Social Media and Mental Health
In 2017 users spent approximately two hours a day on social media. Surprisingly, this amounts to five years and four months of a person’s life spent solely on social media [1] There have been connections made between mental health concerns and social media consumption throughout the years. What is triggering these links with mental […]
#DeleteFacebook? An Investigation into the Cambridge Analytica Scandal Part 2
As we learned in Part 1 of this series, Global Science Research (GSR), Facebook, and Cambridge Analytica have each been the subjects of recent controversy for their respective roles in mining data from over 50 million Facebook profiles. While we can investigate how each company contributed to this event, we must also examine our […]
#DeleteFacebook? An Investigation into the Cambridge Analytica Scandal Part 1
On March 17, 2018, Cambridge Analytica came under fire and amassed international attention as news broke of the company’s role in harvesting data from over 50 million Facebook profiles [1]. While the unfolding story has outraged many, it has also presented numerous questions: how did this happen? How much trust are we putting in our […]
The Data Detox Challenge
We all know that familiar feeling of having too much clutter; whether it’s in our physical or mental spaces, it can be hard to function efficiently when we’re weighed down by disorder. For this reason, when the Digital Tattoo student team heard about the Data Detox – an 8 day online challenge to […]
DT Podcast: Episodes 3, Social Media and Santa Ono, is now available
The Digital Tattoo Podcast: Episode 3, Social Media and Santa Ono In this episode, we sit down with the President of the University of British Columbia and talk about everything social media. Professor Santa Ono uses Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Youtube, and Facebook to communicate with students, faculty, and staff. We discuss how he came to […]
When Seeing Isn’t Believing
Textual literacy skills in the North American public have been on the rise since the dawn of the 20th century. More people than ever before are able to understand, and critically interpret written statements; however, fewer people are taught visual literacy skills. It is easy to believe the things that we see. The human mind […]
Ten New Year’s resolutions for your digital life
New year, new you. Given that such a large portion of our lives are now led online, it only makes sense to make some New Year’s resolutions for your digital self. Here are 10 suggestions from the Digital Tattoo team for a fun and productive 2015: 1. Google yourself. Review what shows up in […]
Ghostery: track your trackers
Ever feel as though you’re being watched? If you spend a lot of time online, that sentiment may be justified. It is no longer a secret that an overwhelming number of online companies now use data mining to target their ads based on individuals’ specific internet histories. Ever looked up an item online, only to […]
Hashing out the hashtag
Following a horrific shooting in Santa Barbara, that left seven students dead and over a dozen injured, news of the massacre spread on social media like wildfire. In the days that followed, it was uncovered that the shooter had a YouTube channel dedicated to promoting misogynistic ideas, and had left a deep Internet archive documenting […]
UBC Snaps: the appeal of “disappearing” media
If you’re a UBC student with a Facebook account, you’ve likely already perused the UBC Compliments and UBC Confessions pages, and perhaps even made an anonymous contribution of your own. Given the exponential rise of Snapchat, a disappearing-photo sharing app, it is no surprise that UBC Snaps is the latest in a series of […]
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