Assassin's Creed: Transmedia

With society's growing emphasis on convergence, and fan's want to know more about the universes that they love so much, transmedia storytelling (or TMS) isn't simply limited to books and movies anymore. Video games have joined in on the TMS craze, and I believe that Assassin's creed is a great example of this.

Assassin's Creed was first released in 2007 and has since had several sequels and spin-offs for almost any platform you can think of. Along the way there have also been low-budget short films released as an attempt to fill in some back story information and fillers that take place between the main games in the series. More recently, there have been a series of books that follow the events of the games, but in a written format rather than playing them.

Coming up this year there is a full-length feature film that follows the life of someone within the same universe, but completely separate from the characters from the games.

Online Abuse: Just Another Reflection of Society

I know what you're thinking after reading the title of this article: "She's trying to discredit the real pain that victims of cyber-bullying go through!" And let's be clear right off the bat here: No I'm not, so take a chill pill. I know that cyber-bullying has real victims that feel real pain, and that bullying via cyberspace is significantly harder to escape from than the face-to-face variety. But here is my proposal for why this problem hasn't been fixed yet, and why I don't believe that it ever really will be: As a society, we are all just a bunch of shitty human beings at our core.

Bullying, in general, has been around since humanity first learned that making someone else feel like shit could make you feel superior to them. A common stigma is that bullies only exist in the world of children in school, especially high school age kids. But anyone that has ever attended college or has worked at a job where there are other people around you know that this isn't true. Instead of being pushed around by the big kid on the playground with self-esteem issues, were now subjected to rumors and stories told in confidence being spread. So basically we're still stuck in high school.

I don't believe that the motivations and primary goals that bullies have have changed much over the years, the emerging of social media has just given them a faster and more convenient outlet with which to carry out their deeds. I'm not trying to justify the behavior, but if we as a society haven't been able to rid playgrounds of bullying, how is it possible to make any dent in a form that allows for anonymity of the abusers and messages and images to be spread in a matter of seconds? If you want to lower the occurrences of cyber-bullying, you need to first lower what causes bullying in general: us being allowed to be shitty people to one another.

Facebook Secretly Censoring More than Usual?

So we already know about how Facebook uses algorithms to only show you things on your news feed that it deems as being "important" to you. Although this is hardly accurate, because there are multiple reasons why you might have been looking up someones profile, or googling information about a particular topic that some girl from high school that you still have on there happens to be posting a lot about lately. But according to an article from Gizmodo, Facebook might be tailoring what appears on the trends as well as what you see in your news feed.

The "Trending Topics" header that appears on everyone's homepage is a feature that came out within the past few years, and is supposedly supposed to show users what topics are coming up frequently among your friends, as well as what users as a collective are talking about. But instead of this section being run by pure algorithm, there are workers hand picking what they think should and shouldn't be shown there.

Aside from making sure that Facebook itself and news about the site stay out of this module, the curators could push topics, or blacklist them at their own discretion. One of the effects of this was a consistent lack of more conservative-based topics ever appearing in the trending section, no matter if lots of people were talking about it or not. This was due to the lack of conservatively-mined people curating the topics.

I might not agree with what news anchors and politicians on the right-hand side of the political spectrum have to say, but I still believe that it is important to put all of the topics of interest that people are talking about out there, without being censored by some third party's bias.