, counting the length of their messages. There were cries of, “I got a ‘Twoosh,’ ” referring to Ms. Elias’s term for a tweet of 140 characters exactly.

George Iskander, 10, was satisfied with his recommendation that students have fewer tests. “I like social media,” he said. “Without social media, of course, times would be harder. Now we can learn everything about the world. Back then you had to listen more

Link here http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/11/nyregion/in-a-queens-school-an-early-start-on-preparing-responsible-digital-citizens.html?ref=socialmedia

Social Media Revolution

"Social Media Revolution"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8&feature=player_embedded#at=33

This video has various facts and statistics about how social media is forming and changing our world. It basically opens your eyes to the idea that almost every person in the world has some sort of social media page. One of the statistics is that "Facebook added 100 million users in over 9 months" which is a pretty shocking realization that a huge amount of people are using the Internet for social media profiles. Another shocking fact is “Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more twitter followers than the population of Ireland, Norway and Panama. That is very overwhelming knowing that there are more people reading a persons tweets than there are actual people in those places. This connects to what Nate has brought up in his gallery finding about the world map of social networks. It is just another dynamic of how many people actually use social media sites and how they are used to create and maintain many friendships online.

Age, Not Gender, Drives Social Media

This article shows the difference in types of social media used and which types are used more often then not with the two genders and the different age groups. Social medias are very fast growing sites online that are becoming more and more about who has more friends or followers and less about staying in touch with each other over time. Many of the younger generations of kids online are spending more time on social media networks than older generations spend on work related things such as emails. Social media networks are becoming increasingly more used by people all over the world and by people of all ages. 

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Facebook enjoys broad adoption among users of all age groups and genders, other social media sites do not have such ubiquitous appeal, according to a survey from Netpop Research.
Facebook, in other words, is not the norm, Netpop found.
For example, Facebook's penetration among socially networked adults in the US is 90%, and the site enjoys roughly the same penetration among socially networked women age 18-34 (92%) and age 35+ (92%).
By contrast, YouTube's penetration among socially networked adults is 56%, but the video sharing site is far more popular among younger, social women (66%) and men (83%).

The use of Wikipedia and Twitter is also higher among younger, socially networked adults:

• 65% of men and 48% of women age 18-34 use Wikipedia, compared with 40% of men and 28% of women age 35+.
• 34% of young men and 24% of young women (24%) use Twitter, compared with 17% of men and 10% of women age 35+.

Below, additional findings from the report titled "Social Media Madness," by Netpop Research.
Younger Users Have Larger Networks of Friends
On average, younger Facebook users have two times more friends than older users, but there's virtually no difference between men and women: Younger women have roughly the same number of Facebook friends as younger men (305 vs. 304).


Similarly, older men and women (surprisingly) share nearly equal numbers of friends (139 vs. 133).
Allocation of Time Online Varies by Age
Some 146.5 million people in the US, or 79% of online adults, now use social networks, according to the report.
Among all socially networked adults, social media now accounts for 18% of time spent online, after entertainment (22%) and email (27%). However, those levels vary by age:

• Young social networkers age 18-24 spend the most (25%) of their time online, and only 17% of their time with email.
• Older social networkers age 35-44 spend 17% their time online with social networks, compared with 26% of their time with email.

Younger users also spend more time using social networks than older users.
For example, those age 18-24 spend twice as much time as those age 35-44 with social media (1 hour and 50 minutes vs. 54 minutes, per weekday).
Motivations for Using Social Media
A breakdown by age and gender accentuates the interest among older users, particularly women, in using social media to stay connected with others:

• 42% of women use social media to stay-in-touch, compared with 34% of women age 18-34. 
• Younger users (particularly men) use social media for a wider variety of reasons, particularly entertainment (28%).
• Younger women spend the least amount of time (among the four age groups) using social media to find information (16%).