Drama Queens, Kings, Knights, Peasants and Well Everyone Else Too

Drama is a term used less for the performing arts and more for teenage conflict in the modern era.  Dr. Alice Marwick and Dr. danah boyd study drama in their paper The Drama! Teen Conflict, Gossip, and Bullying in Networked Publics and more importantly the effects of social network on drama.  These interactions are not possible without an audience and are amplified by social networking sites.  In Marwick and boyd’s paper they interview a girl, Rashna, who puts it perfectly “There’s no removal from what happens at school.  Cause it can always continue on Facebook, and you have access to that at your home.  Which previously was considered somewhere where you don’t have to deal with everything that’s going on in school” (Marwick & boyd 12).  Drama now exists in more than a single medium, which puts more stress on individuals to always be performing.  This allows for more dramatic events along with more severe drama, which borders on bullying.  There is no escape; Marwick and boyd do a great job showing that in this paper.

Happy Place is a website that posts amusing pictures, videos, and stories for their users.  Thus, with uprising in drama on Facebook, they have a complete category for “Huge Drama Queens On Facebook”.  This is a contest for these individuals to see who the biggest drama queen truly is.  Happy Place mocks these people saying “Everyone has at least ten friends like this who constantly court concern with updates about how ‘you’ broke my heart and now ‘life just isn’t worth living,’ and they know they can get a dozen comments from their gullible, similarly theatrical friends…”.  Happy Place is not the only website of its type that collects dramatic status’ and shares them online.  It has become popular practice in pop-culture to share and mock these teens.

Sites like Happy Place only add another medium for drama to be enacted within.  Individuals come to this site to discuss their friends, family or themselves.  This adds another platform to perform in for drama.  Individuals share their own dramatic status updates and discuss it further.  Now individuals cannot even separate their Facebook-selves from their openly public-selves (which speaks to the reading we had for Tuesday, but that’s a topic for another blog).  Another factor involved with sites like Happy Place is it turns drama into cyber bullying.  While some people do put Facebook drama on purpose, a lot of them have no idea they are being ridiculed.  This means that drama is no longer "childish and harmless" but more malicious.  Drama is not the simplistic dealings of adolescents anymore but it is turning into addictive attention seeking activity by young adults that should be concerning to all.

Campfire Horror Stories: The Power of Google

            Independence is a word that every American holds dear to their heart. Siva Vaidhyanahan brings up the alarming fact that we are no longer independent, but dependent on Google.  Google has the search engine market cornered and is not going to stop there.  In The Googlization of Everything Vaidhyanahan speaks to the dangers of this dependence.  Google collects a vast bank of information, but who decides what information is “vital”.  Google has the potential to create a 1984-eske world that should alarm everyone, not just Siva Vaidhyanahan.

            Daniel Tsadok advocates Vaidhyanahan’s statement in his weblog. While Google Chrome is an amazing invention; its innovation is only matched by its danger.  He speaks how Google Chrome merges the search process with the URL and while this is impressive, it is also very dangerous “Sounds great, and fairly innocuous.  Except, as more people rely on Google to navigate the web, Google gains more control over where people end up”.  Google is able to make a website vanish with a click of a mouse.  Tsadok is not worried about the near future but Google’s dominance down the line. 

            Tsadok and Vaidhyanahan clearly agree that Google is dangerous.  Tsadok gives examples of how the dependence could give Google control over documents, calendar, email, phone service and even health records.  The Vaidhyanahan reading along with the Tsadok weblog paints a horrific picture for the future.  Google can gain dictatorship like power over the technology market, which is scary in the tech-based world we live in today.