•We will go over Paper 1, if you have any specific questions, unmute and ask or type in chat
•I will go over syllabus for the rest of the semester
•For video project, you don’t have to use Adobe, you can use iMovie or anything you’re more comfortable with
•I will keep emailing out our agenda through Tlearn about an hour before class, let me know if I should move it even earlier, I will email any important news through Tlearn as soon as I get it
•Disable your video if your connection is spotty, if your connection crashes, just check our WordPress
•So many students from California, if you share local news let us know
•If you have possible suggestions to make our class even more interactive let me know, let me know what other professors are doing that you like and dislike on zoom
•Zoom distractions, some tips from doing this before, tell other people in your house your schedule, maybe even post it somewhere so they know not to bother you, headphones if outside noises will distract you, they are working on the house next door so I use a headset
•In today’s activity if there’s something important you want to share with everyone just point it out, that’s what I want the activity to do, let us share important information and talk about it
Activity (Post to WordPress, this post in particular, as a comment)
Find a piece of media COVID related
If you have to give it a genre, describe what the genre is
What other content would it include or not include
Include examples of other similar content in the same genre
For example, pushup challenge
IG or social in general, similar to ice bucket challenges, for a good cause maybe to raise awareness, but might have blowback, wasting TP
See X do X genre
Other examples, see a dog post a dog, tp keep up challenges, etc
Mysantonio.com genre of local news
Mayoral news, stay home, work safe
How some restaurants are turning into grocery stories
HEB product limits to protect supply chain
Thinking about ordering groceries, from where and when
Hyper local news that only people in a certain area will care about.
Sometimes hard to keep straight with seeing news from UK, NYC, California, or even local news from a few days ago
Comm 2302 Spring 20 
I found a piece of media about posting an embarrassing photo of yourself and saying until tomorrow and if someone likes that photo then they have to do the same thing.
Id give it a mass social genre since its Instagram, related to literally every silly trend on Instagram right now like the pushup challenge, all the voting trends, etc.
I think people are creating and participating in these trends due to boredom and overall lack of social interaction. My particular media example has no downside since its digital.
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One piece of COVID-19 related media I’ve really noticed is tweets and memes of the coronavirus and how much it has affected everyone. For example, they are about how we’re stuck with family, only eating snacks, missing going out to eat, and more. Two tweets I found today were “Y’all remember going out to eat? That was mad fun” and “My quarantine routine 9am – 2am: wake up and stare at my phone”. Some other memes and tweets have to do with online classes and college with coronavirus. Overall, everyone is experiencing similar feelings of sadness, anger, and missing life before COVID-19, and these have turned into memes and tweets.
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“Austin Issues Stay Home Order to Stop Coronavirus Spread”
This piece of media would be most akin to a dystopian/apocalyptic genre. Other content in this genre may be things like natural disasters, societal revolutions, or catastrophic events. An example of one of these pieces of media is the movie “Contagion.” In this film, a deadly infection spreads rapidly through the world and causes much grief and devastation. This film mirrors our own world, almost too closely. Hopefully though, the outbreak will be contained before the situation devolves further.
https://www.kut.org/post/austin-issues-stay-home-order-help-stop-coronavirus-spread
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The March 18th episode of Pardon My Take, which is a sports comedy podcast.
In this episode, the show brought on Dr. Fauci, who is the lead doctor on the White House Coronavirus response team. The hosts, who are normally very humorous and relaxed, brought on Dr. Fauci and asked many questions about the truth related to the pandemic and what measures must be taken nationally and individually. While I don’t listen to too many podcasts, all of the podcasts I listen to have brought on experts in the field to provide truth to the situation in order to better inform their respective audiences. On social media, I have also seen many podcasts that I don’t listen to advertise their episodes in which they speak with health experts in a very serious and informative manner. Thus the genre would be podcasts in general that don’t specialize in health or even news but still focusing attention on being public health informants.
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https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a31693127/coronavirus-covid-19-memes-tweets-jokes/
I chose the last meme on this website as my content. I would place it under the genre of ironic memes and or comedy. The COVID pandemic has produced an increase in meme content to lighten the social media realm during such a chaotic time.
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One trend I have been seeing in the media is the sharing of encouragement through quotes or bible verses on instagram/snapchat stories. Also there have been text message and email threads challenging people to pass on an uplifting message to a stranger. I would say that this type of media would go under a “positivity” genre and is meant to lift people up in a time of uncertainty. While challenges like these occurred before we were quarantined, there has been a huge increase of this genre of media in the last few weeks.
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The piece of media I found was a chain of messages of people drawing carrots and then tagging friends to do the same. This was on Instagram stories. I think people are doing this to cure boredom of being at home. It really has no downsides other than your Instagram stories being full of carrots.
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https://www.editorandpublisher.com/feature/can-news-publishers-survive-the-coronavirus/
genre- industry news
other content it may include: covid effects on other industries, threat of an oncoming economical depression because of covid
ex: web forums that cover how detrimental covid is on the airline industry
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I’ve seen a lot of things on sports pages about the three point challenge or people doing things for fun because there are no sports to watch. One three point challenge was grapes into someones mouth or ice cubes into a cup. Yesterday my dad was watching a video of marble racing because he was so bored. There is no sports to cover so everyone is posting old highlights or just regular people doing athletic things
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The recent trend I have seen is The Push Up Challenge in which people do 10 pushups and challenge friends to do the same. I saw this in snapchats mostly and I would consider it to be in the fitness genre to encourage people to stay active while at home.
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3/25
Recently I got a text message chain that said: I don’t normally do these but circumstances are different right now. I was asked to be part of a 1 million Lord’s Prayer chain to slow and stop the Coronavirus. The idea is you pray and then pass the message on to 8 other people. Let me know if you can’t, so we don’t break the prayer chain. It took me 30 secs to do it …
I guess I understand the sentiment behind this message, but ultimately I found it to be very ignorant. I think that what we need to be spreading, other than just prayers, is helpful tips on how to avoid the corona virus. Chains like this that don’t spread information and rely on outside forces to bring this pandemic to an end are simply unhelpful and maybe even harmful. This genre is like chain mail.
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https://twitter.com/iatemuggles/status/1241262775248269312?s=20 I chose this tweet about a heartwarming conversation between two twin toddlers discussing the coronavirus. I would categorize it as comedy but also heartwarming videos to entertain people and bring a smile to their face. It’s interesting to see how the COVID-19 virus has been viewed through the eyes of kids too young to fully understand it. A video like this is a little girl fishing with her dad while social distancing and comforting the fish she caught. Media like this always helps reduce pessimism, on Twitter especially, and this is very different from the other memes that are centered around boredom and struggling with classes.
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Media I found is a trend on Tik Tok where friends make powerpoints of random topics and share them with each other. This would be in like a comedy genre because the topics are supposed to be comical, but people are also doing it to stay busy and keep up with friends. It would also fall under the other genres that include memes and chain messages. I’d say it’s a positive thing because it is allowing friends to keep in contact over platforms like facetime or skype, and most of the powerpoint topics are meant to be funny or random so it’s not really hurting anyone.
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For the past few days, I have seen a lot of Instagram challenges that are trying to keep people busy while being quarantined due to the coronavirus. The push up challenge was one that I (unfortunately) participated in and I felt like it was a fun way to get a people active and have a healthy mindset during these troubling times. There are also fun tutorials that I have seen on TikTok and Instagram that give fun activities and crafts to do while at home. I saw one video of a girl who ordered some cheap decorative items off Amazon and even got some painting supplies to make canvases. I think these videos are good because they keep people sane, busy, and positive during our time in quarantine.
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#Stayathome
Genre- Social Media
Related article: https://www.kmbc.com/article/covid-19-cases-rise-as-kansas-city-counties-johnson-jackson-continue-stay-at-home-orders-missouri-kansas/31927086
There has been a trend in #stayathome. It was a sponsored tag on twitter a couple days ago and has now been made as a home page story for instagram and tiktok. As cities go on lockdown, a majority of the lockdown relies on people staying home at their own will. This hashtag is to reinforce people to stay at home and create a community effort to stay home. By making it a social media trend, it creates a sense of online community, despite people being alone in their homes. It reminds me of the ice water als challenge where it tries to create community awareness in a playful way, but for a serious situation.
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I’ve seen a lot of tik toks related to covid, most popular about college students being upset. They mostly are talking about being sad/mad about leaving campus and the bad parts about being back home. They basically all talk about what covid has taken away from them from all the cancellations and while its just something for them to do, they are all very very similar and get boring to watch one after another. It is similar to all of the memes going around, but it is more targeted towards the specific ranting of emotions of college students.
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“Stay Home” sticker from instagram. If you post something on your story with the “stay home” sticker, it automatically goes into this shared story by instagram with story from other people who also used the “stay home” sticker. I didn’t notice this at first because I thought I was just looking at my friend’s stories but then I realized I looked at a friend’s story twice. Once I noticed, I went back to the instagram “stay home” story and saw all of them. It is somewhat cool because you can see some useful things like tips on what to do during quarantine. It does get a bit annoying when a friend posts a story with the sticker and I see it twice. Because of this, I stopped looking at the global “stay home” instagram story but it’s a neat idea.
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“Lost Sense of Smell May Be Peculiar Clue to Coronavirus Infection”
I read an article from The New York Times stating that a lost sense of smell or taste might be a new symptom of Corona Virus and that if anyone experiences something similar they should self-isolate. This article was posted on March 22nd so many people may not know about this and the author states that by giving it awareness we can slow down the transmission of the virus.
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A current trend on Instagram that has resulted during the time of Covid-19 is “until tomorrow” posts. Essentially you are supposed to post an embarrassing photo or series of embarrassing photos and can only caption it “until tomorrow” and tag the person who “nominated” you. You’re supposed to keep it up for at least 24 hours. If you like a post with that caption, you can be “nominated” by the person who made the post to make your own. I would put this in a genre of trending Instagram posts or more specifically throwback posts. It reminds me of when #tbt, #fbf, #selfiesunday etc. posts were popular. To me these posts have become annoying and are just filler posts for the lack of content due to the quarantine.
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One trend that i have noticed is that many fitness youtube channels have been releasing videos that have home workouts. one of the genres for these videos would be health. Other forms of media that are also in the genre of health would be videos and articles that talk about cooking now that people are spending so much time at home.
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“The Extraordinary Decisions Facing Italian Doctors”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/who-gets-hospital-bed/607807/
This article would fall into the disaster/drama genre as doctors – whose express purpose is to save lives- are having to pick and choose who they allocate resources to based on the likelihood of them surviving the coronavirus. Other content in this genre includes wide-spread economic devastation, death and political discontent.The difficult decisions needed to be made the doctors and the time-crunch they’re facing brought to mind the movie “I Am Legend” where the world has been devastated by a genetically-engineered measles virus. The main character has to choose between making a cure available but sacrificing himself in the process or allowing the hope of recovery from slipping away.
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One of the pieces of media I have seen repeatedly are the memes stemming from Taylor Swift’s music video for “You Belong With Me,” created by students wanting to return to their campuses during the Covid-19 pandemic. This media would fall into the genre of comedy or memes, but more specifically it relates to other memes and media created by students, like those revolving around online learning or zoom meetings.
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