Why I Heart My Media

I love the word “alone together”. It seems like the answer I’ve looking forward for a long time.

When our question today appeared on the slide, I found what I wrote for the first question might be a better answer to this one. It’s about a Chinese online movement to save the lost children, as well as their parents. The idea is to take a picture of any homeless or begging child you come across in the street and post it on Weibo (Chinese twitter) so that parents whose children are missing may see these pictures and find their children. Believe it or not, there are at least six missing children who have been found by their family in this way. What you did may just be sitting in front of your laptop and reposting the picture of a child you never knew, and you would probably forget about it several hours later, but you could possibly have saved the child and his or her family because your repost might be indispensable for the parents to finally see the picture.

This is an example of alone together having an ethical impact on the real world. But it’s what I’ve written about for the first question. So here I want to share with you another example of alone together having aesthetical impact on the real world. That the virtual choir conducted by Eric Whitacre. The basic idea is to collect videos from all over the world of people singing different part of a choir and remix them to be a real but virtue choir. Everyone was singing and recording alone, but together they made wonderful choir.

Everyone knows the simple truth that “you do not press the red button”. Otherwise an atomic bomb will be dropped from God-knows-where and blow us all up. Right?

Here’s a button that does the opposite: http://make-everything-ok.com/ . Press it!

Nowadays, thanks to the internet, there are many initiatives which allow us to participate in a project with people from all over the world. Due to all these initiatives we can create the illusion of being part of a group even if we are just clicking a button in our computer.

One example of this kind of projects is the webpage change.org. Through this online site anyone can start a petition and ask for signatures. The aim of this project is to raise the awareness about certain issues that worry people, and that is the reason why anyone can start his own petition.

In the webpage we can find many different types of petitions: from a protest against a corrupt politician who they want to resign to a petition from a mother who wants a cure for her child. For instance, in Spain, due to the economic and social crisis, this site is becoming very popular when talking about corruption in the government and cuts in the budgets for health care or educational purposes.

This webpage fits perfectly with the idea of “together alone”, because you can start something that can be really good for the whole society without having to meet other people, and you can participate in a good initiative from the solitude of your room.

Projects like this have proven to be successful in many occasions but, in my opinion, they are taking away the strength of the unity of humankind because, all together, we can create very strong social movements with great results.

My topic relates to Lauri’s topic of kansalaisaloite.fi and could be an example of it. One of the suggestions for new legislation in Finland in 2013 was I Will 2013 (Tahdon 2013), which was about equal marriage law concerning same-sex couples. The initiative gathered 166 851 signatures and was passed to the Finnish Parliament. I Will 2013 movement had a very active facebook campaign/support site, where people received information about how the initiative was progessing and where people could also post supportive messages/pictures. One of my friends, who is a graphic design student, made a comic, which was published in the facebook group. Currently the facebook group has 75 060 followers.

The hype created by the facebook group, among other things, at least for me, kept the issue relevant and reminded me of what was going on. The Facebook group combines the efforts of individual users and a greater goal. The pictures posted by the users were often ironic or funny.

You can find my friend’s comic below, it’s unfortunately in Finnish, but the main idea probably comes across. I Will 2013 –campaign has received criticism, for example, from religious groups and the comic has a take on this. Basically the priest in the pictures blesses everything from shopping malls, to dogs and even stoves. The caption in the last picture says “So you were maybe thinking that I could what?!”

There’s also a picture about the meme-guy mentioned during class, which was also posted on the facebook group.

 

At first I would like to mention that I believe the point of this task is not information can I retrieve about myself and how, rather than how much information can the others derive by me if start searching about me. So let’s rock and roll.
Somebody put something in my drink (Ramones are playing on the background) and I am waking up without remember anything about myself. I have two dogs, my id and a laptop, connected to the internet. But oops, I don’t remember anything about me. Definitely, somebody put something in my drink.
Luckily I remember the basics, such as how to use the internet and a searching engine. OK then, let’s see what happens if I write my name in Google. I have heard somewhere that Google results are different, depending on who is the one searching. It seems that I am not logged in anywhere, so this means that my results will be the sae as everyone else’s results.
My name in this ID is spelled in a strange language, so I should write it like that. According to my keyboard, this language is Greek. So let’s see…

Hmm it seems that I am a journalist. I was born in Australia and I graduated from University of Athens where apparently I studied media. This is the two first results that are coming from Mr. Google. They are from a project which was made in order to celebrate the Press Freedom Day and I have paticipated there. They have taken me an interview and according to the video (in which I am being interviewd) I am a technology editor. A small CV of mine is also there which says that I am a technology editor. Hmm so until now I know that I was born in Australia, studied in a university and I am currently a journalist. I also can hear my opinions about press and freedom of speach. The third result comes from pathfinder.gr, one of the top 50 website portals in Greece. Interesting, am I famous? I wonder. Well everyone should be in this age. I see. So my main job is to make video reviews about technology products. I can see more reviews there and my CV. Hmm, I learnt that I also like movies. Well, technology and film, not that bad, but nothing special I guess.
Then my name is also refered from another technology editor. In his presentation he mentions that I brought him angry birds drinks from Finland. Aha, that explains everything, including the pile of snow outside my house! I am from Greece bu I am currently living in Finland. I see. Scrolling down on Google I can see that I also belong to another technology editor team. No wonder now in the background is playing bad religion and “I love my computer”. I must be married to technology or something.
The next result before the end of the page is from ionio.gr, the website of the Univerity of Ionian islands in Greece, where I helped for the creation of its website.
On this search, my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages are not in the pages. Maybe I should search using latin characters. No Mr. Google, thank you for your suggestion on searching my name in Greek, but since you follow me, you should have known that I did I already did it 5 seconds ago. Anyway…

Yes here it is, first comes my twitter page, then LinkedIn, Adacemia.edu, Quorra and then Facebook.
Checking my twitter account there is this neronakos nickname. I guess it is my dog’s name. Twitter doesn’t allow to people who don’t have an account to check other people’s profiles, but who doesn’t have a Twitter account these days? Let’s see, if someone has a Twitter account what will he learn for me? That I live in Athens, I have two dogs as it seems for my background, I have participated in some courses using hashtags and that probably GreenPeace took over my account and make autotweets instead of me. Because I don’t feel so concerned about the environment after all. But who knows, I have amnesia after all. Judging from the images and photos that I have uploaded, I have some sense of humor. Let’s move to LinkedIn. I see, I can see my CV here. It seems that I am a well educated person since I am collecting masters and I was a good student. Well I guess I am kind of the show off person. Why someone write her grades otherwise? I am native Greek speaker and I can speak English fluently. And I have some videos from Pathfinder.gr. Well, afterall LinkedIn serves this purpose afterall.
So my public profile says that I was born in Australia, grew up in Greece and came to Finland. I am collecting masters and I can even see that I love anime and manga as well as my music tastes. It seems that I am also a humourous person since I have post a lot of funny stuff and I have left them seen in public. Since I am a technology editor, I doubt that I don’t know how to use the Facebook settings, so it means that I don’t care that much who is going to see these things! Well at least it seems I have no “Big brother is watching you” complex and probably I don’t believe that what I post could ever be responsible for not getting a job. From here I can see what one of my master thesis was about, since I asked people to participate in my survey: Usability in social media, the cases of Facebook and Google Plus!. Then it is certain, I definitely know how to use these privacy setting but I don’t care. Well why to? I wonder, since if someone wants to stalk me he can do it finding other ways. I don’t have my images public, but from those who are public I can see that I have a sense of humor since in my profile pic I am wearing a santa hat, a flower in my ears and I am wearing the chopsticks holder as a moustache. There is also one with me posing with a big hat and one with my dog. Some of my dogs photos are public as well.
Hmm how else can I continue in order to learn more? Oh, I can use this neronakos nickname. Maybe I am using it in other accounts as well, or maybe it is my nickname in some fora etc. Hmm it seems that people cannot learn that much about me, except that I like manga.
Well at least I learnt some stuff, like my educational background, when I was born etc and  my interests. And that I have a sense of humor. 

Laida Limniati

One of the most interesting cross-connetion between social media and Finnish democratic system has been the Kansalaisaloite.fi -internet-service (http://www.kansalaisaloite.fi), which gives people the possibility to participate in the democratic law making process by proposing new laws & regulations and changes in the old ones – via the Internet.

The service was launched in 2013 and the idea is that if one creates a law proposal that gathers more than 50 000 supporters in the service, that new proposition has to be discussed in the Parliament of Finland in the form of official early regulation discussion (engl. lähetekeskustelu). This means that it starts the official law proposal process in the Finnish parliament.

To this date there are only a few propositions that have reached the needed 50 000 supporters, but the ones that have, have been mainly pushed forward via different social networks such as Twitter or Facebook. In this case, these platforms have been enabling people to be home alone together in social media, and at the same time have a really concrete effect in our parliamentary process. Without social media and social promotions from friend to friend it would have been much harder to reach these kind of audiences all putting their virtual vote for the same cause.

Interistingly the latest successful law proposal was about the (mainly digital) copyright laws in Finland, which some internet activists thought to be too strict. The proposition gathered 51 974 “votes” via social media and it was passed to the process of Finnish Parliament on 26 h of November 2013. (https://www.kansalaisaloite.fi/fi/aloite/70)

I write my name to the empty search box, hit the search button, and get the ten most relevant hits that might uncover who I am.

I start browsing through the links, but for a short period of time they do not make any sense: the preview images and the links seem to contain two different persons instead of one: a singer-songwriter looking rockstar and this business-casual-nerdy looking thing. After a short and painful re-examination by the mirror I conclude being the latter one. HA! At least I have a rockstar name duplicate!

While browsing through the content links I find out that 5 out of 10 search hits still tell something about me. So at least I am not a total nobody. The hits I get are in order of relevance: Twitter profile, LinkedIn profile, Slideshare profile, some random corporate blog profile and an about.me profile. Short scans trough these links reveal the boring secret: I seem to be quite factual, to the point and corporate in my postings. I even describe myself as Managing Director of an IT company and a “software, media & business generalist”. What the hell does that suppose to mean? By browsing the links I get a feeling that work might be a big part of my life. BOOORING!!!

Unfortunately there is not a public Facebook link or profile to look more clues, but at least from the about.me page I can get a short glimpse of what may lie beneath this corporate image: the background of the page seems to have been made out of Instragram images and there are some faintly familial looking faces that appear in more than one image. Maybe I have friends after all! There is still some hope!

And that’s it! Quite a social network control freak I seem to be. Or maybe I am just shy.

I have to admit it, I’ve done this before. So, obviously there were not many surprising results of this experiment. The first ten most popular hits include links to my social media profiles which is of course understandable. Other hits lead to an online book shop (I’ve edited a book), to student organization websites (I’ve been in student politics) to different writing work I’ve done for blogs and papers (I am a writer at times) and to a story on YLE.fi from over three years ago (it was actually me who was interviewed there, so no worries: old and embarrassing, but still real and all).

The most interesting piece of information was a genealogy website where they had listed a person with the same name who used to live in the 1800th century in Western Finland during the years 1716-1767. Since I live in Finland which is a tiny linguistic region, there are not many people with the exact same name as me. According to Google another person with the same name founded a design glass company in the 1970s. No danger of getting us two mixed up, either.

I have thought quite a few times that there are two sides to having a more common or international name. In my case, everything I publish with my name is quite easily traced to me as a person since Finland is a small country and our lingual world is tiny. Thus also having a Finnish name which is even relatively rare, it means you might be easily tracked down just by your first and last names. Of course this is a good thing since there is quite a cohesive portrait of me on Google: if someone searches for me, they are on to right track and learn things about me that I am OK with sharing. There’s two sides to this and it can also make you anxious sometimes: it is hard to be incognito in a crowd when you have a distinct recognizable name.

(Jaakko U.)

Okay so not fair because I actually have had a chance to edit my search results before I did this task. I’ve deleted a site that I didn’t want to be found on my google search but obviously I didn’t come empty handed out of this assignment.

So now, who am I. Okay instantly I can find two pictures looking like me but that third one I wouldn’t say looks like me but I guess it could be me when I was young and before plastic surgery?! Searching for more images I can see that there is another Ida Sjöman living in Sweden.

I can find stuff about a crane company which I assume I work in. But this could also be a coincidence just because of my name. There is a facebook profile which I’m pretty sure is mine. Looks like I did BA in Kingston University and Masters degree in Helsinki, I currently live in Helsinki and I’m born 13th of June, year unknown. There’s a twitter account that has not much activity and an instagram account that is being used on a regular bases. From this instagram account I can find actually pretty much info about my family, boyfriend (I assume), my interests and what my house looks like (I assume that is my house). There is also a Vimeo account with couple of videos that don’t make any sense to me, maybe I’m into digital media!

Okay then there is an open portfolio and from there I can see my work history and education background as well. I can also find an email address. There’s also a linkedin profile that is under my name, there I can see that I have a few professional connections, great!

Funny finding is that I’m actually on IMDb! International movie database, haha maybe I’m an actress after all or some kind of celebrity? Clicking on that I can see that I’ve actually worked for a production company, information also on my online portfolio, and linkedin so no I’m not an actress although it would have been cool.

In the end I’m not that interesting to be honest. There’s noting off or nothing scandalous to find out about me. No drunken photos or anything that I could see affecting my future plans to become the next Barack Obama.

There is absolutely no good reason for why I posted this video, it simply popped up while I was doing my search! Have a great day all my digital friends!