The Need to Be Safer

Security always seems like a topic that people tend to ignore more than needed, “We’re never really safe online” is a possible argument to avoid the extra hassle of double authentication or keeping more passwords, specially with the events of big companies getting hacked as an example, recently with yahoo getting a whole lot of user information hacked from it.

Recovered from Faze

I’m one of the people that find it difficult to keep tons of different passwords for every account, specially cuz of not wanting to have a notepad with them or a program saving them, but in the end that keeps me more at risk than safe which might be a good reason to change that. Today we were searching for new tools to learn for our online usage and one of the ones mentioned was Last Pass.

Recovered from Forbes

Last Pass is a program where you can keep all your passwords for all your different websites stored in an encrypted form and in a sort of vault for you to check when needed, all saved through a single master password and a possible double authentication.

The thought of having an external program always makes me anxious, what if they have access to my passwords?, are they actually safe?, is pretty much what I think when considering these programs. The one difference here is the recommendation of our course teacher who has used this program for several years, which makes me more confident to try it out.

Now the only problem is to go around all my accounts and make a completely different and new password for all of them. That’s gonna be problematic.

What does someone else think about blogs?

I’ve already talked about what I think about using this blog and what purpose I can find for it, but what do other people think about them? what does a blog mean to them?

Not everyone has a wordpress blog, but I do know a lot of people with a tumblr blog and I decided to ask a friend their feelings about their blog.

For one of my friends, who I’ll call Kyle, the purpose and meaning of his blog is to share the content he creates, he believes tumblr blogs were the correct tool for that because the website uses the dashboard to present the content in a quick manner, where a lot of people are able to see it. Kind of like a “faster blogging” than the more commonly known blogging that you can see here with wordpress.

He says that unlike twitter, which is also managed with a dashboard where you see multiple posts of the different people that you follow, tumblr allows you to present longer posts, even without the need of words or captions and have an archive and tags for them which you can also use to search things exclusively inside the blog or the entire website.

These reasons for why he uses a tumblr blog are pretty much identical to mine, since we both use it for content sharing, although it does have its disadvantages depending on the content, plus the fast paced nature of the website makes it not appropiate sometimes for very detailed pieces of art, favoring more the quick funny comics or silly images.

Night of the Third Day

I would call it night of the final day but there’s no terrifying giant moon falling towards us today.

Recovered from VincentBisshop

Coincidentally enough, today we did an exercise where we categorized the websites we used in 4 different places, which is kind of a followup to what I mentioned on my last blog post. How we don’t use all of our social media and different websites for the same purposes or with the same themes. Those categories were personal, visitor, residence, and professional/study. Some of them probably fit in more than one, while a lot of others only stay enclosed in a single area.

Two of these areas I mentioned might seem obvious (professional/Study and personal) but what about those other two. In visitor sites, you go into it with an objective, to look up information, to do something, but leave no social trace online, kind of when you use google to search up things and you aren’t really commenting or interacting with people or in the site itself.

On the other hand we have resident, where in contrast with visitor, you socialize, meet up and talk with other people and basically leaving your trace online.

Example of the graph where I divide the websites I use.

I can say that for myself the biggest place where I have content, where I have online presence is in tumblr. A website I both use just to look at art, jokes, among other things. But a place where I also post my art and interact with my followers through asks and replies. This constant activity and presence has allowed me to meet a lot of people from across the globe, who I have started chatting with on pm through programs like Discord, and also do things like play games and what not. It creates a completely new experience and kind of friendship that wasn’t possible and didn’t exist before.

Recovered from chibird

There are a lot of people who complain and say that friends met online aren’t “real” or they aren’t as good as real friends. I don’t think there’s a point comparing both, they’re different in their own way and I can say for sure that friends met online can be just as “real” or even closer to you than the reduced amount of people you can meet in person in the restricted space of your city.

Night of the Second Day

There was a lot of information to reflect upon today. Describing yourself, blogging for yourself or just even what things a blog can be used for, and how in the end, there’s no real formula or rule to go about what exactly to write in one, it ends up being a personal thing, a choice of whatever you wanna do with it, with all due knowledge of how to stay safe and what-not. (Special thanks to Laura Gogia, Lee Skallerup, Amy Burvall and Alan Lavine for today’s discussions about the topic).

A lot of social medias cover different areas; instagram allows you to share pictures and comment on them as far as I know (not one I use), facebook allows you to connect with friends, or in my case, privately message and manage groups for college (I really don’t like facebook). On the side of sites I have used more are for example twitter, where you can ramble about random things or post small short worded sentences, it’s quick and condensed and finally tumblr the one I use the most, where you can technically post anything, but comics, images and jokes are easier to manage there.

Recovered from Rival IQ

This is where having a blog differs, it’s a more personal place yet public place, an archived place where you can have from big reflections to small opinions or journals. One can argue tumblr is also a blog, since that’s what profiles are called in the site, but the difference is how it’s presented, through a dash, a quick scroll down method where you don’t really expect reading long posts most of the times, at least not me.

What would I use a blog for, one differing from my tumblr blog which I dedicate to art. Most likely I’d love to use it to discuss both technology and mainly videogames. I’d love to give my personal review and thoughts on games, something I feel can be interesting for people tired of the common big company reviews, which can get influenced by money and what not.

Recovered from Huffingtonpost

Dawn of the First Day

Digital identity. That’s a word I’ve heard around these days with the advent of social media popularity and the shift in society it’s caused. Today in a course dedicated to the topic, we had a chance to have an invited speaker to talk to us about it and we’ll continue to do so throughout the rest of the week. (Special thanks to David Cormier for today’s talk.)

It’s an interesting shift that exists between the time people didn’t use social media or well, the internet whatsoever to change into a period where kids learn how to use it and fully interact with it very young. In my experience it was a very drastic change, from being a kid in a time where, at least personally, didn’t have access to internet or computers to a really fast switch where technology developed incredibly quick. We ended up having these memories from almost no computers, no internet to a point where almost any device can connect to it, in basically a decade. Now we have to worry not just about our professional skills, our studies, in other words our curriculum, but we also have to worry about the image that we have on the internet.

I’m the kind of person that when young was taught to not use my real name when using the internet, which followed into me using an “alias” just like the one on this blog and also creating a “second life”. Offline you have to follow the moral rules of the country/region you’re from, quite diligently, thing that changes when you’re interacting online.

Calling it a second life always stroke me as weird, as if it was a completely different person the one you see online to the one you see in real life, I mean, of course there’s gonna be differences, kind of like how you behave with a certain group of friends compared to another one, I’d never do online something I wouldn’t do in real life, but at the same time, I became able to do things online I can’t quite do as properly in person, and by that I mean, collecting my thoughts more, taking my time to reply to every message without pressure, getting the true reaction from me, compared to in person where I tend to be more explosive and sudden about my replies.

One may argue that one is better than the other, or that it indeed starts becoming a different “me” or a “second life” if you look at the differences. The thing is, recently I decided to start “merging” them per say, making both more similar to each other and making them “one life” again.

I do think it’s important to keep a distinction between the professional and the hobby/informal talk and posts, but maybe there’s also a need for something inbetween, which I’ll try to do here.