Thursday, March 20, 2014

Digital Container or Content Creator: Blurring the Dvide

Hey all!

Sorry for all the late posts, the end of this semester has been brutal.

I took a different meaning from the blog question which asks us to consider what happens when content is affected by that which contains it.

When I think of the blurred line between content and container, I immediately think of Facebook and its "Year in Review" videos. Facebook is an online content container where a large majority of the population has taken to storing their thoughts, conversations, videos, and photos. The amount of social content stored on Facebook is enormous.

Yet Facebook, as a container, is not a neutral entity. The content put into Facebook is analyzed in order to present the viewer with an array of adds that they might be interested in viewing. While in the case of the "Year in Review" videos, Facebook takes an individuals posted content from over the past 12 months and decides which images and posts were the 20 most important by itself. To me this significantly blurs the division between a content container and a content creator.

Twitter is another social media site which I believe disrupts the content it contains. The restriction on character limit is 140, and this has given rise to a whole new shortened language. Just like Facebook, Twitter has created content, via the hashtags and shorten words, even though it is presented as a container for tweets and social information.




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