5 Symptoms of a Phubber

Staying glued to your smart phone and not paying attention to the people around you - You are so called phubbing. Phubber is a serious act of phone snubbing where you assume there is no one else but you and your phone. Still confused or wondering whether you are a phubber? Watch and learn more about phubbers!

Sources: https://youtu.be/OO5x8uv6O8Y

Let's take a look at Five Symptoms of Phubbers

• Always texting continuously via WhatsApp or WeChat
• Always updates status on Facebook
• Always laugh when looking at the phone scene
• Always update location (Check in)
• An Extreme phubber you are!

     Do you notice that you are one of the phubbers? What you want to do after this? STOP being a phubber or CONTINUE to be an extreme phubber?

Permainan Tradisional vs Moden

Pada abad ke-21 ini, kehidupan kita lebih cenderung kepada era teknologi. Kehidupan kita yang semakin dipengaruhi arus globalisasi dan modenisasi menyebabkan kebudayaan hampir ditelan zaman. Tidak hairan kanak-kanak pada abad ini telah bermain dengan permainan yang moden seperti PS, X-Box, permainan di telefon bimbit dan sebagainya dan jauh berbeza dengan kanak-kanak yang bermain permainan tradisional seperti wau, gasing dan congkak. Pada zaman era globalisasi kini, kanak-kanak lebih memilih untuk bermain permainan online games berbanding permainan tradisional. Kenapa? Sebagaimana kajian dalam dan luar Negara menjelaskan bahawa penggunaan multimedia seperti yang terdapat dalam online games ini lebih mampu untuk mempengaruhi minat mereka (Jamaluddin 2001) sehingga mengabaikan kepentingan komunikasi antara satu sama lain. Perbezaan ketara yang dapat kita lihat permainan yang sihat adalah seperti gambar di bawah:

Permaianan Tok Harimau yang dimainkan oleh kanak-kanak ini mempunyai komunikasi yang sihat antara satu sama lain

Sekumpulan kanak-kanak yang sibuk bermain dengan gadget sendiri tanpa menghiraukan kawan lain

Perkembangan dunia dibawa arus globalisasi menyebabkan kebudayaan Negara semakin tenggelam. Negara Malaysia yang kaya dengan pelbagai budaya dan etnik mampu tinggal bersama tanpa konflik adalah satu hasil sumbangan aspek permainan tradisional. Namun, ia semakin lapuk. Kini, online games mempunyai kadar statistic yang tinggi disebabkan faktor keluarga di mana ibu bapa menyediakan pelbagai media di rumah termasuklah televisyen, komputer, pemain DVD dan kabel internet. Pemilikan media seperti ini jelas membuktikan tidak ada lagi sebab bagi kanak-kanak untuk bermain permainan tradisional.

Melalui perkembangan permainan ini, pelbagai masalah yang timbul. Termasuklah kesihatan, masa dan komunikasi dua hala juga tidak disemai. Banyak kajian yang telah membuktikan ramai dalam kalangan kanak-kanak daripada semua peringkat umur banyak menghabiskan masa dengan bermain permainan elektronik (Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005; Rideout & Hamel, 2006; Rideout, Vandewater, & Watella, 2003). Oleh disebabkan itu, perkembangan media seperti ini juga mempunyai kebaikan yang tersendiri dan keburukan juga timbul jika ianya disalahguna.

Rujukan

Jamalludin Harun, Baharuddin Aris dan Zaidatun Tasir (2001). Pembangunan Perisian Multimedia Satu Pendekatan Sistematik. Selangor : Venton Publishing (M) Sdn Bhd.

Rideout, V. J. & E. Hamel. 2006. The Media Family: Electronic Media ini the Lives of Infants, Toddles, Preschoolers and Their Parents. Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation.

Rideout, V. J., Vandewater, & Watella. 2003. Zero to Six: Media Use in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers. Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation.

Roberts, D. F., U. G. Foehr, & V. J. Rideout. 2005. Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18-yearolds. Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation.

Digital Addiction, Could You Resist it?

The documentary “My Digital Addiction”, had shown us how a journalist who had need to stay connected with social media all the time to get himself updated about the news in the society, realized that himself was kind of addicted to the digital devices such as mobile gadgets and laptop after being commented by his friends and family, which he is being told that he had spent most of the time with those devices doing swapping, scrolling, commenting and updating; rather than spending his time with the people around him. He then tried out to put aside all his phone, tablet and everything else and went for a camp, a Digital Detox camp.

It is a camp that had market itself as a place for tech addicts to be forcibly removed from their devices. The camp was fulfilled with activities that had tried to get every participants to get closer to the nature, at the same time rediscovering the art of meaningful conversation or typing a journal using a typewriter and appreciate all of its flaws. After the camp, he found himself had learned to reduce the usage of smartphones and other gadgets as only a handful of interactions are really worth our time or emotion.

After watching this documentary, I realized that even the organizer of the digital detox camp and the journalist were too not confident enough to say that would this change make a long term difference. And now I think, would anyone of us really can resist from the addiction? And if we would have to, how long can ourselves could try to stay away from all those digital gadgets? I somehow doubted on my own determination. What do you think?

Second Life, the Dreamed Life of Ours?

Through the documentary “Life 2.0” by Springarn-Koff, I understood that there are a lot of people out there prefer to live in their virtual life, which is more likely known as their ‘second life’. These group of people are living through an online software named Second Life (SL) with their customized avatars that represented their identity. It doesn’t mean they are lifeless, it is just the way they wanted to live, said one of the interviewees; as some of them still have their connections with their social life in reality, though it is limited. All the interviewees said that they are feeling real in the SL, even if it is virtual. This is because they can have all kinds of social activities in their SL as in the real life, for example, meet a ‘life partner’, build a ‘family’, having sexual activities, have your own business, commit suicide at the same time kill others whom are innocent, and also choosing your sexual identity and orientation. Of course, all the activities above are done by just clicking and communicating with the avatars that are being created.

When they are asked on how they could just closed themselves in the room, especially in the dark one, to enjoy the SL with those avatars; other than feeling it real, a woman, Detroit said that nothing could be more than earning money by just clicking on the screen and playing the online games; while living in squalor in her parent’s basement, working in her pajamas 20 hours a day. Another man, Ayya, even lost his girlfriend in his real life due to his SL avatar as an 11 year-old girl, yet it was because of his emotional trauma of being molested or raped when he was 11. Even married couples could divorced on the reason of they wanted to live with their SL life partner for real, which ended up with an argument when they started to live together and the guy went to India with unknown reason. For me, this documentary is less about the realities of SL, an immersive online world, than it is about the offline pathologies of the people who had chosen to live there. “Life 2.0” would have been more interesting and original if it, like its subjects, had dwelled more in the virtual world, and if it had told us more about that world’s mechanics and folkways.

The stories are interesting enough on their own terms even though they are just typical as 20 million registered members, even more than that of the service; which most of this is harmless. For instance, Detroit had primarily gave us a shock with the visual contrast between her SL avatar and her actual body. It’s way too enough to make us feel want to escape from the real world. Ayya, whom previously profiling himself as an 11 year-old girl, too one of the members that had tried to escape from real life, escaping from his emotional trauma particularly; had finally re-profile himself with a new identity after he had come across and face his trauma during his childhood and realizing he had lose his love ones. It could be said that this SL had directly influenced the members of it service by providing the satisfaction creating a new identity that they wanted to present themselves through online virtual world and doing what they wanted to do freely. They entered a new reality with that new identity, virtually yet more likely like our own; with digital altered egos that can be sculpted and manipulated to the heart’s desire, reality, fantasy, or a healthy mix of both. Within this alternate landscape, escapism abounds, virtual relationships are formed, and a real-world economy thrives; had effectively blurred the lines between reality and ‘virtual’ reality.

The director had successfully managed to create this drama which lead us to question not only who we are, but who we long to be, by assuming his own avatar and immersing himself into the worlds of SL to find out the core of basic human interaction deeply. Indeed, after watching this documentary, I found out that profiling ourselves into another identity, of course more or less, it created contrast between the ‘us’ in real life and the virtual ones; yet at the same time, it had gave us chance to explore who do we really wanted to be. People tend to escape from the reality mainly because they found themselves lost with attitudes of people (stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination) around them. At least for them, the virtual world, their second life, could have less problem of these. However, this kind of idea wasn’t, or isn’t, truly being accepted in the society, voices of objections are somehow a huge forces that this group of people that wanted to run away from the reality more with the thought of  "I'm real. He's fake".

Senior Citizens and New Technology

The evolution of technology has benefit us in many aspects such as the aspect of  education, communication and also in journalism (all these are actually discuss a lot in previous posts). However, have you guys ever thought of what our senior citizens have benefit from the Internet? Does the society concern about their adaptability on Internet? Are they able to catch up with Internet because they are not born in the era of Internet like the generation Y? Are they the one that has been marginalized by the society?

Today, we are going to talk about senior citizens and new technology.

In this era of new technology, age should not be a limiting factor in terms of learning new knowledge. Senior citizens are undergoing the process of adjustment to fit in the world of new technology. However, some researchers suggested that new technology does not bring benefit to the senior citizens and most of the elderly people are not able to adapt well to the fast-develop technology. Rodrigues, Carreira and Goncalves (2014) argued that senior citizens show resistance in adopting technology, making the elderly people deprived from the benefits that technology offers. As human beings grow older, they suffer a decline in abilities such as vision, hearing, mobility and cognition (Diaz-Bossini & Moreno, 2014). This lead them to benefit less in new technology and as a result, they are not able to adapt well in the world of Internet. Wong (2011) also mentioned that senior citizens undergo a decline in physical, motor, cognitive and memory abilities. The actual reason is that senior citizens face difficulties in learning new things. Moreover, there are other reason which is that mobile devices were not properly designed for them and they felt “handicap” when using technology devices. Physical difficulties, psychological difficulties and insufficient skills are the problems that senior citizens face when are introduced to new technology.

Funny cartoon to show the experience of senior citizens in using new technology.

However, if senior citizens are able to get rid all the difficulties. Their life will be changed. Hasim and Salman (2009) added that if the elderly people have positive perception and recognition towards new technology, they are more likely to adapt well to the Internet. Nistor (2014) also mentioned that learning throughout life and access to the digital world are able to help senior citizens to keep in touch with the family members and younger generations.

Elderly people will enjoy using new technology when they have sufficient skills in using it.

So, friends, what do you think about the new technology adaptability of senior citizens? Are your grandparents and parents the active users of new technology too? What do they feel when they are introduced to new technology?

Reference

Diaz-Bossini, J. M., & Moreno, L. (2014). Accessibility to mobile interfaces for older people. Procedia Computer Science, 27, 57 – 66.

Hasim, M. S., & Salman, A. (2010). Factors affecting sustainability of internet usage among youth. The Electronic Library, 28, 300-313.

Nistor, G. (2014). New educational strategies regarding quality of life fo elderly people. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 142, 487-492.

Rodrigues, E., Carreira, M., & Goncalves, D. (2014). Developing a multimodal interface for the elderly. Procedia Computer Science 27, 359 – 368.

Wong, C. Y. (2011). Exploring the relationship between mobile phone and senior citizens: a malaysian perspective. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (IJHCI), 2(2), 65-77.

Food committed porn?

Accordance to the advancement of technologies, IT industry is now facing intense competition in producing mobile devices, especially in aspects of the features and specifications such as processor and camera, as mobile users nowadays are being more and more demanding. As these advancements have been created, it is most likely to lead to a new peak of trend – taking photos of food and keep it updated on SNS.

It seems common in these days to see the photo of food being flooded in social network sites (SNS). This phenomenon has now being termed as ‘food pornography’. This term has been added to tagdef  on May 10, 2012; a website which to help in discovering the meaning of hash tags, it is referring to the food that is so great; it makes you feel guilty, like when you watch porn; whereas Your Dictionary defined it as enticing food imagery. There is even a page, set for the intention of food sharing, and recipes, named Food Porn Daily.

(Figure 1 – screenshot detail on Food Porn Daily, adapted from foodporndaily.com)

Okay, now I have to admit this. Some of the time, it is really thanks to those food pornographers who shared food porn and sometimes checked in location for those foods. Due to these, we are able to find nice food which is strongly recommended by the local to fulfill our taste buds. This is somehow similar to the intention of pornographers share those photos. I believe their share is aimed to introduce delicious food to more crowd of people. While, some, with bad intentions, are to ‘seduce’ their friends

 (Figure 2 – Screenshot of hash tag of food porn on Instagram)

However, on the other perspectives, some may not that addicted to food porn thus take this as a spam. Personally, I am not the type of person who is not really addicted to food. Whenever I see my friends posted food porn on SNS, my responses are – glance through, scroll through, ignore it; it hardly makes me stop and view through the photos in detail.

(Figure 3 – Even food porn also owns a Twitter account, source from: twitter.com)

Towards the end of the day, food porn eventually does not help for the sharing purposes especially when the café or restaurant has just opened, where everyone is so addicted to it; or when a person is in ‘hanger’ – a term use to describe a person who is in anger due to hunger, source from Facebook.

(Figure 4 – Hanger: definition, source adapted from Google+, https://plus.google.com/+Curiositydotcom/posts)

References

Definition of #foodporn. (May 10, 2012). Retrieved from https://tagdef.com/analytics/foodporn

Foodporn. (n.d.). Retrieved May 4th, 2015, from http://www.yourdictionary.com/foodporn

Vent Dissatisfaction and Negative Emotions: Social Media

Social network is a dedicated website which allows users to communicate with people by posting statuses, images, comments and information (Pempek et al., 2009). The examples of social networking sites are Facebook, MySpace, Instagram and YouTube as well as micro-blogging sites which include Twitter, Flickr and blogs. Social networks allow hundreds of different people to communicate together in a central location. Nowadays, people spend a major part of their daily life to interact with others through social networks.

Social networks provided benefits for network users to create social relationships, form identity, entertain and also use it for academic purposes. Besides that, people use social network as a platform to share content and their daily routine as well as to vent their dissatisfaction and negative emotions (Clark, 2013). Social network serves as a complaint channel for network users to complain about their personal issues, family problems, friendship problems, dating life issues, financial problems and education problems. I noticed that people tend to update their status on social networking channels to express their emotion in a negative way. For example, people will update their status when they feel sad, unhappy, disappointed and angry. 

Bicycle lost… Get solutions from Facebook’s user

Struggle with hunger…

Feeling emotional when failed to complete the task on that day.

One of the most famous social networking sites, Facebook provides a platform for Facebook user to express their feelings and what is going on with their lives through status update. Hence, other Facebook users can use the Facebook feature button such as “like” or “thumbs up” and comment spaces to give responses.

Farnadi et al. (2014) found that female social network users are more emotional in their status post than male users. In other words, female users are more likely to express more emotions when they update their status compare to male users. According to Jalonen (2014), women are more likely to use negative words to attract other people attention to their dissatisfaction in order to get the solutions. Besides that, when people disclose about their negative experiences through social media, this can actually prevent other people from suffering a similar incident or similar negative experience (Jalonen, 2014). 

So, what is your way to vent your dissatisfaction or release your emotions? Do you prefer to vent dissatisfaction on social network or tell your family and close friends about your problem? Why?

References

Clark, J. (2013). Conceptualising social media as complaint channel. Journal of Promotional Communications, 1(1), 104-124.

Farnadi, G., Sitaranab, G., Rohani, M., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., Moens, M., Davalos, S., & De Cock, M. (2014). How are you doing? Emotions and personality in Facebook. Proc. of Empire, 25-56.

Jalonen, H. (2014, April). Social Media: An arena for venting negative emotions. International Conference on Communication, Media, Technology and Design. (pp. 224-230). Turku: Finland.

Pempek, T. A., Yermolayeva, Y. A., & Calvert. S. L. (2009). College students’ social networking experiences on Facebook. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 30(3), 227-238.