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There's an App for That: Manipulation



Have you ever wanted to step out of your comfort zone and do daring challenges at the behest of the invisible audience known as the internet? Oh no, are you now required to do ever-increasingly more dangerous dares because they're holding valuable information or people hostage? OR do you fancy yourself one of those invisible audience members who just want to have a good time watching people complete fun TikTok challenges? Well, there's an app for that and this episode is for you! We watched Nerve and quite a few episodes of Black Mirror. 


 

RED: Quotes, someone else's words.


Kat's Facts - The Internet and Control


Like we usually do, we see connections to things we’ve done previously as we go about these series’. Everything kinda connects when you talk about technology and the way that it impacts our lives. Apps are no different, and the presence of social media, combined with app technology in some ways allows us the same dissociation we can experience in chat rooms, or in comments, there is some kind of power associated with saying things from behind a screen, instead of saying it directly to someone’s face. People get bolder, and have this detachment from their words. There’s this feeling that the digital platform is a step away from reality. So when you combine this with communication with other, things can get kinda dicey. We don’t realize the weight of our words, because we can’t see how they hit other people. In the media we’re going to discuss, we’ll be looking through the ways the combination of tech and people can and has been used as a form of manipulation. We have this culture of challenges, social media campaigns, and this pressure of what happens on social media stays on social media, and for our young people, it can affect them in ways that they do not currently have the cognitive functioning to accurately process.


There’s apparently an app that mimics the films dares, in exchange for cash, called Double Dog which exchanged dares for bones aka money. However it has a 3.9 rating on itunes with only 160 people downloading it from the apple store.


Sources:

 

Gabe's Film Analysis -

Nerve -

Voyueristic Internet -

Shut Up and Dance -

Surveillance!

Hated in the Nation -

The power of the internet - how we act when we think no one can see us.

 

Media from this week's episode:


Nerve (2016) Director: Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman A high school senior finds herself immersed in an online game of truth or dare, where her every move starts to become manipulated by an anonymous community of "watchers."

  • What a waste of Juliette Lewis

Black Mirror: Shut Up and Dance (Season 3, episode 3) Director: James Watkins When withdrawn Kenny stumbles headlong into an online trap, he is quickly forced into an uneasy alliance with shifty Hector, both at the mercy of persons unknown.

Black Mirror: Hated in the Nation (Season 3, episode 6) Director:James Hawes

In near-future London, police detective Karin Parke, and her tech-savvy sidekick Blue, investigate a string of mysterious deaths with a sinister link to social media.

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