5th Learning Journal

When I think about social media one of the first things that pop into my mind is the word selfie. Pictures were a driving force in the evolution of social media. The reason that a program like Instagram dominates Facebook with the jet demographics is that Instagram has a cleaner and more streamlined way of displaying images to the consumer. Instagram is also a super popular app because it adopts/steals other prominent software ideas. You can see an example of this with their Instagram stories taken from Snapchat, and reels which adopt a Tik Tok type model. As long as it’s legal, I guess you can’t complain, but it does seem kind of sleepy to blatantly copy someone else’s hard work for your own benefit. Since Instagram has become a hodgepodge of the most popular aspects of other social media programs it’s become a one-stop shop for me to share funny videos, post what's going on in my life, etc. The only thing about Instagram that I don’t like is the culture of its users. Instagram seems like it’s all about displaying the best version of yourself to others or potentially a fake image of yourself. This idea is what has led to so many different types of filters and special effects being developed, but the technology doesn’t stop their deep fakes where people can create not only an image of you but a video with your voice are starting to be created. One example I can think of is a fake podcast between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs. It was astonishing to me that the conversation not only sounded like them but the conversation also seemed somewhat organic. Now the deep fake technology and other AI technologies are a long way off from being super compelling but I don't believe we are too far off from serious problems occurring. These new technologies are going to make confidence in what we can believe as real decrease. We can already see this with how we consume news and how terms like fake news struck a chord with people. We live in the information era where we are already overloaded with huge amounts of info from all different sorts of mediums. If people can make the information we see even more compelling and deceiving I’m sure we will see an increase in abuse of the technologies regarding fraud or scams.

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