Digital Artifact

As a final assignment for this course, I decided to create a humoristic digital artifact.
This artifact is about the “Wood wide web”, the fungi network that trees use to communicate with each other and to exchange nutrients.
We watched a video about it during one of the courses and it really inspired me, I thought it was an interesting parallel with the way humans communicate. When I decided to register to this course, I was not expecting to learn about parallels between human social networking and the way nature works. Although we have learned about many interesting concepts and theories during this class, this one really grabbed my attention and I thought it would allow me to be a little more creative.
I knew I wanted my final assignment to be about the Wood Wide Web but at first I didn’t really know in which way I wanted to present it.
Then I remembered that my first thought when I was watching the video was “Oh, this is just like Facebook!”
I then thought that creating satiric Facebook posts would be a great way to emphasize the similarities between the ways humans and trees communicate.
The process of creating the posts was quite fun and I really enjoyed doing it, I based the little scenarios on some of the facts that were stated in the video and then looked for profile pictures for each protagonist. My favorite part was to write the comment section under each post.
Overall, I am quite happy with the way my artifact turned out and I hope the other students will like it too!

https://prezi.com/v/bp5oo0fq-fks/

Dystopian future #cyberpsy

This week, we debated on the future of technology and how it could negatively impact society.

I think the thought that was shared the most is that technology is what you make of it and that our future relies on us and our intentions, and not on technology’s progress itself.

For example, even though research on Artificial Intelligence evolved a lot in the past decade, in the present day we are still incapable of building machines that can replicate the human mind and that are aware of their own existence, it is also very unlikely that we will be able to achieve it anytime soon. This means that currently, machines are “dumb” and only follow human orders unquestioningly.

Currently, what we need to worry about is our own intentions and plans for the future. Unfortunately, we can witness everyday how selfish people are, especially the powerful ones. This is what really concerns me, the people who can actually use their power and influence to affect the future positively are the same ones who only see their own selfish interests when making decisions.

I believe that if the future becomes very dark, technology will have a very small role to play in it and will merely be a tool for people to cause more harm and faster.

Online anonymity #cyberpsy

This week’s chapter focused on identity, it was really interesting to read.
The anonymity provided be the use of pseudonyms on social media and internet in general can be a two edged sword.
On the one hand, it can help people to express themselves freely on topics they would be too scared or shy to talk about in real life. It can even allow them to show different sides of their personality and to really express themselves without being afraid to be judged.
In that sense, anonymity is very freeing and can allow people to be part of different social circles than the ones they are used to in their everyday life.
This can also be useful to give their voices back to people who got it taken away from them, for example in some countries where freedom of speech is a very distant concept.
However, on the other hand this can also lead some people to abuse this anonymity to harass or threaten people online without fearing consequences. Sometimes people tend to forget that they are talking to actual human beings and can become very hurtful with their comments, oftentimes on purpose. This sense of anonymity can then become very harmful, especially since the ones who abuse it face little to no consequences for their actions. I think there is still a lot of work to do to hold people accountable for their actions online the same way they would be if they harassed or threatened people in the street.

Wood Wibe Web #cyberpsy

This week, we have watched a video about how trees secretly talk to each other thanks to a system nicknamed “The Wood Wide Web”

I had never heard of this concept before, and I think that this is an interesting parallel between the way nature works and the way humans develop as a society.

While I knew that to some extent everything is connected in nature and that every living organism depends on other ones for its survival, I had never thought of the fact that trees could actually communicate. In that sense, they are quite similar to us, while we are connected through multiple devices, they are connected through fungi.

This fungus is essential to their survival as it allows them to share useful resources that they could not get on their own, either thanks to other trees’ “altruism” or by stealing from others, for example orchids that “hack” the system and disturb its harmony.

Unfortunately, this resonates with current events in our society, this issue of people trying to gain profit instead of working towards a common goal as a society has existed just as long as society itself.

I think this is an issued that we definitely need to work on, we need to use our capacity to create big networks ( even more now with the internet) to reach harmony and share resources with those who need it most.

Rhizomatic Intelligence #cyberpsy

This week’s course was asynchronous, we had to read a comic story digital artifact explaining rhizomatic learning. From what I understand this word is used to describe an approach of learning that is holistic and considers that learning involves active participation in activities with a network of people, in short learning by experimenting as a group.

Everyone teaches everyone and there are no professor or defined curriculum.

I feel like nowadays more and more people are attracted to that type of learning, as people start to realize that when it comes to education there is no one size fits all.

I feel like there has been a growing interest in our society for different types of intelligence and learning disabilities or other challenges that children can face in the educational system as we know it today.

In that sense, rhizomatic learning could be a way to challenge the current educational system and could benefit to people who feel lost or anxious when they have to follow more conventional ways of learning. However, I feel like some kind of theoretical structure is still needed and that we should try and find a way to conciliate principles of rhizomatic learning with the methods currently used in our educational system.

Social Media Bubbles #cyberpsy

I enjoyed this course’s content as it allowed us to share our perspectives on social networks and I was not familiar with Manuel Castell’s work.

The way we communicate has definitely changed at a very rapid pace, but we do not always take the time to reflect on the impact of what we share everyday and on the center place all these social medias quickly took in our lives.

Social media allowed us to break the geographical distance barrier, we now have the ability to communicate with communities that can make us feel like home even if they are thousands of miles away.

However I feel like we still restrict ourselves a lot when we communicate on social media, I feel like we are not actually open to everyone and we tend to connect with people who share the same ideas as us and are rarely confronted to completely opposed ideologies.

Nowadays I feel like politics are heavily influenced by movements created thanks to social media, the Me Too or Black Lives Matter to name a few, it really empowered a lot of people who could not get their voices heard until now. In that sense, social media is very powerful and influencial.

But as I said, we are rarely confronted to people who share completely different values, this can be explained by the algorithms for example on Twitter, that are made in a way that you will only be offered content that matches with your current interests. This can lead to a quite biased view of the world and of the political climate, as it makes you believe that most people share your point of view.

I think this notion of social media bubbles should be explored more.

Tagged #cyberpsy

In this course we saw a short film named Tagged.

The short movie is set in a highschool, we are following a group of teenagers and how they end up getting bullied by other students.

I feel like I have seen a lot of this kind of educational movies in middle school and high school. However a lot of them do not feel realistic to me and this one is no exception. Also, I feel like they are trying to put the blame on social media when bullying has always been an issue, teenagers and even adults have always been cruel and mean to eachother. I guess the only thing that really changes with social media is on the one hand the fact that you can have a sense of anonymity and on the other hand that it can take way bigger proportions since it can be shared quickly worldwide.

I feel like putting the blame on social media prevents us from taking care of the problem at its root for example by educating kids and teenagers on empathy and on ways to deal with their negative emotions that do not rely on putting others down.

We were also asked to read the introduction of It’s complicated.

I appreciated the way it explained the difference of relationship with the internet and social media depending on our generation. It also made me realize that technology has deeply changed the way we behave as a society in a very short amount of time.

For example, it changed the way we connect with each other and create new relationships, especially for teenagers and young adults. This really is a double edged sword, we need to analyze the way and the reasons why we are using social media in order to get the best out of it and to avoid its dangers. We often take it as a given and I feel like this can be the root to many problems we can encounter on social media.

This introduction made me want to read the book, I appreciated the author’s insight on those issues.

An internet timeline #cyberpsy

This week we focused on the internet’s timeline, from ARPANET to the internet we know today.

It would be an understatement to say that our relationship with technology has changed since the first personal computers in 1981.

If merely twenty years ago our internet use was restricted to the family computer (for the few lucky ones), nowadays most people find it hard to spend even one day without using the internet.

From finding our way in a new city, to chatting with our family and friends or even ordering and paying for our groceries, we simply can’t escape it.

This can be seen as both a good and a bad thing: of course it makes our lives easier by creating more convenient ways to accomplish a plethora of daily tasks, but it is actually a double edged sword, as most of us would end up completely lost if something as small as a dead phone battery or a internet connection failure occurs.

Nowadays, some houses don’t even have light switches and are completely reliant on “Alexa” or “Google Home”.

It is hard for us to imagine how it could take even more space in our lives in the future and yet, technology won’t stop evolving anytime soon. Internet giants are constantly coming up with new ways to make it central to our lives.

Thinking about this future can really make your head spin. Personnally, I am starting to feel scared of how reliant we are on technologies and how much of our personal lives and informations we are willing to share for free with companies to gain a little more convenience in our lives.

First course #cyberpsy

This is my first blog post for the Psychology of Social Networking course. I am not sure what to write but I guess the most important is to try and I will improve over time.

What I learned:

In this course we learned that the brain re-wires itself constantly due to technology. I have already learned about brain plasticity in the past but I had never thought about how technology can influence it, this is an interesting new approach for me.

What I understood:

I understood that a holistic approach is crucial to understand the mechanisms at work in psychology of social networking.

What I would like to ask:

I don’ have any specific questions at the moment.

What I liked about this course:

I appreciated the fact that we could introduce ourselves and where we are coming from using Padlet, it really allowed us to see that we all come from completely different places and it is exciting to have such a multicultural class even though we are not that many.

I also liked when we were working in small groups, everyone shared interesting ideas on the subject, we all had different approaches that I wouldn’t have necessarily thought of on my own.

Finally, the fact that we have to create a blog for this course and update it each week is interesting and is different from the assignments we usually have. I haven’t written blog posts in over ten years so this will probably be interesting and also makes me a little nostalgic.