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Activism in the digital age: is it helping us or hindering us ?

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Activism in the digital age: is it helping us or hindering us ?

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MOFET Institute | International Channel 480

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Impact of Technology on Political Protest

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Activism in the Information Age: Does Technology Help or Hinder?

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This video is part of the Berkley Center's Campus Conversation on Values. To join the Campus Conversation, please visit: http://bit.ly/yiQUaR For more on the Millennial Values Survey, visit: http://bit.ly/Iozl6y As digital natives, the Millennial Generation relies heavily on the interconnectivity of the web.

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How my friend set up a charity called 'laptop for ladies' to give laptops to people in Sri Lanka

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How my friend set up a charity called 'laptop for ladies' to give laptops to people in Sri Lanka

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''So far, 15 more girls have been given their own laptops, and I'm in the process of sending out more. My sister has been offered job doing freelance data input work, which is a huge step forward. I go out and visit at least once a year, and my adopted family have came out too.''

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I've since set up a charity

When I was a baby, I was adopted from a small village in Sri Lanka.

For most of my life, I wasn't that interested in searching for my birth family. It hardly even crossed my mind. It was only when doing a module on adoption for my Anthropology degree that I began to consider it.

I guess it may have built up over time, but I suddenly had this urge to find my roots. I always felt like something was missing, and that I needed to meet them to fill in the gaps.

It was terrifying, as I had no idea whether they'd want to see me - or whether they were even still alive. So with three friends and a Sri Lankan translator, I managed to track my birth mother down.

She lives in a small community in Nuwara Eliya where she picks tea for a living. It was only then that I found out I have two sisters, and that my father had died just before I was born. I was the youngest, and my mother couldn't afford to keep me.

It was one of the most emotional days of my life. While we couldn't talk to each other, we had the strongest connection. She couldn't stop crying, and I was frozen in shock.

I felt a particularly strong connection with one of my sisters, Pusphpalalitah. It was surreal how much she looked like me. But what moved me the most about this whole situation, was the fact that she was such an intelligent girl with so much potential - yet she was living in poverty. She could not afford to learn English but mentioned to me that she really wanted to learn to use a computer to self-educate. To have a computer, and have those skills - she could finally be able to get herself out of this endless cycle.

So, I decided to set up a charity called Laptops for Ladies, which provides laptops to Tamil women like my sister.

Within a year, it had become a registered charity, and is doing really well. It's been featured on national newspapers and BBC Radio shows, and I was even on Sri Lankan news. So far, 15 more girls have been given their own laptops, and I'm in the process of sending out more. My sister has been offered job doing freelance data input work, which is a huge step forward. I go out and visit at least once a year, and my adopted family have came out too.

It was a life-changing decision to visit my birth family, and it's made me who I am today. Because of it, I'm stronger, wiser and appreciative of how lucky I am. Now I've experienced what my life could have been like, the personal motivation is constantly pushing me to help their community. I have a wonderful family already, but it's been life changing to add to it.
By Poppy Royal as told to Daisy Bernard. Find Laptops for Ladies on Facebook.
@daisy_bernard

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I was adopted from a Sri Lankan village and returned to find my birth mother

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I've since set up a charity When I was a baby, I was adopted from a small village in Sri Lanka. For most of my life, I wasn't that interested in searching for my birth family. It hardly even crossed my mind.

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"Hey, I'm really sorry but I can't make tonight. Let's do something next week instead?"

I don't know how many times I've stared at my battered iPhone 4 screen with complete bemusement after receiving a text like this. On this occasion, a guy, let's call him Andy, was cancelling on me for the fourth time. When we met up a few weeks ago he seemed keen, but since then he has been flakier than a Danish pastry.

Let's be honest: Andy clearly wasn't into me. But he continued to arrange and cancel dates. Sure, I was getting the picture, but he would have saved us both a lot of time if he had just been straight with me. Do some people actually prefer these long, drawn out methods of communicating disinterest instead of being honest?

One such trick is "ghosting", which the Collins English Dictionary recently announced as one of its words of 2015. The team defined the term as: "ending a relationship by ignoring all communication from the other person."

For his book Modern Romance, the comedian and actor Aziz Ansari asked 150,000 of his audience members how they tell people they aren't interested. Pretending to be busy came top, shortly followed by the ghosting technique, but only a sliver of the crowd said that honesty was the best policy.

Nathan Davies, a 23-year-old music producer from east London, serial dater, and advocate of ghosting, says: "As soon as I go on a first date, I'll know that it's not really going anywhere, but I just keep texting and meeting up because they're attractive. I think I give the impression I like them, which is bad, and then I end it by just ignoring them"

These are the same actions that I hear my friends, both guys and girls, complain about. They come home with a twinkle in their eye, gushing about how much chemistry there was with their date, only to have their texts met with silence.

When I ask Davies why he chooses ghosting over honesty, he replies: "I'm scared of awkward situations. Oh, and I'm lazy. By ignoring them you can end it without any bother."

Davies says he has never bumped into someone he has ghosted. Perhaps experiencing a situation that awkward might encourage him to start showing his dates more respect.

And although I disagree with ghosting, at least it is more to the point than what Andy did - which can build false hope.

But, Claire Jones, a 28-year-old photographer who has just come out of a long-term relationship, says she keeps talking to guys she actively dislikes because it makes her "feel attractive."

On the other hand, casting assistant Lisa Sharpe, 24, thinks it's "all about not having all your eggs in one box. It's better to be texting a few people that you aren't that interested in, rather than texting nobody at all."

If everyone you fancy is in a relationship, or you can't face singledom any longer, you might not be in such a hurry to close down your only current option

Using others to make oneself feel better is by no means a new phenomenon and, according to Dr David Giles, Reader in Media Psychology at Winchester University, keeping your options open is a common motivation.

"The reason you string them along is that there's no-one else on the horizon. If you're in high demand you wouldn't think twice about wasting that person's time any longer.

"But if everyone you fancy is in a relationship, or you can't face singledom any longer, you might not be in such a hurry to close down your only current option."

However, I think that the motivation behind texting people we don't like comes down to more than wanting to feel good and keep your options open; it's also about boredom.

It seems like we need to be stimulated every second, be it scrolling through Instagram feeds, reading countless WhatsApp messages, or "swiping right" on Tinder.

Dating apps have capitalised on our need to be entertained. Somewhere in this frenzy we have managed to turn dating into something disposable, in which we ultimately view one another as just another match in a long list of matches.

Sure, you have to pretend to be nice or care in order to get what you want - sex, a date or just admiration. But when you get what you came for, you don't need to try anymore, and that person can be erased from your conscience with a swipe of a thumb.

In her insightful article Tinder and the Dawn of the "Dating Apocolypse", writer Nancy Jo Sales argues that the app and its rivals have irrevocably changed the nature of dating.

She argues: "Hook-up culture, which has been percolating for about a hundred years, has collided with dating apps, which have acted like a wayward meteor on the now dinosaur-like rituals of courtship."

She notes how the incorporation of "swiping right" in online shopping has rendered "the act of choosing consumer brands and sex partners [...] interchangeable."

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman noted the phenomenon of disposable relationships as early as 2003, 11 years before the creation of Tinder. In his book Liquid Love, he talks of the man or woman "with no bonds", claiming that real human relationships have dissolved.

He writes: "Unlike old-fashioned relationships, they [modern relationships] seem to be made to the measure of a liquid modern life setting where 'romantic possibilities' are supposed and hoped to come and go with ever greater speed and never in thinning crowds".

"They look smart and clean, feel easy to use and user-friendly, when compared with a heavy, slow-moving, inert messy, 'real stuff'."

In the book, Bauman discusses an interview with a 28 year-old man from Bath who states that the advantage of computer dating is that "you can always press delete."

Fast-forward to the present day and what Bauman refers to may have escalated to the point of no return. These dating apps give us convenience and speed, but we seem to be losing human respect and decency in turn.

Dating guru Donna Dawson agrees: "You are treating people like a deck of cards. You have to remember that you are dealing with real people and real people's feelings."

Suzie Hayman, agony aunt for Woman Magazine, mirrors Dawnon's concerns: "they've certainly exacerbated the feeling that relationships are disposable, you can just go onto the next one and they have rather given people the impression that the way to deal with not being interested is to stop talking to someone."

You are treating people like a deck of cards

And dating apps seem like they are here to stay - they make big bucks. Analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch valued Tinder alone at $1.35 billion (£900 million) in June.

Marie Cosnard, head of media relations for Happn, a dating app that boasts 6.8 million users and lets you connect with the people you've crossed paths with, argues that these apps haven't changed the way people think.

"All these tools are not inventing new social habits but they are adapting to them. If we look 20 or 30 years back when there weren't any cell phones, people could disappear into the world even more. It's a new way of not responding, but the effect is the same."

$1.35billion

The amount that Tinder was valued at in the summer of 2015

Cosnard has a point: of course trying to avoid people is nothing new. But equally, we now have so many methods of communication that there really is no excuse for not replying.

Before social media was so integral to our lives, saying you didn't get someone's call was a legitimate excuse for ignoring them.

Now you can check Instagram and see your date has put a Valencia filter on a photo of a latte, but didn't have enough time to reply to your message. From WhatApp's little blue ticks to Facebook's time stamp, it is now painfully obvious when you're being ignored.

So, how do people really want to be told that someone's just not that into them?

Ansari concludes his book by saying: "If we are honest with ourselves, we realise that, however bizarrely, we actually prefer to be lied to."

Sometimes the truth is just too brutal

Dawson agrees with Ansari's viewpoint.

"Sometimes the truth is just too brutal; it can be like a blunt hammer that you hit someone over the head with. We are social animals and we need the approval of other social animals," she says.

"It's called the sweet and sour technique. Tell them you're not available and then leave it on a positive note so they don't go away with a bad taste in their mouth thinking 'I'm a failure, nobody wants me'."

Love and sex news: in pictures

To get an anecdotal idea of how people prefer to be let down, I asked a group of 21 to 28 year-olds to rank their preferred way of having someone tell them they aren't interested, between being told the truth, being diffused with a white lie, ignored, or strung along.

The general consensus out of the 23 interviewees was that the truth was the most dignified way of letting someone down, but everyone agreed that this had to be done carefully so as not to upset the other person.

Being told a white lie was the runner up. One participant, Clara Downs, a 24-year-old adminstration assistant, said she "preferred a s*** lie" to being ignored or strung along because she likes to have a "definitive ending."

I can't imagine many worse ways to handle letting somebody down

People's views were mixed on ghosting. Some thought that ignoring a date was an obvious way to show you aren't interested and ranked it near the top, but the majority said that this was the worst as it leaves you in a perpetual state of confusion.

Being strung along was the least favourite due to the timewasting factor and the potential for it to result in a lot of pain.

Alex Tyndall, an MA student, 22, says "I can't imagine many worse ways to handle letting somebody down. I ended up getting hurt because the girl in question was too much of a coward to tell me how she actually felt."

So, if you find yourself in a situation where you know that the person your dating isn't right for you, before you start swiping right again, take a moment to write a text and let them down gently. Let's not let modern society impact on human decency and kindness.

And if you can't quite face telling the truth? Tell them you're moving to Hawaii but they have amazing hair. Sorted.
The Independent's Millennial Love group is the best place to discuss to the highs and lows of modern dating and relationships. Join the conversation here.​

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"Ghosting" is now in the dictionary - so is dating etiquette dead?

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"Hey, I'm really sorry but I can't make tonight. Let's do something next week instead?" I don't know how many times I've stared at my battered iPhone 4 screen with complete bemusement after receiving a text like this. On this occasion, a guy, let's call him Andy, was cancelling on me for the fourth time.

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No longer limited by geography or space?

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No longer limited by geography or space?

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WW2 veteran reunites with girlfriend after 70 years of not seeing each other - all through Skype.

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A 93-year-old second world war veteran from the United States has been reunited with his wartime girlfriend in Australia after more than 70 years apart.

Norwood Thomas and 88-year-old Joyce Morris laughed on Wednesday as they wrapped their arms around each other after Thomas flew from Virginia to the southern Australian city of Adelaide to reconnect with his long-lost love.

"This is about the most wonderful thing that could have happened to me," Thomas said, in a reunion broadcast on television.

"Good," Morris replied with a laugh. "We're going to have a wonderful fortnight."

Morris was a 17-year-old British girl and Thomas was a 21-year-old paratrooper when they first met in London shortly before D-day.

After the war, he returned to the US. The pair wrote letters to each other, and Thomas asked Morris to come to the US to marry him. But somehow Morris misunderstood and thought he'd found someone else, so she stopped writing.

The two eventually married other people. Thomas's wife died in 2001; Morris divorced her husband after 30 years.

Last year, Morris asked one of her sons to look for Thomas online, and they found his name featured in an article about D-day that ran in the Virginian-Pilot newspaper.

Thomas and Morris reconnected via Skype. After their story went public, hundreds of people made donations to help fund Thomas's trip to Australia from his hometown in Virginia Beach.

The two are planning to spend Valentine's Day together.
Topics

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Second world war veteran reunited with girlfriend after 70 years

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A 93-year-old second world war veteran from the United States has been reunited with his wartime girlfriend in Australia after more than 70 years apart. Norwood Thomas and 88-year-old Joyce Morris laughed on Wednesday as they wrapped their arms around each other after Thomas flew from Virginia to the southern Australian city of Adelaide to reconnect with his long-lost love.

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In the more than two decades since the launch of commercial dating sites such as Match.com, online dating has evolved into a multibillion-dollar industry serving customers around the world. A new Pew Research Center study explores how dating sites and apps have transformed the way Americans meet and develop relationships, and how the users of these services feel about online dating.

Here are 10 facts from the study, which is based on a survey conducted among 4,860 U.S. adults in October 2019:

2A small share of Americans say they have been in a committed relationship with or married someone they met through a dating site or app. About one-in-ten U.S. adults say this (12%), though these shares are higher among LGB adults, as well as those ages 18 to 49.

Pew Research Center has long studied the changing nature of romantic relationships and the role of digital technology in how people meet potential partners and navigate web-based dating platforms. This particular report focuses on the patterns, experiences and attitudes related to online dating in America. These findings are based on a survey conducted Oct. 16 to 28, 2019, among 4,860 U.S. adults. This includes those who took part as members of Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses, as well as respondents from the Ipsos KnowledgePanel who indicated that they identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB). The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.

Recruiting ATP panelists by phone or mail ensures that nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. This gives us confidence that any sample can represent the whole U.S. adult population (see our Methods 101 explainer on random sampling). To further ensure that each ATP survey reflects a balanced cross-section of the nation, the data are weighted to match the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories.

For more, see the report's methodology about the project. You can also find the questions asked, and the answers the public provided, in this topline.

3Roughly six-in-ten online daters (57%) say they have had an overall positive experience with these platforms, including 14% who describe their experience as very positive and 43% who say it was somewhat positive. Fewer users - though still about four-in-ten - describe their online dating experience as at least somewhat negative, including 9% who describe it as very negative.

People's assessments of their online dating experiences vary widely by socioeconomic factors. Around six-in-ten online daters with a bachelor's or advanced degree (63%) say their experience has been very or somewhat positive, compared with 47% among those who have a high school diploma or less. The ratings online daters give their overall experience do not vary statistically by gender or race and ethnicity.

4While online daters generally say their overall experience was positive, they also point out some of the downsides of online dating. By a wide margin, Americans who have used a dating site or app in the past year say their recent experience left them feeling more frustrated (45%) than hopeful (28%).

Other sentiments are more evenly balanced between positive and negative feelings. Some 35% of current or recent users say that in the past year online dating has made them feel more pessimistic, while 29% say these platforms left them feeling more optimistic. Similarly, 32% say online dating sites or apps made them feel more confident, whereas 25% say it left them feeling more insecure.

For example, women who have ever used a dating site or app are more likely than men to say they have found it very or somewhat difficult to find people they were physical attracted to (36% vs. 21%) or who like someone they would want to meet in person (39% vs. 32%). By contrast, male users are more inclined than female users to say it was at least somewhat difficult to find people who shared their hobbies and interests (41% vs. 30%).

Other gender differences - such as the importance of users including their hobbies and interests, their racial or ethnic background or their political affiliation - are more modest.

Roughly six-in-ten men who have online dated in the past five years (57%) say they feel as if they did not get enough messages, while just 24% of women say the same. Meanwhile, women who have online dated in this time period are five times as likely as men to think they were sent too many messages (30% vs. 6%).

8Younger women are especially likely to report having troublesome interactions on online dating platforms. About three-in-ten or more online dating users say someone continued to contact them on a dating site or app after they said they were not interested (37%), sent them a sexually explicit message or image they didn't ask for (35%) or called them an offensive name (28%). About one-in-ten (9%) say another user has threated to physically harm them.

These rates are even higher among younger women. Six-in-ten female users ages 18 to 34 say someone on a dating site or app continued to contact them after they said they were not interested, while 57% report that another user has sent them a sexually explicit message or image they didn't ask for. At the same time, 44% report that someone called them an offense name on a dating site or app, while 19% say they have had someone threaten to physically harm them.

Public perceptions about the safety of online dating vary substantially by personal experience. A majority of Americans who have ever used a dating site or app (71%) see online dating as a very or somewhat safe way to meet someone, compared with 47% of those who have never used these platforms.

Among the public as a whole, women are far more likely than men to say dating sites and apps are not a safe way to meet people (53% vs. 39%). Views on this question also vary substantially by age, educational attainment and race and ethnicity.

At the same time, half of Americans say online dating has had neither a positive nor negative effect on dating and relationships. Smaller shares say these platforms have had a mostly positive (22%) or mostly negative effect (26%).
Note: Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

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10 facts about Americans and online dating

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In the more than two decades since the launch of commercial dating sites such as Match.com, online dating has evolved into a multibillion-dollar industry serving customers around the world. A new Pew Research Center study explores how dating sites and apps have transformed the way Americans meet and develop relationships, and how the users of these services feel about online dating.

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This dating app tells you when you cross paths with someone you might like, but its founder insists that's more romantic than creepy

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This dating app tells you when you cross paths with someone you might like, but its founder insists that's more romantic than creepy

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A lot of apps like Tinder simply show you people within a few miles of you. Happn goes one step beyond: When you open it on your phone, you're greeted by a collection of other users with whom you've physically crossed paths with throughout your day.

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Happn
Happn is the hopeless romantic among dating apps, though the concept can sound a little creepy at first.

A lot of apps like Tinder simply show you people within a few miles of you. Happn goes one step beyond: When you open it on your phone, you're greeted by a collection of other users with whom you've physically crossed paths with throughout your day.

While some people might be initially uneasy about the location-tracking nature of the app, Happn's founder and CEO says it's all about replicating the serendipity of real life.

"We wanted to bring back reality into the dating world," Happn founder and CEO Didier Rappaport told Business Insider. "We think that every day you cross paths with people, and most of them, you miss them, because you do not have the time to talk with them or because there was some missed connection."

Even the term "missed connection" likely conjures up images of cringe-worthy Craiglist posts, but Rappaport says he wanted to bring that concept into the modern age. And so Rappaport, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Dailymotion, decided to create his first app to act as a sort of hybrid between a travel log and Tinder. That way, when people noticed someone interesting on their daily commute or while sitting at their favorite coffee shop, they could open up Happn afterward if they missed their initial chance and have a second shot at striking up a conversation.

"When you meet someone, it is always at a precise place and at a precise moment," Rappaport said. "So the fact that on your device you have a geo-location service and your device is always with you, you're always there in real time with your neighborhood and everyone around you."

When browsing Happn, you can see a timeline of every Happn user you've been near in the last few days, ranked chronologically and by the total time you've been around them. If you see someone you like, you can "heart" them secretly to indicate interest, but they won't be notified - you're only matched up if you both independently "heart" each other.

If you want to be a bit bolder and ensure that person knows you're interested, you can send them a "charm," which is essentially a push notification with a guaranteed delivery that costs between 10 and 20 cents.

Since your Happn timeline is arranged chronologically, a charm also guarantees that your encounter won't be lost among more recent encounters if that person traveled a lot that day.

"Security was one of the pillars of our thinking when we built Happn," Rappaport said when asked about the inherent location-tracking of Happn. "When you are very near someone, we will never say 'You are 10 meters,' we will say 'You are less than 250 meters' - you don't have any flag on the maps. We don't record the exact journeys of people, we just remember the crossing points."

Happn got its start in Paris, France, but has since expanded to 3 million registered users with strong followings in London and New York City. After raising a total of $8 million in a seed and Series A funding, Rappaport told Business Insider Happn "should close the Series B by this summer," and plans to continue to see growth increase at a faster pace.

"We reached our first million users in first 11 months, the second million after two and half months, and the third million within the following 50 days," Rappaport said. "We should be at least 10 million members by the end of this year."

Talking with Rappaport, it quickly became clear that while people have a habit of sitting and browsing dating apps like Tinder, Happns takes the stance that you should be living in the moment. And that while you can browse Happn while at a museum to see other people at the exhibit, the main idea is to be able to browse your encounters after you get back home. It's a subtle difference in use case than other hook-up apps like Tinder, whose users often make a game out of browsing the app and swiping through potential matches in any spare moment.

"There is a big difference between the past and the present in terms of romance," Rappaport said. "We are not offering people the ability to only make love, because in the past it was just a huge lie - there is no algorithm that makes finding your love because you checked the right boxes with someone else. We just provide people the ability to meet each other . You can only meet the people who are around you at the right time, at the same time, like you. It's very easy, simple in fact. People need a simple app to help them in their own life, that's all."

You can download Happn for free for iOS over at the App Store and for Android over at Google Play.

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This dating app tells you when you cross paths with someone you might like, but its founder insists that's more romantic than creepy

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Happn is the hopeless romantic among dating apps, though the concept can sound a little creepy at first. A lot of apps like Tinder simply show you people within a few miles of you. Happn goes one step beyond: When you open it on your phone, you're greeted by a collection of other users with whom you've physically crossed paths with throughout your day.

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The power of social media to burrow dramatically into our everyday lives as well as the near ubiquity of new technologies such as mobile phones has forced us all to conceptualize the digital and the physical; the on- and off-line.

And some have a bias to see the digital and the physical as separate; what I am calling digital dualism. Digital dualists believe that the digital world is "virtual" and the physical world "real." This bias motivates many of the critiques of sites like Facebook and the rest of the social web and I fundamentally think this digital dualism is a fallacy. Instead, I want to argue that the digital and physical are increasingly meshed, and want to call this opposite perspective that implodes atoms and bits rather than holding them conceptually separate augmented reality.

In a 2009 post titled " Towards Theorizing An Augmented Reality," I discussed geo-tagging (think Foursquare or Facebook Places), street view, face recognition, the Wii controller and the fact that sites like Facebook both impact and are impacted by the physical world to argue that "digital and material realities dialectically co-construct each other." This is opposed to the notion that the Internet is like the Matrix, where there is a "real" (Zion) that you leave when you enter the virtual space (the Matrix) -an outdated perspective as Facebook is increasingly real and our physical world increasingly digital.

I have used this perspective of augmentation to critque dualism when I see it. For instance, last year I posted a rebuttal to the digital-dualist critique of so-called "slacktivism" that claimed "real" activism is being traded for a cyber-based slacker activism. No, cyber-activism should be seen in context with physical world activism and how they interact. Taken alone, yes, much of the cyber-activism would not amount to much. But used in conjunction with offline efforts, it can be powerful. And, of course, my point is much, much easier to make with the subsequent uprisings in the Arab world that utilize both digital and physical organizing. This augmented dissent will be a topic for another post.

Recently, I have critiqued "cyborg anthropologist" Amber Case for her use of Turkle's outdated term "second self" to describe our online presence. My critique was that conceptually splitting so-called "first" and "second" selves creates a "false binary" because "people are enmeshing their physical and digital selves to the point where the distinction is becoming increasingly irrelevant." [I'll offer my own take for what that digital presence should be called in a soon-to-come post.]

But the dualism keeps rolling in. There are the popular books that typically critique social media from the digital dualist perspective. Besides Turkle's Alone Together, there is Carr's The Shallows, Morozov's The Net Delusion, Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation, Keen's The Cult of the Amateur,Siegel's Against the Machine, Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget, and the list goes on (we can even include the implicit argument in the 2010 blockbuster movie The Social Network). All of these argue that the problem with social media is that people are trading the rich, physical and real nature of face-to face contact for the digital, virtual and trivial quality of Facebook. The critique stems from the systematic bias to see the digital and physical as separate; often as a zero-sum tradeoff where time and energy spent on one subtracts from the other. This is digital dualism par excellence. And it is a fallacy.

I am proposing an alternative view that states that our reality is both technological and organic, both digital and physical, all at once. We are not crossing in and out of separate digital and physical realities, ala The Matrix, but instead live in one reality, one that is augmented by atoms and bits. And our selves are not separated across these two spheres as some dualistic "first" and "second" self, but is instead an augmented self. A Haraway-like cyborg self comprised of a physical body as well as our digital Profile, acting in constant dialogue. Our Facebook profiles reflect who we know and what we do offline, and our offline lives are impacted by what happens on Facebook (e.g., how we might change our behaviors in order to create a more ideal documentation).

Most importantly, research demonstrates what social media users already know: we are not trading one reality for another at all, but, instead, using sites like Facebook and others actually increase offline interaction. This is not zero-sum dualism. As the famous Network Society theorist Manuel Castells stated earlier this month,

Nobody who is on social networks everyday (and this is true for some 700 million of the 1,200 million social network users) is still the same person. It's an online/offline interaction, not an esoteric virtual world.

None of this is to say that social media and the web should not be critiqued. Indeed, it should be, and I hope to do that work myself. However, critiques of social media should begin with the idea of augmented reality. Is a reality augmented by digitality a good thing? My job with this post is not to answer that question, but to help make it possible.

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Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality

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The power of social media to burrow dramatically into our everyday lives as well as the near ubiquity of new technologies such as mobile phones has forced us all to conceptualize the digital and the physical; the on- and off-line. And some have a bias to see the digital and the physical as separate; what I am calling digital dualism.

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Woman conducted an experiment where she put pictures of her slim self on Tinder and then when she had to go on the date she would wear a fat suit. The reaction of her Tinder dates were incredulous and they made excuses to leave. This makes us question how far our superficiality and expectations go when we go from online to offline.

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Fat Girl Tinder Date (Social Experiment)

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WATCH THE MALE VERSION HERE: http://youtu.be/iUy3_kBme4M The secret to true confidence ► http://bit.ly/SPtindergirl Subscribe for more awesome videos! ► http://bit.ly/simpsubcr Tinder is one of the most popular apps on the market, so we wanted to find out what happens when a girl dresses up in a fat suit and goes on a Tinder date.

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#InstagrammingAfrica: The Narcissism of Global Voluntourism

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#InstagrammingAfrica: The Narcissism of Global Voluntourism

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I see three common types of photographs voluntourists share through social media: The Suffering Other, The Self-Directed Samaritan, and The Overseas Selfie.

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An article in The Onion mocks voluntourism, joking that a six-day visit to a rural African village can "completely change a woman's Facebook profile picture." The article quotes "22-year-old Angela Fisher" who says:

I don't think my profile photo will ever be the same, not after the experience of taking such incredible pictures with my arms around those small African children's shoulders.

It goes on to say that Fisher "has been encouraging every one of her friends to visit Africa, promising that it would change their Facebook profile photos as well."

I was once Angela Fisher. But I'm not any more.

I HAVE PARTICIPATED IN not one but three separate, and increasingly disillusioning, international health brigades, short-term visits to developing countries that involve bringing health care to struggling populations.

Such trips-critically called voluntourism-are a booming business, even though they do very little advertising and charge people thousands of dollars to participate.

How do they attract so many paying volunteers?

Photography is a big part of the answer. Voluntourism organizations don't have to advertise, because they can crowdsource. Photography-particularly the habit of taking and posting selfies with local children-is a central component of the voluntourism experience. Hashtags like #InstagrammingAfrica are popular with students on international health brigades, as are #medicalbrigades, #globalhealth, and of course the nostalgic-for-the-good-days hashtag #takemeback.

It was the photographs posted by other students that inspired me to go on my first overseas medical mission. When classmates uploaded the experience of themselves wearing scrubs beside adorable children in developing countries, I believed I was missing out on a pivotal pre-med experience. I took over 200 photos on my first international volunteer mission. I modeled those I had seen on Facebook and even pre-meditated photo opportunities to acquire the "perfect" image that would receive the most Likes.

Over time, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with the ethics of those photographs, and ultimately left my camera at home. Now, as an insider, I see three common types of photographs voluntourists share through social media: The Suffering Other, The Self-Directed Samaritan, and The Overseas Selfie.

THE SUFFERING OTHER

In a photograph taken by a fellow voluntourist in Ghana (not shown), a child stands isolated with her bare feet digging in the dirt. Her hands pull up her shirt to expose an umbilical hernia, distended belly, and a pair of too-big underwear. Her face is uncertain and her scalp shows evidence of dermatological pathology or a nutritional deficiency-maybe both. Behind her, only weeds grow.

Anthropologists Arthur and Joan Kleinman note that images of distant, suffering women and children suggest there are communities incapable of or uninterested in caring for its own people. These photographs justify colonialist, paternalistic attitudes and policies, suggesting that the individual in the photograph ...

... must be protected, as well as represented, by others. The image of the subaltern conjures up an almost neocolonial ideology of failure, inadequacy, passivity, fatalism, and inevitability. Something must be done, and it must be done soon, but from outside the local setting. The authorization of action through an appeal for foreign aid, even foreign intervention, begins with an evocation of indigenous absence, an erasure of local voices and acts.

THE SELF-DIRECTED SAMARITAN

Here we have a smiling young white girl with a French braid, medical scrubs, and a well-intentioned smile. This young lady is the centerpiece of the photo; she is its protagonist. Her scrubs suggest that she is doing important work among those who are so poor, so vulnerable, and so Other.

The girl is me. And the photograph was taken on my first trip to Ghana during a 10-day medical brigade. I'm beaming in the photograph, half towering and half hovering over these children. I do not know their names, they do not know my name, but I directed a friend to capture this moment with my own camera. Why?

This photograph is less about doing actual work and more about retrospectively appearing to have had a positive impact overseas. Photographs like these represent the overseas experience in accordance with what writer Teju Cole calls the "White Savior Industrial Complex."

Moreover, in directing, capturing, and performing in photos such as these, voluntourists prevent themselves from actually engaging with the others in the photo. In On Photography, Susan Sontag reminds us:

Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing - which means that...it is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

On these trips, we hide behind the lens, consuming the world around us with our powerful gazes and the clicking of camera shutters. When I directed this photo opportunity and starred in it, I used my privilege to capture a photograph that made me feel as though I was engaging with the community. Only now do I realize that what I was actually doing was making myself the hero/star in a story about "suffering Africa."

THE OVERSEAS SELFIE

In his New York Times Op-Ed, that modern champion of the selfie James Franco wrote:

Selfies are avatars: Mini-Me's that we send out to give others a sense of who we are.... In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, "Hello, this is me."

Although related to the Self-Directed Samaritan shot, there's something extra-insidious about this type of super-close range photo. "Hello, this is me" takes on new meaning-there is only one subject in this photo, the white subject. Capturing this image and posting it on the Internet is to understand the Other not as a separate person who exists in the context of their own family or community. but rather as a prop, an extra, someone only intelligible in relation to the Western volunteer.

VOLUNTOURISM IS ULTIMATELY ABOUT the fulfillment of the volunteers themselves, not necessarily what they bring to the communities they visit. In fact, medical volunteerism often breaks down existing local health systems. In Ghana, I realized that local people weren't purchasing health insurance, since they knew there would be free foreign health care and medications available every few months. This left them vulnerable in the intervening times, not to mention when the organization would leave the community.

In the end, the Africa we voluntourists photograph isn't a real place at all. It is an imaginary geography whose landscapes are forged by colonialism, as well as a good deal of narcissism. I hope my fellow students think critically about what they are doing and why before they sign up for a short-term global volunteer experience. And if they do go, it is my hope that they might think with some degree of narrative humility about how to de-center themselves from the Western savior narrative. Most importantly, I hope they leave their iPhones at home.

This post originally appeared on Sociological Images, a Pacific Standard partner site, as "#InstagrammingAfrica: The Narcissism of Global Voluntourism."

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#InstagrammingAfrica: The Narcissism of Global Voluntourism

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An article in The Onion mocks voluntourism, joking that a six-day visit to a rural African village can "completely change a woman's Facebook profile picture." The article quotes "22-year-old Angela Fisher" who says: I don't think my profile photo will ever be the same, not after the experience of taking such incredible pictures with my arms around those small African children's shoulders.

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This is your brain on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram other digital platforms Video

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This is your brain on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram other digital platforms Video

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This is your brain on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram other digital platforms

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In our new series TODAY's Digital Divide, we're taking a look at the effect our phones and computers have on our brain. TODAY's Savannah Guthrie reports.

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The new digital technologies are powerful tools in moments of crisis, but they cannot substitute for sustained citizen activism.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/24/digital-media-egypt

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My friends and I spent much of the past month channelling Cairo via New York. Our Facebook and Twitter feeds kept breathless pace with the events in Tahrir Square. There were plenty of fears and reservations (which remain), but our dominant emotion was awe that such change was indeed possible - and that social media could play a significant part in it.

Now that the euphoria has waned, hard political realities come into view. But for my part, I'm left wondering about the nature of this new chimera, with the face of social media grafted onto the body of political action. As I ponder at recent examples from my travels, I think I perceive a pattern: social media can make an impressive contribution when there's a dose of urgency in the air, quickly translated into adrenalin. But absent that charge, online attention and activism can fade quickly.

Coincidentally for me, the events in Egypt came on the heels of the first anniversary of the Haitian earthquake. I co-authored a report on the latter event for the Knight Foundation that examined the role of media in the relief efforts. The report describes how the disaster inspired legions of students at various universities to create impromptu support systems for Ushahidi and other social media platforms. The tech community also came together. One of its contributions was to consolidate and upgrade various search wikis into the Google Person Finder. This platform utilises crowdsourcing to help disaster victims locate their loved ones. The advances achieved in Haiti are now available to the victims of the 22February New Zealand earthquake.

Obviously, people who see real potential to overthrow a brutal dictator and people involved with dislocated populations as a result of natural disasters experience a strong motivation to use whatever tools come to hand. In Egypt, there has been a lot of emphasis on Twitter, but the data suggests that there were well under 15,000 Egyptians tweeting, out of a population of more than 80 million (and some may have been outside the country). So we shouldn't let tech-euphoria distract us from other critical factors. These include al-Jazeera's broadcasts of the protests reaching into millions of Egyptian living rooms; Muslim clerics who authorised resistance to the state's abuse of authority; and uncounted millions of individual cellphone calls (as opposed to tweets). Not all of these activities generate data, but that doesn't mean they should be overlooked.

At the same time, there are a lot of worthy social media projects that have a hard time getting traction. I'm a big fan of Ushahidi, and have been collecting examples of its use on my travels. One of my favourites is on Hong Kong's South China Morning Post's Citizen Map, which charts illegal waste dumping and other environmental abuses. The map has been up since November, but the paper is hoping that the number of participants will grow. The team for the Kibera Open Street Map project in Kenya reports a similar phenomenon: "Build it and they will come ... slowly."

It appears that when a situation involves low-grade chronic problems such as uncollected garbage and uncharted neighbourhoods, it's simply harder to convince citizens to volunteer their time - even if the project is to their immediate benefit. I can't say I'm surprised. During the last big blizzard in New York, an Ushahidi map popped up on my screen to record street blockages. After a day, there were only some 30 reports. (I'm embarrassed to say none were mine, even though our street was impassable for three days).

Evgeny Morozov calls it "slacktivism", where it's easier to click a "like" button on Facebook than it is to participate in a crisis-mapping platform. Part of the challenge is to teach the public the power of the new tools. But maybe it's also time to revive a notion of citizenship that involves more than one-click participation - before we hit the next crisis.

* Anne Nelson is speaking at The Morningside Post's second annual conference, "Information Overload? Navigating the Age of Democratised Media", at Columbia University, New York on Friday 25 February. More details via Facebook
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The limits of the 'Twitter revolution' | Anne Nelson

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My friends and I spent much of the past month channelling Cairo via New York. Our Facebook and Twitter feeds kept breathless pace with the events in Tahrir Square. There were plenty of fears and reservations (which remain), but our dominant emotion was awe that such change was indeed possible - and that social media could play a significant part in it.

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Despite the fact that we are becoming more technological, some things will not change. Will physical books survive and prevail through the E-book era?

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Despite the fact that we are becoming more technological, some things will not change. Will physical books survive and prevail through the E-book era?

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it looks like e-readers are still a ways away from replacing the real thing. According to research from Naomi Baron, a linguistics professor at American University, 92 percent of students still prefer to do “serious reading” using books that make use of actual ink printed on a physical page. Laptops, phones, tablets, and even e-readers all come in a distant second, the professor says.
Americans own a tablet or e-reader, and an even greater proportion own smartphones that can also support books and electronic reading materials, Baron has found that owning is not the same thing as enjoying the actual experience.

Read more:

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Don't get too nostalgic about the days of paper books just yet - it looks like e-readers are still a ways away from replacing the real thing. According to research from Naomi Baron, a linguistics professor at American University, 92 percent of students still prefer to do "serious reading" using books that make use of actual ink printed on a physical page. Laptops, phones, tablets, and even e-readers all come in a distant second, the professor says.

The research involved a survey of more than 300 college students from countries around the world, including Japan, Germany, Slovakia, and the U.S., and is all for Baron's upcoming book - "Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World."

Despite the fact that 50 percent of Americans own a tablet or e-reader, and an even greater proportion own smartphones that can also support books and electronic reading materials, Baron has found that owning is not the same thing as enjoying the actual experience. Many people complain about e-readers hurting their eyes, the less-than-satisfactory battery life, and frankly, the rather impersonal feel of putting Jane Austen's classics on a Kindle. In fact, it looks like the popularity of e-readers may actually be declining - a Scholastic study notes that while 60 percent of children between the ages of 6 and 17 said they'd always want to read books in print in 2012, this number increased to 65 percent just two years later.

"There really is a physical, tactile, kinesthetic component to reading," Baron told the New Republic in a recent interview. "In the Slovakian data, when I asked what do you like most about reading in hard copy, one out of ten talked about the smell of books."

And when she asked her study subjects what they didn't like about reading on a screen, a lot of their answers had to do with the physical progress and satisfaction you get from reading a print book that just isn't there with a Nook. "They like to know how far they've gone in the book," Baron said. "You can read at the bottom of the screen what percent you've finished, but it's a totally different feel to know you've read an inch worth and you have another inch and a half to go. Or students will tell you about their visual memory of where something was on the page; that makes no sense on a screen. One student said, 'I keep forgetting who the author is. In a print book all I have to do is flip back and I see it.' There are all kinds of reasons students will give - 'I have a sense of accomplishment when I finish a book and I want to see it on the shelf.'"

Sure, e-readers serve their purpose, and Baron herself notes, "Generally speaking, if you give standardized tests on comprehension of passages, the results are about the same on a screen or on hard copy." But when it comes to personal preferences, the printed book remains king.

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92 percent of students prefer physical books to e-readers

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Don't get too nostalgic about the days of paper books just yet - it looks like e-readers are still a ways away from replacing the real thing. According to research from Naomi Baron, a linguistics professor at American University, 92 percent of students still prefer to do "serious reading" using books that make use of actual ink printed on a physical page.

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The digital divide, like many other economic or social problems, is a global issue.

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The digital divide, like many other economic or social problems, is a global issue.

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From the most switched on countries such as Sweden to the poorest nations in Africa there is a widening gap between those with access to technology and those without.

The gap between countries on the same continent is also getting wider.

According to figures from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Sweden has a mere 12% of its population offline compared to 56.5% in Greece.

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Some of the world's poorest nations are getting to grips with technology

The digital divide, like many other economic or social problems, is a global issue.
From the most switched on countries such as Sweden to the poorest nations in Africa there is a widening gap between those with access to technology and those without.

The gap between countries on the same continent is also getting wider.

According to figures from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Sweden has a mere 12% of its population offline compared to 56.5% in Greece.

The scale of a country's digital divide reflects the condition of its economy, says ITU analyst Vanessa Gray.

"In Sweden there is a population that is highly educated and a culture of trying new things whereas in Greece income levels and educational levels are lower," she said.

League tables are important to keep nations on their toes, she thinks.

"Being able to compare gives them the incentive to do better. Governments need to know where they stand and learn from other countries," she says.

Finland, which currently has around 13% of its population offline, is so confident it can solve its digital inclusion problems it has recently declared internet access to be a basic human right.

Its public libraries have moved beyond being places where people can gain their first experiences online to offering laptop doctors who trouble-shoot a wide range of technology issues.
Wi-fi villages
Eastern Europe has traditionally lagged behind its western counterparts in terms of economics but countries such as Hungary are investing heavily in high-speed fibre-optic cables.

Despite the blue sky thinking on infrastructure, Hungary has no national e-inclusion policy and there are concerns that the networks will be far more sophisticated than citizens' understanding or use of them.

There are some efforts to conquer the problem and a wi-fi village programme is reaching out to those of its population living in rural poverty, 80% of whom are Roma or Gypsies.

So far 115 rural villages have been provided with wi-fi, offering internet access to 2,000 families living below the poverty line. The target for this year is to reach 30,000.

As well as providing the infrastructure, the project also sells recycled PCs to local Roma people for about 80 euros.

The PCs run Linux and users are trained to user Google's web applications such as Gmail and Google Docs.

One villager managed to make contact with an old friend and secured temporary jobs for himself and 20 other villagers on a construction site for a new road.

Others have started e-learning programmes while one resident used his new-found skill to make a movie about Roma culture which is on YouTube and has been watched by 90,000 people.
Barren deserts

Keeping people that are part of minority communities in touch with their culture is an invaluable service that the internet can perform.

As one of the world's most advanced economies, the US is often held up as a weathervane for the state of the internet. While internet access is high in America in general, use among Native Americans stands at less than 10% according to a study conducted by the New America Foundation (NAF).

Even analogue phone lines only reach one in three families in many tribal communities, while less than 10% of respondents to a major NAF survey had universal mobile phone coverage in their community.

"Tribal homelands have stood like barren deserts in pockets across the technology-rich lands of the United States," says report author Sascha Meinrath.

The NAF study drew together views from more than 120 tribes living in 28 states across America.

It found that connected Native Americans paid substantially more for their internet access but those who are connected, use their connection more widely than the national average.

RezKast, the first Native American YouTube is currently sweeping through the community and the internet has had some more life-changing impacts too.

Five clinics in Leech Lake, a reservation with 16 villages and 4,079 residents, is using telemedicine.

It allows individuals from remote communities to access specialised health care

"This is saving peoples' lives," said network director Frank Reese.

Mr Meinrath thinks the example of the Native Americans can be replicated around the world as long as there is a willingness to teach skills alongside making kit and access available.

"It is incredibly rare that broadband connectivity won't improve the lives of those who use it effectively, in much the same way that books improve the lives of the literate. However, providing books to everyone doesn't help those who cannot read in the first place," he said.

It could be time for a major rethink on how to deal with the digital divide he thinks.

"When it comes to broadband connectivity, the era of 'if you build it, they will come', is rapidly drawing to a close in industrialised countries," he said.

"Now we need to begin far more holistic interventions to reach those remaining offline. And if some folks claim to simply not want to be online, that's their choice - though I view it as akin to pridefully claiming that you don't read books."

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Some of the world's poorest nations are getting to grips with technology The digital divide, like many other economic or social problems, is a global issue. From the most switched on countries such as Sweden to the poorest nations in Africa there is a widening gap between those with access to technology and those without.

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Digital technologies are great tools for activists, but you can't confront the realities of political power with just a wifi hotspot

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Digital technologies are great tools for activists, but you can't confront the realities of political power with just a wifi hotspot

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Web theorists are fond of talking about how the internet has enabled "ridiculously easy group formation" and "organizing without organisations." I say this not to badmouth such theorists  but rather to point out that internet-mediated political organising has its limitations

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As the Wisconsin labour protests enter their tenth consecutive day, with the latest development being a surprise vote in the state assembly by Republicans to put the heat on the senate (which has been deprived of a quorum by Democratic state senators absenting themselves), it is worth reflecting on exactly what is at stake. Though posed as a budget standoff, public employee unions have already accepted all of Governor Scott Walker's proposed cuts. The issue is over the future of collective bargaining in the state.

Scott Walker wants to take away the right to organise for any public employee union that didn't endorse him in the previous election. The fight is over political power and organising capacity. Or, put another way, it's about some of the things that the internet can't do.

Web theorists are fond of talking about how the internet has enabled "ridiculously easy group formation" and "organizing without organisations." I say this not to badmouth such theorists (I'm one), but rather to point out that internet-mediated political organising has its limitations.

Rarely do we see this sort of sustained, mass protest in the United States as we have seen in Wisconsin these past two weeks. Take the Tea Party movement, for example. The healthcare town hall meetings of 2009 consisted primarily of small groups of angry conservatives, turning out to public events and attracting media attention. They were devastatingly effective, and made good use of new technology. That said, organising 15 people to attend a two-hour evening event is pretty easy. Getting 15,000 or so people to attend a multi-week event (in chilly Wisconsin, in February) is phenomenally difficult.

The web has played an augmenting role in these protests. There are the pizza orders, which are pretty cool. There's the Twitter- and blog-based information diffusion, meaning we don't have to rely on traditional news gatekeepers to frame the debate or decide which elements are newsworthy. There are the solidarity events planned around the country. There's the $400,000 raised by DailyKos, Democracy for America, Progressive Change Campaign Committee and other internet-mediated groups, to support the 14 Democratic Wisconsin state senators who have gone into self-imposed exile, in an effort to thwart Governor Walker gaining a legislative rubberstamping of his will regardless of public opinion on the issue. And, of course, the union organisers themselves are relying on a set of "mundane mobilisation tools" to coordinate protest activities.

But, just as the Egyptian protests were aided by social media, rather than caused by social media, the roots of this fight are really quite different.

Labour unions offer a bedrock structure for large-scale collective action. Governor Walker is attempting to remove that structure. If he succeeds, internet-mediated organisations won't be able to fill in the gap. Groups like MoveOn.org can be tremendously effective, particularly in the new media environment. But they can't organise workers in a specific industry or city to improve wages, working conditions and benefits. MoveOn is never going to sit across from management at the negotiating table.

That's where "organising without organisations" reaches its limits: you need to build institutions of power if you're going to confront institutions of power. When the going gets phenomenally difficult, you need courage and commitment to succeed, not just a wifi hotspot.

If Governor Walker succeeds in crippling the unions in Wisconsin, then it will change the long-term balance of power in that state; and other governors and states may follow Walker's lead. Take away the unions, and the super-wealthy will be the only interests in America capable of aggregating massive resources to effect policy change. Viewed in light of the successful takedown of Acorn, and the current attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, the Trojan Horse provisions in Walker's budget repair bill look an awful lot like an additional step in an ongoing rightwing strategy to dismantle every large-scale organising force belonging to the left.

Scott Walker is trying to enact a vision of America in which the wealthy can allocate major resources to influence government policy, and the rest of us can attend Meetups. It's a vision that renders government less responsive and less responsible to its citizens. It's a bad deal for all of us.

* Dave Karpf is speaking at The Morningside Post's second annual conference, "Information Overload? Navigating the Age of Democratised Media", at Columbia University, New York on Friday 25 February. More details via Facebook
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Wisconsin and the limits of web power | Dave Karpf

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As the Wisconsin labour protests enter their tenth consecutive day, with the latest development being a surprise vote in the state assembly by Republicans to put the heat on the senate (which has been deprived of a quorum by Democratic state senators absenting themselves), it is worth reflecting on exactly what is at stake.

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Stina Sanders: Model who lost thousands of followers for sharing honest images – but carried on anyway

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Stina Sanders: Model who lost thousands of followers for sharing honest images – but carried on anyway

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Sanders watched as 5,000 followers left her page after she shared candid pictures of herself

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Stina Sanders inarguably took a huge risk in agreeing to post 'honest' pictures on her Instagram page.

The London-based model and blogger had appeared in campaigns for Nike, Loreal and a number of major brands when she agreed to share the images on her Instagram account for a social experiment.

Sanders began surprising her followers with pictures they were not expecting to see: of herself bleaching facial hair, while she awaited a colonic irrigation to treat her Irritable Bowel Syndrome, with chipped toenails and with unwashed hair.

A world away from her more glamorous shots, they presented a reality rarely seen on social media amid the unattainable standards of perfection constantly perpetuated by edited photos.

And almost immediately after launching the experiment, her followers began to drop away. Sanders lost a total of 5,000 by the official close.

Meet the stars of Instagram

Sander's story instantly went viral. Four months on, she has a burgeoning modelling portfolio and continues to blog and post on social media. She also continues to occasionally share 'honest' images, whether it be photos of herself hung-over and make-up free or photos showing the parts of her body still affected by acne. But this time, her followers are unfazed and she now has over 112,000 fans on Instagram. The Independent spoke with Sanders about what happened after her story went viral and to find out why she decided to continue the experiment.
What are you up to now?
I'm currently writing a book, which has been a dream of mine since I started blogging. Although I would highly recommend that people don't write a book. It's a strenuous task!
How did the attention garnered by this story going viral affect your career - did you get more or less work because of it?
The experiment has given me a lot of opportunities but the only thing it's really changed is the perception that people had of me before. The stigma of being a model makes a lot of people stand on their back foot with you. I like to think I've challenged that stigma and shown that no-one, including models, is perfect, nor do models think that they are.
Did you have any regrets about the experiment?
I have absolutely none. I found the whole thing liberating and I feel I've highlighted that anyone can suffer from a mental illness - as well as the fakeness and ridiculousness of social media.
After putting those real pictures up, how do you feel about yourself now? Did it improve your confidence?
Putting real photos online was daunting at first but then I had a quiet word with myself and asked myself, 'who doesn't suffer with anxiety, gross feet or look a little bit rough sometimes?' I feel a lot more confident now because I'm not trying to pretend to be something that I'm not.
You still occasionally post these kinds of pictures; ones of you in bed with a hangover; of yourself without make-up. Why did you decide to continue posting these pictures after the experiment finished?
I enjoy posting real images as well as make-up photos, I think the balance is important. Poking fun of yourself and showing off your glad rags is (in my eyes) how social media should be.
How do you feel about social media now?
I'm so glad I did it because the experiment has not only raised important issues like mental health, it's also shown everyone that things aren't quite what they seem.
Does social media promote body positivity, or can it be harmful to self-esteem and confidence?
It depends on how it's used. I think a lot of accounts can be negative - it's not realistic to have a 22-inch waist for the average person. People should accept their body for how it is. I'm an athletic build - I'll never be six ft tall with big boobs. It's important to understand that we're all different and we're all beautiful in our own way, inside and out. Someone will always want something that you have, whether that's external or internal.
Do many accounts reflect reality?
I think celebrities like Lena Dunham and Chrissy Teigen are brilliant in how they portray themselves online. They show a balance in their fun/real side to their lives. Personally, I think that's how everyone should be online.

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A model lost thousands of Instagram followers after sharing realistic images - but carried on anyway.

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Stina Sanders inarguably took a huge risk in agreeing to post 'honest' pictures on her Instagram page. The London-based model and blogger had appeared in campaigns for Nike, Loreal and a number of major brands when she agreed to share the images on her Instagram account for a social experiment.

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In the top 1,000 video games, male characters are  4 times more likely than female characters.

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Increase of Vinyl sale in the past 10 years

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Increase of Vinyl sale in the past 10 years

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As the music on the internet is virtually free.. is the rise of the vinyl and the fact it's because more expensive a niche for the rich?

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Jenkins(2006) suggests that the digital divide is giving way to concern about the participation gap.Expanding participation evokes necessarily further change

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Dating apps categorised by how 'free/casual' or 'serious' you want the relationship to be

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Dating apps categorised by how 'free/casual' or 'serious' you want the relationship to be

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EgyptAir hijacker ''selfie'' is wrong in so many levels. Are people missing the actual point here?

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EgyptAir hijacker ''selfie'' is wrong in so many levels. Are people missing the actual point here?

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It is rare to hear on the news of ''selfies with hijackers'', especially when the word is not even is not even right in this context. In an age of globalisation and where terrorist attacks can happen literally anywhere it is more than disrespectful to victims and families of terrorist threats and attacks and to take such a horrific 'act' and turn it into something considered light-hearted by wording and/ or having debates about whether the word should be applied in this context or not  is beyond ridiculous... Are people missing the actual point here?

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Are we becoming so superficial that we have to change the way we look in order to ''love'' and ''approve'' ourselves online? 

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Are we becoming so superficial that we have to change the way we look in order to ''love'' and ''approve'' ourselves online? 

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Los Angeles talent manager Triana Lavey had a more extreme solution when she realized her selfies weren't up to snuff: plastic surgery.

Since 2012, Lavey has dropped $15,000 for plastic surgery, all in the quest for a perfect Instagram selfie. Apparently no filter or photo-editing app was good enough for her pics, so she underwent a nose job, a chin implant, Botox and fat grafting to change how she looks.

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In this day and age, where you are able to access information and pictures at the click of a finger, it is also dangerous what content these pictures can promote.

On instagram, the trending hashtag ''eat clean'' which promotes healthy eating has and can develop disorders amongst teenagers and adults  whom can start obsessing over what foods to eat or not and develop eating disorders such as orthorexia/anorexia/bulimia.
For example, I chose the picture from an instagram post below which promotes ''clean eating'' and says that 'your stomach shouldn't be a waste basket'' to infer that we shouldn't be putting rubbish in our mouths. But the extent that some people go to follow this advice can have detrimental impacts on their health and eating disorders may develop.

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It’s six months since hackers leaked the names of 30 million people who had used the infidelity website Ashley Madison. Resignations, divorces and suicides followed.

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Don't lose what is real, chasing what only appears to be.

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Don't lose what is real, chasing what only appears to be.

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Nowadays, when our relationships get hard, we can just log on & get high off this false sense of security,appreciation & understanding.

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Percent of Facebook 'Friends' who are strangers.

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Percent of Facebook 'Friends' who are strangers.

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The average Facebook user has never met in person 7% of their Facebook Friends and only met 3% just once(2010).
This means that 1/9 of our ''Facebook Friends'' are more or less strangers and yet they see everything we ''do'' and the pictures we post. It's scary to think why it is acceptable through social media to display& share your identity in ways which you would not in real-life.For example, we would not be posting pictures of ourselves through the post to someone you have never met (?) !

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Technology has changed our taste in music in diverse ways. Easier to 'download' music has enabled me to listen to songs I would not have heard of it was not that easy to access.

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Australian teenager with more than 612,000 Instagram followers radically rewrites her ‘self-promoting’ history on social media and describing the ''truth'' behind her instagram pictures, where she describes the ugly reality of every photo taken