First Year Seminar Digital Media and Social Justice
Coming into this class I did not really know what to expect at all. Questions such as; What does first year seminar even mean? Do digital media and social justice really even relate at all? What are we going to be expected of? flashed across my mind. The first day of class was a shock to me, I didn't expect this to be a discussion based class. I had no clue it was going to be a mainly independent study course. It was the biggest surprise of all to me that we would be directing things in our own way. I had expected the class to be guided and structured somewhat like a web design class.
The second day of this class was a real eye opener to me. I began to realize how social justice related to social media. The speaker opened up my eyes a lot and truly got me interested in the subject. The scenarios he had discussed and secrets he had leaked shocked me. I would have never thought that countries like England hid cameras in trash cans, or that stores like Nordstrom tracked your every movement throughout the store by hacking in to your cell phone. That day I also gained an awareness of the dangers of social media. I put a lot of conclusions together and made a lot of realizations. I had always heard to be careful what you post on the Internet and always just sort of ignored it. Now I realize just how many people are actually affected by posts on the Internet, weather it be loosing their jobs or just being socially humiliated. The biggest social media post shocker to me; was the Christmas card that the mother had posted of her family on facebook. It shocked me that someone from the other side of the world had access to her photo and was able to use it for an advertisement. I had always just figured events like this are illegal in our country but this gave me the realization that social media is world wide not just country wide. It makes me wonder if anything I've ever posted is somewhere in the world that I don't know about. I could be a model on an advertisement somewhere in the world and I wouldn't even know.
After this we had many discussions in class, but still there is one that stands out and intrigues me. This is the topic of toxic waste. I always knew the government lied, but I would have never thought things such as digital waste that I "recycled" was never actually recycled. It somewhat infuriates me the majority of recycled toxic waste is merely just dumped for another country to deal with. No, I do not want toxic waste polluting the air I breathe, but it's not fair to just dump all our problems on someone else. This may be the most economically efficient way but morally its not right. Likewise, the earth that we live on is still being destroyed by pollution, our children will still suffer from our consequences in the future no matter where we choose to dump our problems now. I don't know the answer but we need to find another solution to actually truly recycle toxic digital waste. The first step would be to raise awareness about this issue. The more minds we have working to solve the problem the faster it will be resolved.
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