ICIS – Katie's view

I recently created an avatar on secondlife.com, a virtual world where avatars can connect with each other. My avatar was named justfourfun (don’t hate, justforfun and just4fun were taken). I know that virtual worlds are a big deal to some people.  It seems strange to me.  From the little that I experienced, the people in this world seem to be talking about routine things like who was at the door and what their dogs were doing.  I understand that there are many people who are homebound for one reason or another, and these people need outside communication and entertainment (one can only watch so much Jerry Springer), but I felt that there are many more productive ways to use time online, and that these false realities remove people from reality and thrust them into fiction.

I did a little research, and I found a helpful article on time.com  that discusses how peoples interactions in virtual worlds actually affect their confidence in the real world.  This is something I can get behind.  While I have never been shy myself, my brother was painfully shy as a child.  If there were an outlet where he could work though this shyness he probably would have had more friends in high school (don’t tell him I said that).  To that extent, I believe that these virtual worlds are helpful, however, I am still not convinced that getting out of the house and being thrust into the world might not be more helpful.

There is a homeless man who walks around Campbell with a sign that says “Millions of dollars are wasted on names like Mary and Jesus.” At first I thought this man was an atheist, but the more I think about his sign, the more I think that I was wrong about my initial assumption.  What this man is really saying is that people spend so much money on things that should be free (namely, religion).  Religion, salvation, the love of Jesus are supposed to be free.

Today, I read “Five Social Media Trends that are Reshaping Religion” by Elizabeth Drescher, the author of Tweet If You ♥ Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation and professor at Santa Clara University.  In her article, she talks about how social media has changed religion, and how it can be a lot more accessible now.  While I agree that there are many ways that religion can be enhanced with new technologies and social media, I fear that religion will lose its humanity if it is turned too digital.  One of my favorite things about the church is the sense of family. While Jesus and salvation are free, the whole Christian experience can be a whole lot more rewarding when it is enjoyed, explored, and supported by other followers.  My fear would be if religion become too digital that people will stop congregating in the name of Jesus (kind of like how people have stopped mingling at bars and rely on websites to do their matchmaking). 

The California Legacy Project is a project put together by the publisher Heyday and Santa Clara University.  Together Heyday and Santa Clara work on this project to publish books and hosts a radio station about California.  I took the time to look at their page and listen to the podcast on John Muir (my favorite line in the whole site is “No wonder East Coast elites like Woody Allen think there’s no culture here. “).

John Muir was a great Californian.  I happen to be writing a paper for Econ and History about the Earthquake of 1906, and it was refreshing to hear a first hand story of what the great earthquake was like.  The site on Muir has wonderful readings of Muir’s own words read by the local scholars who work on the project.  I think it is wonderful that there is a site like this that celebrates how amazing California is, and keeps it’s unique history.  The history of California is different from that of the rest of the United States, and sites like this are going to keep that history so that it is not forgotten.

I don’t tweet, and it did actually take me forever to understand why people were using hash tags on Facebook.  Facebook is enough waste of my time, I do not need to add to that with other social medias.  I’m sure I’m missing out on some things by not tweeting, but we all make choices.  Despite my non-tweeting, I really liked the article “The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions”  that was posted in the International Journal of Communication.  The peer-reviewed academic journal posted this article that was an in-depth review of how tweets were used and who was using them.

The article was fascinating!  It discussed how tweets were used in the Egyptians revolution to convey messages and encourage riots and gatherings.  This is nothing new to me though; social media is the way to organize events these days.  I wouldn’t be able to remember my own mother’s birthday if it wasn’t for Facebook  (that might be an exaggeration).  What I did find interesting is how many tweets were actually done by professionals and how information was truly being spread through this social media.  I’ve been beat over the head to check my sources before believing what I hear (proof of that point is below).  It does seem a little strange to me that a lot of people rely on such sites for important information.  The article actually says that scholars “question whether Twitter is a social media service or a news medium”

The obvious answer is both.  As someone who gets the majority of her news from Facebook (I know, it’s horrible, but I don’t watch TV either, and I do enough reading for school, it’s the last thing I want to do when I’m done), I am well aware that social media is one of the main sources of information for the youth of today.  I wonder if everyone Google’s information they find on social media sites (like I do, when I care), or if they rely on this information they receive?  Remember the fake Martin Luther King quote? It is easy for something that is not true to make it’s way around the world before anyone realizes that it is not true.

Boring stuff I have to include to get the full credit for this blog in my class, but I feel deters from the flow of my blog, so I’m putting it at the end:

The article was a collaboration of six different researchers from varying backgrounds including Microsoft Researchers and three members of the Web Ecology Project. The head author Gilad Lotan was born in Israel and studied both computer science and design, and he has several articles about social media being used in political uprisings.  The International Journal of Communication is published out of the University of Southern California.

Today I listened to Jillian Michael’s Take to the Gym podcast from 11/25/11.  I love Jillian Michaels because she is very motivational and has excellent health and exercise advice.  She is also very down to earth and sassy.  This particular podcast was interesting because she was trying to describe how to position your body for weight lifting.  I’m not a gym person, so it was difficult for me to follow the positions she was describing.

Another interesting part of this podcast was that Jillian was giving out emotional advice to a caller who was saying she was overly hard on herself.  She sounded like a therapist.  I even looked up her qualifications online after listening to her podcast.  As I thought, she does not have any training in psychology/therapy.  The caller indicated several times that Jillian was spot on in her advice though.  It made me have that much more respect for Jillian.  She is not just about healing the body, she wants to heal the mind too.

In “Writing In the Wild” Bjork and Schwartz discuss how computers in the classroom can change how and what the students write due to their changed locations.  They also discuss how sometimes computers can be a hindrance in the classroom, because a typical computer creates a barrier between the student and the teacher.  While I agree that the computer does create that physical barrier, I think the real problem with computers in the classroom is that they are a distraction not only to the person who is on it, but those around them.

When I first started back at SCU, it surprised me how few students used computers in the classrooms.  The majority of students used paper and pens for their notes.  As I sat behind some of the few students who were using computers in the class, I could not help but notice that they often checked their Facebook accounts, their e-mail, or were working on an assignment in class instead of actually taking notes.  In this sense, something that should enhance the classroom, was in reality taking away from the experience.

Henry Jenkins wrote a fabulous blog post on YouTube back in May of 2007 (click here to read). Reading his post over 4 years after he wrote it, it is almost eerie how accurate he was on many of the things that he has said.  The point that resonated the most with me was #4, where he says that YouTube’s highest value is it’s “spreadability”.  He specifically talked about social networks.  While Facebook was not the phenomenon in 2007 that it is now, I found two cute YouTube videos that clearly show how intertwined Facebook and YouTube now are.

Ross Gardiner (a writer, who actually has some cute short stories on his website here) seems to think that Facebook is bad, but he understands that the popularity of his video is going to stream from viewers who watch his video from Facebook:

http://youtu.be/8UouP8cRYZ8

This young woman is amazing.  I actually like her video more, but it does not make sense unless you watch the previous video.

While I find it annoying to read pieces of paper in videos, they both have very good points, and their clips are cute.  These two videos are clear examples of how intermingled Facebook and YouTube are.  YouTube is not that only source that is linked into Facebook.  These days everything is.  Word of mouth is one of the most valuable sources of advertising there is.  Sites such as Textsfromlastnight and Fmylife have gotten big because of their popularity from Facebook.  While I have no doubt that Facebook would have done well on it’s own, making their videos linkable to other sites was genius, and has made YouTube indispensable.

I know that MySpace exists.  The question is really, is it still a widely used social media site?  In “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook” by Danah Boyd, Boyd references the differences in how teens perceive MySpace and Facebook, and the racial gaps that exist between the two social media sites. While the book was published in 2011, Boyd references the 2006-2007 school year.  A lot can change in 5 years.  It seems to me that everyone has moved to Facebook.  I think I can only name one person who I know who does not have a Facebook.  Even my 89-year-old grandfather has a Facebook.

I work in a first grade classroom (my daughter attends a parent participation school), and the argument that the old thing (MySpace) is inferior and the new thing (Facebook) is much better (even though in reality they are almost the same thing) is something I see all the time.  There is nothing new about this phenomenon.  It has been happening in the schoolyard for years.  Is it really a surprise that kids are trying to use technology to set themselves apart from each other?  To me, the better question is why kids are still segregating into racial groups, then what tools they are using to do that.

It has been a while since I went to high school, but I do not remember there being such a distinct grouping of races (with the exception of non-native English speakers).  Perhaps that is because I grew up in the bay area.  Overall, I did not find this article relevant or intriguing.  The anecdotal evidence from teenagers is not extremely convincing, and I would have much rather read a paper on why these groupings exist and not how they differentiate each other, but maybe that is just me.

After reading “the cult of the amateur” by Andrew Keen, I was ready to write my blog about my opinion of Keen that was very similar to what my classmates have said.  Calling your readers monkeys is not a good way to sell a book (because these days even my 89 year old Grandfather has a Facebook account), or convince a whole generation that the Internet is bad for them. I still feel that way, but last night I went to the theater to watch San Jose Broadway’s version of “The West Side Story”. While I was there, one of the points that Keen made became clear to me, and I am forced to agree.  The fine arts are being lost.  As I sat in the Center of Performing Arts, I looked around and the average age of the people in the theater was probably 60 years old. My generation does not choose to spend their money on the theater.  It made me wonder if this art is one that I will be able to share with my grandchildren or if the costs of running these types of shows will outweigh the profits being brought in, and a whole industry will be lost.  As an Economics major, I have to concede that markets change, and that is how we move forward in society, but it saddens me that my generation would rather spend their time in front of a computer or TV instead of reading a book or going to the theater.

Then today, I watched Keen interview Carmine Gallo, the author of “The Power of Foursquare”.  It seems to me that Keen is as guilty of selling out as his friends he went camping with.  There was nothing on his show about how bad the Internet is, or how it is ruining society.  He had Gallo on the show, and Gallo plugged his book and foursquare the whole time.  Keen’s show made me want to download foursquare to my phone, not to stay off of these social networks that Keen seems to loathe so much.  Watching the interview made me lose the little bit of respect I had for him.

In reading Lawrence Lessig’s “Remix”, a book about “The Future of Ideas” I was inundated with different ideas, as Lessig’s point of view has many valid points.  I was raised in a house where there was a bookshelf in every room.  Literally, every room (including the entry) has a bookshelf, often overflowing with books. We only had one computer and it was in the den.  Now, in the very same house, there are at least three computers, which out number the two people who live there, and the desktop is in the living room, because it is a part of everyday use (and who doesn’t want to surf the net and watch TV at the same time?).  It is too common now a day to see houses with more computers and TVs than people, and zero bookshelves.  Bookstores and movie rental stores are closing in droves, while Apple and Amazon are becoming huge conglomerates.  If people waited to get their information from print, they would be a day behind the news.  The Internet and media have given us access to instant new updates.  I jokingly said the other day that I didn’t need to watch the 49ners game; I could get the play-by-play updates on Facebook.  As the times change, so should the laws. With more and more information being on the Internet and social media keeping everyone connected, it is easy to see how some people will fight to keep information as free as possible, and others will fight to keep profits for the work they have produced.  But, us economist like to say, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Lessig is, obviously, a very knowledgeable person about copyright laws as he is both a lawyer and a professor.  He makes an extremely valid point, that our youth are using the Internet and technology to learn and create new projects, and we should encourage this as much as possible, and not penalize them for breaking copyright laws.  I, personally, do not want to live in a world where “Me and my grandma dancing to Rack City” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFmqMe0pQ5A&sns=fb ) is not allowed to exist.  Videos like this are probably in violation of copyright laws, but it is actually it’s own unique creation, and it is funny as hell.  While the title of this video would indicate that this young man does not have a grasp of the English language, he is extremely creative and that should be encouraged.  As an economist, I have to ask, is the artist being harmed in this video?  I doubt it. Tyga has the video on Youtube too (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knWnMKKEt88&feature=related), and I doubt that any person wishing to purchase this song would not do it because of this video.  If this boy were to be making money off of this video however, I would have to insist that part of that money would belong to Tyga.  I also agree with Lessig that in literature, it is acceptable to reproduce, or quote, a small portion of someone else’s writing, as long as you give them credit, and this should be acceptable with other forms of media as well.

Just to be clear: I am not deviating from my previous blog about copyright laws.  I stand firm that copyright laws should protect movies, songs, and software, and the people who worked hard on those pieces of art should get their just dues.  I simply believe that if those pieces of art are improved upon, or a small section of it is used, it should not be in violation of copyright laws.