
All posts by navignon


My Instagram Journey
I have always been slightly skeptical of using social media personally. It seemed to me that everyone gave off a well-manicured façade, where everyone “humble brags” and shares a very specific version of themselves. I have been on Facebook for years as a networking tool, but hadn’t been very interested in Instagram. It didn’t seem like there was anything on Instagram that I couldn’t already do on Facebook. I’m so busy with everything in my life that I hardly needed another distraction.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BUH3pfWFmSn/?taken-by=norkaphoebe
And yet, here I am, several weeks into using my new Instagram account our social media class at Metro State. I have mixed feelings about my experience so far. On one hand, it’s great to be able to share gorgeous visual snapshots of my life. Using Instagram has made me see the beauty in things both big and small in the world around me. I like having a place where I can share them with people I know.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BU8H-0nFl4N/?taken-by=norkaphoebe
On the other hand, what concerns me the most about being on Instagram is that everything I do is turned into data and picked apart by marketers and sales people. It’s no secret that Facebook (who owns Instagram) tracks everything we do and is also continually developing new image recognition technology which already learns faces, but will some day learn places, products and more. Everything I share with the world is archived, digitized and saved on a server and put into an algorithm for analysis.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BU8IR8jl5Xf/?taken-by=norkaphoebe
I go back and forth on whether or not this troubles me or not. My initial reaction is to be freaked out that I am being watched and my actions analyzed. It makes me feel like my privacy has been violated and I don’t have control over how it gets used. On the other hand, it’s going to help marketers sell things to me more effectively. If it helps them do their job better, and means I get better recommendations, I’m not totally against that. I guess it concerns me that I don’t have transparency in terms of where it’s going and what’s happening.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BUowqCclg2E/?taken-by=norkaphoebe
I know I’m not going through this journey alone – so I look forward to being a part of the Instagram community in this course. As to what happens after this … I am undecided.

Reconsider How To Fight Poverty in Developing Countries
Volunteering seems like an admirable way to spend a vacation. Many of us donate money to foreign charities with the hope of making the world a better place. Why not use our skills as well as our wallets? And yet, watching those missionaries make concrete blocks that day in Port-au-Prince, I couldn’t help wondering if their good intentions were misplaced. These people knew nothing about how to construct a building. Collectively they had spent thousands of dollars to fly here to do a job that Haitian bricklayers could have done far more quickly. Imagine how many classrooms might have been built if they had donated that money rather than spending it to fly down themselves. Perhaps those Haitian masons could have found weeks of employment with a decent wage. Instead, at least for several days, they were out of a job.

Chasing Trump’s Gaffes, Not His True Failures
The Internet has exploded overnight — President Trump, at 12:06am, shared a completely non-sensical tweet.

The Manchester Attack and Different Approaches To News Storytelling

Will Slack Replace Facebook’s Role In Your Life?
Slack has always found useful ways to integrate third-party apps within its service—or, in Slack’s parlance, to reduce the “context switching” that eats away at productivity. But the move also reveals quite a bit about Slack’s larger ambitions, and may hint at the larger direction of the social web. The main point is, Slack doesn’t want you to have to log off—ever. This is a familiar mentality online these days.