Obscurity And Szechuan For All

Social media can be used to affect people in so many ways. We can use it to raise awareness for a common good or we can use it as a weapon to defeat and dishearten a targeted audience. Whether it is used negatively or positively, it can produce an outcome that significantly changes a social environment. One of the most highly used and most efficient ways that I think it can been used is through communication. With social media, we have unlocked a way of communicating with one another that just couldn’t happen any other way. It is instant, easy and free. Communication in our world is basically involved in everything we do.

Social media is built on communication. No matter what it’s being used for, there is always something that the person using it is wanting to say and get across to the people that will come in contact with it. People posting on their own personal accounts generally want to communicate about their lives and their likes and interests, companies using social media usually are wanting to communicate why people should want to buy their products, real estate, or use their services over others; non-profits might use social media to communicate about a social issue that they are wanting to raise money, awareness or donations for. It can even take something very small and seemingly insignificant and wind up creating something wide spread and thriving from it under the opportune circumstances.

An example of a time on social media that this type of movement has happened is the Szechuan Sauce Event. Szechuan Sauce was a specialty sauce that McDonald's had available in 1998 to promote the Disney movie Mulan. Then in 2017 the animated series Rick and Morty alluded to the spicy sauce in the premier of their third season on april fools day. After this appearance in the popular show Szechuan Sauce was being asked for over and over in many McDonald's locations. People created memes, tweeted, commented, made a petition that got over 35,000 signatures and even got tattoos related to the sauce.

One lucky individual even found a pacet of the original sauce in a second hand car and had the privilege of selling this packet for $15,000 on Ebay saying, “I hope somebody who wants to eat some 20-year-old gnarly sauce gets this” (A timeline of Rick & Morty’s Szechuan sauce saga, 2017). McDonald’s then decided to offer the sauce as a special on October 1st to please their fans that were pleading for the sauce over social media. To their surprise so many people showed up and lined up at the stores waiting to get their chance at their Szechuan Sauce that McDonald’s ran out of their limited supply. The fans were less than pleased to have, in some cases, driven miles and waited for hours to get their Szechuan Sauce that riots broke out. People started using social media to communicate their disappointment and anguish at missing out on the limited time offer. The hashtag #GiveUsTheSauce was created and McDonald’s took notice.

McDonald’s was able to see the aubundence of these immediate requests for the reappearance of the special sauce and respond through social media. They tweeted back to their fans that the sauce would be making more resurfaces and not just with such limited supplies this time but with Szechuan Sauce for all at every McDonald's store!





The use of social media in all of these events was the only thing that was allowing communication between fans and store. The fans were able to use social media as a weapon against McDonald’s to demand their sauce be brought back to them and McDonald’s was able to use social media to communicate their apologies to the fans that they disappointed and later to promote their decision to finally please the public and bring back more of the sauce. Social media is the most efficient way to communicate in our modern time. No matter what it is you are wanting to communicate social media can help you do it.

Citations:

Bartleet, Larry, and Larry Bartleet. “Rick & Morty's Szechuan Sauce Saga: a Timeline from April Fools' to Rioting.” NME, NME, 10 Oct. 2017, www.nme.com/blogs/tv-blogs/rick-and-mortys-szechuan-sauce-mcdonalds-2148454.

Maynard, Micheline. “McDonald's Tries Again With Szechuan Sauce, Hoping To Assuage Angry Fans.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 22 Feb. 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/michelinemaynard/2018/02/22/mcdonalds-tries-again-with-szechuan-sauce-hoping-to-assuage-angry-fans/#7b444f133b70.

Life in Ads

One could argue that social media is just a full on compilation of advertisements. Yes even the posts that you and your friends innocently share with your social circles of friends, family, and others could be considered advertisements. We are constantly scrolling through all this scattered information about endless topics that don’t even always pertain to our everyday lives. We’re subjecting ourselves to the wills of others, giving our attention to things that, I would argue, a majority of the time we don’t even care about. All these posts that we scroll past are vying for our attention and time. Classic advertisements especially have a need for us to stop and observe their messages because that is of course their whole purpose in life. But even posts from your friends and family are doing the same. They are asking for your likes and comments and attention. They are pushing out parts of their lives to us and what they think life should be like. They are essentially advertising what their versions of life should look like.

I myself am not so much of a Facebook person, but I can see the appearance of advertisements perhaps even more so when I do peruse my feed. I am on Instagram much more than Facebook and can definitely see the correlation. When I'm scrolling through my feed on Instagram, I see advertisements every few posts. The things I look up or even look at on Instagram always show up more than any other and I can say that this does make me more likely to click on or look at the advertisements. I think social media has done wonders for making advertising easier for people, but it has also made it a bit more difficult in some instances. It is quite helpful because it costs nothing to own an Instagram or a Facebook or a Twitter on which you can advertise your business to your heart's content. It created a new way to reach customers instantly and cost minimally. The only issue with this is that people are not always paying attention. Scrolling through your social media feeds is not exactly a highly cognitive activity. People scroll and scroll perhaps even barely paying attention to what’s in front of them. They don’t have time in the day for all these individual posts so why would they stop the constant flow of post traffic to cross the street and look at an advertisement for a few moments. They may not even do this for people they know, let alone giving time to an ad that they aren’t even searching for.

Companies however have figured out how to streamline advertisements in a way that they are designed and placed for the individual. Instead of using mass marketing techniques like what is usually put out in a broad sense onto the internet, they have started to use more of a tailored response or micromarketing. This micromarketing is a way of tailoring an advertisement to a person so that they are more interested in the topic of discussion or product than other ads. Some people might be freaked out by the fact that companies can find out if you're interested in their products, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing that companies use our interests to create ads for us. It gives them a more direct way to get to the customers that will potentially buy their products and it gives the customers a more direct way to find what they want or are looking for. After all, if I have to look at ads, I'd rather be looking at advertisements for things that I don’t mind looking at such as fashion and cooking rather than things like trucks or magazine covers.

Dan Schawbel wrote an article that states that, “Only 1% of millennials surveyed said that a compelling advertisement would make them trust a brand more. Millennials believe that advertising is all spin and not authentic. That's why they use Tivo to skip commercials regularly and avoid banner advertisements on Facebook and various news websites” (Schawbel, 10 New Findings About The Millennial Consumer, 2015). With so many people choosing to skip commercials and bypass ads companies are needing to come up with more clever and, you could say, sneaky ways to grab people’s attention. One of the many examples of companies using creative ways of advertisement to keep customers engaged and coming back is suggested videos or suggested watching lists. Companies like Amazon Prime, YouTube, Netflix and other video watching platforms use the customers likes and interests and previous searches to their advantage by giving them easy access to more things just like it. This way they insure that customers will continue watching and paying for their services. This pulls from the same idea of gathering information from what your customers are searching for and what they are watching. In this case it’s more about advertising to the people you already have invested in your business, but it's a very effective way to do this.

Regarding this mistrust that millennials have developed for advertisements, companies have developed another much more effective way to reach this group of buyers. They have discovered that, “33% of them (millennials) trust blog reviews for their purchases” and that, “around 40% of people reported that they purchased a product online after seeing it used by an influencer on YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter” (Patel, How You Can Build A Powerful Influencer Marketing Strategy in 2019, 2019). This kind of advertising has become extremely popular and widespread. This type of sponsorship has created a whole new type of advertising. I can validate it by saying that I myself go first to review blogs and videos before I buy a product and I feel much more confident in the purchase after I do.

Citations:

Dan Schawbel, Forbes, Jan 20, 10 New Findings About The Millennial Consumer 2015https://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2015/01/20/10-new-findings-about-the-millennial-consumer/#48592b706c8f

Patel, Sujan, et al. “How You Can Build A Powerful Influencer Marketing Strategy in 2019.” The BigCommerce Blog, 9 Apr. 2019, www.bigcommerce.com/blog/influencer-marketing/.

The ways the power of Social Media can be harnessed

With it’s rapid rise to the top of human culture, Social Media has become a pillar in our major events in our history. Social Media holds a lot of power where it currently sits. Everything in our daily lives revolves around technology and social media. It has become the most dominant way to communicate, explore, learn, etc. From the looks of it, it doesn’t look like social media is going anywhere anytime soon. It may evolve past the platforms we are currently using, but that doesn’t mean it’s going away. When we address something that has such stick in our way of life, we need to realize the power that something like that is going to harness. Social Media has literally changed the entire course of an election whether it be for good, or bad, we shall see, but it definitely happened. Social Media has also often served as the gasoline on the fire of social movements.

With the election in mind, we have a few things to look at. Trump’s social media campaign arguably won the election for him. Let’s look at the statement for a second. A SOCIAL MEDIA campaign won him the ELECTION. Now the candidates in the 2016 election were not the cream of the crop by any means, but I think we are slightly overlooking social media’s role in this. Before this point, no candidate or president has ever had the level of interaction that Trump displayed during the election and continues to display. I’ve heard people express how they have no idea how someone could get behind and vote for someone like that. Prior to the 2016 election, people have long debated whether these elections were rigged or not. It was a constant cycle of the drama in Washington DC overshadowing the entire United States. The people didn’t feel represented properly, and people were getting restless. Then here comes Trump, on TV and also all-over social media (mostly tweeting, but the tweets made their way across all platforms). He became regular and personal with these people. He constantly stated what he wanted to change, and his rallies quickly became popular. The masses had never been exposed to something quite like that before, and they were already at the point where they were getting restless with the system. Social Media provided the outlet which Trump reached all of us through, and that won him the election. If that doesn’t demonstrate the potential power social media harnesses, I don’t know what would.

Social Media has also had huge sway power when it comes to various social movements that we have experienced in the digital age. Social Movements have ended up being disrespectful and violent in the grounds of social media. Regardless of what the movement is for, people always seem to find something to argue about in the comment sections, which leads to hate infused words that someone wouldn’t say in a normal situation. Like I said before, this is regardless of the intent of the movement, and it’s sad because in a way, it takes away from what the movement is. Take BLM as an example, it was started to bring awareness to the multiple police killings and could’ve been a good time to reevaluate as a nation, but social media was home to many extremists and soon it lit a wildfire that was almost impossible to stop. For months, BLM was on the news, but not for the right reasons. Instead of having that time to say what they are about and what the movement intends to do, it was spread with the message that this movement is violent and hostile. Once that happened, everyone started to divide into different viewpoints. So, in that light Social Media was used to manipulate and ‘change’ the motives of a movement

In conclusion, the power that Social Media currently holds in our society is both amazing and frightening at the same time. In a sense, it could be used for amazing feats, but we are mostly using it to tear things down. That’s why I believe until the AI become self-aware, it is never the machine, it’s the person programming the machine. We just have to be aware that we are giving all of this power to a select group of people, and their platforms are essentially most of the market in the present. So, whether it be a potential new campaign scheme in what Trump did with Social Media, or the comments sections and extremist changing the course of a movement, Social Media is something to be careful with. If used right, it could elevate Social Movements to heights yet to be seen. People will have to put their need for agendas and conflicts aside, and really hear everyone out before we decide on a sure answer.

Privacy

Privacy on Social Media can be a very difficult thing to come by these days. With several people saying the NSA is watching everything we do and say, to Facebook’s several security issues, it seems people are on both sides of the fence on these issues. In the reading for class, some of the polls said a good amount of people could care less about Facebook’s security issues, and they will continue to use the platform, regardless if their information is at risk or not. I choose Facebook out of the group, because they have had some of the most shocking problems out of the Social Media platforms. Also, location is something that is my greatest technological fear aside from AI. No matter how badly I want to get rid of my phone, I know I live in a part of the world that is technology dependent, and I wouldn’t be able to function properly if I didn’t have technology as well. Which is why my end goal is being in a place where technology isn’t the equivalent of our supreme overlord.

A huge problem going on with Social Media and Facebook, is phishing. Phishing is where a scam uses the cover of being the Sites moderator, or the sites security team, telling you that something has gone wrong, and they need you to send your information to them to help fix your account. Or, in specific, one that has been sweeping Facebook, is a message telling you, you are going to be deleted for abuse, and the only way to stop this is to send the scam your updated payment and log in information. These scammers are able to dress up this scam and make it look legit, and sadly a lot of people fall for it. Of course, these scams seem to be getting better, due to the increase in the quality of technology and all the things one can do with it. This problem is present everywhere, and currently at TLU they are telling all students and staff to be on the look out for phishing emails, and they have told students very directly to be on the look-out and not interact with them in any way. As far as a solution to this problem, I don’t see a solution in black and white. With this type of scam, there may have to be a lot of moving parts in order to really be effective in regulating these types of scams.

A concern I’ve always had about privacy currently would be the location feature that seems to be in every piece of equipment made in today’s age. I see location as having many positive benefits. These could include missing person location, and many helpful ads-ons for maps and apps like it. The other side of the coin is how in depth and accurate they have made these locating systems make me a bit nervous. Take Snapchat’s map for example. Currently, you have the option to go into a ghost mode (Thank god) so it doesn’t show you on the map, but the accuracy of this map is a bit scary. It will tell you as far down as the street they are on, where exactly they are at, and how long ago they were there. I’m sorry, but that isn’t worrisome in the slightest?? Of course, they have the option of the ghost mode, so it isn’t all that bad. When you go a level deeper although, you start to get into the location services of the phone itself. I have the strong suspicion that it doesn’t really matter if you have your phone location on or not, it is still able to be located. I’ve had a few situations where my location has been turned off, but when I get done eating somewhere, a notification from Google pops up, asking me to give a review of the place. So, no matter where I am, I always seem to have the constant reminder of being able to be located at the push of a button.

In Conclusion, Phishing is something that Social Media platforms have to adapt to and fight against. There are always going to be people that want to take advantage of others and are always going to do so. I think to minimize scams and privacy breaches like these, the consumer needs to be heavily educated on what the most common type of scams are and know not to engage with the messages they send. Location management seems to be the fear I am never going to get away from, unless I go live out in the middle of nowhere. Location is something that is extremely beneficial, but also comes with some things consumers may not totally feel comfortable about. Although, maybe that is the correct way to go, we can’t remain in our comfort zones forever.

https://thehackernews.com/2011/11/exposing-25-facebook-phishing-websites.html

Digital Advertising

Digital Advertising is a concept that is not nesessarily rooted in a concrete history of data. Digital Advertising has only been around as long as the Digital age has. For the most part, nailing down a consumer on a digital platform has been hit and miss. While certain ads go the musical route, or some go the comedy route, the fact remains that not all ads are going to yield the same attention. Some ads may be done to the best of it’s ability, but if you show it to someone in the middle of a YouTube video and force them to watch the entire thing, some people may get aggravated. Personally, I don’t think it’s the type of ad, I believe it’s the placement in most cases. With our intimacy with social media growing, ads come along and have gotten closer than ever before. Now it seems like everywhere we look, there is an ad being thrown in our face. Ever since the birth of Social Media platforms, consumers have seen ads grow in their complexity, and now they have turned into an ugly beast that is on everything we click. No matter the website, you will always see an ad. Of course, my least favorite type of ad is the non-skippable video ads these platforms force us to watch at times.

This picture here is a good example of pairing ads to videos that the consumer is viewing. In this case, this ad is set up to where it might warrant more positive reactions that simple grumbles. By pairing an ad that actually relates to the subject matter of the video, you make the consumer a little more at ease, and are possibly arming them with future tools. On the flip side of that, you could put an ad for the newest, most expensive gaming system on the market, and it is not going to be popular with all of your consumers. That is what makes Digital Advertising so complicated. No matter how good you are, you have no way to please everyone, so ad campaigns are taking hit, regardless of how well they are mapped out. With the fact aside that everyone can’t be pleased, I believe this is a solid way to go if these non-skippable ads are here to say. We are pinning our hope on the moral views of the companies in charge of the type of ad shown. I think it would ease the consumer and put these platforms back in a slightly more comfortable position. It is also a very good chance for these companies to give the consumer a break and actually do something with our best interests in mind.

As mundane as an Old Navy ad might seem people are far more likely to get aggravated. The reasoning is because the ad has nothing to do with the type of video they are watching. As you scroll through the videos on YouTube’s page after a search, when you click on a video, you don’t want your interest in that video to be suspended for 15 seconds while you are forced to watch an ad that provides no interest to you. Jeans are such a mundane and simple thing, and I think it is those mundane type things that aggravate consumers more than anything. The non-skippable ads that have rolled onto YouTube are still a source of controversy and aggravation from their many consumers. As far as anyone can tell, they have no intention on changing this feature, and consumers are just going to have to deal with being interrupted. Another Social Media platform that has jumped on this wagon is Facebook. Though, their ads feel a lot more like spam in the middle of their videos. At first, the ads would cause the video itself to mess up, which angered a lot of people. With talks of having Social Media regulated, these hiccups sure didn’t help the unrest that was growing amongst the consumers.

In conclusion, regardless of how well done an ad is, everyone is not going to be fully satisfied. If these platforms need to be proactive and at least tweak these types of ads if they aren’t going to change them. Recently, it’s been a lot of what is best for the platform, and not nesessarily what is best for the consumer. If ads were tailored to be a bit more user friendly, there wouldn’t be such a split in the hostility of the consumer. Some consumers could care less about the ads, while others are ready to drop social media all together because of it. Regardless of what side you’re on, it’s time to realize that these ads are getting a bit out of control, and they need to be regulated in some fashion. Whether that be the platforms themselves overhauling them, or to put some sort of governing body in place that regulates what these platforms can do.

 https://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/video-advertising/youtube-advertising/

https://www.vabulous.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/youtube-non-skippable-ad.png

They're watching you

We lock our phones with personal passwords or our own fingerprint, clear our browser history and tabs, yet will go onto Facebook and will mindlessly like and share posts as a daily routine. It knows more about you than you realize. It knows what foods you prefer, the political group you associate with and even where you are.

Are we really as concerned about privacy as we think that we are?

Facebook currently has “more than two billion people and millions of organizations, companies, and political movements {that} offer up detailed accounts of passions, preferences, predilections, and plans” according to Siva Vaidhyanathan in chapter two of his book, “Anti-social Media”. He goes on to explain that “Facebook is the most pervasive surveillance system in the history of the world” and that the “commercial value of Facebook lies in its complete control of this priceless account of human behavior. We do the work for it, basically.  We like, share, comment, and interact with accounts that are similar to ours. We update our profile with our relationship status, age, hobbies, past and photos of special events in our lives. We are quite literally feeding Facebook with our information and not understanding the severity of the situation at hand.

There was a realization in my social media class, that most people know of these security and privacy issues, but still do not really care. They assume that because the government has always been “spying” on us in one way or another, than what is the difference between Facebook doing this now?

Facebook knowing everything about us is what many believe led to the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Russians bought ads targeted towards certain people, and convinced a small majority of people in swing states, that Donald Trump was the better candidate when compared to Hillary Clinton. These tactics to specifically target certain groups of people is quite scary. By posting hateful and even false posts about a candidate, elections are no longer a democratic place, because is it really our choice if we’ve been coerced into believing that it is true?

How can we still feel safe on social media, knowing that Russians were meddling in our politics and deciding our political future on that same platform?

Yet, we still continue to spend an unbelievable amount of time scrolling and having our mental health deteriorated by Facebook and other social media platforms. I am also one of these people, and I admit that it is a lot easier to talk about Facebook being invasive than to actually quit altogether to protect yourself. It seems as if though even getting off of Facebook will not keep our information private, because if you’re in the contact list of someone who does have Facebook, then they already know what they need to. This is all sounds like some creepy cheap sci-do movie where technology is taking over the world, but frankly it is the reality we are living in.

No, Facebook is not exactly taking over the world, but the multi billion dollar company is changing the way our lives work without us even really noticing. Not only are we constantly giving our attention to the social media platform, but we’re giving it the “individualized” ways that we think. We like a post that has 20,000 likes already, and think nothing of it, but we are telling Facebook, “These 20,000 people and I have this in common!” Which gives them a literal platform to exploit you with. If Facebook knows that you are just like everyone else, then it makes it that much easier to sway you into believing certain things or in a certain way. Because, think about it, the posts on your news feeds are already filtered towards your desires, beliefs, and even morals.

Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, is now claiming that he wants government regulation over political speech, so that certain content will be taken down if it’s influencing votes or going too far politically. Although with government regulation stepping in now, I am not sure if Facebook will continue to thrive like everyone else is saying it will.

Facebook is known as a strong social networking platform that some people depend on to make a living, play games or just connect with family/friends. Yet, Facebook continues to have multiple security breaches where countless users information is exposed to the public. With it also limiting people’s freedom of speech, and now proposing that the government begin to get involved, Facebook may not have the long run that everyone thought it would. People can say that privacy has never been an option, but even having the mindless games obtain your information just for the sake of advertisements is overboard! Facebook ads will just become the “new way” that the government will be able to control us, just like the way the 2016 election was controlled by Facebook.

Social media, Feminism, and Politics

I was 14 years old, the first time that I heard the word, “feminist”. I had no clue what it meant, besides that it obviously had something to do with women. I was intrigued to learn that it was the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes, and I strived to learn more about this term and all that came along with it.

Around the same time as this discovery, I downloaded Facebook and Instagram since I just began high school and I longed to be just like my friends who had been using these platforms for a bit of time.

After following pages that interested me, including feminism, my timeline began to be filled with inspirational and news filled stories about women that made me feel something. These same posts and social media platforms in general are what I believe to have created a stronger feminist movement, that is not only well put together but also better informed.

I found that Social media platforms have given movements like feminism, Black lives matter, and others the possibilities of letting news be spread faster and reach more people, and also of having an easy way to gather numbers to form a protest or march. It has been called a "new wave" of feminism, since it allows anyone with internet access to learn about these issues and become activists themselves. The new possibilities are endless, and has given people the option of speaking their mind and having real conversations with others about these topics. Survivors of assault can find comfort online, where others have posted their stories in the #MeToo movement, which has now turned into a phenomenon that empowers women to open up and not be afraid to share their story. 

There are many pages on these platforms that spread news, awareness and even comical posts about feminism. One page that is professional and factual is Planned Parenthood's social medias. Planned Parenthood is one of the pages that I followed on my Instagram to learn more, and also where I happened to learn the most information about women's reproductive rights that I was not getting anywhere else on the news. Posts like this picture above, show some of the information available to the public that social media is sharing.

Women's reproductive health is spoken about fairly lightly at schools, with a focus mainly on safe sex because of Texas having an abstinence only sexual education programs, many students are left ignorant on topics such as these. This in return leads to unwanted pregnancies, and abortions that students are also misinformed on. We are told places like Planned Parenthood are evil, and perform late term abortions just because women do not care enough to use any form of contraceptives, which by the way is a lie.

Social media has given Planned Parenthood a platform to spread news about abortions and the other services that they offer, that they otherwise would not have had the chance to if it was not for the platforms. There are so much stigma towards abortion, women’s rights and sexual assault, that social media was necessary for these topics to be clarified and spoken upon truthfully. Women are still being silenced in every day life, so having this outlet where you can reach anyone in the world to make a point is quite astounding. I have learned so much about slut shaming, sexual harassment, and misogyny while scrolling through my news feed that it allows me to broaden my horizons and go about the world differently.

Politics have found a place in feminist social media pages, for there are plenty of posts solely dedicated to letting the government know that women should fully own the autonomy of their bodies, and all of the statistics of sexual assault and the pay gap between men and women.

Having a source that allows you to communicate globally with just the click of a button has revolutionized the way we exist. It allows us to be much more organized, and also simply just be well informed individuals.

Social networking has given feminism a new source of energy, and will continue to grow and become a more established movement as time goes on!