Abstract
The technology that garners modern-day communication is rapidly evolving, but not its accessibility. Despite significant advancements over the past 20 years, rural areas of the United States still struggle to receive reliable cell service. The Charlottesville Mountain Biking Team (MBT) experienced this problem during their team’s riding session on the Blue Ridge Mountains. With spotty cell service, coaches had trouble locating each other and relied on verbal descriptions via MURS handheld radios: a difficult task, and a safety risk, within the dense Virginia forests.
Our project addresses this concern by integrating GPS functionality into the MURS handheld radios used by the MTB. To comply with FCC laws, the design focused on an external radio module that attaches via a Kenwood pin, rather than altering the radio’s internal contents. This allowed users to see the exact location of the radio after the release of the push-to-talk (PTT) button. Additionally, the choice to use MURS handheld radios significantly improves accessibility as users do not require a radio license to operate. As soon as the PTT button is released, GPS coordinates are extracted and encoded, transmitting the location to the receiver. The receiver is a module that can be plugged into a laptop and allows access to the software, displaying the map and exact location of the radio.
The STS technical thesis I will introduce is starkly different from the technical project, but both share the underlying theme of accessibility to vulnerable information. In the age of social media, many celebrities are subject to constant surveillance and scrutiny. On the other hand, they may choose to share their personal lives online, from which they might garner an online following. Oftentimes, the scrutiny they face comes from this online sharing. For rap artists, this expression of vulnerability, which I define as any expression of self, is vital to their art. Furthermore, much of their fanbase is based on this sharing of vulnerability through their music, something that the genre is significantly known for due to its origins.
This paper aims to answer the question of how exactly these vulnerabilities affect their public perception and whether showing vulnerability impacts their online following. The method of research selected was data collection, in which I observed 70 X posts over the course of 11 months for three rap artists, each with distinct controversies: Nicki Minaj, Kevin Gates, and Kanye West. Each of the posts was sorted into one of three categories: neutral, positive, and negative sentiment. The data was then summarized in graphs to show how the public sentiment changed over time, noting the accompanying controversy of the artist that followed the wave of positive/negative sentiment. The findings concluded that despite controversies, if the controversy was consistent within the brand of the artists, or, in simpler terms, online users feel as though the controversy is ‘expected’ from the artist, the public sentiment of the artist remained positive or neutral. Furthermore, whenever there was an increase in negative sentiment in a controversy, the public sentiment remained negative only for a short period of time, implying that users generally did not keep the same attitude towards the artist for long.
