For today’s “Make A Horror Sound” Daily Create exercise, I made a scary sound by recording the discussion at a recent faculty meeting and slowing it down by 800%.

This is my take on an alternate version of the Happy Birthday song for today’s DS106 Daily Create activity.

For years I have wondered with disbelief how the century-plus-old song Happy Birthday could be protected by copyright. The DS106 Daily Create activity published today touches on this with an assignment that challenges us to re-imagine the Happy Birthday song and shows several examples of how different television shows and movies got around the copyright.

Whenever possible, I use my media and digital literacy skills to question the “facts,” so I wondered if indeed the song Happy Birthday is protected by copyright. The first thing I found in a quick Internet search was the 2015 Snopes article that stated a judge had ruled the song is in the public domain. Well, I think Snopes is a credible source for information, but I’m not one to accept it as the final authority, so I did some more looking.

I also found a 2015 Variety article that seems to confirm what Snopes said about the ruling. There were a couple of other articles related to the case, the most interesting is the fact that a documentary filmmaker settled a class action case against Warner/Chappell Music. No way! How did I miss this news about the Happy Birthday song?

To me, it was really heartening to learn that sometimes the little guy can prevail in these copyright disputes. An important takeaway for those interested in copyright issues is the fact that big media will often overstep what the law actually requires; in the case of Warner/Chappell Music it was to the tune of two million bucks a year in royalties. But someone had to have the resources to challenge them on it.

Always keep in mind that there are provisions in copyright law for fair use of media. It is worth knowing what those provisions are and what the US legal system has to say about it. But a copyright owner won’t encourage others to make use of content under those fair use provisions and certainly won’t turn down royalty money coming in that it isn’t entitled to. I think our Daily Create assignment today highlights some ways to avoid copyright entanglements, but with this new information about the Happy Birthday song, it looks like we can sing the original to our heart’s desire.

Last summer, my mother died from an aggressive type of brain cancer. When I think back on what happened, I definitely see how digital/social media weighed in to our family’s journey through her illness and passing. My siblings used text messaging and Facebook to stay in regular contact, and to plan our visits to her while she was receiving treatments out of state. Extended relatives and friends contacted us through social media to hear about her status. My mother sometimes used Facebook during her illness, and it was sometimes evident how her cognitive functions were declining, even on social media.

This and other experiences have made me reflect on how social media weighs in to someone’s passing. I’ve actually been thinking about this for a long time. I think the first time this issue of social media and life’s end came to my attention was in news reports of a soldier being killed overseas in combat and his wife learned about it first through social media instead of the usual formal notification from the military. Someone in the know couldn’t wait for the formal notification, and broke the news themselves.

Then the same sort of thing happened to me. A while ago, I learned that my uncle had died on Facebook before anyone in my family could formally notify me. A well meaning friend offered condolences to my aunt before the family had a chance to notify everyone, and I saw it. A few hours later, my father called with the news.

My wife was also profoundly affected when her dear friend suddenly passed away. The surviving spouse without warning took down my wife’s friends Facebook page, and along with it all of the photos and memories that the two friends had shared there. Fortunately, a year or so later, the spouse reopened her memorialized page so those who had been locked out could have a chance to visit whenever they like. But the shock of being suddenly locked out was a hard surprise to take at the time.

Of course, death isn’t the only time that social media comes into play in our relationships. There are wonderful positive experiences worth mentioning too. Reconnecting with long lost classmates, friends, and former co-workers makes social media a powerful tool to have. People use social sites to find new love, even finding a mate online is a popular thing to do.

But again, the dark side of social media can show up in these uses as well. Perhaps there is a reason you haven’t connected with your classmate these past decades, and social media is reminding you of why. Maybe you used an online tool to find a new love interest, only to have that tool used against you for the break up. Or worse still, it seems that ghosting is a thing in the 21st century, where there isn’t even a breakup, just a disappearance, never to hear from that person again. This ghosting happens in love and in work. People take a job offer, then quit coming, or don’t even show up for the first day.

How have our relationships with others been affected by social media? If you think about it, everyone using social media has personal experience with this. It seems to be here to stay, so we need to think through the best way to approach things.

Personally, I try to keep in mind that there is a real flesh-and-blood person on the other end of that online connection. I often ask my students if our online self should be viewed as an extension of our self. I think perhaps it should be, as the hurts we feel online are just as real as hurts that happen in the face to face world. But, as Sherry Turkle points out, our online connections are missing part of the feedback loop of the face to face world. Digital communication is tone deaf, and if we do something hurtful, either intentionally or unintentionally, we can totally miss it.

Whenever possible, if it is a difficult conversation, I recommend having a face to face conversation about it. It is harder to miss the  verbal cues and body language of the other person if we are in the same room together talking. I think we are getting into habits of mediating our difficult conversations though, and I’m just as guilty as anyone. I think I’ll just send this difficult news as an e-mail instead of telephoning or going to see them in person. We have to be aware that this is setting up a situation for missed feedback and ever harder feelings than what might be had we used a non-digital conversation.

You can’t ever go wrong with the golden rule that says to treat others as we would wish to be treated. If we always keep that one in mind, things will almost certainly go better than if we just fire off because we are angry and it made us feel better in the moment. The work of living a digital life well lived is difficult, but worth it, I think.

This week, I’ve introduced the five key questions of media literacy to our online #digme406 class and asked them to use these questions to think about the Social Media platforms they use. The five key questions of media literacy are:

1. Who created this message?
2. What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?
3. How might different people understand this message differently from me?
4. What lifestyles, values and points of view are represented in; or omitted from, this message?
5. Why is this message being sent?

I think these questions apply not only to “media messages”, but media platforms as well. The software applications that we use are also constructed and contain biases of the creator, just as any other form of media.

For an example, I will work through an analysis of Twitter here.

1. Who created Twitter? 
   • The founders of Twitter are Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone,  and Evan Williams. There is controversy surrounding the founding of Twitter (Carlson, 2011). From what I can tell, Jack Dorsey was the engineer who thought of the concept and Noah Glass was its champion at the original parent company Odeo. Some say that CEO Evan Williams snookered the Odeo investors by convincing them that Twitter was heading nowhere and buying back their shares from them. The stock has since increased in value over 1,000 times.
2. What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?
   • Twitter’s original appeal was that it was compatible with phone SMS or text messaging. It was succinct, limited to 140 characters. Many people found this brevity invigorating. Get to the point! Do it with style! As with most social media applications, if you have an app installed on your phone, it will alert you when someone sends you a message or something else interesting is happening. Simplicity rules the day here.
3. How might different people understand this message differently from me?
   • Twitter has been an invaluable tool to me over the years. While others were sharing photos of their lunches, some of my best Internet friends and I  held Twitter “chats” discussing a variety of topics related to teaching and learning. I have built a world-wide network of contacts who share my interest in improving the experience of school for students. Some people think it is mainly for fun, and I use it that way too. I also see it as a way to connect with people who know more about things I would like to learn about. I think it can be used to build a professional learning network. Some people see it as a tool for spreading propaganda and hate. Some people see it as a good way to be attacked by online trolls, or to mess up and lose your job, so to them it is dangerous territory. It is actually all of these things. But driving on highways in cars is also dangerous, but it gets us where we need to go. I see Twitter like that as well. Learn how to do it effectively and safely.
4. What lifestyles, values and points of view are represented in; or omitted from, this message?
   • Let’s begin with the omitted points of view. I think a big POV (point of view) omitted from any social media platform is the POV that rejects the need for always-on communication. I don’t personally carry a smart phone. I use technology enough as it is, to not need to carry a mobile computer in my pocket sending me constant alerts. I want downtime to recuperate from the fast paced digital life. This habit and attitude runs contrary to the end goal of social media; the goal of gaining my attention. These technologies are purposely built to entertain and engage us, to distract us away from other things we might spend our time on.
   • A represented point of view is one that recognizes the human need for connection, and this technology meets this need. It also acknowledges the fast-paced, busy lives we lead. It expects that most users of Twitter will be mobile users.
5. Why is this message being sent?
   • The ultimate purpose of building a service like Twitter is for it to earn a profit. This profit comes from advertisers who pay to access the millions of people who give their eyeballs and attention to the Twitter application. (The way that attention is gained is described back in question #2.)
   • Another purpose that a service like Twitter is created is to enhance and improve the lives of its users. I think many designers and engineers do what they do with this aim in mind. However, sometimes I think the first goal, earning a profit, sometimes directly competes with the second goal of improving lives.

References

Carlson, N. (2011). Real History of Twitter. Business Insider. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/how-twitter-was-founded-2011-4

I’ve been working on a web application for an agri-technology company here in Kansas. I’ve been away from web application development for a long time, and this project has been built using .NET. I’ve never made a web application in .NET.

I’ve made some desktop applications in C# using .NET and Visual Studio, which made me think I could assist with this project. But, I’ve never dove into an existing project like this and tried to make useful modifications to it. So this is another first for me.

Today I built a piece of code that I think will be useful for solving one of the problems on my to-do list. It is a console app that reads a specialized JSON file, a GeoJSON actually, and converts it to a CSV file. When I started looking at solving this issue, I thought it would be a matter of reading a JSON text file, parsing it, and re-writing it out in the new CSV format. Well, it’s a lot more complicated than it sounds.

I wound up using a couple of data structures in C# I was familiar with, a List and a DataTable. I suspect if I was smarter, or found the right example, I might have been able to do it with only one of these. But alas, I have been hacking away at this issue for some time now. Anyway, for now it goes from .GeoJSON -> List -> DataTable -> CSV. I thought I could go directly to the DataTable, but because GeoJSON is JSON data within JSON, my attempt to skip the List caused a problem.

It’s a lot of shuffling of data, not very elegant, but it works. Now I’m going to see if I can optimize things a bit, and integrate it into the bigger application.