Ask Aunty Digi: Spicy Digital & Social S%#t you should know

By Jade Kaukau
Digital Social Director

Kia ora e hoa, it’s time for another Aunty Digi yarn!

The world of Social and Digital is like a Gemini, it has a dark side and a light side. Despite its duality, it can bring so much joy and weirdness.

On that note, grab your coffee, wine, or treat because this time around we are getting into the world of crytpo and NFTs as well as some weird, cool news from the interweb.

To kick things off, we’re jumping straight into the nitty gritty with a bit of crypto chat.

NFT
NFT stands for non-fungible token, which means that it is unique and cannot be replaced with something else. For example, one Bitcoin is fungible - trade one for another Bitcoin, and you’ll have the same thing. A one-of-a-kind piece of art is non-fungible, a human is non-fungible – you can’t trade the Mona Lisa for a Monet or Lady Gaga for Madonna because they’re two different things.

Most NFTs are part of the Ethereum Blockchain and can be any digital asset, like drawings, videos, GIFs or music. They can be bought and sold just like physical assets and are held in digital wallets which any person can have in an unlimited amount.

It’s commonly used to sell digital art, also referred to as crypto art, but people sell tweets and even memes.

Crypto
The shortened version of Cryptocurrency, it’s a digital or virtual currency that can be used to buy goods and services. It’s secured by cryptography making it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend. The first and most well-known crypto currency is Bitcoin which launched in 2009, since then competitors like Ethereum and Dogecoin have popped up.

Basically, the internet created its own currency to trade online, outside of the usual banking approach which is both controversial and disruptive. I highly recommend looking into it when you can, because it will become more mainstream and will become part of online financial literacy.

Blockchain
This is a digital ledger, a system of recording information that makes it difficult or impossible to tamper with. It's a ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the blockchain. Each block in the chain contains several transactions, and every time a new one occurs, a record of that transaction is added to every participant’s ledger. The decentralised database managed by multiple participants is known as Distributed Ledger Technology or DLT.

This means that if anyone changed one block in one chain it would set off alarms and be obvious it was tampered with. If you wanted to hack a blockchain system, you’d need to change every block in the chain, across all the distributed versions of the chain.

On to the latest on the wild web and digital landscape:

An art student in China got some attention after revealing her 3-week experiment that saw her enjoy luxury at no cost for 3 weeks in Beijing. Maybe a summer vacation idea?

Memes help us with Covid stress according to a new study. Millennials and Gen Z knew this already, but it’s nice to have academic validation
There was a trend #GoLittleRockstar on TikTok, using this song except the lyrics are actually ‘pope is a rockstar’. One creator put up a video addressing it and has since been read to filth in the comments. Over 661M people have purposely disregarded the lyric to jump on the trend
A person who doesn’t like vaccines decided to sing a version of Mariah Carey’s ‘All I want for Christmas’ and honestly, Mariah should sue.
AI generated fake videos, also known as deepfakes, are becoming more common - and quite concerning. Currently there is a deepfake floating around of Jacinda Ardern. This was an old deepfake video originally her smoking weed but has since resurfaced because of the new smoking laws. Which poses the question, how are we meant to distinguish between what’s real and fake online when this tech really takes off? Check out the NZ Herald’s take on deep fake tech.
Instagram might increase story frames from 15 seconds to 60 seconds and Tiktok is looking into 5-minute posts (the limit is currently 3 minutes). With these time limit increases, are we starting to improve our goldfish attention spans?

Spotify wrapped has now almost become a Christmas tradition (sorry Apple Music and Tidal lovers), which is a dream for any brand. They really stepped up their game this year and dominated our Instagram stories, reminding us that they are always watching, listening, and collecting our data but in a cute quirky way. The new integration to TikTok was exciting, the slang was pretty cringe, and the ‘aura’ reading was very gay geriatric millennial of them But as we all know; nothing is safe from becoming a meme and Spotify wrapped was a target.

Exhibit A & B: