Megabots Mad Rad Blog

"From Participation to Power" I chose to focus on the introductory chapter of The Participatory Cultures Handbook , "What Is Participatory Culture?" by Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson. This reading gives a detailed overview of how participatory culture developed over time and why it has become such a crucial part of everyday life, especially in our digitally connected world. What I found most interesting was how the author positioned participatory culture, not as something new, but something that has expanded greatly due to technological change and shifts in social expectations around communication and collaboration. I never thought about it in this way, that everything we do online today has roots that go back in time. The discussion of participatory knowledge cultures really stood out to me. The authors describe how people now work together to collectively organize and build information. The authors draw on Pierre Levy's idea of "collective i...

"Is Twitter the Underground Railroad of Activism" For this week's blog post I focused on Feminista Jones' article about the political and cultural significance of Black Twitter. What struck me the most is the argument made that for Black communities, Twitter isn't just Twitter, it functions as a modern adaptation of historical alternative communication systems.  Jones explains the historical tradition of coded communication among African Americans, ranging from the spirituals that allowed enslaved people to communicate across languages to the political narratives embedded in early hip hop. Understanding this history makes it clear why Twitter has become such an important digital space for Black users.  What really resonated with me was Jones' discussion of the George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin cases. She explains how rallies, petitions, and national awareness were circulated through Twitter within hours. From Jones' view, Black Twitter doesn't wait f...

  Trust Matrix: Unraveling Key Predictors of Consumer Trust in AI-Generated Personalized Advertising For this week's blog, I focused on the "Decoding the Trust Matrix: Unraveling Key Predictors of Consumer Trust in AI-Generated Personalized Advertising" article by Feng and Kim. The article examines how AI is transforming personalized advertising, and what makes consumers trust and distrust AI generated ads, AIGPA. I quickly noticed how complex trust becomes when AI target ads based on consumer data.  AIGPA uses advanced machine learning to adjust content in real time, making ads feel more relevant but also less transparent. The article discusses that trust in AIGPA depends on three things: the source, the receiver, and the context. Factors that are source related, like how transparent the ad is and whether consumers trust the ad reflects reality.  I really resonated with this because transparency has become an issue online, people deciding  whether or not what they a...

AI is blurring reality: Hyperreal Digital Culture       For this week's blog, I'm focusing on the assigned reading "When AI Blurs Reality: The Rise of Hyperreal Digital Culture" from Georgia Tech. The article discusses how hyperrealistic AI content is reshaping social media, blurring the line between real human creators and fabricated AI personas. Something that really stuck with me was this idea that influencers can now exist without ever being real people. I remember years ago there was debate over a social media celebrity that goes by the name of Miquela, and people went back and forth over wether she was real or not. Went people realized she was an AI character, it was somewhat of a big deal, where as now, this is very normalized. An example from the article, Nobody Sausage , a AI character with over 30 million followers and brand deals. Although these AI influencers create content and interact with fans, they do not physically exist.       ...

                                                                           "What are deepfakes -- and how can you spot them?"  This reading really widened my eyes because it aligns perfectly with a trend on TikTok right now. This past week, my "For You Page" on TikTok has been filled with artificial intelligence videos of well known celebrities like Jake Paul, doing funny, unlikely, things. But the alarming part of this trend is that the videos are incredibly realistic. Often times I catch myself not even realizing the videos are AI, and feeding into the content. Deepfakes use AI to create realistic but fake videos, images, or audio. They make it look like someone is doing or saying something that never happened. These are usually aimed at celebrities or influe...

                                                                                      "Panopticism" from Discipline and Punish I feel like I often forget the organization of power, and how it structures my behavior everyday. Foucault's discussion of panopticism created a strong connection between the organization of power to everyday life. What started out as an illness outbreak in town, the Plague illustrates the shift of people no longer just being punished after misbehaving, but now being monitored to prevent it. Once seen as parts of a house, windows, doors, and streets, became spaces of surveillance. The emphasis was on controlling actions before disorder could even occur, and the idea of visible punishment seemed to disappear...