Project Log: Rachelle Elbert

Individual Project- My Progress

• 3/14/16
• Who's In Control?
• http://criticalcomms.blogspot.com/2016/03/whos-in-control.html
• I actually googled "Why Facebook and YouTube use advertisements?". It led me to this page: http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-youtube-video-ad-buy/297010/. It talked about that you only see YouTube ads when you are logged into your account, and that they show specific ads based on your demographics (age, gender, location). This led to another internet search and very interesting discussions with friends about being targeted by social media- and how much of it are we actually seeing. 
• Next, I will actually try to add facts and statistics to my next post to back up my claims. I can go a lot farther with these thoughts, but at the time I didn't necessarily have any. I am excited that this is where my topic is going. 

Group Project- My Contributions 

• http://criticalcomms.blogspot.com/2016/03/whos-in-control.html : "Who's In Control"- Here I discussed how Social Media is being run by our opinions, which are not always enteirely educated.
• http://criticalcomms.blogspot.com/2016/03/understanding-humanism.html; "Understanding Humanism" - Here I played with my first topic on how humanism has changed throughout the ages, but asked myself: is our humanism taking over the society and making it crumble?
• 3/21/16 Bryce and I made a video introducing our topic of Open/Controlled. We finally linked our topics together- because of video accessibility and bias information being spread through different web sources, we are losing our control over logical reasoning, and are being emotionally motivated. Acting on emotions can lead to an over-sharing of personal information that jeopardizes personal security and privacy.