A Stroll through New Media (Cullen Harwood)

When I read the prompt for this post, I figured that this would be probably the easiest post of the semester.

As a little background, I love to walk. This should be apparent from the title of the blog if nothing else (a stroll is similar to a walk, but with more swagger I think). I typically don’t stroll, usually just walk though.

Now, when I went for my walk yesterday, with the intent of being influenced by the massive amounts of technology and advertisements and subliminal influences that are obviously going to be present in the world. I looked, and listened, and waited, but went for a 45-minute walk without really having any sort of interaction. Maybe I was oblivious. Maybe Ithaca is stuck in the 1950s. Maybe that was awesome. No matter what it was, I hadn’t really come much closer to being able to effectively write this blog post.

I called my youngest brother, whom I frequently walk with, and asked him to go for a walk, keeping a similar prompt in mind while he did so. He called me back 5 minutes later to tell me that mom said no. Stymied again.

I was running out of options for material for this post, when I decided to go to the kitchen of my fraternity to get a cookie and spark something. I stepped out of my room and saw a giant “Heinekan” poster. I walked down the hall where my brother was sitting on the couch using his ipad. Downstairs, a couple of guys were watching the hockey game, and in the kitchen there was a “study” group watching Youtube videos. I sent a text message to my current  hook-up about our cereal selection when I realized that even though we can escape some of it here in relatively rural Ithaca, our homes have become incredibly dominated by technology and advertisements. It is not uncommon in most homes to have someone on the computer at any time or to find those little 3×5 magazine subscription cards in the bathroom. Both are forms of media influence.

I think that due to our location, this is true. If I walked through Times Square in New York, or the Mag Mile in Chicago, I would be bombarded by lights, sounds, and technology to the point where I am oblivious to it. Even in the home, it has become overwhelming to the point where we ignore it. When I am watching a TV show, I could probably not tell you what the commercial was just for, or who halftime was “brought to me” by. Yet it still dominates the space, and in a fraternity house, is almost even cool. The guy uses the Heniekan poster as a status symbol. We love our schwag and the technology around us!

Rated: from 5 votes

The past few weeks, one of our main talking points has been culture, and how it has been affected by the advent of the internet. In particular, on Tuesday, we discussed whether we need a shared culture or shared knowledge. I thought it would be interesting to look at Culture’s Wikipedia page.

The page is a pretty standard article containing pictures, an intro, segments, many hyperlinks, and most importantly, over 200 notes and 20+ references.

To me, the culture entry in Wikipedia seems to be severely lacking because it doesn’t really address anything current. While I realize in picking this topic that this is a very very broad topic that acts almost more as a definition than an article, it still surprises me that there is no commentary about the public sphere, or our changing culture, nor even the internet! In part, I commend Wikipedia for keeping the article unbiased and not allowing commentary, but at the same time, these are hugely driving factors to our current culture.

As a frequent Wikipedia user though, one thing I discovered today was the “discussion” tab. I have never used this feature, and it greatly confused me and I don’t quite understand it and I am uncomfortable and confused and no longer want to click this tab.

Rated: from 3 votes

My favorite blogger of all time, Hank Moody, put it excellently when he said:

“You know, I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four figure wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn.”

And he’s right! But when it came time to actually prove that he was right, and answer Professor Gillespie’s question, I struggled to find something on a website that truly offended me. Facebook, Youtube, MySpace, sure all of these groups censor their wildly inappropriate content and this is a total violation of the free expression that the internet should have given us, blah blah blah.

Come on, these websites have made us so jaded and accustomed to an outlandish barrage of sometimes revolting content, that it actually takes quite a bit to actually phase us now. The internet has indeed set us free, as Hank Moody has said, and the people that have been the most effective at using this freedom are those that choose to run around naked! The number of boobs I had seen by the time I was 15 will be minuscule to that of my currently 10 year old brother! (Although, neither of us will have seen real boobs…).

Thus, when we actually find something that is truly horrifying, it sticks out to us. Thus, this video I found. A little description: an elementary school put on Scarface as their class play. This is revolting. I am more upset that this has happened, AND BEEN MADE PUBLIC, than I am walking in on my brother when he was searching “Bikini Models” on YouTube (true story). What this video, and the fact that it has been liked by people, shows much of what is wrong with our society.

I guess I am hedging the question a little bit here, but I feel as though there cannot be a lot of content that truly surprises us anymore. While obviously YouTube has no way to monitor sheer stupidity, the fact that this video can then be circulated is unfortunate.

Just as Comic Books and Rock-n-Roll were supposedly similar to Satan’s work, so too is the internet. But just as eventually Comic Books became social critiques and Rock and Roll could put the word “fornication” in the title, this too shall pass. Long live the internet and it’s free access to boobies!

Rated: from 3 votes

Congressman Mark Kirk is an incredible individual. Not only does he represent my district (the 10th district of Illinois), but he is a Cornell alum, and also knows how to use a website..

Check this out! Not only are there video clip after video clip, but he has stuff for his constituents, issues, surveys, maps, and even a kids page! It isn’t too cluttered, it is highly interactive, I have never had so much fun looking at any political site in my life!! (although, the link to my town’s website is totally wrong! It gives you a different town in the district!)

But what does he do in order to add to the public discourse? How has Mark Kirk made it so my interests are better represented? Oh, I can email him, and follow his blog and receive his newsletters, but who cares? This is my biggest complaint with representation in general. Sure congressmen can claim to represent us, and I bet if I sent an email, i would get a lovely response, but there is no way of knowing that it was actually my hero (Mark Kirk, yes I did vote for him) that is responding to me.

What’s worst is that access to my former senator has gotten increasingly difficult. Before President Obama became President, his senatorial page became swamped with campaign stuff. It became nigh impossible to contact the guy who was supposed to be representing me! In this world of increased access and ease of communication, why is it more difficult to get a hold of those we vote for??

Rated: from 8 votes

Bruns lays out four key principals of produsage: Open participation and communal evaluation, Fluid heterarchy and ad hoc meritocracy, Unfinished artifacts and continuing process, and the idea of Common property with individual rewards. While all four of these principles are crucial to the produsage model, the one that is the best example of produsage is the concept of an unfinished artifact and the continual process of improvement to a product. The reason for this being the best example is simple: First, this concept encompasses the ideas of open participation and common property because no product is every truly finished in this model. Additionally, part of the idea of produsage that has developed is that any property is fair game to be altered and improved by the ‘consuser’. This idea is furthered along, and done so legally, by the implementation of copyrights on intellectual property like Creative Commons, GNU licensing, and open source programs. Everyone has access to use and alter these products, creating products that are never finished and always evolving. Bruns’ last category, fluid heterarchy and ad hoc meritocracy, is not as strong of an example of the produsage model because it is too highly specialized. Bruns states that “a product leader will emerge from the community”, but this concept is not as readily applicable. Not every situation requires a leader. While a forum moderator could be pointed to as an example, it is challenging to believe that they are really acting significantly differently than any other producer or user. The status a moderator has achieved does not have to be based on a better understanding of a topic or an innate leadership ability, but may simply be due to more activity than other users. More activity is not necessarily good activity, thus the best contributors may not actually be project leaders.

As produsage becomes increasingly prevalent, so too do the effects that it has on our culture. One of the mediums that will be the most greatly affected is the way that news is disseminated. In Natalie Fenton’s article about news in the digital age, she quotes Hargraves, who claims that “journalism stands accused of sacrificing accuracy for speed, purposeful investigation for cheap intrusion and reliability for entertainment” (Fenton 558). While the 24-hour news network may have had something to do with this, so too has the internet. Mediums such as Twitter and Facebook, while used mainly as social networking, also allow for incorrect information to spread like wildfire. One example of this was the reported death of Brittany Spears, detailed on Twitter, in June of 2009. This was preceded by other celebrity ‘deaths’ including Miley Cirus and Jeff Goldblum. All of these stars are still alive. In this case, Twitter acted, as Fenton states, “a dynamic tool for enhanced democracy…the ability to bypass a news intermediary to get information means that people communicate with people rather than be filtered out through the mainstream media” (Fenton 559). This is especially true now that our cellular phones are wired to the internet. It has become far too easy to bypass a filter.

Rated: from 2 votes

When the United Nations sponsored Information Society met in Geneva in 2003, they created a list of objectives that they believed could help the entire world join the public sphere and become a part of the global conversation through the internet. Seven years later, their plan has still not been entirely successful. The reason why is simple, but first, I’ll address what the most important achievement needs to be:

I feel that the WSIS is right in their beliefs that widespread internet access can create an “enabling environment”. There is a reason that this is the sub-title that is the longest; it’s because the pieces that fall into this category are the most controversial because many of the principles in this section deal with governance. The reason this is controversial is obvious: why should or would any country let a delegation of people (predominately from wealthy, high internet  traffic, capitalist countries) determine the rules and regulations for their internet? Never the less, these are crucial issues that need to be addressed on a global scale so as to allow an easy means of cross-border communication. Too many rules and regulations by a country creates a disruption in services offered (ie. Google and their endeavors in China) which defeats the whole point of cross-border communication and sharing of knowledge.

While these issues are the most important to deal with, article 10 (in which WSIS recognizes that not everyone has the same access abilities) is the most important barrier to address. Without truly widespread access and usage, we cannot have a real “human network” (as Cisco likes to put it). The internet has revolutionized the way that information and knowledge is disseminated and spread, but the true potential has not been unleashed. Places like Belize, Samoa, and the Central African Republic have fewer internet users than the Town of Ithaca. Once everyone is connected can we say that we have truly accomplished a spread of knowledge in the human network.

Rated: from 12 votes

Is it ironic that I twittered in class about learning about twittter? Social media and society at its finest!

Rated: from 2 votes

One of the coolest things ever was to see that video that Professor Humphreys showed us yesterday which demonstrated buzzwords that appeared during the Super Bowl. What this demonstrated was that there was a huge, almost national, conversation occurring. That is so cool!

I joined twitter this summer and at the time, I didn’t know why I did it. I had read a cool article in Time magazine and thought “sure, why not”. A month later, it became apparent as to why I joined twitter when the state department asked twitter to not perform maintenance so that the people of Iran could communicate with the outside world. I feel that this confirmed twitter’s postition as a form of social and legitimate mass communication media. A politician that can effectively figure out how to harness the power of twitter will revolutionize the world.

I feel the biggest problem currently, even with the political disscussion I looked at, is that there is too much garbage. There needs to be a system to allow people to rise and fall in the system (similarly to our blogs. good ones rise to the top).

Rated: from 3 votes

Upon reading the four articles (Lanier, Fake, Bruns, and Petersen), there are a few things that stick out to me as the crucial pros and cons. To highlight:

PROs for UGC: Because we can (Fake and Bruns)

CONS for UGC: Extorting the individual (Lanier and Petersen)

I don’t have to go into too much detail about why each individual feels this way, but I will highlight a few key points. First, Lanier mentions that by open software is killing intellectual property and creating a system where all of your hard work is worth “kudos”,  thus having no real monetary value. Petersen backs this up claiming that these messy relations that are created are muddling up web 2.0. On the flip side, Fake likes the idea that the amateur general public can create and publish content and Bruns coins the term “produsage” and hails the companies that enable us.

Bad LolCatz

I tend to agree with Bruns and Fake, but I do see where the others are coming from. My concern for the free and open market that has been opened to anyone is the degradation of a quality product. Hank Moody says it perfectly in Californication: “…the fact that people seem to be getting dumber and dumber…“. I won’t lie, I am blogging with the best of them and submitting my photos to Brickfish in an attempt to pretend that I am a legitimate amateur photographer. But what this does is blurs the line between good work, acceptable work, and down right bad work. Lol Catz are a great example. The first LolCatz were hilarious. Now, you look, and most of the pictures and captions are just

Good LolCatz

dumb, not funny, and dumb. (Yes, they’re that dumb). Same thing with Failblog, or the BadgerBadgerBadger song, and so on…and I haven’t even started to address Wikipedia or Garageband.com where people can post anything claiming that it is decent work. Fake mentioned posting pictures of her dog on flickr, to what avail? All of these links are terrible!

So while I agree that Petersen and Lanier may be onto something with their critique of amateurs, at the same time, that is where greatness is born. The indie music and movie scene have exploded and developed into their own legitimate industry. The shortcoming of Fake and Bruns argument is their failure to address the success of the amateur due to the ease of distribution. They both discuss how great it is that we are doing this, but fail to mention the success stories. So what? We have to trudge through hundreds of videos on YouTube, but that was the first place I saw Lady Gaga. Or watch slideshow upon slideshow on flickr. Or blog after blog. Through all the junk, we discover that diamond in the rough.  And that is why the amateur and open source has worked.

Rated: from 5 votes

iTunes has quickly become one of the most outrageous media outlets known to mankind. Purchased by apple in 2000, it was released in 2001 and has since been distributed worldwide for free. It isn’t that it is the best digital music player on the planet so much as it is the only program the iPod and iPhone will work with. Initially, iTunes started out as just a music player, but soon the advent of the iTunes store, with songs for 99 cents each made it a music distributor as well. Then they started selling podcasts. Then they started selling movies. And TV shows. And renting movies. And suddenly, iTunes has become one of the most important programs in our lives.

Upon first glance, Apple may not seem like they are a media company, but when you look farther into it, the truth is is that dealing with the media is a large part of what they do. Founded in 1976 as a personal computer company, they have expanded to become one of the most respected and admired brands in the world (according to Fortune). Apple owns products such as the Mac computer, the iPod, the iPhone, Apple TV, iTunes, Aperture, Final Cut, and Macbook to name a few. Additionally, they have partnerships with Intel and Microsoft to distribute products like Office and BootCamp. Sure they focused on the personal computer for a very long time, and that may be considered more of a medium for consuming media, but the advent of iTunes  saw Apple become a company that has a major influence on the media market.

The most interesting aspect of Apple’s media flurry though is the control that they have exerted on media distribution, unparalleled by anyone before. When music companies wanted to implement a variable pricing scheme on songs, Apple said no, it is 99 cents, so deal with it. To add insult to injury, Apple then decided to rid the world of DRM protection and the record labels had little choice but to agree. While the sales revenue on iTunes might be minuscule (Apple reportedly makes anything ranging from 90 cents down to 27 cents per song), they have sold over 5 billion songs. The money adds up. Similarly to Amazon’s recent attempt to control distribution of eBooks with their Kindle, Apple has developed a way to control the music, movie, and any other market that is sold on iTunes. Amazon needs to look to Apple as an example.

I can not do Apple and their iTunes a true justice in a short blog post (I haven’t even gotten the chance to start on the iPhone, or the iPad’s new challenge to the media market, and iTunes will play a crucial role in that). Through their partnerships with internet radio and labels and the like, iTunes has become an incredible piece of software, and the only Apple software I will put on my computer.

Rated: from 13 votes