Ideal schmideal

From my experience dealing with avatars or profile pictures, I have learnt to always take them with a grain of salt (or a bucket in some cases). No one is ever going to be able to show you a complete rundown of themselves in the space of a Facebook ‘about me’, and so as E.T. Higgins, author of Self-Discrepancy: A theory relating self and affect, says; people ‘mediate their image, strengthen their virtues’. In doing so, people often present an image...

Courageous or Coward?

In Julian Assange’s interview with 60 Minutes (2013), he is referred to as an activist. Activism is defined as “the doctrine or practice of rigorous action or involvements as a means of achieving political or other goal, sometimes by demonstrations, protests, etc.” (Dictionary.com 2014) Referring to Assange as an activist may be the most accurate description of him, as the goal of Wikileaks was to inform citizens of government corruption. Codeinet 2013 Bertot, Jaeger & Grimes (2010) present the idea that social media is a strong tool...

Wreck-It Rudd

During the 2013 election, whenever I logged on to Facebook or Instagram, I was bombarded with statuses, photos and memes of everyone’s political opinions. People were absently mindedly contributing to the election campaigns by either agreeing or disagreeing (generally the latter) with the candidates. Entertainment was a major part of Kevin Rudd’s 2013 election campaign. By adopting words such as ‘selfie’ (self-photo) and ‘quiche’ (from...