YEY for EMOJIS

So yesterday seen the release of the new ethically diverse emoji’s.

I must admit, I was probably a bit more excited than I should have been.

As soon as I realised today was the day I sent a reminder text message to my sister, best friends, mam, boyfriend (even though he doesn’t care)….

To update you have to go to settings > general > software update.

The only snag is, if you don’t have a iPhone 5 or newer, you ain’t getting the new emoji’s!

You don’t understand my love for the emoji. I just don’t understand how we sent messages before without them. My boyfriend doesn’t use them and I always take everything he says so seriously. He actually asked me the other day what one of the emojis meant and what there point was. Well! I went on and on and on. He probably wished he had never asked.

Emojis help to convey the meaning of your message, they can even be used without words because they are that fab.

Anyways, this was just a post to encourage everyone that hasn’t to download the new emojis 🙂

Happiness

I’ve just been at work when one of the cleaners asked me if I believed in God.

I ummed and arrred for a while and replied, ‘I’m not sure, I’d like to think there was a heaven but I am not completely sold’. He actually laughed at me and told me that, ‘you cannot be truly happy in this world without knowing God’. My immediate response was but I am happy. He asked me what I find happiness in and I replied, my family, my friends and just being here is enough for me. Again he laughed and reiterated his opinion that I can’t be fully happy without God in my life.

Strange one that isn’t it, because religion is something that I feel sometimes can be a hard topic to discuss with people. It was random that he actually came out with that. It made me wonder why he asked me that question. Do I look unhappy?

I’ll tell you something, I won’t just be happy, I will be overjoyed once this month is over with and I have no more deadlines for a while!

I don’t believe that you NEED a God to believe in to make you happy. I think you can find happiness, love and enjoyment from even the smallest of things. If sitting in and eating cheese and pickles all day makes you happy, then do it! If sitting in a park and people watching for a couple of hours makes you happy, do it! Whatever you find happiness in, appreciate it, because without my friends and family, I would be a very miserable person!

#ShoutOutToAllTheFamAndFriendsOutThere

Reflection….

I feel that I need a moment to sit back and think about what hectic week I have had.

So this week I interviewed my first participant in relation to my dissertation. My research question is –

Supporting young people with disabilities to make the transition to life after further education.

I didn’t really prepare myself for the interview (I did have an interview schedule though!) as I thought that I would already feel comfortable enough – having volunteered at the Seashell Trust for the past year. God had I underestimated myself….for some reason my nerves got the better of me and I couldn’t articulate myself properly. Not only that, when listening back to the interview I realised how much of an agreeable woman I actually am. I had missed opportunities to probe further and ask questions that could of given me some really interesting data. Spite that, all was not all doom and gloom and I did manage to get some fantastic information from my participant.

What was great, was that the interview did not run smoothly how I would have liked it to have. We had staff members enter the room on numerous occasions, we had students coming in the room and presenting challenging behaviours, and finally we had a fire evacuation! I liked all these obstacles, as this was something that made my research feel real and made me feel like a real researcher. When you are reading journals and research papers it’s not often you hear them mention things like these, but for me I think that these are great talking points to discuss. It kind of gives me my own stamp on my research.

All the chaos as well as my volunteering inspired me to go home and apply for a permanent job there. I knew that there was jobs going there but the only thing that put me off was the fact that I am currently employed, and the wage I get at my current job is great for the amount of work I actually do. I realised that I was wasting my time doing something that has no benefit over my future, something that bares no importance in my life. It’s stupid to stay in a job that brings me nothing but dread. I did the math and don’t think that I will be taking that much of a drastic pay cut, so I took the plunge and applied. And guess what? I just got a phone call inviting me to an interview next week, yes yes! Wish me luck!

So, what makes a campaign successful?

As well as looking at random campaigns on my blog, we have also been looking at them in class. We were asked to look at some public health campaigns that have been particularly effective over the years, the Department of Health: Smokefree campaign, Hand Hygiene campaign and the Organ Donation: UTV Organ Donation campaign: From The Heart.

We were then asked –

1. What made these campaigns successful? If they were clear, compelling and convincing, how did they achieve these effects?

Let me start by firstly looking at the Department of Health: Smokefree campaign….

After reading the Smokefree 2012-2015 strategy, they outline a number of reasons what make a campaign such as  the Smokefree one, a success.

Firstly the start by explaining that they are going to keep the campaign focused as a single issue campaign, unlike with other campaigns where they are looking to take a life course approach. They are going to keep utilising paid for mass media channels as they have proven successful, but they are going to increase their use using social media.

They do lend some of its success down to the fact that they have had policy and legislation changes, that have backed up their campaign, such as the introduction of smoke free legislation in 2007. They also say that because the government has set targets, i.e. the number of smokers they want to reduce by the end of 2015, this backing will also have helped the push.

Within the strategy they describe the conditions required for successful behaviour change, which I will briefly explain now –

• Positive environmental change – as mentioned before, such as the introduction of the smoke free legislation in 2007.
• Dissatisfaction with the present – e.g. by focusing on the health harms or the impact of smoking on others/loved ones.
• Positive vision of the future – e.g. being able to see oneself living a smoke free life.
• Being confidence in the audiences ability to quit.
• Presenting different successful support options and signposting.
• Motivating and triggering, through the use of advertisements.

A lot of their TV adverts are very graphic and serious, they immediately engage the audience through their use of imagery showing the effect of smoking. In their strategy they say that research shows the most powerful advertising always appeals strongly on an emotional level. How they tend to go about this is play the ‘family card’, they tug on the audiences heart-strings. Dramatizing the harmful effects really creates that emotion and even makes me think about my actions as a social smoker, and the effect that this may have on my friends and family. Playing the family card also gives people with families a motivation to quit, because they have seen the effects, and now they might want to modify their behaviour to reduce the impact to their families.

Moving on the UTV organ donation campaign launched in 2013, its main aim was to encourage people to join the register. The campaign hosted a week long push, with UTV and ITV televising special shows around the implications of donor shortages and the reasons behind it.

To raise awareness they have a series of shows, some of which examined the publics attitudes towards donating and some personal accounts of people awaiting donations.Such as the Smokefree campaign’s technique of pulling on heart strings, this campaign is also utilising. With people opening up and expressing their personal need, it really makes you feel like they are talking to you personally and they are asking you for help, which to me, really evokes an emotional response. It’s really good because as a viewer it makes you think, what if you were in that position, you would hope that someone would be able to donate to you, which kind of makes it a personal experience.

The use of celebrities I personally feel keeps the reader gripped when the topic might be getting a bit too tense, but the high profile figures will also help to promote the cause, and reach out to the wider audiences of the fans. Again, the use of Twitter and hashtagging, will allow for a greater network of people to receive the message and in turn pass it on, helping to mobilise the campaign.

In terms of the Organ Donation campaign, I have described more what I feel has made their campaign as successful one, but many of the points from the Smokefree were described within their campaign strategy outline.

#TheChokeables

A campaign was launched on the 11th January this year by St John’s Ambulance titled the Chokeables. It is a campaign aimed at educating parents on how to stop a baby from choking.

I first seen this campaign earlier this week whilst watching mid morning television, I thought that this was a particularly good time to aim the advert, as this is a time where parent’s are most likely to be watching TV, after taking other children to school etc. I think that the campaign is a very powerful and informative in its approach, using visuals and featuring the voices of famous people such as, David Walliams, David Mitchell, Johnny Vegas and Sir John Hurt to keep the viewer gripped. The campaign sees the actors play objects that could cause babies to choke – a small princess toy, a chewed-up pen lid, a jelly baby and a peanut – which is also making parents aware of the things that could be a potential hazard to their child. It’s only short (40 seconds), which is good as parent’s probably don’t have enough time to sit and watch TV for long periods of time, which makes it easy to watch.

It comes as new research shows that four-fifths of parents (79 per cent) do not know the correct technique despite more than half (58 per cent) saying that choking is a major fear for them and 40 per cent that they have witnessed it.

Sue Killen, St John Ambulance chief executive, said: “Knowing what to do in an emergency can be the difference between life and death, especially with something like choking.

“We all know how time-pressed parents are so this film makes it as easy as possible to learn first aid – in less than 40 seconds we can all know a skill that could save a life.

The main push for the campaign seems to be television advert, but online they are quite active in promoting their campaign on social media such as Twitter.

They have been tweeting posters such as the following –

This image shows the types of things that a baby may choke on. It has been used throughout the campaign to inform parents.

These images have been circulated throughout the campaign by St John’s Ambulance and throughout social media by people retweeting and sharing. Through the use of networking it will allow for the campaign to reach a wide pool of people, hopefully making the campaign a success. It will be interesting to find out how much of a difference the campaign makes at the end of it’s run.

I decided to have a look at how it was doing on Twitter and it is clear to see that many people are still retweeting the information posters and the advert. I noticed a tweet that said the campaign had over 4 million views in just ten days, I’m not sure of the validity of this statement but if that’s true that is amazing. I have tried for hours to figure out how to add in a snippet of the Twitter feed into this blog post, but I just can’t seem to grasp it. But if you would like to take a look yourself, here is a link to the St John’s Ambulance Twitter feed.

If you would like further information about the campaign you can get more information here.

And lastly, here is the video itself….

Please reshare to help and raise awareness!

Update on the Speed Flat Mate Dating….

So last night after work, I headed to this Speed Flat Mate Dating that I mentioned in a previous post. Danielle (current roomie/bestie) met me in Piccadilly and we headed to Tusk, which is a bar in town. When we arrived we were greeted by two ladies, who asked us if we ‘have a room’ to rent, or are ‘looking for a room’, we then had to fill out a sticker which identified us as having a room, our name, location of the flat and how much it is going for, rent wise. It was immediately apparent that there was a a lot of people looking for a room and only a couple of us that had rooms to rent. I also noticed that there seemed to be a lot more men then there was women, which for me wasn’t very ideal as I would much prefer a female.

We headed to the bar and decided it was the best option to get a bottle of red to loosen us up and make this whole situation bearable. After all, I did feel quite nervous, like I was actually on a date! Not only that I started to become worried, with thoughts running through my head like, ‘what if know one picks me?!’

We took our wine and wine glasses over to a table and sat down. I started to scan the room, looking for potential roomies and quickly scanning their stickers. I didn’t really know what to do, was I meant to get up and mingle or should I wait for people to come to me. It was all a bit too much, a bit daunting. I was thankful for the invention of wine!

Luckily, some nice guys sat next to me started the small talk, what I found really interesting was finding out people’s background. Why were they looking? What they did jobwise etc etc, that’s maybe just my noseyness coming out, but it was fascinating. There was such a mix of people around, young and old, I just couldn’t understand why so many people were looking for rooms. I mentioned to one of the guys there that if he is unsuccessful in looking for a room, then why didn’t he just look for a flat with someone else who is looking for a room? Maybe the easiest option.

I started talking to people and it seemed that unfortunately most people were looking to rent and move in ASAP….Danielle’s room isn’t even available until the end of June! Whoops, far too keen. I decided that it was probably far too early to look for a new roomie after that, so we sacked it off and headed to another bar before going home. Poor Danielle, I was moving her out before she had even packed!

I think I have just been worrying far too much that I wouldn’t be able to find anyone, but that event actually made me realise that I will I just need to look closer to the time. So, all in all it wasn’t all a complete  waste of time and I met some really interesting new people.

OMG OMG OMG OMG

Do you ever have one of them moments when you literally just can’t even….

I’m having one of them right now.

Everytime my UCAS emails me to tell me there has been a change on my UCAS Post Grad application I can’t help but have a mini heart attack. I have never in my life felt so anxious, I would rather walk the plank than have to wait for these decisions.

I received decisions from three of my four Universities but I am still awaiting decisions for one. I must admit, I have found this whole process so stressful, coming at a time were I have had the stress of final year deadlines, and not to mention just the pure essence of FINAL year. I literally just can’t even come to comprehend anything at the moment.

Everything is happening so fast, my life seems to be changing so quickly and I hate that I can’t control it. I look back at my last four year at University as an undergraduate student and I just can’t believe how fast it’s actually gone.

This year my best friend in the whole wide world is leaving me to go travelling with her boyfriend. With everyday that passes it frightens me as I don’t think I will cope well without her. Obviously I don’t admit this to her, but as much as we have bickered and grew together over the last four years, I am well and truly going to miss her. She’s like that sister you never really wanted. She keeps telling me that she will come back and it’s only temporary but for some reason, I just don’t think that she will.

Sooo because of her selfish decisions to leave me, this means that I now had to advertise her room on the internet. I feel like I’ve just put an advertisement into lonely hearts; but here I am again, waiting on someone to contact me. I don’t know if I’m more nervous about my UCAS or recieving messages from potential roomies.

It sort of feels like I’m starting again. I hated the idea of moving in with people who I had never met before in first year, what if I don’t get on with them? What if they don’t get me? Now, I feel like I’m back to square one. Initially when I set up my advertisement I did it on a well known site, so far I have had about 12 people contact me. 3 of which I think could be potentials, 4 of which were boys – which I clearly stated in my ad that I only wanted girls (typical!!!!) and the rest I ‘Googled’ and maybe even Facebooked, and immediately decided no.

Yesterday I received and email from the website telling me that they were holding an event in a well known bar close to where I live, it’s called ‘Speed Flat Mating’ – concept taken from idea of speed dating. I am so nervous, I don’t know why, maybe it’s the fear of the unknown. I have asked my bestie/current roomie to come with me, I think it’s a bit easier with someone there to support you. She knows that sometimes I can see the best in even the oddest people and odd is not what I want living with me.

Feel like I’m sort of cheating on my boyfriend, but I will blog what the outcome and everything in a further post….wish me luck. Oh and the point of this post, was just to let everyone out there know, your not alone!

The ‘Kaycee Saga’

Most people will have probably of heard of the TV show Catfish, right? In short, it is a TV programme that was devised from a documentary produced by 2 men in 2010, it looks at identifying whether people who are having online relationships are basically who they say they are. They gather evidence that may suggest that one of the individuals may not be telling the whole truth, and then track them down to confront them. Many times revealing that one or both or the individuals are not quite portraying themselves correctly. In some instances it has even been found women pretending to be men, manipulating women to fall in love with them and send them gifts, such as money etc.

Well, the story of Kaycee Nicole is quite similar. Kaycee Nicole was apparently an American, teenage girl who was sadly suffering from leukemia. Like many other teenage girls, she was an active internet user, through this she ‘made friends via email, instant messaging and even by telephone’. One of her friends suggested that she create a weblog to share her ‘courageous story’. Throughout a two-year period she satisfied her readers with daily updates and confessions of how she was feeling. Her honesty and bravery won the hearts of millions. Kaycee’s mother, ‘Debbie’ also started writing a blog discussing the difficulties of caring for a child with Leukemia, all of which seemed totally believable….

Kaycee sadly passed away on the 16th May 2001, thousands of messages supporting Debbie through this terrible time were posted online. Many of her online followers tried to send flowers, gifts and cards of condolences to the family, but Debbie refused to accept. This sparked some doubt within the online community as to how genuine the whole situation was. They started to do some more digging and found that actually, Kaycee was a completely made up character. There was no record of her in any high school, hospital or even registered in Kansas with the same name.

Photos purporting to be Kaycee were in fact of someone else – an innocent college basketball star who was still very much alive

Piecing everything together it soon became apparent that Kaycee had never really existed. The whole story had been made up by Debbie Swenson, a housewife living in Kansas.

The New York Times managed to interview her, within their article they state that Debbie –

appeared embarrassed and contrite, acknowledged that she had been the one to create the Kaycee character but said she had not intended to hurt anyone. She said she was surprised to learn how many people had been reading about Kaycee and to learn how emotionally invested people had become.

”The whole idea of an online journal is to write what you want to write,” she said. ”I wanted it to be something positive.”

In an article by the Guardian, they describe how she –

had started by constructing an online personality, but it spiralled into an increasingly complex deception as the diary became ever more popular. Once her cover was blown, she revealed the truth quickly with one final diary entry.

“Her name was not Kaycee and she was not my daughter,” Debbie wrote. The diary, she says “was about the lives of three people who suffered with cancer. I am to blame for wanting to tell their stories. I am to blame for weaving the lives of all three together.”

The story of Kaycee Nicole came to light in 2001 which goes to show that knowledge of the power of the web has been known for a long time; knowing that you can easily manipulate your readers through something such as an intimate online blog, that allows for readers to feel part of your life, drawing them in and making them emotionally involved, this is not a fresh topic and is something that we see mirrored in many of the episode of the programme Catfish.

Debbie seemed to use the weblog to tell the stories of three people who had died of cancer, maybe her retelling her stories in this particular way helped her to deal with her person trauma from these? Can we blame Debbie for the fact that people automatically thought that the blog was a true account? I wonder if anyone had ever asked her before the suspicious arised and what her reply was?

It is a shocking to find that so many people misuse the web in ways that can mislead people and lead to betrayal, which many people were left feeling after the Kaycee revelations. My advice to you when talking to people online is to be wary, don’t believe everything they say, be savvy, Google them! Find out more, do not meet someone who you have met online alone, and if you are going to meet someone, inform close friends/family of your plan. Some people aren’t as they appear to be and this is something to take into consideration when chatting to people online!

I Just Don’t Get It….

This week in my communication lecture we were told a story that really stuck a chord with me, it was about a user of Twitter who sent out a series of tweets stating that he was going to end his life. A modern-day suicide note.

Before he tweeted this he tweeted he felt that he didn’t have anyone to turn to which to me I found really upsetting. He was a well-known person with many connections, but still he felt alone. It made me appreciate the fact I have a select few people I can turn to in times where I feel I need someone to talk to, but also made me question many things, such as how many other people are out there feeling the same way as he did? And how many people use social media as a way of gaining that support?

I understand that sometimes people find it hard to talk…my little sister is one of them, and forever I am telling her that a problem shared is a problem halved. But different people use different strategies and hers is also through the use of Twitter, to express her emotions and vent.

I did some further reading and found that “Britain is the loneliest capital in Europe” (The Independent, 2014: Online) . This shocked me at first but when I began to think about it, I began to think about the bigger picture and how things like the mobile phone, have become big parts of our daily lives. I read in the Daily Mail (2013: Online) that the average persons checks their mobile phone around 110 times a day. That to me is astonishing! Why? What is the need? Why do we feel so close to our phones? What are we waiting for?

Nowadays you look around we are surrounded by people buried with their head down engrossed in their mobile phones. We are a generation where people spend more time on-line building ‘relationships’ through cyberspace, than actually being bothered to make the effort and find out about who lives next door. Studying social care I think that this is scary.

The Independent (2013: Online) found the following statistics –

34 million hours are spent on Facebook each day, with a further 28 million hours on Twitter.

And almost a third (30%) of the UK’s 33 million Facebook users are on the network for at least an hour a day, with 13% spending at least two hours on Facebook each day.

More than a quarter (26%) of UK women on Facebook check their pages at least 10 times a day, compared to less than one in five (18%) of men.

Of the UK’s estimated 26 million Twitter users, almost a third (31%) spend more than an hour a day on the network, while 14% – more than 3.6 million people – say their daily usage exceeds two hours.

Personally I think that if we invested more time in our real life friendships and relationships, rather than wasting our time on-line with superficial fake friends and acquaintances, then maybe the levels of loneliness won’t be so high.

Have you ever watched Jeremy Kyle, now forgive me for using it as an example, but  how many times do you watch an episode of this and find that Facebook has been the main cause of the argument and relationship breakdown? Yet, so many still waste time on it.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that some forms of social media can be helpful, such as the case I mentioned at the beginning. But 9 times out of 10, I would put down the way our generation is so unconnected down to digital technologies and social media.

The video below is an advert illustrating how mobile phones are ruining relationships….

I mean, I can’t say that I haven’t been guilty for overusing my phone but I just think that we need to do something about this, and change the way we are behaving before we end up so engrossed in cyber culture we lose grip of the real world. We seem to be the cause of our own isolation and at this rate we will be the cause of our own extinction if this sort of behaviour carries on……haha.

So next time you pick up your mobile phone THINK!

I am well aware that I have used this post to mainly nag about the use of mobile phones but it wasn’t originally tended for that, but sometimes you just have to roll with the flow and let it out!

References

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2449632/How-check-phone-The-average-person-does-110-times-DAY-6-seconds-evening.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/britons-spend-62m-hours-a-day-on-social-media–thats-an-average-one-hour-for-every-adult-and-child-8567437.html 

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/forgot-phone-goes-viral-eight-2224887

Online Activism At It’s Best

So, I was just sat scrolling down my Facebook, procrastinating when really I should be focusing on my fast approaching deadlines, when a something caught my eye and made me think.

It was an e-petition for the ‘Green Party to be included in the BBC political debate’. So after kind of being won around by the Greens lately, mainly due to the fact they see the importance of investing in young people, youth services and communities, I thought yes I am defo going to sign then.

The great thing is, nowadays you can actually now have an impact without even having to leave your sofa. With an option of sharing the petition yourself through the use of other social media platforms, i.e. Facebook and Twitter, you are doing more than just signing the petition but adding to the spread of it. As mentioned in a previous post the author Clay Shirky, mentioned that through doing this, I will have added to the complexity, through creating more connections and more networks, that will hopefully spread the word further.

An article written by the Guardian, states,

….the BBC “will continue to keep any new evidence of increased support for the Green party under close review” – Guardian:Online:2014

I’m just hoping that the BBC are taking notice of this activity and are aware of the online support that the Green Party are receiving, currently 13,560 people have signed this out of the 15,000 signatures they are asking for, we can do this!

This led me to question, I wonder how effective these online petitions actually are, and if any had actually made any impacts…

An article by The Independent (2012) which stated that signing e-petitions has become one of Britain’s favorite forms of political participation. The author then goes on to discuss why he thinks internet petitions especially of this form have become so popular,

It is that internet-driven norms of networking, flexibility, spontaneity and ad hoc organizing have started to diffuse into our political culture and these norms are generating new expectations about what counts as effective and worthwhile political action. These new online norms also increasingly mesh with changing practices in the world of older media, particularly television.

And I completely see his point, but also I think that not just in terms of political e-petitions but just online petitions in general, over the past few years nearly everyone has access to the internet, and most people will access the web daily; that coupled with the ease of accessing these petitions, and sharing them so easily will both have added to the increase, because lets face it, the internet isn’t really making it effort for us to do this.

But after further researching, I found that for a e-petition to be considered for debate by the Commons, it has to reach 100,000 signatures and petitions that reach 10,000 signatures would elicit a written response from the government (BBC: Online: 2013). They also go on to state that not many petitions actually reach the 100,000 signatures needed with many becoming, what they describe as, ‘digital dust’.

I was shocked when I read this because to me this isn’t as many signatures that I thought, and to me, 100,000 is doable, especially when the cause is something that affect us all, such as political petitions. Millions of people access the web daily, so I wonder what is preventing them from reaching these targets? Maybe they need to promote themselves in other ways?

Although some may not be reaching there targets, digital petitions are on the rise. This shows me that there has been a cultural change within society, maybe even an evolution….the shift in things being done manually to digital, e.g. people going to a town hall to sign a petition vs e-petitions.

I wonder what effect this is going to have, if any? I wonder if it’s representative of the population as a whole’s views, or, if it is the views of the young, tech, savvy generation that regularly use the internet and are aware of these online petitions?

Who knows? I’ve sat and rambled on for long enough now, so I’m gonna wrap this up now with some references and then go and enjoy a large glass of wine…if it Saturday night after all!!!

BBC, 2013. First Day ‘is Crucial For The Success of E-petitions. [Online] Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23441223

The Guardian, 2014. BBC Refuses To Include Green Party Televised Leader Debates. [Online] Available at:   http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/29/bbc-refuses-include-green-party-televised-leader-debates-general-election

The Independent, 2012. How Digital Petitions Are Replacing Traditional Parties As The Engine Of Modern, Popular Democracy. [Online] Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/how-digital-petitions-are-replacing-traditional-parties-as-the-engine-of-modern-popular-democracy-8329266.html