Electric Toad Posse

In my final essay, I discuss social media, brand and identity in marketing.  I discuss the benefits and challenges that business might face when using social media as a marketing tool.  Examples of two businesses who have shown good use of social media as a marketing tool are Wendy's and Starbucks .  Each of these companies have been attracting social media attention in different ways recently and it's interesting to analyze their actions.  All in all, I believe that brands should use social media as a marketing tool because it is a key part of staying relevant in today's market.  My Final Essay: Social Media, Brand and Identity in Marketing By: Mary-Lynn  

As billions and millions of dollars go into police training, there is still obstacles that officers and military face that they cannot prepare for before it happens in the line of duty when it matters. I have done research on how interacting with virtual reality can have similar effects of real life experiences and therefore correlate as training to police and military personnel, to enhance their understanding of how to handle intense situations. Using virtual reality can be cost efficient for funding and can be effective alongside of the use of real person to person training. Police and military may still use force in certain scenarios, however, through virtual reality they can be taught how much force to use and when it is necessary. My Final Essay link is here .

For my final essay, I chose to look at video games. I wanted to be specific in the area of video games I chose, so I selected to analyze and argue about game narratives and why we play them. When I was about halfway through my paper, I noticed I was arguing two points. One being the existence of narratives in video games, while the other was that we play games to have control over something. I ended up incorporating the two as one large point which actually helped argue the two points. My essay, titled  Open Narratives in Video Games and Why We Play Them  explores these two topics by looking at what philosophers of games studies say, and discussing such things as our psychological needs to help show my thesis. -Robert Hager

Digital Humanities is what we as humans make of different forms of literature through various mediums of electronic devices. We have started to digitize and archive items that may have gone extinct to them originally being composed on paper or film, or items that can deteriorate and never be physically available to remember. Also throughout the class we have discussed authorship and who receives credibility or recognition for their work or contribution to another piece of work. As a final project we have been asked to do a research paper on one of the discussed topics of Digital Humanities that intrigued us. Alongside of the research paper we had 'Essay Exhibits', which were in-class presentations from each student, and gave a general insight to their research on that digital humanity topic that they planned to write their essay on. Of the many students presentations I found one by the Hash Slinging Hackers tribe mate, Kevin, to be very interesting and informational. He expl

For our final in-class assignment, we presented our essay exhibits to our classmates. The purpose of these presentations was to share an outline and general overview of the topics we were researching for our papers. Over the course of the week, I saw many interesting topics that showed my classmates grasp of Digital Humanities. The topics ranged from video games, to social media. Many of the topics looked at their topics impact on society, a different way to interpret their topics meaning, or an in-depth look as to what they perceive their topic to actually mean. Many of the students used past readings and concepts from class to show all this.  One such exhibit that was present was the impact of gaming and its incorporation with social media. The student looked into the gaming industry and saw how big of a market it was. He looked at some of the key individuals in the gaming community to show the impact and incorporation of social media. He further told me he would look at the strea

For the last week of class, we were able to introduce our final essays to our peers during essay exhibits.  It is interesting to see topics that stood out and to which topics other's chose to learn more about.  Four classmates and projects that I found interesting were Hayley W's " Is Social Media Destructive? ", Ryan B's " Games as Art, " Rob H's " Video Games as Digital Narratives " and Connor C's " Virtual Reality: Modern Training ."   Coca-Cola ad from the 1890's "Is social media destructive? " Hayley's topic is clear from the beginning.  She seems to have a focused understanding of the concepts she is covering.  She points out that there are both positive and negative aspects which social media has on humanity.  She will discuss how advertising is used on social media platforms and compare it to historically relevant forms of advertising.  She will also discuss how self identity is related

Convergence is not a new concept, but it is being is being implemented in a new way.  Convergences is a process of two or more things coming together.  In relation to media, convergence , can be the merging of different medias as a result of digitization.  It can also be media and digitization with computer networking come together from an economic strategy.  Analog forms of media have existed for a much greater amount of time than digital media.  These analog medias include books, newspapers and radio.  Before digitization of these medias, they were each consumed as separate products.  After the internet and computers became more accessible, these media types were being made in digital formats.  Digitization allowed each of these medias to be more easily shared and consumed around the world.  With the internet, the whole process of information sharing has been going at a faster pace.  Information can be shared with the world in a few clicks. Some convergence has cause controversy

Archives have been used even before the beginning of digital outlets. They have been used and are used to store data, knowledge, artifacts, and anything else into specific categories for others to access. One digital archive example are websites that categorize something specific about a certain topic, group or person; such as ones which focus on outfits and clothing of a certain generation and person. We decided to direct our archive in this orientation through the use of the artist, David Bowie. He was well known for his outfits that stood out among other artist at the time; for this reason we will be looking directly at these outfits. Bowie is deserving of an archive due to his original outfit, and alter ego that fueled a majority of these. Bowie and his outfits are historically significant. For example, BBC  said that during an interview at the age of 17 he told viewers about a society he had created, that being The Society for the prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men. He sai

In class, our tribe used two applications to analyze data from three of our previous blog posts including our posts discussing electronic literature , un-creative writing  and Kurzweil .  The first application we used was Voyant , a open-source and web based text analysis tool.  First, we copied the text from all three blog posts and analyzed them three separate times.    When viewing the resulting charts for the electronic literature post, we can see that literature, el (abbreviation for electronic literature), electronic, digital and story were the most frequent/significant words used.  I say significant because short words such as his, her, be or with are not included in this analysis because they are necessary but do not clearly describe the theme of any piece.  After analyzing the results for the uncreative writing blog post we see that thoughts, writing, uncreative, youtube and comment were the most frequently used words.  This really kind of sums up

Technological singularity is a hypothesis that some form of super human or artificial intelligence system will outsmart the best minds or code that one has integrated into it. This technology that we use everyday has a source code scripted into it and collects artificial intelligence to provide you quick computing of your personal doing. The most important general-purpose technology of our era is artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning (ML) — that is, "the machine’s ability to keep improving its performance without humans having to explain exactly how to accomplish all the tasks it’s given." Considering that, Ray Kurzweil has also researched the topic vigorously and is a futurist himself. He has written a book based on his prediction on the singularity, and of the epochs of evolutionary progress, and the potential next epoch being the merger of human technology with human intelligence. However Kurzweil does say that "the evolutionary progress looks