The Facebook Finale

This is my last blog post for my Internet and Globalization class!!!

At AUP, we have a name for the students who often frequent the school bar. They are the “Amex Hood Rats.”

I am not one of those students. In fact, if anyone ever wants to find me, I’m probably curled up on my bed in my little cave of an apartment… just prowling the Internet. All day, every day. I think the Amex Hood Rats’ name for me would be “loser.”

According to this article/infographic, “The average student uses Facebook 106 minutes a day, or nearly 2 hours.”

I am also not one of those students. I know that I spend a great deal more time on Facebook than that and I blame that highly addictive game, Words with Friends. And also my inexplicable desire to stalk “friends” that I haven’t talked to in months.

This article essentially tries to reassure students that their Facebook usage does not affect their college GPA. I am not surprised. It doesn’t matter how a student spends their time. They could be drinking at the bar or just surfing the net all day. When it comes to studying, they’ll study if they’re a good student. Actually, the author Alex Wilhelm phrased it pretty eloquently:

“People who want to do something other than homework use Facebook as their favorite distraction; if Facebook didn’t exist, they would do something else. In other words, ‘bad students gonna be bad.”

I’m certainly not a bad student; I’m just a lazy and an easily distracted one. I’ll do my work eventually, but that’s after I spend hours clicking through my friend’s pictures or scrolling down my newsfeed. What’s weird though is that according to this line graph, I should technically be a student with a 2.6 GPA. Ouch.

Like any addiction, Facebook isn’t the problem. It’s how you use it. When it starts to interfere with the way you function and process information, that’s when you need to cut it cold turkey. For example, using it at home versus in class changes the context completely. At home, it’s just you and your laptop and possibly your final paper that you need to finish by midnight. As crucial as that paper is, it’s always a bit mentally relaxing to numb your brain with Facebook at least once in a while. If you’re truly a good student, that assignment will ultimately regulate how long you stay distracted. At school, it should be just you and your teacher. I know this is hypocritical of me to say, but since most classes last just about an hour we students don’t really have an excuse to take that Facebook break. Are we really attaining all that information as we passively listen? I would really like to see this study done in terms of students’ GPA in relation to how much of their class time they used to go on Facebook.

I’ll be the first case study. For the classes that I spent primarily on Facebook, I’ll let you all know how my exams go. In the mean time, I’ll try not let myself get too distracted during this study week! (But if anyone wants to challenge me in Words with Friends.. please do!)

Posted 1 month ago

1 note

Freshman-in-France ©?

This is an assignment for my Internet & Globalization class. One more to go. The end is in sight!

Once upon a time ago, I used to blog for fun. I wrote about random musings that made no sense and posted silly pictures that made me laugh. Then I moved to Paris and created a new blog to talk about my new life in France. Gradually my daily journal grew with popularity to the point where people were flooding my mailbox for advice. I became “that American girl who studies at AUP.” Now, I blog because I am a brand.

Welcome to my life, 2.0. The girl you read about here is one created for that of the social media obsessed world. I am real in all physical sense, but in terms of personality and character – I am a fake. I have carefully manipulated all of my blog posts and pictures so that I may be portrayed perfectly with all of my best qualities highlighted. I know that I am being watched, so if I am going to be judged, I want to at least be able to control how others see me.

I wouldn’t necessarily attribute this to some underlying self-esteem issue or anything, but rather a deep concern for my future. In the New York Times article, “Putting Yourself Out There on a Shelf to Buy,” author Alina Tugend laments how society has grown obsessed with public image. Brands are not just limited to bags and sodas anymore, but to us as humans. If one hopes to compete in this highly competitive job market, one must attract all the attention they can garner through every medium available. However, the most popular forms are Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. (All three of which I have, I must add).

“If you don’t brand yourself, Google will brand you,” said Sherry Beck Paprocki, co-author of the forthcoming book, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Branding Yourself” (Alpha, an imprint of Penguin, May 2009). That means you need to try to control what information comes up when your name is searched online by a potential employer, as it inevitably will be. Will she see a professional LinkedIn profile or that embarrassing photo of you from Halloween 2005?”

Any serious job applicant needs to do a serious cleanup or reorganization of their Internet presence. I, myself, am set on ultimate privacy for Facebook while my LinkedIn is manicured at every opportune moment. I can’t say that this blog has gone “viral,” but it does have a good amount of readers. In a bizarre twist, I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve been “recognized” in real life. Although I don’t actually advertise myself business-wise here, my focus is to advise and captivate the young prospective Parisian expat community. Doing that alone helps increases my social capital or “klout.” It promotes my name even if it’s by a little bit.

I guess you can say I’m starting off small though. This entire blog is actually pretty self-censored to a stifling degree lest I don’t deter future employers or upset the wonderful AUP administration that gives me such a generous amount financial aid… but who could still give me more. (Ehem). But in all honesty and all jokes aside, branding is a tiring but rewarding duty. As much as the author of the article resists the idea, I cannot help but embrace it because I know that one day it will help me. Even if a prospective employer sees this blog and remembers me as that “American in Paris girl,” as long as it helps them remember me when it comes down to filling a job, then this will all have been worth it. It’s a start to my fledging Marketing and Advertising career but at least my brand equity something that sets me apart from other competitors.

Posted 1 month ago

2 notes

Tags: marketing, advertising, internet and globalization, klout, web presence, branding, facebook, twitter, linkedin,

AHHH, THIS IS THE BOSQUET GRAND SALON. I’ve had a class in here almost every semester for two years! #AUPREPRESENT <3

newsweek-paris-france:

Many are the students who have contemplated this sleeping bard … Detail from the ceiling of the main meeting room at the American University of Paris, where we heard a talk last night by Marwan Bishara. The former AUP professor is now the senior political analyst for Al Jazeera English and author of The Invisible Arab: The Promise and Peril of the Arab Revolutions.

Reblogged 1 month ago from newsweek-paris-france

7 notes

Tags: american university of paris,

Streaming killed the Television Ad.

This is the final stretch! 4 out of 6 posts for my Internet & Globalization class.

A big dilemma for American college students is trying to keep up with their favorite television shows. It’s hard to watch TV when there’s not one to be found anywhere near them. Sure, the lucky college student may find a television in their dorm hall lounge, but good luck fighting over it. So what’s the solution here? Streaming, baby!

Streaming media is a way to watch a video or listen to a song in ‘real time’ without downloading it to your computer or storing it to your hard drive. Streaming is a relatively recent development, because your broadband connection has to run fast enough to show the data in real time. Files encoded for streaming are often highly compressed to use as little bandwidth as possible. This is the beloved answer for those who may not have a television set but do have a laptop and access to WIFI. However, this is the true nightmare for the media industry.

Brian Stelter discusses this phenomenon in the New York Times article, “Youths Are Watching, but Less Often on TV.” It is argued that the young are still watching shows for hours on end each day, but they’re not necessarily doing it on the television. How exactly is it that the TV shows we watch are free? Let’s be real here – nothing is ever free. When we are watching shows on the TV, we as the consumer are being purchased at the same time. Companies will pay television networks the big bucks to insert their commercial here or place their product there. Stelter theorizes, “The long-term implications for the media industry are huge, possibly causing billions of dollars in annual advertising spending to shift away from old-fashioned TV.”

Some advertisement industries are trying to cope by making the transition into digital and online video. Even now, every Youtuber must sit through a few seconds of obligatory advertisements before they can watch their video. But is it working? I, for one, am always most eager to mute a particularly long video commercial or “X-out” from a pop-up as soon as possible. On the other hand, I understand that it is my participation with the advertisements and my possible related consumerism that allows for the production of my favorite shows. However, this is really a Catch-22 because while I would try to at least tolerate a commercial, I can’t because all I can do is stream the shows since I don’t have access to an actual television.

My generation is highly in favor of what is free and readily available. It may be amoral but it is a lot easier. Maybe one day this mentality will backfire. For example, lower quality television shows may be more prominent since there’s no longer enough funding for it. Thankfully, however, the saving grace of television and advertisement industries is that it is mostly the youth that they are concerned about. The older generations haven’t made that technological transition and are still watching television, thus still providing that much needed revenue. Perhaps this is a wake up call to advertisement agencies in terms of how they should rework their marketing tactics.

In any case, I shall conclude with a list of my favorite streaming sites:

YouTube – Millions of time-killing random videos and original web series
Hulu (US only) – Completely free with tons of movies and shows, although some are pretty vintage
Ch131 – Has the latest episodes of the most popular television shows. They also have blockbuster movie releases before 2012
sidereel – Much like Ch131 but easier to navigate

Posted 1 month ago

Tags: streaming, television, streaming websites, internet and globalization,

The Ugly Truth

I am now halfway done (3/6) of my blogging for my Internet and Globalization class!

Today, we will talk about being anonymous on the Internet. This is not to be confused with the troll/hacker group Anonymous, but just the state of hiding one’s identity. I recently came across an article from the Wall Street Journal titled, “Internet On, Inhibitions Off: Why We Tell All.” Reading it truly evoked long stifled emotions of what it was like to be on the receiving end of cyber bullying.

The author, Matt Ridley, suggests that we as humans are much more honest when it comes to impersonal interaction, meaning an exchange that does not require face-to-face contact. This can include standing next to your coworker in the elevator or calling a friend on the phone or even saying confession to a priest behind a curtain. In my case, it happened on the computer and apparently, it even has a name! John Suler of Rider University calls it the “online dishibition effect” which basically means that the Internet eliminates the need to follow social etiquette because hierarchy and status does not exist. We are essentially whoever we want to be and thus we are free to do and say as such.

Now rewind to 8 months ago on what seemed like a normal summer day. I was doing my regular rounds on the Internet when randomly stumbled upon a forum where a few of the posters were talking about my blog. My God and these were not nice comments at all. It was so strange and disheartening to read these insults and critiques from people I had never met before and who were basing their assumptions from this person I convey online. This “online dishibition effect” worked for and against me because while I was able to express how I feel, certain readers were in turn, able to express how they felt about me. I use my blog as the ultimate confessional, a place where I open up about myself in a way that I wouldn’t be comfortable with doing in real life. I write for myself but at the same time all these anonymous people around the world are reading what I write. The following is an excerpt from the blog post I wrote following that find:

Have you ever seen something that you didn’t like and then posted a nasty comment about it afterwards? Let’s be real. Remember Rebecca Black? Sometimes we write hurtful messages online because we feel protected by the wide expanse of the Internet. Made up usernames and fake profile pictures can mask our bitter or jealous identities, but our comments are real and tangible. I am not an exception to this matter of negative reactions. I remember when the song “Friday” was becoming a global sensation. I shook my head as my American friends reblogged it on Tumblr while my French friends linked it on Facebook. I covered my ears as it played on a radio in Scotland and then warily listened to it as students in Egypt sang it on the streets. I didn’t like the song, but I certainly had no problem with the singer herself. It made me sad to read articles in the news about how Rebecca Black was receiving hate mail with notes such as “Go kill yourself” and “I hope you develop an eating disorder.” According to one source, Black explained how she cried when she first started receiving the nasty comments. She admitted, “I felt like this was my fault. And I shouldn’t have done this, and this is all because of me.”

In the end, I actually managed to find the culprit behind the comment. It’s funny how the tables turned. In that forum, the anonymous poster was so brutally frank and arrogant that you would think they pretty much owned the Internet. Why? Because were anonymous. But once confronted, the same poster became timid and apologetic. I’m happy to say that I successfully doused that flame war.

Posted 1 month ago

Tags: internet and globalization, rebecca black, cyber bullying,

You mean the World… of Warcraft to me.

If you’ll please excuse this interruption from my normal Paris ranting, this is the second blog post for my Internet & Globalization class.

In high school, I had the stereotypical “nerd” boyfriend. Now, don’t mistake this as the cool, black-rimmed glasses wearing geek that the hipster has made prominent. No, my guy was your typical socially inept and acne ridden nerd. Unsurprisingly, he was the one who introduced me to the number one most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), “World of Warcraft” or “WoW.” It sets users into a virtual fantasy world where they can create avatars to explore the land, interact with other characters, and fight monsters. As a previous player, I can vouch that the game can get extremely time consuming if one is serious about developing their avatar to its full potential. In fact, on average users spend about 34.6 hours a month gaming. It’s no wonder that with these statistics, the clever folks at Mashable came up with this entertaining infographic arguing “Why ‘World of Warcraft’ Might Get You More Dates than Match.com.”

Now, as a personal disclaimer – I did not meet my then boyfriend on WoW. But we sure did a lot of our dating via it. Nothing said affection more than waking up to a virtual rose in my mailbox or even better, having him spend hours walking me through a particularly difficult dungeon. This is the courtship of online love. Thus, I can easily understand why it is argued that WoW is a more successful place than Match.com. It is because I personally believe that Match.com isn’t a specific enough site for someone to actually find the love of your life on it. There is too much of a plethora of different personalities on there to find the one that most closely “matches” your own. This is contrast to the other dating websites that are much more exclusive, like JDate (just for the Jews) or AdamMeetEve (if you don’t get the biblical reference then you definitely won’t match with these people). Therefore, I’ll have to clarify that this infographic only applies for the special few – the nerds. But just to quickly summarize the numbers:

To give my insider’s perspective, online games make it more possible for nerds to find love than if they used dating website. It is entirely more likely that they will meet someone who shares their interests in Sci-Fi and computer-programming while they raid than if they spent the same amount of hours perusing through countless dating profiles.

It may not have been on Match.com, but I’ve tried that whole online dating thing and it’s hard! Sure, your match may be searching for you too, but there are so many frogs to filter through that finding your Prince Charming may seem impossible. I’ve found that the guys on dating websites to be either: desperate since they’re terrible at wooing girls in real life, or suave Don Juans who definitely know how to woo and just want a quick hook up or 5. Those who play World of Warcraft go into it with no expectations about finding love; they just want to have fun. If anything, the dating is more accidental than forced. According to the infographic, “Men approached by women in a high-adrenaline situation are 37.5% more likely to feel an attraction. Battling demons and trolls with a girl is a bigger rush than grabbing coffee with her.”

To conclude, I’d like to share a funny article that I found while researching this topic. It’s a how to for those who “Want to Get Married in World of Warcraft?” I’m not sure if it’s sarcastic or not, but I did find this particular gem in the comments section:

Posted 1 month ago

2 notes

Tags: world of warcraft, internet and globalization, match.com, classwork, nerds, geeks, MMORPG, dating sites,

Q: Hi Loraine! I'm a senior from Boston, MA and I'd like your opinion on some AUP and California related stuff (since you're an expert on both!). I am in love with both France and California, and I applied to schools in both locations but due to financial issues I have few options. I can afford one year at AUP, or community college in California then transferring to a university. Do you recommend AUP first then settle down in California, or the opposite?

A:
My mom always told me that, “It doesn’t matter where you begin, all that matters is where you end up.” So in that case, just think about where you want your diploma from.
I find it odd that you’re going to community college all the way in California. Why are you making it so difficult upon yourself? Do CC in Boston. If you’re going to move to California just for community college, you’ll have to find a place to live, pay higher tuition for out-of-state fees, and you’ll be running the risk of not getting your classes because the California school system is suffering from overcrowding. The one good thing about going to community college in California is that you’ll be able to transfer your credits to a UC or CSU more easily (if that’s where you want to go).You might as well suck it up in Boston for a couple of years to save money and get your general electives out of the way, use that money you’ve saved to do a Euro trip during the summer THEN transfer to a California college (public or private) that has the best reputation with the cheapest tuition. However! If you want to do that whole actual “live in Europe” thing, then definitely go to AUP for a year. Spend that $50,000! That’s what a surprising amount of people do. I’ve made so many friends in my beginning years here who have all left to go to bigger and brighter places. AUP a good place to both satisfy your wanderlust and work on a degree. Make sure your credits would transfer in full to whatever university you end up going to. In any case, let me tell you something for sure though - CALIFORNIA WEATHER IS THE BEST. holla!

Posted 1 month ago

1 note

Oh la la? Oh ha ha.

Go to Paris, they said. Paris is magical, they said.

SHIT PEOPLE DON’T TELL YOU BEFORE YOU MOVE TO PARIS.

Posted 1 month ago

5 notes

Tags: paris, france, study abroad, expat, american university of paris,

”The best way to learn the French language… is to take a French lover.

President Celeste Schenck of the American University of Paris @ Freshman Orientation 2010.

Posted 3 months ago

13 notes

Tags: american university of paris, celest schenck, french, france, paris, love, sex, language, best president ever,

Home stays in Paris.

Someone just asked me about whether they should do a home stay in Paris and I was going to publicize my answer, but accidentally didn’t. SO:

+ Positive

If you’re new to the city and don’t know anyone, it’s nice to know that you’re not coming to an empty house.
If agreed upon, your meals/cleaning/laundry is taken care of.
You get practice your French with native speakers.
You get learn about their culture first hand.
If you really get along well, you will always have a family in France to visit.

- Con

You lose a certain degree of independence and autonomy by living in someone else’s home and agreeing upon their code of conduct.
Inviting groups of people over is not very likely. Inviting a member of the opposite sex is usually forbidden.
The French love food and thus it is harder for them to navigate around any of your dietary conditions.
If you have allergies, beware of households with pets or smokers.
Parisians aren’t as welcoming or open as Americans, rather you are just someone to rent their empty room to.

My personal recommendation for anyone considering a homestay in Paris is to live there for one semester maximum. If you go to AUP, then same logic but this applies to the Campuséa dorms as well. The first few months are generally your transition time where you’re getting to know the city and making friends. My biggest beef against long term home stays in Paris is that you’ll be homestaying in … Paris. I understand if you go to some small, rural French town where everyone knows each other, no one speaks English, and the people are as warm as the weather. However, Parisians just fall into their own “special” little category of je ne sais quoi. If you’re going to make the argument that you really want to learn French, then just consider how much actual time you’ll be spending conversing with your host parents over the dinner table. If you actually want to learn the language, you get out into the streets and make some French friends or find a French lover.