Post #3

Post #3

I would like to touch on my experiences I have had with an Iphone app called "Gifboom". This app can be incredibly fun in my opinion but there are also many things I dislike about it. It is a great way to reach out to people via social media while also showing off and practicing your creative skills with photography and images. A GIF file is a file containing a series of images (on gifboom you get 30 frames) which flash one after the next to create what appears to be a video clip, and this loops over and over until you click out of it. You can alter images in so many different creative ways; its seriously an awesome experience that can make a boring day fun. Usually, if you work hard to make a really cool gif such as making it look like you are levitating or using a play on colors, then you can get a lot of "likes". People using this app are driven to get "likes" because if they get enough it might appear on the popular page. So I have said what I personally like about this app, but there are many negatives for me. I would like to point out that I am a 20 year old female who is in college. The average age of users on gifboom is probably around 14. There are of course many outliers to this statistic, but I cannot help but feel outnumbered. But the general demographic is female teens and pre-teens. This guides the content that people post on GIFboom to be very immature and lacking in creativity. For example, most of the gifs that make it to the "pop" page are those of these young girls spinning around in their new outfits or doing what I like to call the "fake laugh". This is such an odd concept when you really think about it, but when you go through the FaceBook images of most teenage girls you see them making facial expressions called "kissy face" or "duck face" or they appear as though they are laughing and they have their hand placed on their hip...well on gifboom, this is dramatized even more because the images are MOVING. So you get a 14 year old girl who makes gifs of herself in her bikini while doing this "fake laugh" as if being in the frame of the camera is a hilarious concept. Why is this? Why are there so many young girls on gifboom? And why do they all make gifs of themselves in skimpy outfits? I think that it is caused by our society's guidance of female behavior. Modern day America asks a lot of its youth...to be beautiful, smart, go to college, witty, funny...and if you aren't all of these things well, then, you just don't fit in. When girls are given gifboom to play with, they make it their outlet for this attention. They crave the praise of everyone who comes across their gifboom page in hopes that they get everyone to say "OMG YOU ARE SO PRETTY" etc. I use this app as an outlet to create slow motion clips and capture funny moments... to express my love for photography and videography and its fascinating ability to be able to communicate with anyone in any language...but society and the media guide youth to use these things in manners that I consider innapropriate.

Other than using this app for most of the day today (creating an elaborate and creative GIF can sometimes take a very large chunk of time) I also watched to movie "Sex and the City" for the millionth time... Every time I want to watch a movie I feel like I always end up watching it. I love it. It presents every girls dream; to find a tight group of friends that love you, to live in a lavish city with endless shopping and males in the sea, and a fun lifestyle that you get to live with a group of best friends. I also spent some time on YouTube watching documentaries. The one I spent the most time watching, and was most struck by, was called "The Most Hated Family in America", and also watched an interview of the family that is "most hated " by Tyra Banks. If you have not watched this documentary, you should go watch it now. It is fascinating the belief systems and cults that people develop, especially these people. They go to the extreme.