Canadian Communication Thought Fall 2022

Hi everyone, my apologies for the lateness of my post. My name is Keenan, and I am a fourth-year communications Studies student. One use of technology that has made a significant impact I'm my life is podcasts. My favourite is "The Winged Wheel Podcast," a hockey podcast covering the Detroit Red Wings, a professional NHL team. The hosts, Ryan Hanna, Brad Krysko and Evan Lobsinger, also chat about hockey in general, from NHL news to what equipment to buy on a budget; they try to engage with all hockey fans and not just diehard Red Wings like myself. I found this podcast a little over a year ago, and it has increased my sense of community in many ways; By a stroke of pure coincidence, all three hosts live and record in Kitchener! This circumstance was remarkable to me as my dad was the only other fan I knew. Growing up in Ontario, I could never find any Wings fans, no community. It always felt like my dad, and I endured endless swarms of Toronto Maple leaf fans. But now, th...

 Hi, my name is Ashley and I'm in fourth year communication studies. One of my favourite pastimes is watching old television shows from the 50s to the 80s. I mostly watch them on either youtube or facebook watch, since Netflix doesn't have as many as I would like. I'm not quite sure why I like these shows so much, but I think a big reason is because I get to learn about what could and couldn't be shown on television back then. Some shows were certainly a product of their time and are very problematic by today's standards (Dukes of Hazzard, I'm looking at you) But despite some bad representation, there were still plenty of moments in old television shows in which I was pleasantly surprised at how progressive they were. A major example of this would be the first interracial kiss on television, shown on "Star Trek" between Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner. There was also an episode of "Hogan's Heroes" where the audience finds out that Ca...

Hello everyone. My name is Dylan Gowanlock, and I'm a fourth-year communications student. I hope you have all had seamless transitions back into the school year and into the classroom particularly. I look forward to seeing you all on Monday and Wednesday mornings this term. While I myself use all of the social media platforms we are all well acquainted with by now, I try to have one online hobby I use to keep myself grounded. Lately, this hobby has been using the website flightaware.com (https://flightaware.com/live/map). On this site, the user is able to look at a live interactive map of ongoing flights and track their progress. When I am just about to go to bed, I like to try to find the information using the website's interactive design of at least one flight that will fly over my head and figure out where it departed from and where its final destination will be. While I don't do this often, I find that when I'm able to actually see a passenger airliner moving overhe...

      Hi everyone! I hope you’re all having a good week, my name is Lydia Goksen and I am a third-year student majoring in communications with a philosophy minor. In this blog post, I would like to talk about the app Co-Star which I find rather compelling. Co-Star’s focus is social astrology, the app uses a combination of NASA data, Artificial Intelligence, and your exact birth time and date to predict and create your own personalized astrological charts and daily horoscopes. The app allows you to add friends to keep track and compare zodiac signs, provides you with daily updates, and builds a customized personality analysis by taking other planets and the 12 houses of the zodia c into account. People have turned spirituality into a cultural change, being “spiritual” have been shown to help with stress and give you a sense of comfort. The daily messages Co-Star sends sometimes seem to align with what you could be going through, today I received a notification that reads ...

Hey everyone, my name is Maggie and I'm a third-year majoring in communications studies. Social media plays a large part in my everyday life, as I can assume it does for most people. A platform that I find quite compelling, and one that I'm frequently using, would be Reddit. This is a platform that I got into this past summer when I was working on solving the book Cain's Jawbone. Through Reddit, I was able to find a series of communities that discussed the book and different ways to approach it. I found one community specifically that I frequently visited and found it to be very helpful with my progression in solving the novel. From there I started looking at other communities where users posted stories or events that happened in their lives and asked the other users for advice or opinions regarding it. I now browse the app frequently readings through the posts in specific communities (such as the 'suggest me a book' and 'ask reddit' communities) and keeping...

Hi everyone! My name is Jamie Ogrodnick, I am a third year communications major. A technology in Canada that I find interesting, that is now used across multiple popular social media platforms, is the use of screen filters that alter the appearance of what is captured on one’s cellphone camera. Filters are now an option when opening the camera function directly beside the capture button on Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok, for example. The effects of these filters can put a full face of makeup on an individual or add goofy effects over top of one’s image or video. What I find interesting about this is how the use of these filters can change the recipient’s perception of the image or video entirely, in either a positive or negative way, yet we are often ignorant to recognize the affects of their falsities and altercations. I believe these filters contribute to the way that people interact with and react to social media regularly as they are capable of making us feel happy, ...

 Hi everyone!  My name is Taylor Randerson and I am a fourth-year communications major with a psychology minor. For this week’s discussion, I want to touch on how many of our current social media platforms are changing their interfaces to adopt similar technical affordances to TikTok. In particular, TikTok in recent years has primarily gained mass popularity for its display of short-form video content. I would argue that its functionality (an ongoing feed of videos where the user must swipe up to view the next piece of media) is not necessarily a revolutionary or unheard-of idea prior to the application's launch in 2016. As such, I’m sure most of you have participated in or at least heard of similar applications such as Vine which had significant popularity in 2013-2016. However, I feel that TikTok is unique in that it has had a significant impact on the layout of other forms of social media platforms. More specifically, I have recently noticed a pattern of well-established so...

      Hello everyone. My name is Justin Couto and I am a fourth year communications student. I am a really big hockey fan and specifically my Toronto Maple Leafs. At times I feel almost as if I am apart of the team myself because of the range of emotions the team puts me through over the course of the season. Over the last year I have discovered a hockey podcast called 'Spittin Chiclets'. Made up of 2 former NHL players, Ryan Whitney and Paul Bissonnette as well as a few others, this group talks not only about what is going on currently in the league, but they also share some of the best and funniest stories from their careers. The podcast also features many different celebrity guests who are not hockey players such as Jon Hamm, star in the show Mad Men. The fun stories that they share about moments in their careers is what continuously brings me back to the podcast. They do not only talk about hockey, they also talk about what it is like being a professional athlete...

 My name is Zach Tyrrell and I am a third year student majoring in communications (as most, if not all of you are). The platform that I find incredibly interesting is Reddit. In case you aren't familiar with Reddit it is a platform that is made up of millions of "subreddits" that each serves a specific purpose in relation to a specific community. The beauty of Reddit is that you can discuss your topics of interest with others around the world. For example, as a big sports fan I am able to go to the subreddits of my favourite teams. After a big game or breaking news I can visit the subreddit and see what other people have to say. I can make a post myself or interact with others via the comments. In addition you can upvote a post and the more upvotes a post has the more people will see it.  Reddit was not a platform I used until the start of my University career. It has slowly become one of my favourite platforms to use because I enjoy interacting with others who share my i...

 Hello everyone, my name is Angela Petrova. I am a third-year communications major. Currently the social media app “BeReal”  has recently skyrocketed in popularity among teenagers and young adults. It was created in 2020 by two French entrepreneurs Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau. The app essentially works by sending users a randomly timed notification once a day and then giving them two minutes to take a photograph simultaneously with the front and back camera. This is meant to encourage individuals to communicate with their friends or others what real life actually looks like rather than seeing another staged and filtered picture as they would on other platforms.  This app tries to encourage individuals to show off their authentic lifestyle and embrace that sometimes life may not always be as how it is portrayed online. By displaying this image its ultimate goal is to dismiss today's dominant influencer culture. The app was meant to make people feel comfortable doing ...

 Hello everyone, my name is Victoria Beara. I am a third-year communication major with a concentration in digital media. My interests include going to the gym, watching sports, and spending time with friends and family. In society today, social media is everywhere, and technology is inevitable. That being said, a social media platform I find interesting is a relatively recent one called "be real." For those who don't know what be real is, it is a social media platform that will send you a notification at a random time and tell you to be "be real." This means you have to take two pictures, one using the front camera and the second with the back camera. However, a two-minute limit determines if you are "real" or not. For example, if you see the notification later and don't meet the 2-minute expectation, it will notify your friends that you were late and how long you were late. I find this interesting for two reasons. First, you cannot use filters or ...

Hi everyone, my name is Megan Yamamoto and I’m a fourth-year student majoring in Communications Studies with the Management Option. A fairly new and up-and-coming social media platform that I find interesting is the app Be Real. Be Real essentially is like a combination of Snapchat and Instagram morphed together to create a platform with real-time photos published to a timeline where individuals can react and comment on posts. The app is based on the premise that once a day at any random time, every single person on the app is sent a notification saying it’s “it’s time to be real”. This means they have 2 minutes to post a photo from the front camera and their back camera of what they are doing at that moment. You are allowed to post after the designated "BeReal time” but it will notify your friends that you posted late. I find this social media platform very interesting because it’s an attempt at making social media a little more realistic as you are not allowed to edit photos or ...

Blog Icebreaker - (Pinterest) By Sarah Humphreys Hi everyone! My name is Sarah Humphreys, and I am a third year Communication Studies student, with a minor in North American Studies and Education. My interests include fitness, healthy living, art, and fashion. I use social media platforms heavily and love how many platforms foster instant online discussion, connectivity, and knowledge sharing. The platforms I use the most would be TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. I have always found Pinterest particularly interesting as it is a huge platform which possesses various lifestyle images and videos. My favourite aspect of Pinterest is how organized and customizable each profile page is. Saved images and videos go directly into folders and can be categorized and sorted to meet the specific interests of users. A Pinterest user who I believe posts compelling content is Nina Garcia ( https://www.pinterest.ca/ninagarcia/ ). Nina posts an abundance of fashion inspiration which is all org...

(John A. MacDonald tipples his way through a debate about  the Canadian Pacific Railroad in CBC's TV min-series The National Dream) Just to break the ice and to acquaint you with the blogger platform, share with us something in the social media and/or internet universe with respect to communication and culture (and/or media/technology in Canada that you like or find interesting and compelling. It can be a website, a YouTube or TikTok video, Instagram Page, a Spotify playlist, a Dischord chat, a subreddit, etc.  Link to it (or screenshot it) and tell us a bit about what you find interesting about it. Your blog entry need not be more than a paragraph or two at most. Post your blog entry by no later than 6 PM on Monday, September 19th, and, then, post comments to at least TWO of your classmate's entries by 6 PM on Friday, September 23rd.

  Welcome to the CS 304 Canadian Communication Thought Blog for Fall 2022!