Nightmareweaver

Nightmareweaver

As a future marketing professional I will be responsible for essentially making brands, companies, corporations and even people look good. So, if I’m essentially responsible for these companies image mine must perfectly refined. I need to look professional, responsible, creative and capable. These can all be achieved very easily through a well-designed website. It would convey that I understand fluent design, coding and the value of competent image. Not only that but it has samples of all of my different types of work available. So that future employers can see what my writing skills, my photography and my design skills. This portfolio could either make or break my career prospects as well as show the progress of my skills over time. I wouldn’t have to email an employer copies of what I’m capable of it’s all of instead of email after email.

This is similar to having a clean online presence on social media as well as any other thing on the internet. Which is something that I never considered until I came to college and my I really started sifting my social media. Anything that ever posted on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook that I went back to and questioned I deleted immediately. Even recently my social media posting was make or break for the rest of someone’s life. An old roommate of mine from community college, Elder was moving from Brazil to America and applying for citizenship. Our first semester together I filmed a video of him reading a metal song as if it was a poem and posted it to YouTube solely for the sake of being funny, and had completely forgotten about it. So, this video had very foul language and was very inappropriate and just a few weeks ago I received a Facebook message from him saying that his lawyer suggested that we take it down to increase his chances of citizenship. Generally, your social media posts won’t have an impact like this but can really make or great your chances of getting a job. It’s becoming commonplace for certain professional places will have you log into your accounts and show them your social media during the interview.

Now, I had the absolute worst time building this website. At this point in my life and this point of our society and my career choice I have no business saying, “I’m not very tech savvy” but it’s true. I had to rebuild my site repeatedly and I watched every tutorial and I YouTubed and message boarded and still ended up with this horrible excuse for a website. This is something that I could never show to a potential employer because I would just be nailing myself in my own coffin at this point. Coding might as well be Chinese to me because I just don’t get it. Leaving my attempts at making a working site were just pitiful. Much like my video project my intentions for this project were much bigger than what I ended up with. 

Express Lane: 140 or less

In its core, Twitter is just another social networking site. It’s mostly full of snapchat dog filter photos and more spam accounts than you could ever even imagine. Yet it has become more powerful than we could have ever imagined and all with only 140 characters or less which is strangely #impressive. Twitter can expose injustice, incite and document riots and of course sell hamburgers.

The internet is an overloaded tsunami of information that are all competing for your customer’s attention span. Suddenly your online presence is a course for concern, you have to utilize every social avenue in its correct form. Twitter is a great way to communicate with your customer base directly with tweets and retweets. The 140 or less character count causes your thoughts to have to be extremely concise and ends up with some very interesting tweets. Several tweets have been testing the waters on what interacting on twitter really means. Like any other marketing social media marketing means you have to appeal to your target audience and given that twitter is generally millennials most companies try to appeal to them. But given that the team behind the literal twitter handle are speaking for an entire company or corporation how much freedom you have when tweeting.

Like Wendy’s for example has a very interesting approach to social media and has been ‘roasting’ people absolutely ‘savagely’. The international fast food chain set out to make waves and get noticed online, almost nobody would have noticed if they just tweeted pictures of hamburgers with #freshneverfrozen. The team running the page seem to tweet at their leisure always with Wendy’s promotion as their main goal but the way they get there is very interesting. But what the most interesting is their responses to the tweets they get. It’s become an interesting twitter trend to tweet at @Wendy’s and ask them what to get at Burger King or McDonalds and they always have very interesting responses which is usually a witty response or a picture of trash can to symbolize a McDonalds. At first it seems very unprofessional and very risky yet it’s working. Wendy’s has gained legendary twitter status in a short time, just from these savage roastings.

However, Twitter can of course be utilized to do much more important things then sell hamburgers though. Twitter has been used by people to document important events all over the world giving us unfiltered unedited chunks of what is really happening in the world. When tragedy struck Boston during the Boston Bombing Twitter was the first to know about and got exclusive coverage until major news outlets covered. Within minutes of it happening people knew what had happened and family members knew who was safe. When Syria was under attack, its citizens used twitter to show us the realness of the tragedies that were happening. It was graphic and it was raw but it was real nothing was sugarcoated.

With Twitter being seemingly ubiquitous it’s one of the best ways to communicate with the masses. When incidents like the United Airlines incident footage of the attack was all over the internet. Twitter was used to directly spread information and footage of what happened and it had a direct influence on UA. Their stock immediately dropped an insane amount, before the days of the internet this incident would have never take off the way it did and would have most likely been swept right under the rug.

When 45 for some reason decided to respond to Syria’s chemical attacks with a hellfire of bombs which would kill innocent civilians it made rounds all over twitter. It’s impossible to not see 45 trending on twitter because that’s his favorite place to be. There was a direct feed of Americans mostly disagreeing with the attack but a few in support of, but also contact with people all over the world and how they responded to violence. It’s always helpful to get the opinion of the people outside of American viewpoint to see how vastly different we work as a country. Most importantly we got the viewpoint of Syrians and we got to hear and see that our actions have consequences, we could see the real human cost of our actions.

Contrastingly when Gov. Cuomo and Sen. Sanders passed their NYS free college bill we all got the inside scoop from twitter. People all over the web celebrated this victory for New York Students online. Yet while the bill is a great win there were some flaws and holes poked in it on twitter. In a day and age where it so easy to simply block people we don’t agree with, we really must make an attempt not to because we are really starting to devalue contrasting opinions, and that’s quite a misstep.

I chose to follow a diverse palate of ‘tweeters’ and chose Sen. Bernie Sanders, Arby’s and angry Bill O’Reilly prodigy Tomi Lahren. I chose sanders because during the primary election he was the one I believed in and social media was the way his political revolution spread. When major news outlets only focused on corporate shrills Trump and Hillary the bare minimum was shined on Senator Sanders so his momentum was made online and most of it was done by his voters and supporters. Whether it was groups being set up or fundraising events you were getting invites too it was all done online.

I followed Arby’s because they are doing a tremendous job with their social media marketing and have found tremendous success from it. As someone who someday hopes to run a social media campaign I found their bold attempt to appeal to a very specific audience as absolutely genius. Lastly, I followed Lahren as her political opinions and her show of blonde yelling never ceases to anger me. She’s controversial and she makes people mad and she knows that and she owns it.   

Twitter is a very unique experience because it is so limited and causes you to have to be so concise and precise at all times. It completely limits your writing style and really causes you to have to think outside the box. Writing a tweet that is informative and interesting at the same time is a surprisingly big feat to accomplish. I have a much bigger appreciation for the people who get paid to tweet all day long, it’s tough out there.

  

The Poster Child for Murphy's Law

Murphy’s Law states that “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” Always keep this in mind and do your best to prepare for it, which is of course much easier said than done.

The topic at hand was to create two videos both based on the same intentionally ambiguous topic. The first one touched on your personality and the second a collective effort of the group where your individual ideas were collected and displayed together under the same ambiguous umbrella. Murphy however paid the class a personal visit for this project at the expense of the students.

Initially the idea proposed and worked on for the first half of production of the video proved to be unsuitable given the resources we had. Instead of focusing on the idea given the group essentially wrote the pilot script for a television drama. While everyone in the group was vocally supportive of the original pitched pregnancy narrative it was simply out of reach with our limited production capabilities time and length constraints, the inability to speak throughout and a budget of exactly zero dollars and zero cents. While other groups were rounding home plate on their videos ours had to be brought back to the drawing table. This became the first of many interruptions the group faced in creating the final mastercut of the film “Time Flies”.

Ultimately after a weekend of group chatting the decision was made to create a video that was just an ambiguous representation of how something objective and undaunting such as the passage of time is so unique and subjective to every single person. Still the production capturing of these videos was a bit difficult. When filming the personal shot several homemade camera mounts had to be made in order to create the proper angles and steadiness that are needed with a production team of one single person who spent a great deal of that time onscreen. Many scenes had to be reshot over and over and over again as the phone being used to film would continuously fall over, run out of storage space or simply force close out of the camera during the middle of a shot. In every plan that was set up for creating this project found one or more ways to go haywire. After production finished it turned out those problems were only the tip of the iceberg based on the immense amount of technical problems we would then run into.

To identify a possible root of the problem was the fact that Apple’s interface on all their hardware is purposely built to be unique to their competitors like Microsoft. That’s objectively how they create their products their brand and even the way they market themselves. That said if someone has spent their life using Microsoft computers almost exclusively may find an iMac to be slightly difficult to navigate. If you’re Apple illiterate in any way, you will have to get your feet wet...before you really hit the ground running (or swimming).

It became a running theme that when somebody in the group was using iMovie single files or entire finished videos would simply vanish into thin air before transference was even thought of. This tragic phenomenon coupled with the unpredictable nature of the weather in Buffalo put post production way behind schedule. Entire class periods became dedicated to editing, searching and pulling our own hair out. Individual footage would present one minute only one computer and not another and then only the other and then nowhere. Fragmentation became a big problem as well when only bits and pieces of footage would be available for some reason. So the flash drive would be reinserted to get all of the footage put back in and once again only fragments were available.

Moving further into post music became an unseen catastrophe, as mentioned previously there was a set budget of zero dollars and zero cents. This meant that buying bargain bin songs off iTunes was out of the question. Majority of the group after lots of trial and error inexplicitly obtained their music from alternative sources that are still unknown. However almost an entire class period was devoted to first finding a suitable song and then to the obtaining of it.  1/3 of the group decided to skip that whole mess entirely and used songs solely found in the iMovie and GarageBand sound effect library which didn’t have any downloading involved and all the songs were Creative Commons royalty free music. To its credit the free sound effect library was rather extensive as easily held 200+ sounds and short song clips.   

The biggest technical issue faced in putting the groups full length together was that of transference. Getting our physical copies of the individual videos onto one computer to create one official mastercut. It’s still shrouded in mystery whether the issue was simply an iMovie issue or a flash drive issue but there was a communication that was lacking from one computer to the flash-drive to the mastercut computer. Even if the files were all on the master computer they were somehow inaccessible and thusly unusable. Interestingly this was not an issue of amateurization as even when a professional spent the better half of 11:00-12:50 trying to help transfer the files they were still inaccessible. A common occurrence was that the entire group’s iMovie Library and iMovie Theater would be put onto the flash-drive ready to be open in the master computer and the Library and Theater both would be registered as being there in iMovie and therefore accessible from the computer but were for some reason greyed out. The grey font of death rendered the footage unusable until this afternoon when everything went according to plan.

Ultimately video can be much more concise in conveying a message given the fact that it’s the combination of every form of art and expression that preceded it. With that in mind the topic of time was able to be explored much more thoroughly in this medium.

WikiHow and the age of electronic community information

Since it is under the Wiki umbrella WikiHow is similar to Wikipedia in the sense that it is an open-source information database per say. Anyone can write a WikiHow but not everyone will get published. The site has a team of polite gatekeepers who are ready and willing to change your information at a moment’s notice. It’s certainly not as easy as your middle school history teacher told you it was to just post on a wiki; you can’t just post “whatever you want”.

When penning your first WikiHow it’s imperative that you provide your information in an in-depth and accurate manner. You are teaching someone something that is entirely unique or uniquely done. You’re a teacher and the collective internet are your students. Which is a vital part of the internet. Having everyone connected of course has its disadvantages, but it allows for so much knowledge to flow freely through the internet. In the grand scheme of things this a new privilege. Users of the internet before Web 2.0 logged on and only saw a specific set of information. Information in Web 1.0 had gatekeepers to get through, the people creating the website were the only ones deciding what information went there. The sense of community we feel on the internet is because of that vital share of information. The internet is a ubiquitous equalizer now, allowing anyone access to not only to information from people all over the world, but the opportunity to partake in it.

WikiHow is a website designed for the general public so it has to be accessible and easy for anyone to navigate. That’s why its creation mode has your basic settings and advanced settings. The basic setting has all the boxes pre-made and allows you to just type directly into them. If you don’t know anything about coding basic may be the best fit for you. However if you do know coding or are willing to learn along the way the advanced editing is where you begin. This allows you to create the Wiki you want to have. Control over your page can certainly help you convey your message properly since this is your page and your information so it should be done your way. You also need to think about your audience, you know your topic very well but how well can you explain it to someone else who may be new to it?

For example my topic was about being able to post your political thoughts and ideas online while still being respectful of others. I chose this topic because as both an avid screen scroller and politically active person I saw a great deal of political posts all over my feeds. A vast majority of these resulted in pretty heated arguments where people would get very disrespectful with one another. This entire election season and especially after Trump’s unfortunate win we’ve seen this great divide in people. You’re very much on one side and the other side is everything wrong with the world. What I was trying to do with my WikiHow was try to ease some of that disconnect. I didn’t in any way want to end the political discussions because that is an integral part of our society. I just wanted to see people be able to discuss their views and engage in lively debates without having to be rude or degrading to others; which almost seems impossible these days.

For an abstract concept like mine alternative media was necessary to convey the message fully. For mine I had a picture for all eight steps. A majority of the photos I used were a combination of two photos collaged together. The photos showed someone posting on social media on one side it showed the wrong thing and the other displayed the right thing to do. I feel that the photos really pulled together my post allowing the reader to really get the full message across.

My experience directly with the WikiHow admins has been questionable at best. After submitting my how it was under review, which seemed normal. Yet somehow days later my article is under extreme revision. So somewhere along the way I seem to have made an error or series of errors that caused this to happen. It could have been poor coding on my part as before I started this class I had zero knowledge of coding. However the page seemed pretty well intact when I published it. The admins may just not like the way I worded things, or my particular way of explaining myself. They also may not have liked the photos I chose to use. The photos I used were not of super high quality as my editing skills are sub-par at best. Not that they were slapped together but given the quality and care given to most wikipages that have actual photographers or actual graphic designers working for them. In that regard I do like the unity that WikiHow can have given that most of their illustrations look the same as if they were done by the same artist. This just makes the website seem very well managed and legitimate. Whereas my article didn’t have the finesse and uniformity that others that I saw did have.

For example here is a Wiki page about a very basic topic how to walk a dog. For starters this article is organized well, it’s divided up into three sections. The first section the basics, then purchasing the proper equipment and finally making sure the walk is comfortable. This already organizes the article making it more user friendly which is of course very important. The article writes concise explanations for every step as not to confuse anyone and has illustrations to explain them visually. To further prove their point they even have citations directly in their article and utilize bulleted lists to make it easier to read. This is golden example of a well done WikiHow page, that maybe I should take inspiration from in creating my article.  

My WikiHow

How To Walk a Dog Example Wiki 

Photos pulled directly from my WikiHow page 

The Internet and You.

Our Greatest Marvel

The web right now is of course subjectively one of the greatest marvels of modern technology. It allows for the possibility of everyone in the world to be connected. So borders are meaningless, different countries, governments and leaders don’t have the authority they used to. Information is posted and updated in seconds flat. We can use the internet to create movements that won’t be televised or mentioned by the new American bourgeoisie. Movements like the women’s march, the black lives matter movement and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders.  Not only has that but the internet as a whole has an undefeated market share. We use the internet now to watch TV, movies, get a cab, do our shopping, learn new languages, order food, to do our homework and even call our friends. None of this stuff was dreamed about before 1999. So would I say that Web 2.0 is living up to its hype? Yes of course I would. While we’re technically in Web 3.0 right now and possibly Web 4.0 depending on who you ask Web 2.0 completely revolutionized the internet and then the world. Has this new user generated content had its problems? Of course it has, everyone knows about “Fake News”. I don’t mean my dad calling me about how “Will Smith died I’m reading it on the computer right now”. But fake news in the sense of overly biased reporting and stories that are thrown out of proportion to feed a specific narrative. Windshield reports like dangerous stories like Breitbart trying to literally discredit global warming by reporting that the ice caps are increasing while 3% increased 97% of them decreased. No matter who you supported in this election you eventually saw ridiculous stories online from websites that weren’t credible that you or your friends believed because you just really hated the other candidate(s). Obviously this is very dangerous. Overall I think we just need to be savvy internet users and we can reap the rewards of the Web. What I think will happen with internet in the future is that we will continue to see things like google advertising where we see things personalized for us. I believe that cybercrimes will stay on the rise and we’ll have to stay vigilant in keeping ourselves protected. We will keep seeing the internet being easier to access and making our gadgets less clunky.  We’ll have very personal experiences.

 The History

In the beginning there was Web 1.0 and it was different, exciting and in retrospect the opposite of all of that. Web 1.0 was for a lack of better terms just the novelization of dial up. You could access different websites and they had information on them but that was it, as the viewer you simply just read what it had to say.  Web 1.0 was known as the “read only” version of the internet. Of course in a time where that was all you knew, it’s still a pretty amazing feature to have.  Suddenly you didn’t have to search through the library encyclopedias to find the information you needed you could simply log onto the web and type it in. According to flat world business the e-Shopping-Cart was technically a part of Web 1.0. Essentially what companies wanted to do was give their customers an overview of the products that they had. They also wanted their products to be available to anyone who could access the internet. However with the limitations of Web1.0 this trend would come later. In January 1999 the words Web 2.0 were first used by Darcy DiNucci in the Fragmented Future. DiNucci said that “The Web we know now, which loads into abrowser window in essentially static screenfulls, is only an embryo of the Webto come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we arejust starting to see how that embryo might develop. The Web will be understoodnot as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the etherthrough which interactivity happens. It will appear on your computer screen, onyour TV set your car dashboard your cell phone hand-held game machines maybeeven your microwave oven.” The term Web 2.0 was popularized by Harvard Grad TimO’Reilly and Dale Dougherty in 2004 when it was used at their O'Reilly MediaWeb 2.0 Conference. However technically title was first used by DiNucci. Web 2.0 marks a point when websites made a drastic change to user generated content. This allows for interactive and social media sites to be created. Websites like Myspace, Facebook and even Wikipedia are products of Web 2.0. However it’s important to note that Web 2.0 isn’t a change in the internet quality or of the internet just the way websites are made and thusly accessed. The passing of information being transferred is ubiquitous to Web 2.0 the online community network was created. With Web 2.0 timing in 1999 most houses now have houses with computers and maybe if you’re lucky two. The internet became an equalizer and suddenly everyone had a voice and their voice meant the same.  

Because the Internet

 In 2017 social media is a seemingly dynamic ubiquitous tool, a preserver of facts, an equalizer in its own respect. For once in a history we have a social platform almost entirely of the hands of the people. Is it intrusive? Intrusive is a relative term but I imagine that most people including myself get irritated with the presence of social media. One of the most obvious hindrances of its existence is that it’s honestly just a major time waster. We all like to think that we’re very busy people with busy lives and that’s not wrong, but just take a second how much time you’ve spent solely on social media today alone. Scrolling, posting or watching it doesn’t matter you’ve been staring at your phone today. Now I want you to think about how much time you’ve spent on social media in the past week, month or year alone.

Suddenly it all catches up to you. Don’t get me wrong here I’m not here to lecture you about how millennials are selfish ego-driven snowflakes or some gen x speech just that we need to break the cycle a little bit.  For example let’s just say that you all together spend 2 hours a day on social media. Let’s practice restraint and cut down an hour off of that, congratulations you just got 365 hours a year to learn the guitar, write a book, go to the gym, paint or whatever you want it’s your time.

Does this mean that social media as a whole is bad? No, that’s a ridiculous assertion to make, it just needs to be utilized correctly. Social media is the voice of this generation whether we like it or not. Journalism is in no way safe from this trend, we don’t buy newspapers we read the news online, more specifically in (hopefully credible) sources on Facebook. In this past election for example, the phrase “the revolution will not be televised” made it’s come back. Only this has less to do with Gil Scott-Heron and more to do with Bernie Sanders. More often than not news coverage was Hillary vs. the rascally gang of interchangeable rich white guys, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson and the bare minimum coverage of Sanders.  Yet millions of people voted for him in the primaries, the only way many people knew about him was because of so many young people spreading his message online. Without social media he would have never even had a chance to winning the primaries. The future is polarizing in that regard, the power must be returned to the public and social media is the way to do that. If you have access to the internet there is no limit how big your influence can be and this trend will continue. The internet will no longer stay quiet in times of racism, sexism, trans-phobia, homophobia or islamophobia. There will always be a way to be heard. I see more people standing out, I see more people resisting.