I remember being with my two classmates, Jordan and Diego, when we first thought about the idea. “We wanna do something with the Golden Record.”

It seemed interesting, but there needed to be a twist to the idea. It was not just sending an object out to space to contact extraterrestrial life; it had to be more. The sounds contained on Carl Sagan’s Golden Record show so much of Earth’s culture, but we had to do our own take on it.

We decided instead of sounds on a record, that we would show objects. Since we are of different ages and come from different backgrounds, it seemed like a good idea to gather random items to show the hypothetical aliens what they would think of human culture through visual appeal. We brainstormed the idea a bit more and finally brought them to the next class.

There were books, knick-knacks, video games, flags, stickers, photos, a painting, and more. Once we put all the items in the suitcase, we realized that we had provided so much art, nostalgia, and landmarks in time. It was interesting to see that even though these objects were all different, they still had a few things in common.

Realizing this, I pitched the idea to the first person who stopped by. More ideas kept flowing through the more I talked about it. It was easier after the first person, because even discussing it with my classmates and hearing what they had to say about the project, it was also about perspective.

“What would you put into the suitcase?” I asked those who stopped by.

It got them thinking, and it made me realize that is what part of what this project was about. Although ours emphasized art, nostalgia, and the human experience, other people had different ideas of what they would send. There is not one way to do this project, but we ended up finding something that we can all relate to.

Listening to all the other students’ projects and presentations gave me different ideas on how to do presentations and research. It is always nice to see how people care about their ideas, just as we care about ours.

The post Reflection on the Time Capsule appeared first on Digital Writing.

As I was scrolling through patterns on Etsy in search of a new project, I stumbled across a really interesting idea: a flower-shaped crochet lamp pattern! I was super interested, because in my head a small lamp with a really cute crochet flower around it sounded adorable, and not too difficult either. The picture of the finished project was beautiful, but something just didn’t feel right. The finished product didn’t look overly difficult; anyone with a small amount of crochet experience could predict a little bit about the pattern in their mind.  

As I stared at the listing, I realized I wasn’t just looking at a bad pattern; I was looking at an example of synthetic deception. Synthetic deception happens when AI is used to create a completely fictional product and then markets it as reality. 

This looks beautiful, doesn’t it? The first thing I imagined was this little flower lamp sitting on my desk while I work on homework. The more I looked at this rose, though, the more I realized how difficult it would be to actually assemble. Yes, the stitching doesn’t look too in-depth, but how is the light installed in the flower? Is the flower crocheted around the lightbulb? Are the pre-crocheted pieces stitched together? Where is the power cord or battery pack? And why is the light shining so bright through the yarn? If you think critically about the construction, there are quite a few layers of petals over that bulb. The light would have to be incredibly bright to shine through so much thickly stitched yarn. While I was wondering that, I happened to look at the stem of the flower.

I will readily admit that I am not the most experienced crocheter out there, but I do know one thing for sure: crochet stitches physically cannot get smaller in size as they go. For reference, I’ve included a picture of another crocheted flower stem. 

While the general flowers are a bit different, the concept remains the same: the literal size of the stitch is consistent throughout the pattern. The number of stitches may increase and decrease, but the physical size of the individual stitch cannot increase or decrease. In crochet, your stitch size is determined by the diameter of your hook and the weight of your yarn. While you can change the number of stitches to create shapes, you cannot physically shrink the size of an individual stitch as it travels down a stem.

What I found to be the most confusing thing about this whole shady online shop was that the reviews for the store and its patterns were really good. At first glance, Crocheteaseshop looks like a massive success: over 5,000 sales and a 4.5-star rating. As I started digging into the feedback, I noticed a huge disconnect. The 5-star reviews were all pre-creation. People were leaving five star reviews before they even tried the pattern. 

It wasn’t until I filtered for the 1-star reviews from people who actually made the pattern that the synthetic deception became obvious. These buyers described the PDF patterns as completely nonsensical, with instructions that were either unfinished or physically impossible to execute.  As Caulfield and Wineburg argue in Verified, the goal of digital literacy isn’t just to find ‘the truth,’ but to develop the lateral reading skills needed to spot a fake before you’re already $5 deep into a scam.

To really see the synthetic deception for what it is, I had to find what actual crochet authority looks like. I looked at a designer named June Gilbank (the creator of PlanetJune), and the difference is night and day. While Crocheteaseshop hides behind AI, a real designer provides ‘better coverage’ through physical proof.

On a legitimate site like PlanetJune, you aren’t just buying a finished photo; you’re seeing step-by-step tutorials of actual human hands working the yarn. There’s a technical accountability there that a bot can’t fake. Her reviews on Etsy don’t just say ‘it looks pretty,’ the reviews say the patterns actually work. It proves that in the world of SIFT, better coverage means finding a creator who shows the messy, middle parts of the craft, not just an AI-generated end goal.

This part goes into the end of my research where I found out that the patterns actually do exist, the cover images are just AI-generated. It’s all still confusing because there are hardly any reviews talking about the finished product, but the few that exist only mention the pattern being confusing at times. The few that included pictures of finished projects looked real enough, but didn’t say anything about the pattern being gibberish. 

I purchased the pattern for the tulip flower lamp, so I could see it myself. The pattern included needed materials, instructions, and even a custom lamp to fit the pattern perfectly. The lamp the shop linked seems real, and its $30 price tag would explain why they sell their patterns so cheap. 

While I have not yet begun this pattern due to school, I was able to find some reviews of the shop that looked legit. One user, Barbara, said that the seller was very helpful when she had questions about the cardigan pattern that she purchased. She included a picture of her finished product, and the cardigan looked similar to the cover picture, but it’s obvious that Barbara chose to use different colors. Even so, the basics of the cardigan looked pretty similar to the shape of the one advertised in the cover photo of the pattern. If the patterns are real, and they produce real products, why use AI to make more appealing cover photos? Skipping the step where potential buyers become skeptical of your credibility kind of seems like a no-brainer. I wanted to know why a store that very well seems to sell real patterns that create real products would use AI to draw their customers in.

I did a quick Google search for “AI-generated cover photos for crochet” and was met with a couple blogs and Reddit threads providing tips to detect fake cover photos. Unsurprisingly, I found no evidence of anyone being in favor of the AI-generated pictures. This thought led me to ask why shop creators would even consider that people would be more likely to buy their products with a “more appealing” cover. My next thought was something like this: “maybe the shop owners are counting on those few people who can’t tell the difference?” If there will always be one or two people who will just think they found a pretty pattern, or a pretty dress or basically anything else, shop creators who ust AI to draw people in will always have a business. I had just completed some Spanish homework before working on this quest, and I felt like not being able to tell if a picture is AI was kind of like not being able to read a word in a different language. If you’re not familiar, there’s almost no hope in figuring it out. I decided to look at Google Scholar for anything to do with visual literacy. I ended up finding a WordPress HTML site that covers visual literacy in teaching and education. Right in the middle of the abstract, it read “[visual literacy is] defined as the ability to interpret images as well as to generate images for communicating ideas and concepts.” According to this definition, someone who lacks visual literacy would have an incredibly hard time finding the difference between a real cover image and one created by AI. 

While going through the search results about visual literacy, I found a source that covers digital AI in marketing. This source touches on synthetic deception and how the use of AI in advertising could challenge consumer protection laws. I’m really glad that I found this source, because it ties back into the AI cover photos of crochet patterns deceiving potential customers. 

It was really fun to learn that SIFT can be applied anywhere, not just to “factual” information! I’m always going to keep an eye out when browsing for anything online now. Just because reviews are good, it doesn’t mean you can trust it.

The post AI Generated Crochet appeared first on Digital Writing.

The internet is such a fun and exploratory world. Makes us laugh and makes us cry, but more and more recently it’s just gotten confusing. I’m sure if you were on any online spaces on March 1st you saw the infamous Alexis Stone post: 

It’s very easy to have an initial knee-jerk reaction to: “Jim Carrey is being impersonated by Alexis Stone at the award ceremony?” 

If you were me on March 1st, you saw the Alexis Stone image first and probably laughed and scrolled away initially. Only to be met with a gazillion more posts with various angles of “Jim Carrey” (or “Jim Scarrey”) at the Cesar Awards where objectively something was… off?

Then you find a repost of a repost of a repost of Alexis Stone and find yourself lost in the comments. 

Looking at the comments is a bit hard to navigate. There are a lot of various different ideas (and funny reaction memes), but we have to stop and really look at what’s happening before we send it out. I know my initial reaction was a deep sigh and I immediately wanted to share it with some of my closest friends (one of which is a big JC fan). 

But we have to pause and ask oursevles: 

What do we already know to be ‘Tru’?

 (I’m sorry if this isn’t a pun-safe space you might need to find other coverage.)

• Well we know that the media has a penchant for spreading misinformation about celebrity clones. “Ms Mojo” has posted a video of “20 Absurd Celebrity Cloning Conspiracies”, Jim Carrey isn’t the first and he won’t be the last.
• We also know that there is a large issue with plastic surgery. Articles like this one from CBS news, videos on Youtube such as this one, even refer to plastic surgery as a pandemic sweeping across Hollywood. If you’re wanting a more entertaining commentary on the effects of being in the public eye on one’s self image and how it connects to physical cosmetic procedures check out ‘The Substance’.

So now that we know that we can take a deep breath and if you did believe it, you’re not alone! If you are a complete skeptic (like myself) maybe you didn’ t believe it and just want to scroll past…but it’s always important to look into the issue. Maybe you’ll learn something new about yourself, the media or even Jim Carrey. (I learned that he doesn’t have any social media of his own! I also learned that he is in so many more movies that I need to see!)

Behind ‘The Mask’: Investigating the Source

I’m treating the Alexis Stone Instagram post as our “source” as it was my first introduction to the issue. We have quite a few questions about this source (especially if you’re me who has no social media presence as it relates the world of fashion and makeup). 

Who is Alexis Stone?

Alexis Stone is a known drag-performer. Best known for their intense and hyper-realistic makeup looks impersonating celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence.

They even make public appearances in these drag/celebrity personas, like their apperance/perfomance at the Balennciga Awards as Mortia. Knowing that it may not be too far fetched to believe that this really was just another performance. 

Where did they claim to appear?

This is the important part and why many fans were up in arms about the claim. Alexis Stone was claiming not only to have attended the 2026 Cesar Awards, France’s most acclaimed film awards, In Jim Carrey’s place (you can learn more about the Cesar Awards here). But also received an award in his place with the attempt to completely fool the audience. Not a performance or an appearance but truly assuming the identity of Jim Carrey. 

Finding Other Coverage

Before we draw conclusions from just that let’s look at the actual acceptance speech. (Delievered in amazing French by the way!)

Jim Carrey is known for keeping a relatively private life. Not making many public appearances it’s hard to keep track of what exactly he looks like on a day to day basis. However, if we compare it to his last public appearance when he inducted Soundgarden into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he definitely looks different. If we look at the coverage of that event only 3ish months prior the difference actually seems very drastic. 

Maybe he really is Alexis Stone under there… OR maybe we can pause… and brainstorm a few more reasons why Jim Carrey might look different based on what we know about Hollywood.

“Botox!”  was my first thought after watching that interview. You can see the differences in his face are placements where botox is usually injected or alterativaly locations that might be targets for plastic surgery. This wouldn’t be the first celebrity to get botox done and he definitely wouldn’t be the first to have a botox job that is a bit messed up maybe. 

You can actually see the bruising on his face that is traditional with the healing process of a lot of cosmetic surgerys as pointed out by various sources on social media such as Dr. Sammi on instgram. 

But after a quick search I was able to find a lot of “experts” talking about his potential cosmetic surgical interventions. However, I found an Yahoo Article that consulted a “Dr. John Spiegel” about his opinion on the matter to which he has responded: “He has 100 percent had botulinum” referring to botox as well as speculating about face-lift and eyebrow treatments as well. 

A great source for trying to navigate potential misinformation would be “Verified” by Mike Caufield and Sam Wineburg. Verified takes you through various steps and various tools you can use to verify informatio on line. One of these concepts they introduce is “lateral reading”. Lateral reading is all about leaving the original site and looking up different components ofthe site, the authors, the site itself, and any claims that they make. Like getting a second or third opinion. 

Some lateral reading of Dr. John Spiegal reveals that he really is a cosetemic surgeon who wuold be able to accurately identify such procedures. A quick google search pulls up his practice’s home page which claims he has been presented on various famous shows, you can see reviews about his work on Google as well and you can even find his profile on the Boston Medical Center. He’s an easy guy to find and doesn’t seem to have any notable reason for making up lies about Jim Carrey’s possible procedure.   

We also received statements from Jim Carrey’s publicist not long after the incident that it really was Jim Carrey. Many sources, such as the Daily Mail, have confirmed that Jim Carrey had been practiving his speech for months to deliver it in such phenomenal French. It’s confirmed on various sites including the original source, TMZ.

Are we Getting Dumb and Dumber?

Despite all this, what still makes the clone theory or Alexis Stone so believable? How were people being tricked by this even after Carrey’s publicist released his statement. Even looking at different angles of Carrey on the same night throughout the night the difference is visible but it looks a lot more like the Carrey images most conspiracy accounts are clinging to. Some people even compare his appearance with past appearances and have drawn similarities between the two such as his dimples: 

There are quite a few factors, such as Jim Carrey’s incredibly private life. It’s harder to track what celebrities look like when it’s 3 whole months between appearances! (3 months may not seem like a long time but in the public eye that’s considered private). 

Jim Carrey, the comedian, did in factclaim to use decoys in a 2008 segment on the Letterman show.

Although clearly a joke (or maybe not clearly for some) it was said almost 20 years ago now and recently resurfaced among the chaos. 

There is also a giant issue with media literacy. 

Books like “Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Business, Economics, Social Sciences, and Humanities” talk about media literacy and how the rise in hoaxes, such as Jim Carrey’s clone or decoy theories, are damaging to the trust in media outlets. 

There’s also the glaringly obvious detail I have skimmed past for right now that adds a layer of complexity to this. A topic that seems to be at the center of just about every debate ever: AI. 

Alexis Stone’s original post was AI. 

If you didn’t know, now you do, USA today confirmed with their technology that the post was constructed with AI. 

The image itself to me was initially very obviously AI and I thought that it was just a (bad) joke. However, with the age of AI there was at least a sliver of doubt. I knew in my heart it was fake but when I looked back at it, I found myself (for just a second I promise!) questioning if it really was AI. 

It’s scary! In an era of real deepfakes and Ai generated content, understanding the differences is getting harder and harder. Even notable newstations such as FoxNews have fallen to the scam of AI generated content. 

The harmful portion of this whole “scandal” (I hesitate to even call it that), is that yes it harms Jim Carrey. A man clearly pushed by the public to get these procedures done just to have the backlash that he received for it. However, dumb jokes like this make the problem worse. More and more it is getting harder to figure out what to believe. 

So… What Egg-actly can we Do?

This article outlines a lot of the societal implications of allowing deep fakes and AI misinformation to spread: such as the legal effects, the “erosion of public trust”, and how these deep fakes can be especially harmful democratic societies where opinion and public discussion are so crucial. It also outlines some steps to mitigating the spread of AI misinformation such as community flagging or algorithm detection. These work, sure, but is still content that is falling through the cracks. The most interesting backup to this issue that I’ve read being put into place is AI detecting itself…. 

AI identifying itself there just seems to be an inevitable problem. A study was done to see just how effective these AI detection tools were and “the vast majority of detectors falls below 60% [detection rate], hovering around the level of random guessing.” Random guessing! 

It’s not helpless case. It may seem overwhelming, keeping up with it all, but all it really takes is a bit of time and patience. As Caulfield and Wineburg detail “Verified”, with the scarcity effect further detailed here, with a overwhelming influx of information there is a scarcity of attention. So don’t let your attention wander and don’t over egg-haust yourself. Just take a moment to breathe, sit down and sift through the information.

A closing note from Sonic 3:

The post Uncovering What’s ‘Tru”.  appeared first on Digital Writing.

For a long time now, early schooling has been a place for play and imagination. Playgrounds are ripe with made-up games and rules that often engage in role-playing activities. In fact, role-playing has been cited as beneficial for childhood development and is heavily encouraged as a social tool for children. Many children “play house,” dictating imaginary roles of parent and child, and we can’t forget the infamous dog role. Animals are a large part of childhood, and it’s somewhat inevitable that children would play imagination games centering animals. Some of the very first knowledge we gain as children is the ability to name and act out different animals. And, a large part of childhood media whether it be books, toys, television center around animals. 

With both imaginative play and animals being so prevalent in childhood you would think this is not a large issue, or something under large amounts of scrutiny. However, in recent bathroom politics, the idea of children pretending to be animals has become a hot topic.

I first encountered this issue on Instagram where I saw Texas representative, James Talrico, pushing back against the proposed “F.U.R.R.I.E.S Act,” standing for “FORBIDDING UNLAWFUL REPRESENTATION OF ROLEPLAYING IN EDUCATION”; this bill was proposed in a Texas legaslative session. The proposed bill “prohibit(s) any non-human behavior by a student, including presenting himself or herself, on days other than exempt days, as anything other than a human being.” Exempt days being Halloween or dress-up days promoted by a school itself; there are also exemptions for events like plays or those who may be a school mascot. However the bill specifies that dress-up days cannot have a theme that is  “primarily related to the history or celebration of a biological or artificial species other than homo sapiens,” and if you were thinking about being an animal in a play, better make sure the play is district funded or held by a sponsored theatre organization. 

The bill goes on to define non-human behavior as “any type of behavior or accessory displayed by a student in a school district other than behaviors or accessories typically displayed by a member of the homo sapiens species.” The bill goes on to define these accessories and behaviors that are specifically prohibited.​​ The list of banned behaviors immediately starts with the prohibition of litterboxes in school bathrooms, and moves onto things like meowing, self-grooming, pet accessories, fur/tails, and “surgical means of features that are non-human.” 

Governor Abbot heavily supported the bill and can be quoted saying, “Kids go to school dressed up as cats with litter boxes in their classrooms.” Yet, when asked for evidence or the name of schools who were allowing this, Abbot had no response. The reel I had seen from James Talarico calls out the suspicious motives and nature of the bill, attacking public schools in the midst of a political campaign pushing vouchers for private schooling. In the video, Talarico also highlights the fact that the idea of litterboxes in school bathrooms is a proven hoax, with no credibility to the claim.

Even though the issues addressed in the bill lacked evidence, and some issues were disproven all together, furry panic took its hold in education and bathroom politics – because that is a thing now. Around the time of Talarico’s video, there were lots of reactions to the proposed bill and its topics being discussed online. The popularity and controversy of the F.U.R.R.I.E.S Act made its way off the internet, though, and started making its way into social and political conversations beyond Texas. 

Soon after seeing these short videos which discussed the issue of litterboxes in schools, I was approached by a coworker who claimed the issue had reached Tennessee. Interested in where the conversation would go, I asked her where she had heard this information. As I expected, the information she heard was from a friend, who heard it from another friend, who more than likely heard it from another friend. My coworker explained that a school in Jackson, Tennessee, really did have a litterbox in it! I responded by telling my coworker about the F.U.R.R.I.E.S Act which had likely inspired the rumor she had heard. I further explained that in the Texas legislative session, the issue had already been labeled a hoax; despite its legal existence in a proposed bill. She pushed back, telling me that she had seen a photo and knew it was real. The conversation ended here.

At the time, I only knew the information I had seen in Talarico’s short, clipped, video. My claim that it was a hoax was only as strong as her claim that it was in fact not a hoax. So, I got to searching.

Because of the popularity of this topic, there were lots of different news outlets covering the outbreak of the “furry panic.” Scrolling through the plenty of headlines that come up when you search “litterbox in Jackson TN school,” many headlines which mention the falsehood of the claim, I found two links posted by WKRN (a local source) that at least give context to the local rumors. While one link is a video and the other is an article, they both give similar information and credit the litterbox rumors to the same source: a Tennessee Legislature Committee hearing where Sen. Janice Bowling commented, “I’m hearing this in my rural districts where maybe schools are not fully disclosing that they are allowing children who identify as snakes, cats, whatever, they are providing litter boxes.” Sen. Bowling goes as far to call the rumored litterboxes in schools a “growing crisis.”

Similar to the conversations had in the Texas legislative session, Tennessee legislators had no evidence for the claims being made. These senators and representatives who made these claims had no names of schools who have been proved to allow this. The claims themselves had weak foundations, using words like “maybe” to describe whether this is a genuine issue or not.

The overall lack of evidence made me start to question, where did this all even start? Well, the timeline of the hoax itself is somewhat tricky, or at least does not fully add up. The F.U.R.R.I.E.S Act, the first instance of furry panic I had seen, was proposed March 13th, 2025, and has been waiting to make it out of the house committee since April of 2025. 

Oddly, the legislative incident in Tennessee occurred in September of 2022, almost three years before the proposal of the F.U.R.R.I.E.S Act. Similar claims were made in a Michigan school board meeting as well. This incident occurred on December 20th of a 2021, where a parent claimed children “identified as furries” and were using litterboxes in their school bathrooms; the parent does establish before speaking that this issue was “addressed by a child.” With all of these incidents happening years before the F.U.R.R.I.E.S Act, it is clear that the claims made in the Texas legislature were not the first instances of this rumor. And, it was not the rumors in Texas that had inspired my coworkers claims, but a recycled rumor straight from Tennessee; well technically from Michigan and Texas too. Basically, neither Abott nor Talarico made this topic an internet or social sensation, it had already been one for quite some time.

When these rumors were circling between states and school counties in 2022, the TODAY show took to addressing these claims. In their report posted in October of 2022, they mention the Michigan school board meeting where furries and litterboxes were brought up as a concern; more specifically they mention the lack of proof presented in the meeting. 

The headline that is visible on screen during the report reads, “cat litter in schools disinformation campaign.” Three years before Texas even got their hands on the rumor, national news sources were labeling the litterbox hoax as a disinformation campaign. I think it is important to note that in TODAY’s 2022 report, they highlight that 20 conservative candidates and elected officials made litterbox claims in 2022. And, that number has only grown since elected officials in Texas repositioned the spotlight on the hoax cycling back into popular media.

The TODAY show clip does accredit the Michigan school board meeting as “the first sign of the rumor.” While this may be true in the case of the rumor being presented in official school meetings, the rumor or hoax itself still had to come from somewhere. The Michigan parent credits the information coming from a child, which is more than probable with childhood imagination and pranks. 

However,  a Joe Rogan podcast clip making the claim of litterboxes in school bathrooms was posted just two months before this school board meeting took place. While Joe Rogan is hard to define politically, his audience can be considered a republican leaning one. While there is no political affiliation defined at the Michigan school board meeting, the pattern follows with all the representatives or officials who engaged with this rumor. 

Interestingly enough, Joe Rogan almost immediately debunked the litterbox claims himself around a month after the original clip was posted. He admitted this in his podcast saying, “It doesn’t seem like there was any proof that they actually put the litter box in there.” In fact, the topic of litter boxes in school bathrooms has an entire Wikipedia page explaining that it is just a hoax; which was originally created in September of 2022.

So, let me round it out a bit. In October of 2021 Joe Rogan made his claim that a school installed a litter box; which he admitted was false about a month later. Two months later in December of 2021, this claim was repeated at a Michigan school board meeting. Between the months of December 2021 to October of 2022, when the ABC report debunking was posted, this claim was repeated 20 times in legislative spaces. One of these incidents being the Tennessee legislative meeting in September of 2022; which happens to be the same month the Wikipedia article labeling the litterbox as a hoax was published. The incident is still being recycled through he-said-she-said stories and online clips when Texas joins the party in March 2025. This hoax continues to stay relevant in the media until my coworker mentions it to me in a conversation, in 2026. 

With so much proof, that there is no proof, you think this whole thing would be over by now and everyone could get on the same page, right? USU folklore department head Lynne McNeill explains that claims, like the litterbox one, that are reported in town settings as true information with a lack of evidence become a sort of urban legend. She describes the process as;  “we t(ell) the story as though it happened in our own hometown. So when it’s fake news it really reads as news about a particular town in a particular place. It’s an urban legend when it’s wildfire traveling by word of mouth.”

So, it is not unlikely you will see this claim again; some other person in some other town will hear whispers of litterboxes in schools, and it will become a sensation again; just like it did with Texas, seemingly three years after the hoax died down.

The post Verification Quest – Eli Y. appeared first on Digital Writing.

“Remember that both the con artist and the propagandist feed on the impatient, because time to investigate and reflect does not favor liars” – Caulfield and Wineburg

So Many Feelings

Everyday online feels like facing a tsunami of emotionally volatile content while being expected to maintain 1) a “good” opinion on the happenings of the world and 2) an encyclopedic knowledge of context and content.

Being aware of content isn’t the key to ‘successfully’ navigating the internet, BUT being aware of the methods used to draw you in to certain content is. Emotions run high and it’s not always just the anger and sadness you need to pay attention to. The happy dog video seems great and you may even hear a claim that the smiling pitbull was bread to be a “nanny dog,” a lie that has been floating around for a few decades. There is really no benefit to the lie, but it still makes its way into pitty circles.

Emotion is not a bad thing, though. Yes, we can be mislead if we solely trust our hearts and not our minds, but that does not mean we can’t use out emotions to better help us understand what we are interacting with. By taking what you find compelling (Caulfield and Wineburg) and adding a bit of thought, we can develop a better sense of what actually matters to us. If you read an article about a current topic and find a claim that makes your gut drop…well now you know what to look up and verify! Feeling can help us narrow down what is important to us, and help guide us in the lateral search process. Be aware and use what you find with that awareness to better understand what matters to you. Many people use emotion to try and get the better of their audience, but it is helpful to be aware that this is happening while also using what we know about ourselves and the content to actually be better researchers.

Context and AI

In the era of AI, we are all susceptible to falling for a video or photo made by a prompt. It was the case before that if you saw a video too good to be true, there was a chance it was edited from a legitimate video into something more compelling. We now have to compete with videos that have no attachment to reality other than what data was fed into the processor. It is still important to be aware of context when it comes to photos and videos (especially videos), though. It may be assumed that someone with a high position, say a governor of a state, may be quite cognoscente of what he shares so as to not mislead the public, but it is important to understand what is actually happening. Hate to break it to you, but a soldier just pulled out of a foreign nation after ejecting from an aircraft is unlikely to be smiling with his buds a few hours after escape. Even if you missed the AI-ness of the picture, the context surrounding it is fishy enough to alert you to some foul play (intentional or not).

AI also has little track record. Let’s say you see a video that seems too good to be true (a cat doing back flips, maybe), but you don’t know how to check if it is AI. Many AI creators will crop out the watermark of the site they used, but that is something to look for in case they don’t. Beyond what is in front of you, a quick search can help to determine what is actually going on. If there really was a cat that could do back flips, that is something that would likely create a pretty big impact online, but if when you do your search of “cat doing back flips” you only find articles that link back to the same video you saw…it may not be very real. Date can also tell us a lot. If something is claiming to have been around for an extended amount of time, but the only info about it is from super recently, that can indicate some sketchiness.

I think… I’m Going to Ignore that

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” – Herbert Simon

Attention is not something you can force yourself to give beyond what stores you currently have. It may feel like it is important to keep a constant eye on the political machinations of twelve nations, including your own, while also maintaining a good grasp of the goings on in your community, and oh don’t forget to keep track of that meme that keeps developing every two hours… but all this work will only drain you. Yes, being well informed is great, but maybe it would help to take a step back, and chose what you want to focus on and what you want to throw in the bin. This is not lazy or inconsiderate, it is a useful tool to prioritize what space you have in your brain for what is important to you. If you keep seeing posts that just make you mad, even if the topic is real and relevant, but the feeling of anger is just being pushed by the creator, it may be a good time to take what you need and leave the rest (as my tarot reader loves to say). I may be mad that we have governors who don’t pay attention to what they post, but does it do me or anyone else any good to continue to follow the story? The answer is very much, no. Your time and energy is valuable, so divest it carefully and purposefully.

There is no time like the present to chose awareness. Be aware of what you see and consume. It is not as demanding as it may seem at first and it will lead to a better relationship with the internet if you try. AI is everywhere and there are still human created lies floating around the internet, but there are ways to sniff out a majority of the b.s. and find what is 1) true and 2) important to you.

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The Beginning  

At first I was intimidated by the prospect of this lesson. I knew from the get-go that I would be working with something that is out of my comfort zone. There is a bit of peace knowing that, though, as I had little expectation for what the outcome was going to be. I allowed myself to slow down a bit and enjoy learning something new.

I still feel a bit unaware of the language used, though I took thorough notes to look back on. I think that learning HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language was quite interesting. The acronym has been floating around for so long that I never really thought about what it could mean or even about the fact that it is an acronym.

The Middle

I started to become more familiar with what I was doing as I was able to see what the outcome was. I was able to put a line of HTML in and see the outcome spit out onto a split screen. How cool! I was also able to practice concepts as soon as I learned about them, which was a life saver. At some point some of the language became automatic…

            h1 [tab]    p [tab]

… but other things also became a bit confusing. There is so much information and knowing the basic foundational principles is great, but I can also go to a random website and see what the outcome could be which made me a bit sad at my lackluster attempts at tables.

For as many things confused me, there are twice as many resources that can answer essentially any question I have. Whether I find myself back at LinkedIn Learning, WC3, or Web Aim, I am sure that I will be able to find something to guide me in whatever area I am not confident in.

The End (Not Really, Though)

As much as HTML is really fun, I appreciate the additions that CSS brings to the table. I may not be a master coder or able to build a better site than Wix can for a small fee, but I do feel like a more independent user who is capable of a deeper level of online creation.

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The internet is not always the kindest place, but the algorithm is at very least on our side when it comes to finding relatable content/communities. The vastness of the internet also helps when it comes to sharing ideas among large groups of people. These two things on our side, many women have taken to the internet as a place to celebrate, share knowledge, and create community; often creating empowering (or at least fun) trends in these spaces.

A recent popular example of this would be the “I can’t talk right now, I’m doing hot girl shit” trend. The trend itself is a clipped audio from Megan Thee Stallions song, Girls in the Hood, which quite literally says, “I can’t talk right now, I’m doing hot girl shit.” While the audio suggests “hotness,” which is commonly paired with objectification, women have reclaimed the language; categorizing many activities and states-of-being as “hot girl shit.”

This specific example of Megan Thee Stallions audio is explored further by Danya Issawi in her article, “Cant Talk, Im Busy Being Hot.” Issawi explores how this specific trend has allowed women to reclaim what can be objectifying language, and individualize themselves as hot girls. We see this through the plethora of examples the audio comes with; showing off women’s personality traits, night off looks, quirky habits, big achievements, and lots more.

We see this reclamation of language by women pretty frequently on the internet, especially in meme culture. My favorite phenomenon of this through meme culture (wars) would be women using “jokes” or language created by hateful groups of men in a mocking manner; “ruining” the joke in incels eyes. I put the first mention of jokes in quotes because often, there is no joke at all, and the meme or language used is downright demeaning. 

We can see this with the use of the word “foid” online right now; trending in video and meme content. The word started as incel language on the internet, meaning something along the lines of “female android,” used to dehumanize and insult women: both reddit users and urban dictionary cannot offer a solid definition to the word. Either way, the dehumanizing term started to be heavily used in meme culture, eventually being taken over by women meme creators.

Women’s use of these demeaning terms is often extremely ironic, pulling the word miles away from the incel contex it originated in. The creator “sh3bulk” on Instagram does these ironic reclamations of language commonly in her content, using words like “foid” and “femcel” in videos that mock the behaviors shown by the typical user of these words. She is not only jacked, but quite successful in her content with 384k followers. 

Through her content, thousands of women find a relatable platform and community, engaging with each other over the reclamation of dehumanizing language. Platforms like “shebulk’s” help to humanize women and provide a place for large amounts of women to gather and fight against dehumanization on the internet.

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Rogers’ piece really caught my attention because of the content. What I really appreciated about it was that it told a story. The content flowed very well, and everything was placed in a way that made sense. Rogers was able to bring a sort of narrative structure to his article that felt like I was moving through a place. It has dimension to it.

What I didn’t care for as much as the aesthetic components. Now, I wouldn’t say anything was particularly wrong with it. In fact, it looked rather professional and conventional. I think it felt sterile, which is what I didn’t care for. I thought of all of the ways that the page could have been themed and styled to give off a social media application vibe.

Jackson’s article provided the exact kind of flair that I like to see. The inclusion of one of the environments or set pieces as a background photo at the beginning of the piece was quite unique. The article uses pink accents on quotation marks or block quote markers. Pictures being included throughout was really nice as well.

What I did not like about Jackson’s article was the content. Of course, the content was essentially just opinion. I certainly don’t have an issue with Jackson having an opinion, even if it’s one that I think is wrong. What really got to me was the layout.

The content is delivered in a manner that feels quite ‘stream of consciousness.’ I didn’t feel like I was being led through a story. Instead, it felt like reading Luther’s grievances to the church without the list being numbered.

I do think that this style can be effective. If you want to give off a casual, intimate voice to the reader, then I think this is one way to do that. However, I think that trying to argue a point gets a bit muddy in this specific case. It reminds me of the dialogue in the film Uncut Gems. Nothing is all that clear and the main idea is kind of hard to pick out.

Overall, what I’ve really taken away from both of these is a mix of content and aesthetic. I’d prefer to incorporate more aesthetic choices that resemble Gita Jackson’s article while using the dynamics and dimensionality found in the Rogers piece. Working with CSS for the Writing Digital Culture project should allow me to experiment more with design choices in particular, so I’m looking forward to seeing what I’m able to pull off.

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1. You must fit the role of a woman to be treated with respect and dignity.
2. Even if you do fit into those traditional roles, you also must deal with not being seen as fully human.
3. The perfect woman is one that does not voice her opinion, attends to the men in her life, and looks pretty.

If I’m being honest, I resent this aspect of society. The part that isolates women and treats us as objects.

How is that any way to live?

Answer?

It’s not.

And women, for centuries, have asserted this protest. We have made it known that we are people. In a perfect world, this demand would be heeded, and we would be treated as such in all walks of life. But in a perfect would, misogyny wouldn’t exist. So…here we are.

To jump over centuries of oppression and resistance…the 21st century has opened up the seemingly endless possibilities that misogyny can take the form of. One of which being a replacement of a woman.

You might ask yourself: How?

Answer?

A.I.

I saw a video recently from the BBC World Service that filled me with so much dread and disgust I just knew I had to talk about it. This isn’t a surprising emergence at all. Something about A.I. appeals to people. Something about these A.I. models or programs like ChatGPT or Claude scratch that connectivity itch that people have. Does it matter that they’re not real? Absolutely not. What matters is that they are tailored for you. They are meant to be agreeable. They are not meant to be human.

So even though this isn’t a new occurrence, this video still left a bad taste in my mouth.

Why is that?

The popularity of this A.I. model and others like it is what drew my eye. The consumer base is mainly composed of men. The fact that these models are made to draw in the eye and change at a whim is particularly disturbing.

Whether you like the typical IG influencer or not, the fact that something like this exists in an already over saturated field is quite alarming. It raises the question as to what makes an A.I. model so appealing.

A.I. models are something women can never be, malleable and thoughtless. The sheer fact that they are no more than inanimate entities and yet attract the same attention as human models asserts an unavoidable truth in this society.

Women are seems as objects.

Replaceable.

To see that this model is receiving advertising opportunities treats our contributions as disposable. The consumers love the look of a woman, but they detest the fact that she may have a brain and full autonomy.

I look to this video (and troubling trend) as a reminder. In a world that is not made to protect or value you, you must find that within yourself. Misogyny is embedded into the very fabric of society. We will likely never escape this. The inevitable truth is that we must take this truth and combat it.

So to thrive in this world, I have learned three things:

1. You must make yourself known in this world, lest you’ll be forgotten.
2. You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Doing things that bring you anxiety, yet present a net good for all.
3. This harkens back to #2, be a feminist. That means analyzing your feeling about women and womanhood and asking yourself “Is this truly what I believe?”

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The first article, titled Can’t Talk, I’m Busy Being Hot, is about a TikTok trend in which women film themselves doing something normal, like eating spaghetti, and calling it “hot”. The article includes interviews from different people, mostly women, and states that it is a movement, empowering women. The article is designed well, providing plenty of insight into how people feel about the trend and even includes a video example. The style is written in a casual tone and feels very personal.  Whether many women believe it is empowering or not, there is no scientific evidence to prove this is true; however, it is structured in a way that it is easy to read, and some readers can relate.

Another article discusses Baldur’s Gate 3, a video game released back in 2023, which was well-received, won several awards, and made millions of dollars. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a masterpiece built on a bad tabletop game is a review that talks about the cons more than the pros of the video game. The article starts by praising the game for its depth of characters, narrative, and worldbuilding; however, it quickly talks about how it is too similar to Dungeons & Dragons, a popular tabletop game. The article is stylistically written towards gamers. The pictures provided are useful and show different scenes within the video game. This is one person’s opinion on the game, and though they may complain about the game, they also praise it for several reasons.

The third article, I Infiltrated Moltbook, the AI-Only Social Network Where Humans Aren’t Allowed, is about someone who made an account on a social network site run by AI. The heading under the title provides the outline of the article, which is convenient if the reader is curious about what they are about to read. The writer provides some insight on how the website functions, why they made the account, and their interactions with the AI.

After reading these three articles, I found that they all had one thing in common: they were geared towards a specific audience. The first leans towards women (or at least those who follow TikTok trends), the second targets gamers, and the third is meant for those who are interested in modern tech. I soon realized it is important to take these subjective points of view into consideration. Do not just write what you want, but write for your intended audience. Not everyone is going to read the things you create, but those who are interested should enjoy them.

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