Localizing Low Pay with Global High Tech

Reflect on how is the ‘Fight for $15’ an issue of race, gender and class? Reflect on Goldstein’s lecture and address how it is an important aspect of understanding digital diversity.  What is your analysis on the automation of service/fast food labor? Use these links to get started:

This is a topic I am actually extremely passionate about and have personally done a bit of research on. My mother when she was 18 personally started a union at a Burger King in New York and was fired from her job because of it. She has always raised me to believe that people are what are important and that though corporations have the legal rights of a citizen, generally they support no ones best interest. Our society is breeding an attitude of “every man for himself” and everyone should do it on their own, and this is the kind of society that breeds a lack of compassion for our human race. I believe strongly that though this might be just a matter of the lower class at this point in time, it will trickle down and effect the middle class, all genders and races. 

Currently the only people benefiting from large corporations are the minority population, as in the CEO’s, CFO’s etc. Who is to decide who’s job is more important? Why is it just because employees are fast food workers that they are undeserving of a livable income? “Fast food is a $200 billion a year industry and retail is a $4.7 trillion industry, yet many service workers across the country earn minimum wage or just above it and are forced to rely on public assistance programs to provide for their families and get healthcare for their children” (Fight for 15).  I have been reading tweets being tweeted at @fightfor15 and it is interesting to see people who normally would have no voice to fight and petition, fighting for their families and children. I saw one post from a women saying “how can you say we make enough money when we are eating ramen for lunch and dinner?”. For those who think it is easy to rely on food stamps and government assistance, they are wrong. Food stamps generally supply coupons for food that has little dietary value. Though I personally have never experienced how hard it is, both of my parents growing up have dealt with the struggles of food stamps and eating subpar food.  

Maybe $15 dollars seems extreme to some, and maybe this campaign is asking for too much, but we have to start somewhere. I applaud people for taking such a big leap for human rights. According to the Fight for 15 website these are the current statistics.

We place so much more value on technical skills and technology. The more we continue to grow as a digital powerhouse, the more we disregard blue collar workers. Is our society going to become run entirely by computers?  I know this is all very extreme and I can’t talk because I am digital technology major but I just think we need to place more of an importance on people, and caring for people.

 

Making Cheap Stuff (April 2)

 

 

• Why do factory workers in foreign factories work under the current conditions?
• What role, if any, does gender play in the U.S.-overseas production chain?
• How are artifacts/products embedded with social and cultural meaning? How and why does a product become disposable?
• What are the economic and social impacts of globalization?

After watching the film “Mardi Gras Made in China”, I was surprised and deeply saddened by the conditions of the factory workers in China.  The film shows the glamorous side of Mardi Gras, the beads, the music, and the grand festivities. And then shows the side we as Americans don’t want to see, the labor conditions of the Chinese producing the beads. It was crazy to me that someone spends their entire life, 14 hours a day, dedicated to producing such a frivolous item such as beads. My personal assumptions about “Made in China” were similar to the actual conditions of the workers in this film. It is always i the back of my head how terrible these people’s lives are. Something that really struck me was how the workers are not allowed to leave the compound unless its a Sunday. They are confined to small rooms with many other workers to sleep, and are not allowed to socialize with the opposite sex unless it is a Sunday.  The workers are completely putting their lives on hold to work in a factory, they don’t build relationships, they are essentially prohibited from falling in love, and are isolated from friends and family. Lives are being destroyed just to make a stupid item like mardi gras beads, it really makes me sad.

Globalization has allowed us to connect to different countries around the world and create trade relationships which lowers our overall cost of production. It has a huge impact on our economy and the cost of manufactuing/ sales. If we are able to import our goods from a country that doesn’t regulate workers rights and pays them less, it is going to cost companies a whole lot less to sell those goods. This is the only reason goods are imported from places like China, Indonesia or India. In a capitalist economy, it all comes down to making the largest profit. Going off of my previous point, we choose places like China, Indonesia, and India to import our goods or manufacture them because they are willing to exploit their workers. Typically these are countries with impoverished citizens that often have no choice but to work these deplorable jobs because its the only way for them to support their families.

We continue to choose manufacturing and importing goods overseas because the customer is always looking for the best price, and if that means purchasing the same item overseas that one can get in the U.S for much cheaper, they are always going to pick the product from overseas. If consumers were willing to pay more to have products manufactured in the U.S, companies would stop outsourcing jobs.  Below is an illustration giving the primary reasons companies choose to outsource production:

Conditions will not improve even if workers demand it, they are manipulated and often promised more money without a pay increase. In the film we watched one of the workers spoke about a workers strike they started, after being on strike they were promised more money, but never received more. Unions are often if not always prohibited and workers are punished if they try to form one. I continued researching after watching the Mardi Gras film and found this film about toy production in China. This one really got to me because they are producing toys for Disney and other large companies. It is a long video but I found it very eye opening:

 

 

Embodiment: Bodies in Cyberspace

I really liked this weeks class lessons, I learned a lot about personal perceptions, how others perceive and want to be perceived. One overarching question this week is what is embodiment? What does it mean? Embodiment is an idea or a vision and something or someone that is the perfect example of that ideal. This directly correlates to many of the reading this week.

One of the questions we were asked on this quiz this week is why and how people are on the quest to find out “who am I?” and in a sense we try to answer this with our social media. The things we post, the sites we affiliate with who we are and how we try to convey who we are to the world.

A New Kind of Imperialism

After watching Office Tigers in class, I have discovered and learned facets of technology. Technology has created and spurred a whole new type of globalization. Allowing us to connect with people around the world. Though the benefits of our growing technological world seem endless, there are repercussions of our changing society.

It’s ironic that with the advancement of our culture, that we are taking steps backwards. An ever lingering part of the world includes social strata and the divide between social classes. Globalization has allowed us to work with people across the world. In the film Office Tigers, we take a look at a few American business men who decide to build and run a call center in India. Their jobs are to manage Indian employees, teach them American tendencies and to profit. I find it interesting some of the things they teach their employees. One part of the film that really stuck out to me was when they called a staff meeting at the office.  They were trying to get the employees pumped up and energized for the work day, and taught them the phrase “kick butt”. This part just clicked with me and kind of made me understand how they try and push American tendencies on them.  They are taught that if they work hard that eventually they can succeed and manage and run call centers as well.  This is Cultural Imperialism. Though it doesn’t seem as if employees are being directly exploited, they are. Cultural Imperialism can be defined as the creation and maintenance of an unequal relationship. In this case workers are hired in other countries for cheap, not even minimum wage, and are typically given no opportunity for pay raise or promotions. After reading Drori’s article about imperialism it is easy to see how the social structure is maintained. Opportunities are far more limited for the lower classes and it is easy to keep blue-colar workers in their statuses.

Because of maintained social structures, there has been controversy and discussions about if our world really is becoming “globalized”, in the sense that due to technology most are given fair playing ground. Or has the increase in technology led us to exploit other countries. Globalization has led to increasing communication and relationships across the globe but has led to disconnect with ones own culture and cultural imperialism. Technology has led to diaspora and scattered cultures everywhere. In order to keep up with the growing economy many are forced to find work outside their cultures.

Instead of creating a global community, we are creating global disconnect. There is an increase in cultural exploitation and imperialism, as well as broken communities. This is an ever growing problem that will continue to affect our world as long as technology continues to develop.

Digital Culture: What are we becoming?

Hey Guys! Here is the link to my pinterest board and all my thoughts on digital culture!

Enjoy!

 

My Filter Bubble

This week we discussed the political stakes and cultural implications of space, place and community online.  For this blog watch Eli Pariser’s TEDtalk and discuss how filter bubbles are shaping online interactions and space.  How is this different from a self selected filter bubble such as wearing headphones in a crowd? Why does Pariser tell us to “Beware!”? Beyond the steps he prescribes in his talk and on his website, what do you suggest can be done to ameliorate online filter bubbles? What can be said about “Virtual Campfires”? How does the pheromone of filter bubbles fit into the digital divide/gradations of inclusion discussion?

After watching Eli Pariser’s TEDtalk, I learned a lot about filter bubbles and how much we aren’t actually seeing on the internet. Filter bubbles basically take your cookies on your computer and based on passed websites you have gone to, your gender, you location and other factors, the internet then decides what information it is going to show you. Honestly I find filter bubbles to be terrifying, it is a way of preventing us from learning or seeing information based on what a computer thinks we should or should not see. When we Google search something, the results I will see are going to be much different than the results someone else will see. He gave the example of two people, one who liked to travel and who was relatively less involved in politics and then another man who was well education and versed. I forget what they typed into the search engine but the results were very different. The man who was well educated got information about politics and government while the other man got travel information. What if the man who got travel information really wanted the information the other man saw? I just don’t like the idea that a computer is choosing what we learn. This is what Pariser wants us to “Beware” of, the lack of information we are actually seeing is frightening.

The idea of filter bubbles is much different than wearing headphones in a crowd. Both are blocking out “noise” or “information” but with headphones it is self controlled and that person is choosing to omit certain information. The problem with filter bubbles is that many people are unaware they even exist. We aren’t choosing to filter our searches on the computer for the most part, especially if people are unaware they are being filtered. Though Pariser gives a thorough list of things we can do to prevent the internet from creating unwanted filter bubbles we can also do other things to prevent them. We can look for information in newspapers, on tv, and stay up to date on what is important and what we should know about. Choosing to find information from places like NPR provides us with relatively unbiased and unfiltered information. Giving out as little personal information as possible also can help with our filter bubbles. I choose to use multiple browsers to do searching on and I find that to be extremely helpful. Google Chrome will often give me different information than FireFox or Safari.  And I think most importantly the best thing you can do is know that filter bubbles are out there, be aware when searching the internet that a lot of the information out there you are not seeing.Try changing key words and searching multiple times to come up with different results, that usually can make a difference in what you find.

I really enjoyed this websites description of filter bubbles, I like the pictures and the images and it does a good job of presenting information about filter bubbles in an enjoyable way  http://dontbubble.us/

Blog 2: DTC 475 Unflattening our Discourses on Technology

For this prompt I chose to focus on the first option, breaking down the argument made by Clifford Nass about multitasking.  After reading the interview with Clifford Nass I have broken down his argument into a few main points. His first point is that people in modern day are constantly multitasking and doing an insane amount of it, “The top 25 percent of Stanford students are using four or more media at one time whenever they’re using media. So when they’re writing a paper, they’re also Facebooking, listening to music, texting, Twittering, et cetera. And that’s something that just couldn’t happen in previous generations even if we wanted it to” (Nass). This taken out of context could seem that Nass is in support of multitasking and that maybe it is pushing students to do better on tests and focus more. But what Nass is actually saying is that the more we multitask, the less we are actually accomplishing or taking in. This is the second point of his arguement, “…in our research, the people who say they’re the best at multitasking because they do it all the time. It’s a little like smoking, you know, saying, I smoke all the time, so smoking can’t be bad for me. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.” I am inclined to agree with Nass’s argument, sometimes when I study and try to listen to music or read and try to listen to music I can feel my brain going into sensory overload and retaining nothing. It becomes all just noise, and instead of focusing on just one sensory,  I choose to use none.

I just thought this was an interesting and somewhat funny definition of what multitasking is. Clearly humans are not meant to be multitasking because it is a job meant to be done by computers. We are not machines and we all have limits that make us incapable to multitask successfully.

Though I think we are not capable of multitasking when learning and processing information but I do think that we have the ability to multitask in social situations. We are multifaceted and dimensional, containing different traits that make us adaptable in all kinds of social situations. We have the capability to change our emotions to respond with how someone else is acting. As far as gender roles and race goes, I think we are not defined simply by one aspect of our human personality. I constantly change my reactions based on who I am talking to and how I think they will respond. I would never talk to my grandma the way I would talk to my best friend per say. I change my word choice, my tone, and my sense of humor to adapt more to hers and vice versa.

I find the topic of multitasking very interesting. Why do people think they are so good at multitasking? and how is it really a skill if you do it all the time but no one is actually capable of processing information in that way. A better skill to have is being able to multitask in social settings and when communicating with people. The only way I believe we are capable of multitasking is with our emotions and our reactions with our own kind.

Blog 1: DTC 475 Why Study the Internet?

After reading Kristin Foot’s article “Web Sphere Analysis and Cybercultural Studies” I have made connections about web spheres to social media and how we can incorporate analysis of social media through web spheres. I found Foot’s article to be incredibly insightful and eye opening into understanding how web spheres work. Web spheres are “a collection of dynamically defined digital resources spanning multiple websites deemed relevant or related to a central theme or object, in the sense of gegestand (a focal point)” (1, Foot). When breaking down this definition of a web sphere it is easy to see how one could create a web sphere for social media. As it is, twitter invented a breakthrough in web sphere with the hashtag. This allows users to communicate a mutual idea and create a page of these ideas. Users are able to create a hash tag and imbed videos, pictures, or links about a certain idea.

In my opinion, social media is set up for web sphere success in its very nature because it connects so many users to different types of media. With that being said, there are aspects of social media that would have to be tailored specifically for the web sphere “a web sphere is boundable by time and object orientation and is sensitive to developmental changes within which social, political, and cultural relations can be analyzed in a variety of ways” (2). Developmental changes within social relations would make web spheres through social networking sites happen so frequently and on multiple levels. We would need a way of sorting data and be able to monitor only information relevant to a web sphere. We also need a way of recording and storing the information collected. Without the ability to reproduce the information created, it gets lost in the web, there is simply so much information being created, old information becomes untraceable and lost. Based on how 9-11 was analyzed, we can create similar models for events in social media. They monitored 9-11 in terms of different social groups, who was writing, posting and recording what. By breaking up information by groups we are able to answer questions without actually asking them.

What I hypothesize and purpose is the idea of sorting information by age groups and by regions in social media. For example, if we just poll people in Seattle about the upcoming Super bowl team, we will get an overwhelming amount of responses in favor of the Seahawks. This information though true, would not be an accurate depiction of the whole country. By breaking down based on region, age etc we will then be able to see the full picture about an idea or concept. Finally we need a way of storing this information so it is not lost in the sphere; well twitter has already started doing that. If we type in a certain hash tag, assuming no one has deleted their posts, we will be able to see a full history including news links and photographs that will never be lost.

The results of my usabilty test

The following questions were given during my usability test. These are the results:

1. When entering the page is it clear what the purpose of my website is?

Jenna- Yes! Portfolio for design

Julie- yes it is clearly labeled

Brandon- yes it is fairly clear but maybe make design portfolio in a larger font

2. Are the headings clearly labeled?

Jenna- Yes easy to tell what each of the pages are for

Julie-Yes

Brandon- Yes

3. is font size legible and the appropriate size?

Jenna- Yes, easy to read but not over bearing

Julie-Yes

Brandon-Yes

4. Are heading fonts legible and an appropriate size?

Jenna-Yes

Julie-Yes

Brandon-Yes

5. How do you feel about the background?

Jenna- Love! the texture and the background

Julie- Background is good but maybe change the menu bar when highlighted to black instead of grey, it is a little hard to read.

Brandon- Good! But maybe add a low opacity box behind the text to give it more contrast since the background is so bright.

6. Is the alignment of the text okay?

Jenna- Yes

Julie- Yes

Brandon-Yes

7. Are the pictures related to the website’s purpose?

Jenna- Yes, help enforce your view as a designer

Julie- Yes relate-able because they show the work you have already done for design

Brandon- Gallery seems a little disjointed

8. Any suggestions for improvement?

Jenna- Maybe add a resume?

Julie- Add a photo pf you, and add other work besides just the photos you have taken. Also maybe include the work you want to do later on.

Brandon- Overall, good but better connect the pictures to the sites concept

My updated Portfolio

Here’s the link to my new site!

http://jlw092.wix.com/jessicawalsh