Category Archives: Uncategorized

The New York Times article The Program describes a real-life version of Cory Doctorow‘s Little Brother, where the U.S. government begins to spy on its own citizens post-9/11. This article is written by filmmaker Laura Poitras, who focuses on films that describe the 9/11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath.

William Binney

The article describes the experiences of William Binney, a “NSA whistle-blower”. After working for the NSA for 32 years, he quit his job in 2001 after 9/11 when they began to use “the program” Binney had designed to spy on individuals in foreign countries, for use on American citizens. He “went public” with his inside information from the NSA, just like Marcus did with the Department of Homeland Security in Little Brother.

Prior to reading Little Brother I had very little knowledge of government surveillance on U.S. citizens. Sure, airport security is a necessary evil, but I had no idea that the government held in gaining access to personal information via video cameras, audio bugs, and wiretaps. Even after finishing Little Brother and beginning Homeland, I was skeptical of the reality of the situation. After reading the article and watching the video, I became aware of the extent of the issue, that this is real, and that the line between public and private actions are blurrier that once thought.

The video that accompanies this article shows how Binney is informing the public about the activities of the NSA, and what their next moves are.

Jakob Nielsen, author of the blog Alertbox.

Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group, after being an engineer at Sun Microsystems. He holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction, something I have never heard of before. He writes a blogon web usability, which is what I will be highlighting today.

While reading the post How Users Read on the Web, I was astounded at the fact that 79% of users don’t read webpages- they just scan. My first thought was: I’m currently on a webpage, AND I’M READING EVERYTHING! So, I looked back and thought about whether this is true for all webpages, and I figured it was most likely not. For some reason, I chose to actually read this webpage, instead of scan. Why? Maybe because it was for a graded assignment, maybe it was the fact that it was a short read.

The post E-Mail Newsletters: Increasing Usabilty very much intrigued me, because as part of my job this summer, I had to “revamp” the Ruff Rider Newsletters, as they had previously only been in plain text e-mail format. (Here is an example of the new e-mail newsletter I helped create!)

E-mail newsletters have become an important part of increasing website views, as they draw in more people, and have the ability to reach a large number of individuals with the click of a button. This post highlights the importance of having a recognizable sender and a clear, concise, yet
intriguing subject line. Social networking has also come to compete with informing individuals, but newsletters remain on top- as they provide more information. Mobile availability is also important with the increasing use of smart phones for email and other content. Having the e-mail be viewable on mobile devices, and the webpage compatible for mobile use is extremely important in this day and age.

A good example of a good newsletter is the one I mentioned above (not to brag…). This newsletter meets all the above standards, but its design features are most notable for drawing the reader’s attention. The use of color, images, and different heading and sub-headings help the reader follow the page, and selectively choose what to read.

A poor example of a newsletter is the old Ruff Rider e-mail newsletter.

This plain-text format is not aesthetically pleasing like the previously mentioned newsletter. Simply looking at it is not interesting, and is probably not read by any. Actually, it may not be opened at all, as the sender of the e-mail is from a personal account, not the group that it is supposed to be from, unlike the new and improved e-mail format.

Although newsletters may be overlooked in today’s society as e-mails are increasing and inboxes are more cluttered than ever, these are still an important tool for notifying interested individuals on changes, offers, etc. that a company deems important for public knowledge. Therefore, it is important to understand how to utilize newsletters and to efficiently share information to increase viewership.

Jane McGonigal is a game designer, and is very active in and passionate about the benefits of “gaming”. That being said, I have hard time reading what she says in the excerpt Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World about gaming being so beneficial for individuals as an escape from reality and a true form of expression.

I have little to no interest in the gaming culture at all, and therefore it is hard for me to believe that individuals are choosing virtual reality over their real life. I have brothers that love playing video games. but they do so as a break from reality, not an exodus.  I believe there is a small sub culture of “hardcore” gamers who devote almost their entire lives to said video games. I think that for all others games can be a fun time-killer, but social interaction with others, face-to-face, is necessary and more important.

I find it interesting that McGonigal believes that entire lives being led on the internet is a good thing. If culture continues to evolve in this way, how sad would it be when our offspring don’t know how to interact socially with each other when physically together?

Danah Boyd, a social media researcher, presents an interesting and possibly controversial subject in the excerpt White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with Myspace and Facebook. This excerpt explores the ethnic, racial, and class-based implications on social media network choice.

This text is personally relevant to me, as I was initiated into social networking via Myspace, and made the switch over to Facebook. When I was in middle school, the majority of my peers had Myspace account. Despite my parents requests, I made an account and became active on the sight. In October of 2005, I made the switch to Facebook as I was invited via email by one of my peers. I was told it was exclusive, that only college students were on the site until now. This exclusivity intrigued me, and I longed for an invitation. Boyd says that Facebook didn’t open up to high school students until September of 2005, thus making my classmates and I very early users. I come from a wealthy and educated town, and this is also implied in Boyd’s text about the majority of Facebook users.

Birds of a feather flock together.

Although my classmates had all been on Myspace as well, once Facebook became available, it became passé to be a Myspace user. This goes along with Boyd’s idea that teens choose to go where their friends go. Why would someone be apart of a social media network where they can’t interact with their friends? The teenage years were already a struggle before the dawn of social media. Now there are so many more ways an individual can feel rejected and lonely.

Though I do believe there are obvious racial and ethnic differences when it comes to network preference, I think a more important predictor is education and class. I consider my network of friends to be diverse when it comes to race and ethnicity, but we are all of similar social class and education level, and are all coincidentally Facebook users.

I think this is an important topic to discuss, as there are definite societal barriers put in place on individuals when they are logging in to social network sites, but we should think about the future of social networking as a whole- Will facebook still dominate in ten years? What about the millions of users on Twitter? We cannot account for new sites emerging and how tastes may change in the future.

Social media is, thus, like home; it is the architecture in which we now live.

Andrew Keen is a business man in the tech industry of Silicon Valley. He is also very opinionated on the current Internet Culture, as his work is based in this. This excerpt from Digital Vertigo shows how culture has been changed from increased forms of social media, as well as internet usage in general. He presents a very basic look at the digital age, and demonstrates how his involvement in this industry has linked him to many influential individuals.

Keen argues that in the past, there has been a distinct “Real World” and “Social Media World” but now the latter is becoming the former. As people spend more and more time online, that becomes their world; their Avatars are their real selves. Everything we need is online. You can shop for virtually anything, be entertained with movies, tv, and other sites, and even cure loneliness, as is the aim of social media. This is becoming the world we live in, as we are constantly connected to it.

This constant connectedness is aided by the sharing of ones “Location” by many devices. With our cell phones, tablets, iProducts, and the like, constantly showing out location, we can never truly escape from social media and the digital world.

But  no, rather than uniting us between the digital pillars of an Aristotelian polis, today’s social media is actually splintering our identities so that we always exist outside ourselves, unable to concentrate on the here-and-now, too wedded in our own image, perpetually revealing our current location, our privacy sacrificed to the utilitarian tyranny of a collective network.

This concept of sharing one’s current location can also be seen in an interview with Andrew Keen and Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless.

Ted Morgan- Why Skyhook Has Become A Harvard Business School Case Study

Skyhook was the first company to develop the technology of “Current Location” through WiFi. They have revolutionized the advertising industry because of this, collecting data from users on their location and behavior on their device embedded with this technology. As more companies have developed their own version of this technology, Skyhook has been the most successful, and is on millions of devices.

So if we are to blame and individual or organization for knowing our locations, behaviors, or the apps we frequent, it’s Ted Morgan and Skyhook. Having grown up in a time where the world was not yet connected to the internet, and therefore not connected with each other, I can say that we have come a long way. Keen dramatically implies how our lives are becoming progressively more “web-intensive”, that we thrive to share our ideas, videos, pictures, etc. in a way that is almost narcissistic. Although I wish that this weren’t true of myself, I do indulge in many a social media site, and share my thoughts, ideas, and cute cat videos that I come across. But in the grand scheme of things, is this my “real” life? I don’t think so. There are times when I feel suffocated by technology and my constant connectedness to people. An introvert in nature, I don’t always feel the need to post on a friend’s wall just for the heck of it, or retweet something funny said by a celeb that I follow, because I don’t think its necessary. And although there are great things that can be found on the internet, somethings are best enjoyed out in the mountains at my Colorado home, where I have zero cell servies and questionable WiFi coverage (although I may instagram my pictures when I return to the land of internet usage).

Remix by Lawrence Lessig

This book describes the changes in copyright law as technology and access to coprighted materials has grown over time. The book is introduced with personal accounts of the struggles of individuals with copyright infringement issues, whether it be for their own artistic creation, or the sharing of information on the internet and other similar devices. Lessig helps us to sympathize with individuals that have been mistreated by these laws, as well as shows us how our own lives are affected by such issues. The time, hassle, and not to mention, financial strain placed on these individuals, as well as the organizations that must carry these actions out, is ludacris.

Picture the meeting: four, maybe more, participants. Most of them lawyers, billing hundreds of dollars an hour. All of them wearing thousand-dollar suits, sitting around looking serious, drinking coffee brewed by an assistant, reading a memo drafted by a first-year associate about the various rights that had been violated by the pirate, Stephanie Lenz. After thirty minutes, maybe an hour, the executives come to their solemn decision. A meeting that cost Universal $10,000? $50,000? (when you count the value of the lawyers’ time and the time to prepare the legal materials); a meeting resolved to invoke the laws of Congress against a mother merely giddy with love for her thirteen-month-old.

The author demonstrates that there are more important issues than this, and that time and money could and should be allocated toward more important and severe infractions.

The progression of technology is never ending, and has come far in the past one hundred years. Therefore, laws have had to change as well to accommodate new forms of technology as well as the various new ways to access it. Culture has been drastically changed by this advancement, and advancement in technology has only promoted more competition to create “the next big thing”.

Digital technologies will thus shift the expectations surrounding access. Those changes will change other markets as well. Think of the iPod– perfectly integrating all forms of RO culture into a single device. That integration will increasingly lead us to see the device not as music player, or video player, but as a universal access point, facilitating simple access to whatever we want whenever we want. Many devices will compete to become this device. And that competition is certain to produce an extraordinarily efficient tool to facilitate, and meter, and police our access to a wide range of culture.

One topic of this reading of which I had no prior knowledge was RO and RW (Read Only and Read/Write) cultures. RO is defined as the “professional” side of culture, demanding respect. This type of culture is unchangeable, and must be accepted as is. On the other hand RW is the consumer friendly side of culture. It involves consumers and looks for their input, allowing individuals to contribute to culture and to learn from it. I find this interesting because I had never thought about culture in such a way. The static and dynamic, the unchangeable and ever-changing.

This excerpt helped me to learn more about culture, how it’s influenced by technology, and the ways in which it affects people on an individual basis. The ever changing creative forces are hindered by copyright laws, but this only stimulates more creative thinking in attempt to create something enjoyable, but legal.

This text presents an in depth look at the cybercultural world and its many characteristics. With the progression of technological advancement and the increasing integration of the physical (i.e. real) world and the technological world, there have been many cybercultures that have been created. It is this integration of technology and real life the fosters creative thinking and technological advancement.

This text is the beginning of a book, and it introduces Cyberspace in an educational way. It defines the need-to-know terms and allows individuals who may not know a lot about the digital world to become informed. What I find particularly interesting is that the real world and digital world both rely on each other, and shape each other’s progress and advancement.

This excerpt does a good job of identifying the key aspects of cyberspace and showing how our lives are increasingly influenced by technological advancement. The concepts of identity, race, governance, access,etc. are being drastically changed and the digital world allows such concepts to be as present (or not) as each person pleases.

For the first assignment, I chose a blog that I have been reading for a very long time. This is a women’s fashion blog about different styles, trends, and articles of clothing that tend to repel the opposite sex. While most fashion blogs glamorize the fashion world, this blog does exactly the opposite. The blogger’s crass language and lack of fear in dressing herself are unique. She isn’t afraid to evaluate trends that most women would find unflattering. She tells it like it is, evaluates and analyzes designer’s collections, and critiques them where she sees fit. This unique approach to fashion blogging is an admirable, and successful, attempt at making her viewpoint known to the world.