Internet Culture in the Information Society

Writing in the Wild  is a short essay written by Olin Bjork, an English professor at Santa Clara University, and John Pedro Schwartz, an English professor at the American University of Beirut.

In Writing in the Wild, Bjork and Schwartz discuss mobile composition.  They talk a lot about writing from the location whether you’re on site or in the library.  It seems as if they are pushing that when you are on site, it is a advantage to you because you have all the sources you need right in front of you.  I disagree with this.  I feel that when you have so many things around you going on, it is more of a distraction than a helpful tool.

It seems as if Bjork and Schwartz also don’t really like the idea of writing in the dorms or in the library.  I, on the other hand, would prefer these.  I like being in a quiet, comfortable location.  This also means that there is not too many unknowns going around me when I’m doing my work, which ultimately means less distractions.  Writing locations is totally based on preference and how the person is able to work.  No one can make a unified decision on the best place to study and write.

Read the whole chapter here

Did you know that your smartphone is taking in your information at least 100 times a day?  According to Sileo, a group that is dedicated to the education and prevention of identity theft and data breaching, companies like Apple and Google are constantly aware of your whereabouts and are storing them into a giant database.  I find this to be a little disturbing since these are companies that are designing the software and hardware not phone carriers.

One thing that many may not be aware of is that these companies are actually allowed to do this because each user hits “Agree” to the terms and conditions without actually reading all of it.  This is scary because a lot of the products and software that I use have these terms and agreements and the chances of me reading through all of them are very slim.

The Sileo Group is advising the community to put pressure on these companies to stop collecting our data and to discontinue the location-based tracking.  Although it may be helping these companies with marketing and trends, it is putting the future of tech privacy at stake.

Read the article here.

UPDATE: After looking online about this data collecting in relation to the iPhone, you are able to turn this function off.  If you go into Settings->About->Diagnostics and Usage, you can choose don’t send which will not automatically transfer your data to Apple.  As for the geotracking, you can manage your location services and which applications are using it.

Henry Jenkins is a media scholar, a professor, and an author of several books.  In his archive “Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube,” he brings up different points on how YouTube is an influence to and influenced by culture and other media.  One point that I particularly agree with is number 4.  It states that YouTube values other social networking sites because it embodies YouTube and keeps it popular.  He states that it is not that common anymore for someone to just sit and surf one website.  And so, YouTube is incorporated into many other social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace in a way that they do not have to navigate away from their initial page to watch a YouTube video.

I feel that this approach is very effective.  Teenagers and young adults get bored when looking at only one website for a long period of time.  By incorporating videos from various sources and social networking sites, Jenkins says that we are moving towards “spreadability,” the creating of value and awareness through the circling of media.  Relating this to today, Jenkins was right.  All social media are linked together in some way even though they are all competitors.  Here is a youtube video containing multiple social media and showing how they are all used together to tell the Christmas story.

Read the entire article here

Looking at the sites for web design inspiration, the one thing that stands out to me, or at least the thing that I admire in web design is the clarity and usability.  Being a web designer, I feel that these are the two most important factors of a web page.  An example for clarity would be that you are able to understand and decipher what is going on.  For instance, I really don’t like web pages that are cluttered, have too many things going on at once, and have illegible fonts.  The clarity of the page is unknown because the directions are unclear.  For usability, I like when you go to a page looking for something, and it takes a no-brainer to find it.  It is almost as if there are giant arrows guiding you to your destination.  One statement that I have learned that I constantly need to consider is that a web page can be useful, but is it usable?

So relating the design tips to the hypertext we are going to create, I want to focus on my web page to have a clear purpose.  The links that go together should appear that they go together and not just look real fancy.  As for the overall structure, I have to work on how I want to relate the different projects with each other, yet have an overall theme that ties the class together.

UPDATE:

Here are the websites I was discussing the in post

• Typography
• New Designs

Something that is becoming a giant part of web design is typography.  I haven’t really thought about it before, but the fonts you choose should not just be random, but carefully chosen to display a certain mood.  The only part about this that sucks for web designers is that some fonts may not be accessible to everyone, so not everyone can see the same idea you are trying to convey.  New technologies for developers such as typekits are now surfacing and becoming a great resource for adding new fonts to your site that can be accessible by everyone.

Danah Boyd writes about the connection between teenagers and social networking sites and how it all relates to the term “public”

Danah Boyd is a researcher at Microsoft Research and also a researcher/professor at New York University and Harvard Law School.  Her main focus in her research is social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society.

In the study she does with teeneagers and their participation with social networking sites, she finds a lot of great data by interviewing the subjects as well as doing field research online on the actual sites.

She makes a lot of good points of mediated and unmediated publics and how these teenagers don’t really understand the difference between the two.  I feel that as a young adult that has gone through the Myspace stage when you had to have a profile because it was the cool thing to do, audience and having yourself out in the public does not even cross your mind.  For most people, it is hard to grasp the idea that everything you put on the Internet will be there forever.  Teenagers, being their rebellious selves, would care less about the long term effects and more about what is happening in the moment. Boyd further investigates the situation by seeing how these teenagers are monitored and if there is a better way of doing it.  Obviously, parents are going to want to know everything and anything that has to do with their child.  However, is this right?  Will this allow them to make a mistake and learn from it?  With today’s technology, is it worth it for a teenager to make a mistake online that will last forever?  I really don’t know.  Today’s generation of teenagers growing up will experience things completely different than the next generation.  With technology constantly updating and improving, it is really hard to tell what to expect, what is right, and what these kids should be allowed to do.  One thing, though, that should be made clear is the risk of putting themselves in the public and what kind of consequences it may have in the future.

Read the study here.

Andrew Keen is an author as well as an entrepenuer.  However, what he is most widely known for is his view on how the Internet and especially Web 2.0 is degrading the quality of our culture.

In his recent book, The cult of the amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture, he calls Internet users monkeys and states that the Internet is just full of amateur work.  Although, this amateur work is getting more hits than their traditional counterparts.  For example, he talks about news blogs and how they are irrelevant to anyone but the author, yet popular ones will be read more than the New York Times.  Looking at another medium from the Internet, video, YouTube has been blowing up with popularity and the more it starts to take over, the more likely Hollywood will go to dust.  On the whole he feels that our world will soon be run by these amateur monkeys and lose “today’s experts and cultural gatekeepers.”

I disagree with the way Keen feels about the Internet.  Yes, it is a bunch of amateurs posting whatever they wish, but the Internet should be a place of free expression.  If you choose not to read/watch/listen to what these “amateurs” have to say, then just simply don’t .  He also states that the Internet in some way is “stifling creativity,” but to my knowledge, it only enhances it.

He makes a good point, though, when discussion trust.  How do we know who is posting what?  Is it a well-known establishment posting an amateur video to promote their product?  Or is it simply a fan showcasing what they love, or hate for that matter.

In his interview on TechCrunch with Walter Isaacson, Keen talks about the late Steve Jobs and how he was a historic influence.  Isaacson stated that Jobs really cared about making the connection between art and technology to deliver a product to consumers that they would love.  Furthermore, Keen says that Jobs had an excessive consumerism and also idealism which made him not political and not civically engaged.  Therefore, Jobs did not really care about political acts and so, he poured his perfectionism into his products instead of society.  I feel that this last bit was the most important to Keen because he is involved in society and it must hurt to hear that a man so successful cared more about his products than society.

View the book here, and the interview here

Lawrence Lessig is an American academic and political activist.  Many know him as the activist who is trying to reduce the legal restrictions regarding copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum.

When reading part one of Lawrence Lessig’s remix, the main point that stuck out to me was how he related media to the binary terms Read/Write (RW) and Read Only.  He states that Remix is a RW culture, however the government sees and other media distributers see it as RO.  That is so because in RO, you cannot change the content.  You can simply read/listen/watch the content and that is it.

I agree with Lessig that remix can be a good thing.  Rewinding a bit to see how people learn, it is through repetition.  During this repetition phase, we plagiarize other work so that we can learn through example and also see how we can derive and make our own path from it.

The book is posted here

Featured in Haper’s magazine, a left-wing perspective monthly magazine featuring various topics, Jonatham Lethem, a novelist wrote his perspective on plagiarism.  He is more than qualified to write on this topic because he is an artist and has to deal with various influences and plagiarism all the time.  The main point of the article was that influence is everything.  Sometimes it is hard to tell where someone else’s work ends and yours begins.  I completely agree because with so many ideas in the world already thought, how is anyone supposed to keep track which was original.  There are four quotes from the article that I liked in particular.  The first one is:

“For a car or a handbag, once stolen, no longer is available to its owner, while the appropriation of an article of ‘intellectual property’ leaves the original untouched. As Jefferson wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

This easily distinguishes the difference between stealing a concrete item and an intellectual one.  The next quote is:

“That a language is a commons doesn’t mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.”

This was in the commons section stating that a language is something that people can contribute to and is not “owned” by anyone.  The next quote solidifies the fact that no idea is original.

“…all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.”

This last quote is interesting because it is saying that corporations are controlling artists from showcasing their true potential and contribution to the world.

“But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.”

Overall, I enjoyed reading Lethem’s article.  I liked how he pulled in a lot of different sources together to be related to one another, especially the not-so-well known artists.  He kind of did a play on plagiarism by including all of these different works into his own.

The full article can be read here.

The Huffington Post is an online news site that collects news stories from various websites and sources.  The excerpt was posted because it is explaining what is to come from WikiLeaks.  Also, Julian Assange has multiple demonstrations a few days prior to the posting of the excerpt.  Micah Sifry is an author of a book about WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency.  Therefore, he is qualified to write about this subject because he has done a lot of research on WikiLeaks and believes that the transparency movement is going to stay for a while.  WikiLeaks is a wiki meaning that anyone can add information to the website.  It also does not require you to have an identity when posting information.  This is one of WikiLeaks’ main issue, having vital information being shared, but not knowing where or who it came from.  Sifry’s main point is that hiding information is useless.  In this day and age almost every adult carries the internet in their pocket or in their bag exposing them to information.  However, it also makes them vulnerable.  He also makes some going points on credibility.  The internet allows you to adopt multiple identities, therefore making it hard to gain real credibility.  I think he makes a very convincing point on what transparency is and how Assange used it with WikiLeaks.  I like the quote that Sifry included from Bruce Scheiner “Secrets are only as secure as the least trusted person who knows them.”  This is a really good point, and it is true that when a lot of people know a secret, it is more likely for it to get exposed, and when the US government can’t keep track of how many people know certain secrets, the possibility of it surfacing to the public is inevitable.

Read excerpt here