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Black background. No music. Title shows on black screen: Homeland\remix\Man on Fire. As title begins to fade a female scream rings out. And a male voice yells NO. Black fades.

Scene opens with the sky just starting to get light. Desert. A young male and young female are sitting next to each other. The camera is on their backs. He is tall and skinny, with light brown hair. She has long dark hair and is quite small. They both look dirty. Like they haven’t showered in a while.

MALE

Hey Ange are you ready?

ANGE

Yeah.

They rise and gather a few belongings before starting to walk. The camera follows their backs.

ANGE

Gosh, Burning Man had been so much fun. But I couldn’t sleep at all after seeing her last night. After seeing her just take Masha and Zed like that. I am really ready to leave now. Get back to our lives.

-pause-

They were just stolen from the night. No one but us even knew they were still alive, and now we don’t even know that. Marcus, I am worried.

MARCUS

I am too. I think we need to be careful from now on. The Department of Homeland Security is supposed to be defunct. And she wasn’t even wearing her uniform. It looked almost like some sort underground action. Let’s just try and stay safe.

They walk for a moment, before coming close to an older car. There is no one around.

MARCUS

This doesn’t feel right.

ANGE

No. I think we need to go.

MARCUS

Let’s find somewhere to hide.

The two young adults run over to a hill where they sit again.

ANGE

Something feels off.

MARCUS

Okay we are a bit early. Let’s just stake it out right here and see if he comes to meet us. I am really getting kinda anxious to leave.

ANGE

Yeah…[She trails off]

The camera angle switches from looking at Ange and Marcus to looking out in the distance.

A figure in the distance comes into view and stands next to the car. It is a woman with a short hair cut and sun glasses. She doesn’t seem to see Ange and Marcus at first and then she focuses in on them  and gives a small smile.

MARCUS

Carrie…There she…OOF.

Screen goes black.

ANGE

[fearfully] Oh…

Scene opens up slowly. Like coming out of a fog. We see the ceiling of a bathroom. Then Marcus sits up; he in a bathtub. He gets up and tries the door handle. It is of course locked. He knocks a few times.

MARCUS

[starts] HEY…

A scream. The door opens as Marcus is about to raise his hand to pound on the door and yell.

CARRIE

Hello again Marcus. It’s just great to be reunited. And once again, you have something I want. Come. We started without you.

They walk down a hallway toward a door that is cracked open. They appear to be in an old house.

I had hoped I wouldn’t have to wake you. You know after our last encounter, I had hoped I wouldn’t have to see you again.

They walk into a room. Female wimpering can be heard, but the source of which cannot be seen.

MARCUS

[Demanding] Where is she?

CARRIE

Don’t worry about Ange. She was quite unhelpful so we are putting her away soon.

MARCUS

You can’t do this, the DHS is under completely new leadership and you and all of your friends were fired! I honestly can’t believe you’re not locked up.

CARRIE

[laughs] Sit down. [Marcus does not sit] God you’re so naïve Marcus. Do you really think that the DHS is “all cleaned up” as the newspapers have been saying? You people still don’t know what is good for you. Just cattle. No Marcus. The DHS is still alive and well, in all its former glory. Maybe we don’t have the uniforms or the guns, but we still have the directorship, the resources, and the power. And we still watch you Marcus. You and your girl friend have had quite a magical little life, haven’t you? We know the kind of troublesome groups you run with online. And we know that someone got to you a couple days ago. We know what you have. And that’s why you are here. Now sit down or we will bring your girl friend back out here. [Marcus sits]

[Carrie pulls out a USB Stick]. I need you to seed this file Marcus. I know you know the encryption.

MARCUS

No way.

 Carrie hits Marcus immediately.

 CARRIE

See the great part about not wearing the DHS uniforms is that the rules for interrogation tactics are a bit, shall we say, fuzzy? I don’t want to ask again Marcus.

 MARCUS

It will never happen. I am not as weak as I was before.

 CARRIE

[Raises her hand to hit him again and pauses] What is that? [Sniffs]

MARCUS sniffs

Fire.

 CARRIE and MARCUS start coughing and MARCUS uses opportunity to get up and run. As he runs out of the house he sees an unconscious body on the ground. CARRIE is yelling after him. MARCUS runs outside where ANGE is waiting. The house is on fire.

ANGE

No time, start running.

The two run. Scene changes to a dark alley. ANGE and MARCUS are sitting against a wall.

MARCUS

What the hell did you do back there??

 ANGE

Don’t worry about it. Marcus, we have to get into hiding.

We need a plan.

 Scene blackens. “To be continued” comes on screen. Credits roll.

Homeland’s Cover

For my previous discussion on Cory Doctorow and Little Brother see my last blog post. The second part of Doctorow’s young adult novel, Little Brother, involves Marcus (now known as M1k3y), and his new love interest Ange as they plot to take down the DHS. The most interesting turn of events is that after Marcus  fearfully tells his parents his story, they fully support him, and they decide to go to investigative reporter, Barbara Stratford, to release the story. Though this puts Marcus and Ange in serious danger (they are captured and tortured by the DHS) the story has a good ending. The DHS is raided by the Highway State Patrol and everyone (including Daryll) is rescued.

Doctorow is releasing Little Brother’s sequel, Homeland, in early 2013 and has released a three chapter excerpt of the novel. The excerpt takes place in Black Rock City, Nevada, the temporary city that grows and thrives during Burning Man. In three short chapters, we are reintroduced to Masha and Zeb, who have briefly come out of hiding to give Marcus and Ange a motherlode of incriminating evidence against the United States government. Soon after Severe Haircut Lady (AKA Carrie Johnstone) returns to kidnap Masha and Zed.

The setting for the book’s set up is a well-chosen symbol. Burning Man represents a “gift economy”, one in which every resident must have something to contribute to the Black Rock City community. People supply sunscreen, offer body paint, do free Tarot readings, or host an epic party, or host Dungeons and Dragons. The list goes on, but the main idea is that if you do not contribute, you are not respected in the community. You are called a spectator and are not welcome to be a part of the community or partake in the gifts. This kind of economy parallels the online hacker community. The idea behind hacker communities is that you are only allowed to reap the benefits of others’ hacks if you yourself have hacked and can offer something. This can be seen in online communities such as Pirates Bay. (I will not link here for the sake of legality). Here one can download free files, but the give and take is that you must upload something before you can download. Doctorow may have chosen the opening location of Homeland to mirror this online community.

Cory Doctorow hard at work. Plenty of inspiration

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer and author most famously of “Little Brother”, most recently of “Rapture of the Nerds”, and soon to be of “Little Brother”‘s sequel “Homeland”. He also developed an open source peer-to-peer software company called OpenCola. He has also contributed works to The Guardian, the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Wired and more. He was once the Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties.

“Little Brother” cover.

Doctorow published “Little Brother” in 2008. It’s a novel set in a dystopian San Francisco in which resident’s lives are monitored by the government through cameras and bugs. The story focuses on the lives of several  high school students who are initially targeted by Homeland Security. The students decide to revolt by beating the DHS at their own game.

The first ten chapters of the novel involve the initial planning stages and implementation of Marcus (AKA M1k3y) and his friends’ plans. The students are very in touch with the technology of their time. They are actually a fairly rare breed compared to their contemporaries. I think this parallels the world we really live in. Although virtually everyone is completely plugged into the technological world, very few people really understand what it means to be constantly “wired in”. I could myself in the herd of blind technology users. Though I use a cell phone and Facebook regularly, I have don’t really know what that means for my privacy in the long run. “Little Brother” raises some interesting question on the consequences of our society becoming increasingly reliant on technology. It is possible that years down the road, the government will be able to track our every move via our personal technology, just like in Marcus’s world.

According to Gilad Lotan‘s personal website, he has a background in big data, analysis, and visualization. He leads the data science team at Social Flow. Erhardt Graeff‘s research interests are in the intersections of politics, technology, and education. He is s a founding member of the Web Ecology Project. Mike Ananny‘s interests are “the public significance of systems for networked journalism.  Specifically, he studies how institutional, social, technological, and normative forces both shape and reflect the design of the online press and a public right to hear”. He participated in Microsoft Research in Cambridge. Devin Gaffeney is interested in social network topography, online activism, information and communications technologies, international relations, political economy, telemetry and is a consultant for Social Flow and the Managing Director for the Web Ecology Project. Ian Pearce is not a professional footballer as the Wikipedia page says. He is somehow involved in the Web Ecology Project, but Google really doesn’t want me to visit the site. danah boyd has been previously discussed in class. She focuses on “social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society”. She is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research.

Social Flow analyzes data flow on Twitter and Facebook so as to better find out how to use both spheres to their total advantage. The Web Ecology Project also analyzes online social interaction. Microsoft Research is a software research organization.

Tweet tweet.

“The Revolutions Were Tweeted” was a culmination of combined research from the above-mentioned actors and their respective organizations. Overall, they claim that news has developed with technology, but the main dynamics and models remained the same. News organizations still develop stories in a leader-follower relationship, it just happens daily. Also professional news organizations lead stories ahead of bloggers. Even though user comments create the possibility for a participatory culture, journalists are rightfully skeptical about what kind of influence user involvement should have on their work.

Twitter has added a new face to the news dynamic. It allows everyone to connect to and be a part of the news. Twitter users can relate blooming new stories to their followers and a chain reaction starts in which the billions of Twitter users can all be privy to the same information.

Between the professional news world and the Twitter sphere, a well-placed actor can control how and what information flows. The authors defined information flow as “an ordered set of near-duplicate tweets”. In essence they tracked information flows during the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings and divided the actors involved into twelve categories, or actor types. Finally, they analyzed how each actor type played a role in the information flows.

The authors concluded that findings on Twitter simply reflect relationships that already existed. The volatility of the uprisings may have played a factor in highlighting all of these relationships as well because it is possible that people are more inclined to participate in the Twitter culture when the political world is active.

The two main actor types were bloggers and activists. Generally, those involved will either have personal interest in the unfolding story or business interest, as in mainstream media organizations, or just a basic interest in the story.

Writer, Andy Greenberg

Andy Greenberg is a regular writer for Forbes with a focus on privacy, technology, and information security. His most recent work is This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hactivists Aim to Free the World’s Information, a book that depicts the development of information leaks.  Greenberg explains that from its beginnings, technology has both created a more open culture, but also allowed for more secrets. His world of cypherpunks and hacktivists is one in which these cyber-hippies attempt to uncover institutionalized secrecy.

An excerpt of This Machine Kills Secrets, hosted on Wired Magazine’s website, portrays a vignette of the elite hacktivist society. At the “Camp”, or Chaos Communication Camp, hackers gather in East Germany to band together for a hacktivism conference of sorts. During this particular Camp gathering Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a key player in the original WikiLeaks project, attempts to lead a team to release the WikiLeaks spin-off, Open Links. Domscheit-Berg’s brain child would take WikiLinks to another plane. Rather than simply releasing leaked information to the public, the site would be access-only to major players in the activism game. The information would be encrypted and released only to parties deemed need-to-know.

The site is ultimately unsuccessful simply because the hackers could not get it up and running. Also, the idea received a fair amount of criticism from the Camp’s attendees and from WikiLeaks’ face Julian Assange. The camp is full of internet’s celebrities, which are often faceless and nameless. The secretiveness of the underground internet society makes it seem almost elite. Not only does the internet community appear elite, but also deeply political in its own way. The rivalry between Assange and Domscheit-Berg appears almost childish, with each respective pot calling the kettle black. The egos of each brilliant man seem to have gotten in the way of what was once a common goal: worldwide democratic revolution via technology. Instead, creative differences have created a divide within the hacktivism community. While the cyber-hippie culture may have good intentions, the divisiveness may be something they have to work on.

Jakob Nielsen has created a lovely, easy to read biography section for himself that begins with an exhaustive list of praise for his work. Each of which is linked to an outside source (which is very important and shows the credibility of Nielsen’s praise). By the time the reader glances at how long the list of praise is, it is clear that Nielsen is incredibly credible. I myself cannot help but be endeared to this angelic, Danish face:

Look at that smile.

Nielsen’s biography goes on to explain that much of his career has been dedicated to internet usability. He has been working in the field for a long time, and you can tell by the dates of his articles. Sarcasm aside, his work has spanned decades (1989 to the present) and a true understanding of how users treat the internet is apparent. Possibly the most heartwarming moment in a glance through Nielsen’s biography is the humbling “Parodies” section in which he actually links to articles and websites that have made fun of him.

So with all this in mind, I take Nielsen’s articles “How Users Read On the Web” and “F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content” absolutely seriously. In How Users read on the Web, Nielsen employed actual experimentation to investigate exactly what writing styles and tricks, ensured that users read through a page and took it seriously. He suggests that website creators make text meaningful by highlighting key words, creating sub headings, using bullets, and keeping paragraphs concise and to the point. Generally he suggests, keeping things to the point, because users do not have a very lengthy attention span while on the web.

This brings up, Nielsen’s article on F Shaped reading patterns. Through his experimentation, Nielsen has found that users read a web page in a roughly F-Shaped pattern. This shows that readers only briefly scan a page. This means that content should be front loaded onto a page as to grab the readers’ attention.

All in all, Nielsen’s information seems very much accurate. As a web user, it seems very clear that web reading is often terse and not always an accurate read. The Seattle Art Museum has a lovely informational page on their various programs. This website follows many of Nielsen’s rules. It keeps all of the sections separate with meaning full subheadings. All of the information is to the point. This biography on my favorite politician, Patty Murray, is unfortunately an example of a not very readable site. The text is very long without much breaking it up and very few web users are going to take the time to finish it.

As a side note, Patty Murray is amazing and you should take a look at what she has done.

FuturePress consists of Pedro Noel and Santiago Carrion Arcos, who met in Spain after both studying philosophy. The two were a part of the Wikileaks phenomenon by writing cable analysis which they posted under the name Wikileaks Worlds. They eventually became regular contributors to the Wikileaks  Central project. They established a number of projects on their own, finally creating FuturePress.

[What] we describe as “collective of writers, artists and activists” fighting for the people’s right “to know what their leaders are doing, for their right to communicate freely on the Internet, and for their right to participate democratically in our global community”.

Noel and Arcos believe that the media should in fact be biased, but biased toward virtue, toward “equality, truth and justice”. FuturePress’s article “A new culture of resistance: from WikiLeaks to the squares” discusses how technology is a vital part of the revitalization of grassroots resistance. There are direct connections between Wikileaks and uprisings in Tunisia and other parts of the Middle East and in parts of Europe, like Spain. The city square has reactivated as a center for cultural revolution. In the square, direct democracy takes place.
Directly correlated to the square, claim the authors, is the socialization of the internet. Groups of hackers, like Anonymous, have become a vital aspect of the internet culture. In a way they are able to effect change, their own special kind of direct democracy. Anonymous was able to shut down websites that had boycotted Wikileaks, costing millions in damages. Also, websites like Facebook and Twitter have revolutionized how revolutionaries communicate. Both social websites helped create the pathway for the Occupy movement.

Authors, Noel and Arcos have been the victims of cyber attacks and have even been threatened in person. I think that this is a sign that the work they are doing is necessary. Investigative journalism used to be a respected and honorable endeavor. Seeking out corruption and revealing it to the public was responded to with gratitude. It seems now that news corporations are less willing to directly reveal political corruption. The actions of FuturePress are simply a revival of a vital aspect of democracy.

Henry Jenkins is currently a professor at USC and has previously worked at MIT. He has mostly focused his body fo work on the gaming industry, but has researched and written extensively on all forms of participatory internet culture. He has depicted four types of participatory culture in his works: Affiliations,
Expressions, Collaborative Problem-solving, and Circulations. These types of participatory culture are the nexus of much of Jenkins’ writing.

In his blog “Confessions of an Aca-Fan” Jenkins uses real life examples to explain some of the concepts he writes about. In fact, the very first post is about the “hit film” Snakes on a Plane. He notes that the movie made such a buzz before its release primarily because fan-made media hyped it up to such a great extent. This is Jenkins’ way of describing how fans andmedia interact to create a sort of participatory culture in which a movie that is widely understood to be a “bad movie” can make such a huge media splash.

In 2007, Jenkins posted “Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube” in which he adapts a ten-minute speech he made regarding social networking and the Web 2.0. The proposition that struck me was #6.

6. YouTube may embody a particular opportunity for translating participatory culture into civic engagement. The ways that Apple’s “1984″ advertisement was appropriated and deployed by supporters of Obama and Clinton as part of the political debate suggests how central YouTube may become in the next presidential campaign. In many ways, YouTube may best embody the vision of a more popular political culture that Stephen Duncombe discusses in his new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy

…[see quote at original post]

Yet as we do so, we should also recognize that participatory culture is not always progressive. However low they may set the bar, the existing political parties do set limits on what they will say in the heat of the political debate and we should anticipate waves of racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry as a general public, operating outside of those rules and norms, deploy participatory media to respond to a race which includes women, African-American, Hispanics, Mormans, Italian-Americans, Catholics, and the like as leading figures in a struggle for control over the White House.

Jenkins assumption about YouTube playing an important role in political culture has become all too real in the most recent elections. Not only has the presidential campaign gotten out of hand, but the “other forms of bigotry” that Jenkins described have trickled into the political arena in many facets.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK5pDrDXZlM[/youtube]

This ad gained a lot of media attention, including an interesting article from NPR. This was released by John Dennis in his bid to defeat Nancy Pelosi in the race for California’s 12th District Congressional Seat. John Dennis’s home page reads “John Dennis – Not a normal Republican” and this is something he has once again proved to be true. Not only is he an “anti-war libertarian who supports Texas Rep. Ron Paul, gay marriage and medical marijuana”, but he is also willing to semi-humiliate himself with such a ridiculous campaign strategy. John Dennis is a perfect example of Jenkins’s prediction that YouTube would play a vital role in politics.

Andrew Keen is a self-proclaimed internet entrepreneur, who currently works in and around the Silicon Valley’s tech industry. He writes the social history (and present) of the internet in his book , Digital Vertigo. Like the title insinuates, the findings are dizzying. Keen uses a real life experience wherein he was visiting the gravesite of Jeremy Bentham. In essence Keen compares the modern man’s obsession with social media to Bentham’s wish for a publicly displayed burial site.

An equally dark image Keen presents  is of the internet’s progress as a comparison to French philosopher Michel Foucoult’s Panopticon. In Keen’s words, the circular prison system described by Foulcoult offers hypervisibility to those who wish to peer into the lives of those held captive. Keen also mentions Bentham’s Inspection-House. He sees the internet as a catch all for individual narcissism. Where someone can share very aspect of their lives in the social sphere; our lives have become hypervisible. He warns that not enough safety’s have been put in place to protect an individual’s right to privacy.

Failing to properly as- semble the social media airplane after jumping off that cliff and crashing to the ground means jeopardizing those precious rights to individual privacy, secrecy and, yes, the liberty that individuals have won over the last millennium. That is the fear, the warning of failure and collective self-destruction in Digital Vertigo.

Keen cites conversations he had with social media moguls in which these titans of technology claim that humans are essentially social animals. They even go as far as to claim that the world will become entirely socialized within the net five years.

“And no matter where you go,” he told Robert Scoble, Silicon Valley’s uber-evangelist of social media, “we want to ensure that every experience you have will be social.”

As I read Keen’s account of the over-socialization of the human experience, I find myself agreeing with one of Keen’s descriptors in particular – schizophrenic – “simultaneously detached from the world and yet jarringly ubiquitous”. Our online experience is so removed from reality, but it is at the same time becoming our new reality. I personally believe that what Foucoult said is true – “Visibility is a trap”. As our lives become more and more accessible to the public, we lose a sense of individuality that comes with a detachement from social media.

As a final note, this class we are taking is in itself a socialized version of something that used to be wholly individualistic. One’s academic pursuits and performance used to be private, but now we have created an atmosphere in which one’s performance is visible to the entire class. The benefit of which is up to us to decide.

By mid-2011, the Pew Research Center found that 65 percent of American adults were using social-networking sites—up from just 5 percent in 2005.65 In June 2010, Americans spent almost 23 percent of their online time in social media networking—up a staggering 43 percent from June 2009,66 with use among older adults (50–64 year olds) almost doubling in this period and the 65+ demographic being the fastest growing age group on Facebook in 2010 with a 124 percent increase in sign-ups over 2009. And by the summer of 2011, the Pew Research Center found that this number has risen dramatically again, with 32 percent of fifty- to sixty-four-year-olds in America accessing networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook on a daily basis.

As I read through copyright guru, Lawrence Lessig’s, complimentary digital copy of his book Remix, I can call to mind many instances in my own life where the perils of copyright law have come into play. An amateur filmmaker friend once had a video bumped off of Youtube because he sampled a Coldplay song in one of the scenes, even though Coldplay totally fit the mood of sappy moment in his short script. Unless my friend serendipitously makes a college student’s equivalent of a fortune to pay Coldplay’s unreal royalty fees, his film will never see the light of day. My musician friends often record albums with the knowledge that they are spending their own money without hope of seeing it come back. They will simply upload their songs onto Soundcloud with a free download.

My friends are a part of Lessig’s RW (Read/Write) Culture. They listen, absorb, recreate, and share new and old media. The average creative young adult does to some extent. They understand the potential danger of a Read Only Culture, where the only individuals with the ability to make it in the world o new media were those with the cash to buy in. These two cultures are the focus of Lessig’s exposition for Remix. The Read Only culture is defined by a dedication to consumerism. Copyright laws don’t just protect the rights of artists, they protect their wallets. On the other hand, a Read/Write Culture involves a healthy amount of consumerism, while promoting creation and recreation of new media.

The works of amateurs and students, as Lessig insinuates, is relegated somewhat to the underground of the art world. Artists like Girl Talk are still wildly popular on college campuses and mixed media art is some of the most underrated works today. These low budget works are no less deserving of credit than Coldplay’s last album. The creativity and passion that goes into creating mixed media is as valuable as any blockbuster movie. These young artists have effectively created a hybrid between the two cultures, RW and RO.

As a student of economics, Lessig’s message of maintaining a competitive economic market alongside the creative one especially important.

“Policy makers must assure that rights are not allocated in a way that distorts or weakens competition. A costly overlay of spectrum rights, for example, or an inefficient market of copyrights, can stifle competition and drive markets to unnecessary concentration. These factors must be regulated by policy makers. They will not be “solved” by an invisible hand.”

What I did not find as convincing was Lessig’s argument for the value of the remix. From the opinion of a 20 year old who is not particularly invested in internet culture, but is perhaps tech savvy, the “remix” has its place. Lessig perhaps values the remix a bit too much. He describes a couple examples that take scenes from movies and news and splices them together to create a powerful message about war and media. I have seen short videos like these and would agree that they can be valuable and moving but I have also seen remixes that fall short of any societal value. I value creativity, but to say that splicing together clips of cartoons involved much creative thought may be stretching it.