Difference between revisions of "Reddit"

Revision as of 19:33, 12 November 2011

The Reddit Alien: Reddit's logo

Reddit.com is a social news site in which users, known as Redditors, can post questions, opinions, user generated content, and links relevant to the interests of the users. ^[1] Redditors then can “Upvote” or “Downvote” the submission to make then it move toward the front page, the most frequented part of the site. The user who submits the post also receives one point of “Karma” for the each of the Upvotes the post receives, and a negative point of Karma for each Downvote. Karma is amassed in each user’s profile, showing “how much good the user has done for the Reddit community.” ^[2] The sense of community plays a large role on allowing in the actions of Redditors to act charitably and use Reddit as a place to cultivate gains social capital.

Structure

The content of Reddit is decided solely on how users vote. An Upvote makes either the submission or comment rise closer to the top of the page, while Downvotes act in the opposite way. The front page of Reddit contains the submissions most Upvoted by Redditors, and is the most prominent and visible place on the site.

Sub-Reddits

Reddit is comprised of hundreds of sub-Reddits, each narrowly focused on a specific topic. Some large Reddits include ‘world news’, ‘pictures’, and ‘funny’, which are displayed on the front page for all new users. Local Reddits also exist for many major universities and cities around the world, allowing users to schedule and generate interest in meetups.

Karma System

The Karma system acts as a cumulative recommender system in which users receive points, or Karma, for their input to the site. One positive point of Karma is given for each Upvote received, and one negative point is given for each Downvote. A user’s Karma score is displayed in their profile page, separated into two categories, comments and submissions.

Controversy

Some users believe the Karma system causes problems from people who post or comment in agreement with the majority opinions on the site purely for the purpose of acquiring Karma. According to a comment from a user who has since deleted their account, “Reddit is corrupt, karma invalidates valid opinions in lieu of popularity, in this sense reddit is a celebration of lowest common denominator thought pieces.” ^[3] Another concern with this points system is the existence of users who “repost” material to gain Karma. Reposting is a problem in an environment like Reddit, because it causes content to be recycled and prevents new content from reaching the front page. Some users believe that Reddit would have better and more original content if the Karma system were removed.

Reddit as a Community

Reddit has developed a sense of community that holds members responsible for their actions. Ethical behavior comes along with this sense of community, as people feel a social responsibility to according to their ethical norms adjusted to the environment. A moral framework called Reddiquette is one way that allows users to adapt to the new moral objects present on Reddit.

Reddiquette

According to a statement on the webpage, Reddiquette is “not meant to be a list of commandments”, but more of “an informal expression of reddit’s community values” that helps shape what ethical behavior is on the site. ^[4] Reddiquette is an extensive set of morals, organized in a set of what to do, which is comprised of twenty items, and a set of what not to do, made up of thirty-seven entries. Some subjects covered in the section of what not to do include personal privacy, complaints about reposts, pleading for votes, and comments that lack content. In the “Please do” section, some topics covered are linking directly to the page of the original source of content, and moderating on the basis of quality, not opinion.

n a 1970 interview, the German critic Gunter W. Lorenz asked Miguel Ángel Asturias why he began to write and the novelist replied: Yes, at 10:25 pm on the 25th of December in 1917, an earthquake destroyed my city. I saw something like an immense cloud conceal the enormous moon. I had been placed in a cellar, in a hole, in a cave or someplace else. It was then that I wrote my first poem, a song of farewell to Guatemala. Later, I was angered by the circumstances during which the rubble was cleared away and by the social injustice that became so bloodily apparent.[1] This experience, at the age of 18, led Asturias to write "Los mendigos políticos" ("The Political Beggars"), an unpublished short story that would later develop into his first novel, El Señor Presidente.[2] Asturias began writing El Señor Presidente in 1922, while he was still a law student in Guatemala. He moved to Paris in 1923, where he studied anthropology at the Sorbonne under George Raymond. While living in France, he continued to work on the book and also associated with members of the Surrealist movement as well as fellow future Latin American writers such as Arturo Uslar Pietri and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier.[3] The novel was completed in 1933, shortly before Asturias returned to Guatemala. Even though El Señor Presidente was written in France and is set in an unnamed Latin American country, governed by an unnamed President in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, there is still plenty of support linking the novel to the Estrada Cabrera era in Guatemala. For example, as critic Jack Himelblau explains, "Asturias [...] wrote his novel primarily with his compatriots in mind, who, undoubtedly, had lived through the tyranny of Estrada Cabrera from 1898 to 1920."[4] Manuel Estrada Cabrera was notorious for his brutal repression of dissent in Guatemala, and Asturias had been involved in protests against his rule in 1920.[5] Asturias integrated and reworked incidents from Estrada Cabrera's dictatorship into the novel, such as the torture of a political adversary, who had been tricked "into believing that his innocent wife had been unfaithful to him".[6] Estrada Cabrera was eventually forced out of office as a result of popular disturbances and the intervention of U.S. and other foreign diplomats. Rather than go into exile, however, the ex-president opted to defend himself against criminal charges.[7] In the ensuing trial, Asturias served as a legal secretary and so, as Gregory Rabassa's biographical sketch points out, he had the opportunity to base his own fictional leader—the President—on his observations of the disgraced Guatemalan dictator.[8] As Asturias himself put it: I saw him almost every day in the prison. And I found that there's no doubt that men like that have a special power over people. To the extent that while he was a prisoner people would say: "No, that can't be Estrada Cabrera. The real Estrada Cabrera escaped. This is some poor old man that they've locked up in here."[9] El Señor Presidente was not published until years after it was written. Asturias claims that Jorge Ubico y Castañeda, the dictator of Guatemala from 1931 to 1944, "prohibited its publication because his predecessor, Estrada Cabrera, was my Señor Presidente which meant that the book posed a danger to him as well".[1] Additionally, because Ubico was Guatemala's dictator while the novel was being finished, critics have linked him with the characterization of the President in El Señor Presidente.[10] As Himelblau notes, elements of the book "could easily have been interpreted as reflecting [...] General Ubico's dictatorship".[11] The novel eventually first saw the light of day in Mexico, in 1946, at a time when Juan José Arévalo was serving as Guatemala's first democratically elected president. Despite the manifest influence of Asturias's experiences in Guatemala under Estrada Cabrera and Ubico, and despite certain historical ties, critic Richard Callan observes that Asturias's "attention is not limited to his times and nation, but ranges across the world and reaches back through the ages. By linking his created world with the dawn of history, and his twentieth-century characters with myths and archetypes, he has anchored them to themes of universal significance."[12] Asturias himself affirms that he "wrote El Señor Presidente without a social commitment".[13] By this he means that unlike some of his other books, such as Leyendas de Guatemala (Legends of Guatemala) or Hombres de maíz (Men of Maize), "El Señor Presidente had a wider relevance because it did not focus so heavily on Guatemalan myths and traditions."[13] Asturias depicts aspects of life that are common to all dictatorial regimes, and so establishes El Señor Presidente as one of his most influential works. According to Latin American literary scholar Gerald Martin, Asturias's El Señor Presidente, which was written and published before the Latin American Boom of the 1960s, uses a style now classified as the "new novel" or "new narrative".[48] In this novel, Asturias breaks from the historic and realist style that dominated novels at the time.[48] Martin argues that the novel "exemplifies more clearly than any other novel the crucial link between European Surrealism and Latin American Magical Realism. It is, indeed, the first fully-fledged Surrealist novel in Latin America."[49] Richard Franklin contends that on occasion surrealist writing obscures meaning, but in El Señor Presidente Asturias avoids this flaw. His combination of rationalism with "a world of forms" creates "an imagery which reveals a deeper reality, one which is more deeply rooted in the human psyche".[36] As such, Asturias's surrealist style highlights the modern disintegration of long-standing belief systems.[48] Literary scholar Gabriele Eckart gives as an excellent example of Asturias's surrealist style his portrayal of The Zany's psychic processes in which "language sometimes breaks apart into incomprehensible sounds".[50] This allows Asturias to present the real and imaginary, as well as the communicable and incommunicable, as non-contradictory.[50] Himelblau also highlights how El Señor Presidente projects "reality in relative, fluid terms—that is it allows its characters to disclose the temporal setting of the novel's fictional events". In this regard, then, Himelblau notes that El Señor Presidente "is also, as far as we are aware, the first novel in Spanish America that seeks to render fictional reality of time as a function of point of view".[51] The novel defies traditional narrative style by inserting numerous episodes that contribute little or nothing to the plot as the characters in these episodes often appear inconsistently.[46] Instead of relaying the book's themes through characters, Asturias uses repetition of motifs and a mythical substructure to solidify the book's message.[46] Asturias employs figurative language to describe dream imagery and the irrational. Literary critic Hughes Davies points out that Asturias frequently appeals to the reader's auditory senses.[6] Asturias's often incantatory style[6] employs "unadulterated poetry to reinforce his imagery through sound".[36] This helps readers to understand the physical as well as the psychological aspects of the novel. According to Knightly, "few of Asturias's characters have much psychological depth; their inner conflicts tend to be externalized and played out at the archetypal level".[52] More significantly, Asturias was the first Latin American novelist to combine stream of consciousness writing and figurative language.[53] Hughes Davies argues that from the outset of El Señor Presidente, the gap between words and reality is exemplified through onomatopoeia, simile and repetition of phrases.[27] Knightly notes that "animistic elements surface occasionally in the characters' stream of consciousness".[52] For example, in the chapter "Tohil's Dance", Tohil, the God of Rain in Maya mythology, is imagined by Angel Face as arriving "riding on a river of pigeons' breasts which flowed like milk".[54] In Angel Face's vision, Tohil demands a human sacrifice and is content only so long as he "can prevail over men who are hunters of men".[54] Tohil pronounces: "Henceforth there will be neither true death nor true life. Now dance."[54] As Knightly explains, this scene follows the President's orders for Miguel Angel Face to go on a mission that ends in his death,[52] and is "a sign of the President's evil nature and purposes".[52] Davies contends that these literary techniques, when "combined together with a discontinuous structure, give the text its surrealistic and nightmarish atmosphere".[27]sturias blurs the separation between dream and reality throughout El Señor Presidente, making it one of the novel's most prominent themes. Latin American writer and critic Ariel Dorfman notes that the mixing of dream and reality is partly a result of Asturias's frequent use of figurative language. This stylistic choice is reflected in the content of the story itself, which suggests that an important effect of dictatorial power is the blurring of dreams and reality.[55] Dorfman also notes that the President is sustained by fear, which further blurs the distinction between reality and dream. This fear grants him the voluntary or involuntary support of others, enabling the President to exercise his mandates.[56] Dorfman asserts that the President's use of fear elevates his mandates to legends. These legends are then able to "impose itself upon reality because men live it fully in a way to make sense of their humanity".[56] One example of this theme, elucidated by Eckart, is a series of scenes leading to the arrest of the lawyer Carvajal. When the President decides to blame Carvajal for the murder of Colonel Sonriente, it is clear that Carvajal is confounded by the charges.[57] Moreover, despite being a lawyer, Carvajal is unable to defend himself during the sham trial with "the members of the tribunal so drunk that they cannot hear him".[57] As Eckart asserts, "to be captured and tortured without ever knowing why is another horrible feature of a dictatorship. For the victim, reality unexpectedly becomes unreality, no longer comprehensible by a logical mind."[57] Therefore, the use of fear by a dictatorship blurs the line between reality and dream for the people being ruled. Asturias's ambiguous use of detail adds to the confusion between reality and dream. For example, the title pages of parts one and two state that they take place between April 21 and 27. Part three, on the other hand, occurs over "Weeks, Months, Years". While this time-scale initially appears very specific, no year is indicated. Furthermore, the novel is set in a country similar to Guatemala and includes references to Maya gods (such as in the chapter "Tohil's Dance") but no direct statement by any character confirms this. Bauman argues that Asturias, by "preferring instead to distance himself from the immediate historical reality and focus critical light on the internal problems", attends to what "he sees there".[58] This enables Asturias to address a wider audience, not restricted to Guatemalans, that can relate individually to the experience of living under dictatorial rule. In obscuring reality, truth becomes unclear. As literary critic Mireille Rosello notes, it is the President who decides what is true, denying any other opinion, even if other characters witness an event with their own eyes or ears.[59] Unlike the characters in the novel, readers are aware that the characters are relying on a notion of truth or reality that no longer exists under the dictatorship of the President.[60] "Truth" does not exist before the President puts it into words,[61] and even at that, the only "truth" under dictatorial rule is the words the President is speaking at any given moment—one cannot even safely repeat the President's versions of events.[62] The characters are thus left unaware of what constitutes the n a 1970 interview, the German critic Gunter W. Lorenz asked Miguel Ángel Asturias why he began to write and the novelist replied: Yes, at 10:25 pm on the 25th of December in 1917, an earthquake destroyed my city. I saw something like an immense cloud conceal the enormous moon. I had been placed in a cellar, in a hole, in a cave or someplace else. It was then that I wrote my first poem, a song of farewell to Guatemala. Later, I was angered by the circumstances during which the rubble was cleared away and by the social injustice that became so bloodily apparent.[1] This experience, at the age of 18, led Asturias to write "Los mendigos políticos" ("The Political Beggars"), an unpublished short story that would later develop into his first novel, El Señor Presidente.[2] Asturias began writing El Señor Presidente in 1922, while he was still a law student in Guatemala. He moved to Paris in 1923, where he studied anthropology at the Sorbonne under George Raymond. While living in France, he continued to work on the book and also associated with members of the Surrealist movement as well as fellow future Latin American writers such as Arturo Uslar Pietri and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier.[3] The novel was completed in 1933, shortly before Asturias returned to Guatemala. Even though El Señor Presidente was written in France and is set in an unnamed Latin American country, governed by an unnamed President in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, there is still plenty of support linking the novel to the Estrada Cabrera era in Guatemala. For example, as critic Jack Himelblau explains, "Asturias [...] wrote his novel primarily with his compatriots in mind, who, undoubtedly, had lived through the tyranny of Estrada Cabrera from 1898 to 1920."[4] Manuel Estrada Cabrera was notorious for his brutal repression of dissent in Guatemala, and Asturias had been involved in protests against his rule in 1920.[5] Asturias integrated and reworked incidents from Estrada Cabrera's dictatorship into the novel, such as the torture of a political adversary, who had been tricked "into believing that his innocent wife had been unfaithful to him".[6] Estrada Cabrera was eventually forced out of office as a result of popular disturbances and the intervention of U.S. and other foreign diplomats. Rather than go into exile, however, the ex-president opted to defend himself against criminal charges.[7] In the ensuing trial, Asturias served as a legal secretary and so, as Gregory Rabassa's biographical sketch points out, he had the opportunity to base his own fictional leader—the President—on his observations of the disgraced Guatemalan dictator.[8] As Asturias himself put it: I saw him almost every day in the prison. And I found that there's no doubt that men like that have a special power over people. To the extent that while he was a prisoner people would say: "No, that can't be Estrada Cabrera. The real Estrada Cabrera escaped. This is some poor old man that they've locked up in here."[9] El Señor Presidente was not published until years after it was written. Asturias claims that Jorge Ubico y Castañeda, the dictator of Guatemala from 1931 to 1944, "prohibited its publication because his predecessor, Estrada Cabrera, was my Señor Presidente which meant that the book posed a danger to him as well".[1] Additionally, because Ubico was Guatemala's dictator while the novel was being finished, critics have linked him with the characterization of the President in El Señor Presidente.[10] As Himelblau notes, elements of the book "could easily have been interpreted as reflecting [...] General Ubico's dictatorship".[11] The novel eventually first saw the light of day in Mexico, in 1946, at a time when Juan José Arévalo was serving as Guatemala's first democratically elected president. Despite the manifest influence of Asturias's experiences in Guatemala under Estrada Cabrera and Ubico, and despite certain historical ties, critic Richard Callan observes that Asturias's "attention is not limited to his times and nation, but ranges across the world and reaches back through the ages. By linking his created world with the dawn of history, and his twentieth-century characters with myths and archetypes, he has anchored them to themes of universal significance."[12] Asturias himself affirms that he "wrote El Señor Presidente without a social commitment".[13] By this he means that unlike some of his other books, such as Leyendas de Guatemala (Legends of Guatemala) or Hombres de maíz (Men of Maize), "El Señor Presidente had a wider relevance because it did not focus so heavily on Guatemalan myths and traditions."[13] Asturias depicts aspects of life that are common to all dictatorial regimes, and so establishes El Señor Presidente as one of his most influential works. According to Latin American literary scholar Gerald Martin, Asturias's El Señor Presidente, which was written and published before the Latin American Boom of the 1960s, uses a style now classified as the "new novel" or "new narrative".[48] In this novel, Asturias breaks from the historic and realist style that dominated novels at the time.[48] Martin argues that the novel "exemplifies more clearly than any other novel the crucial link between European Surrealism and Latin American Magical Realism. It is, indeed, the first fully-fledged Surrealist novel in Latin America."[49] Richard Franklin contends that on occasion surrealist writing obscures meaning, but in El Señor Presidente Asturias avoids this flaw. His combination of rationalism with "a world of forms" creates "an imagery which reveals a deeper reality, one which is more deeply rooted in the human psyche".[36] As such, Asturias's surrealist style highlights the modern disintegration of long-standing belief systems.[48] Literary scholar Gabriele Eckart gives as an excellent example of Asturias's surrealist style

Ethics on Reddit

Reddit has created an environment in which many users act ethically, fostered by the presence of a community that works to make Reddit a better place. Users work together to suppress hateful speech, act charitably, and help fellow Redditors out with either advice or favors. ^[5] Several sub-Reddits allow users to ask for favors from other users, including /r/favors, and /r/randomactsofpizza, a Reddit in which users can donate pizza to less fortunate Redditors.

There also exists controversial content on Reddit which has come under scrutiny for being immoral. In September 2011, Reddit garnered negative media attention for its subreddit r/jailbait. R/jailbait displays photos of non-nude underage girls in sexually suggestive clothing or positions. Most of these photos were taken from friends of the girls from their Facebook, Twitter, or other social media sites. Anderson Cooper featured it on his show AC360, criticizing it for spreading a form of child pornography and arguing it's lack of protection for the privacy of these young girls. This eventually led to the subreddit being shut down with the site administrators claiming it to threaten "the structural integrity of the greater reddit community." ^[6]

The Reddit community backlashed Anderson Cooper and the media with explanations ranging from freedom of speech and press to the photos not being illegal. Other distasteful subreddits such as r/beatingwomen and r/picsofdeadbabies were also discussed being banned for the same reason as r/jailbait, but currently are still running.

References

1. ↑ http://www.reddit.com
2. ↑ Reddit Help: Frequently Asked Questions. (n.d.).Retrieved from: http://www.reddit.com/help/faq
3. ↑ Anonymous. (07/2011). Reddit.com: "I love Reddit to death, but sometimes I think Reddit would be better off if it just eliminated accumulation of karma for users". Retrieved from http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/irb53/i_love_reddit_to_death_but_sometimes_i_think/.
4. ↑ Reddit Help:Reddiquette. (n.d.). Retrieved from: http://www.reddit.com/help/reddiquette.
5. ↑ thetacticalpanda (08/2011). Reddit.com Retrieved from http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/jjsws/i_just_received_some_hate_mail_in_my_reddit_inbox/?sort=top
6. ↑ Reddit Staff. (10/2011). Reddit.com/r/jailbait