The first thing you do when you log on to this site and create an account is you tell the website what are your most distracting activities, and what are your top online activities. This helps the site to categorize how distracted you are while you’re online. Personally, I listed social media, shopping and entertainment as my most distracting online activities.

As can be seen above, I have been relatively productive this Monday. Blue signifies productive acitivies and red is distracting. Partly, I feel like the reason I am being shown to be really ptoductive because it is a monday and also it is an extremely busy time in the semester with lots of projectes and assignments due; and in this day and age we use alot of technology to do both indiviual and group work using things such as google drive etc.

Here is a more specific breakdown of my top activities; my three most time consuming producte adcitivies are google form, rescue time (lol) and google drive. In terms of distracting activities messaging, calendar and IINA (best video player on mac definitely check it out) are my top three.

I think that this app is a good way to keep track of your daily internet usage as well as a cool tool to say more statistics about your life as well as potentially working towards breaking some bad habits of browsing online.

I decided to try out tweet deck and keep track of a current trending event. The event I chose was the new article national geographic in which they acknowledge their past coverage as racist and harmful. Becasue the event is currently trending I did not have to specify my search to “natioanl geographic racist” or anything like that, “national geographic” alone was enough. Keeping track of the unfolding of the event. Alot of the information that came through were news sites posting articles about national geographic’s analysis. There are ways to filter out tweets so that you only see tweets with a certain amount of activity under them, this can be a way of only seeing tweets that have a certain amout of validity due to the support it has received from other users. However, on the internet there are always people offering out their opinion, good or bad. One of the things I noticed was that aside from people coming out to support national geographic’s decision to hold themselves accountable, there were also people who were against their decision. Saying that they were giving in to PC culture and being brainwashed.

This article and self examination comes with National Geographic’s first female and first jewish editor since its creation in 1888. That and today’s social climate of discussing social and race issues definitely prompted this as well.

All in all tweet deck gave me a good overall perspective in terms of analysis as well as opinions different people had on the subject.

One faithful day in 2005 a man named Matt Furie created a comic series called “Boy’s Club” about teenage monsters, and one of those monsters was named pepe the frog. Nobody paid much attention to this comic until 2008 when a comic strip was shown of pepe pulling down his pants all the way down to urinate and his word bubble said “feels good man” and from that day a meme was born. In 2009, the first remixed pepe appeared where he says “feels good man” instead of “feels bad man”. In the following years came the golden age of pepe memes. Countless remixes and evoltions of pepe appeared. Following is a chart of pepe’s evolution. Remixes of this meme included jpeg still images as well as gif versions of pepe.

At about 2014 pepe hit the mainstream, celebrities such as Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj both hae been documented using pepe in their social media accounts. Here and Here . Nicki Minaj’s use of a pepe meme is a clear descendent of the Sad pepe sub meme.

Something else that emerged around this time was the practice of collecting “rare pepes”. Meaning, people would make their own pepes, sometimes in the image of historical figures, pop culture icons, and situational pepes. People would also watermark their pepes so they won’t be stolen and at times it was just a comeptition to make the weirdest pepe possible even if it makes no sense. Sometimes people even posted their own rare pepe designs for sale on ebay. Following are some examples.

The QR code leads you to a google search for “DISTRIBUTION IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED”. The arabic in the meme has a typo in the top word طرفك as you can see the dot on the ف is missing in the third letter from the right; the word means “your party”. It is unclear what the original creator of the meme was trying to say وجهي means “your face”. I suggest you to click into the source and read the thread of people investigating the meaning behind this meme. This is just one of many examples of rare pepes.

The next stage of pepes evolution takes a dark turn. He is appropriated by white nationalists and neo nazis during the 2016 American Presidential Election. In 2015, a photo of smug pepe (see evolution of pepe chart) drawn in the like of Donald Trump was posted to 4chan. Eventually this made it to the official twitter page of Donald Trump. This is when the entire alt-right movement adopted pepe as their personal mascot.

Pepe was drawn into confederate flags as well as on to the likes of hitler and KKK members and comics with burning crosses and the nazi swastika. In September of 2016, pepe was declared a symbol of hate by the anti-defamation league.

In October of 2016, Matt Furie, the original creator of pepe posted this on his blog.

On the same day TIME magazine published an op-ed by Matt Furie in which he criticizes the use of pepe the frog by the alt-right. This can be read here.

In May of 2017, the death of pepe. A comic by Furie was posted in which he depicts pepe in a open casket at his funeral. RIP 2005–2017

Feel free to contact me about any more information regarding pepe the frog, may he rest in peace.

Facebook has many security settings that are extremely important to protect your private infromation from your friends and non friends alike. Once you join facebook look to the top right corner of your screen and look for this arrow.

In the tab that pops out you’ll hit settings. After the page loads head over to the top left of the screen and choose “Security and Login”. On this page will be your first layer of security and privacy. It gives you several options to protect your account including the ability for you to nominate friends who can help you access your account if you get locked out. It also shows which devices are logged in under this account and where they were last active. This can be useful to make sure you haven’t been hacked. Two factor authentication is also a highly recommended security feature although you can tell that I don’t have it set up for my account.

Going back to the tab on the top left of the screen you should hit the privacy tab. To me this is the second most section when thinking about facebook privacy and security.

Here you can customize thing such as who gets to see your posts, who can tag you in posts, who can see your friends list and different methods in which people can find you. Everyone has different preferences, if you’re more of a privaate person you would set everything to the most private levels ie:people cant look you up via email or phone number and nobody can send you friend requests or see your friends list. etc. I personally require facebook posts that friends have tagged me in to go through review by me and i have over 200 photos waiting to be reviewed.

Under the privacy tab there is an even more detailed tab about tagging called “timeline and tagging settings”

As you can see you have alot of control over if people can even post on your wall and who can see the posts on your wall etc.

Last but not least, the block function. This section is pretty self explanatory, it allows you to block users, messages from people, even app invites.

These are the basic rules you need to follow when on facebook.

To give a simple definition of “the cloud” or cloud computing: it is to use a number of servers hosted online to store, manage, and process information instead of a local server; Thus allowing access to the same information from a number of devices.

Using cloud storage services brings alot of conveniences to our lives, whether it be for work, for sharing family photos or a million other possibilities it makes sharing files convenient and cheap! Some of the biggest cloud sharing services include: google drive, dropbox, Onedrive, and iCloud. These services provide free storage from 2 to 15 gigs each depending on the service.

Cloud computing helps us in many ways, it is a cheaper way for us to store files off our harddrives as well as provide synchronized access to all that data across multiple devices and platforms. The only necessary component to accessing all this information is that you have a stable internet connection. The downside to this however, is that if you lose an internet connection or a server the cloud site is using fails, then you lose access to your files. If you are using a non secure internet connection, it also allows people to monitor your connection and what you are doing which could be a cyber security concern. There are also many instances of these cloud computing sites have their security compromised, iCloud, dropbox both having major scandals over the last few years.

The alternative to Cloud Computing is on-site servers. This comes with positives and negatives. The positives are that it is more secure because it is on-site, your connectivity to your files won’t be cut off if the internet goes down. But to have on-site networks you have to have certain infrastructures in your office or home or what have you. It costs money to purchase enough storage space especially if you’re storing extremely large amount of files and data.

It is a well known fact that nobody likes reading the terms and conditions, which may seem harmless enough but is there anything more behind it? Turns out, there are many factors that go into terms and conditions. Corporations don’t want people to read their terms and conditions and they execute this vision with a variety of methods.

1 + 2. POOR READABILITY IS THE FIRST OF THE MAIN METHODS USED TO ACHIEVE THE GOAL OF NOBODY READING THEIR TERMS AND CONDITIONS. CONSTANTLY USING UPPER CASE WORDS IS EXTREMELY UNCOMFORTABLE TO THE EYE AND LOWERS READABILITY. SOMETHING ELSE THAT LOWER THE READABILITY OF LARGE TEXTS IS UNNECESSARILY COMPLICATED AND REPETITIVE LANGUAGE. ON TOP OF THAT BAD FORMATTING OF PARAGRAPHS ALSO MAKE THINGS DIFFICULT.

3. Inconsistent font use and text size also deters people from actually going through with reading.

I know that realistically, nobody is actually going to read all the terms and conditions that gets thrown in their face, so the good people at terms of service; didn’t read are helping us out with that. They have ratings and detailed summaries of what each website does and doest not do. ie: do they save your information aka your “digital fingerprint”, whether or not they track your movements while not on their site (facebook and amazon both do this). They even tell you which websites retain ownership over the material you post (500 px, facebook) or which sites don’t allow you to delete your account (Wordpress, Skype, Evernote). These are all things we are unknowingly agreeing to and the corporations don’t want you to know! In conclusion, it’s always best to know what you’re agreeing to in this world where we cannot operate without agreeing to terms and conditions.

1. Facebook

Facebook, arguably the most popular social media site as well as one of the oldest still being used today. Some common uses of facebook today include, seeing the news. Just viewing the news there are several methods being used on facebook. The first kind is the more traditional route in which a news site posts the link to an article they wrote with a short caption accompanying it. The second and newer method of consuming news is via short video. Many sites such as Al Jazeera will make a 2 minute video with no background voice over and just on screen text to summarize the situation surrounding a certain event. The second major use of facebook today is, you guessed it, memes. Every studen ’s facebook feed nowadays is guaranteed to be filled with memes, even if they themselves do not follow any meme pages. This is because facebook shows posts where your “friends” have commented or posts that your “friends” have liked. It’s common netiquette to mention your friends in the comment section of memes so that they will receive a notification and be able to laugh at the meme with you. One thing to be careful about on facebook is, you do not want to be that person that is constantly filling everyone’s feed with long facebook posts about your life, because sorry to break it to you, your life isn’t that intersting.

2. Twitter:

Twitter is relatively straightforward, you get to tweet anything you want within 280 characters. Pictures, videos and links can all be included within tweets. Content on twitter is relatively similar to facebook although they come in smaller doses, and much faster. Memes, news articles, news videos, but the one thing that twitter has that facebook doesn’t is — tweet threads. A thread is when someone replies to their own, or someone else’s, tweet and thus begins a thread and anybody can follow it as if it’s a converation. It is often utilized when someone wishes to tell a longer story that cannot be told in 280 characters. The biggest rule you want to follow on twitter is that you don’t want to be spamming your followers feed with 100 tweets a day.

3. Instagram:

Instagram, used to share pictures and videos. The content of these posts range from photography and videography to news videos, to memes. All three are wildly popular categories and most people’s feeds include a variety of the three. The biggest do not of instagram is also not to post too much. Posting what you had for breakfast lunch and dinner everyday isn’t something anybody wants to see. It is also an unwritten rule where nobody actually uses instagram’s default selection of filters.

4. Snapchat:

One of the newest of social media platforms, snapchat operates on a very different concept from the other social media mediums. The basic concept is that you can send photos or videos that will disappear once you click away from them. Since its inception, other functions have been added such as stories, which allows you to post things that last for 24 hours. As the person
who posted the story you can see who views your story, as well as if anybody screenshots your story. Basic etiquette is to not screenshot everything you see, it should only be used for special occasions, although the discretion of what counts as a special occassion is up to you. Snapchat has another function which is also unique to their platform, streaks. A streak is created when you and a friend send each other snaps for 3 days in a row. There is no limit to how many days a streak can last, if neither of you snaps each other for 24 hours the streak breaks. Snapchat will warn you that your streak is about to break by showing a rotating hour glass next to the number of your days the streak has lasted. Common etiquette is for whoever sees it to save the streak by sending a snap.

All in all, the key to social media is not to overdo it. Don’t post too much and clog everyone’s feed. Follow these steps and you’re golden.