Internet Culture Blog

For many of us the idea of social media is nothing new. Those of us born into the digital age of the computer and the internet are now being referred to as digital natives. Our generation knows little of what it is like to live in a society that is not always in constant connection with each other.  With the influx of new technologies being developed that encourage us to participate in sharing information and ideas with each other through social networking many times we forget to question whether or not these technologies are effect us in a positive or negative way. In the case of sites like Facebook and Twitter we have seen a trend in people feeling antagonized by the pressure to remain updated on the lives of their friends. They are bombarded with useless information that they really had no business knowing in the first place and tend to waste their time on these sites when they could be engaging in more intellectually stimulative activities. However a recent study by Gilad Lotan an avid fan of blogs and new forms of media is providing a new outlook on how social media can be used as a tool for social mobilization.

In Gilad Lotans’ study The Revolutions Were Tweeted, he looks to indentify the effect that ordinary citizens had on mobilizing other against the injustices being face in their countries.  Lotan does this by analyzing groups of tweets by hashtags (e.g #sibouzid) and identifying 12 key groups of media that would be present during the revolution.  These groups ranged from forms of traditional media to bloggers, to pirating and advertising bots. results of Lotans study showed a great increase the amount of newer forms of media such as bloggers, activists and journalists were the most active on twitter in spreading news about the revolution. This is ground breaking because now there is legitimate evidence that the internet can be a tool that elicits social change or at least spreads information and allows ordinary citizen a chance to participate in the exchange of information. While in the past people were confined by their inability to afford writing technologies or a lack of education, Twitter has now given them everything that they need to being a discussion. An interesting picture that I found on Gilad Lotans’ site shows the effects of individuals in spreading the word about injustices being face in Egypt and Tunisia.

It seems that nowadays everything we do is moving onto the internet.  In the last couple of years we have seen great innovations that have lead us to a horizon which we had never thought we would reach. Inventions such as social networking, instant message, text messaging, online banking and much more are greatly influencing the way we conduct our lives. However and aspect that is often overlooked when accepting these new technologies into society is that  of their security.  Too many times in recent months have we all been bombarded with the floods of stories about individuals, companies and government servers full of information being hacked and millions of dollar in information stolen or deleted. With every new technology that has been introduced, there have also been new dilemas presented along side them. Although the internet can be seen as a tool that promotes the freedom and creativity of millions, it can also been seen as a tool of the intellectual elite to secure influence and control within the populace.  With this come the Issue of Data Mining.

Data Mining  is given an accurate definitition by Dr. Bil Palace, a professor at UCLA on his informative teaching aide site here. While the collection of Data by most companies can be seen as having valid use for the analysis of customer or client demographic data not all companies adhere to the same principles of data protection that we would think.  In the United States for instance personal data collected by companies has been commodified and is freely and legally able to be bought and sold to companies for  undisclosed usage . This is often times shocking to most people when they first hear it because they’ve always been instructed in the real world not to give out too much personal information about themselves for fear of identity fraud or physical harm. Do you feel like this is how you would react if you knew about privacy protection laws in the United States? Do you think we should we be skeptical about this practice in the united States?

Nowadays it would be very difficult to walk up to a random person on the street and ask them if they knew what YouTube was without receiving some awkward looks. The media giant emerged in 2005 with a few programmers from the online payment company paypal and a goal to make the world a better place. As far as I am concerned I believe that they accomplished their goal. YouTube was unique because of hat author of The Wealth of Networks,Yochai Benkler talks about in his analysis of youtube.  Benkler first starts by stating the overall vastness of youtube in relation to its demographic customer information, it contains people from all sectors of life, politicians, government agencies, business, schoos, interest groups and last but not least individuals. As Benkler illustrates, YouTube provides a platform for all of these people to interact and take part in participatory culture.

Participatory culture is different from normal everyday culture because it involves a choice by each individual to take part in it and to be influenced by it. YouTube does its job by creating a space for users to select which videos they choose to watch and whether or not they choose to upload videos by themselves. Within PArticipatory culture those with power are the individual users who choose which content they absorb or if they absorb any at all. Benkler also alludes to the importance of youtube in the creation of selective media and how with youtube there is now more of an emphasis on the individual and private organizations that for corporate programs which create false private interest groups such as “Astroturf”.  “Astroturf” was a fake grassroots movement funded by corporate interests to create hostility towards the Obama presidency by supporting the Tea Party and spreading anti-obama propaganda. For more information check out this video : http://youtu.be/zfIPt9VoarE

Aside from all of the private interests that also make themselves at home on YouTube there are also groups of users who come together to share information and ideas that could potentially change the world we live in and how we view ourselves and others. I believe that this is the power of Youtube and the ironic truth of the internet.

Often when we think about the web, what comes to mind is a flurry of of text images videos and music mixed with a few lines of binary code and a scroll bar on the side. However this is only because not many of us think about the integral parts of a website that the authors put much time and effort into. It is interesting to think that with each line of text you see on a website, that it could have either taken a single person years or a team of individuals a few hours to create. However this fact is what makes the Internet such an interesting technology for design. Whether a single individual is making a website about a personal interest or hobby, or a team of executives is planning a new marketing promotion for a product, then internet is able to take peoples ideas and puts them into a tangible or visible form to be consumed. When thinking about all of the recent websites that have been gaining popularity as of late, a few that “pop out” are social networking sites such as Facebook,Twitter, Google groups and even Youtube. All of these sites not only manifest the ideas of their creators but also allow others to design and submit how they are presented on each site respectively. Another thing that most of these sites share in commonality is their ease of use. All of these websites are able to attract new users by providing functions that allow for the easy sharing of information and the ability to get help if needed. Websites such as these may seem to have risen out of obscurity by mere chance or luck however, the methods which were used to build them were also sound and are often overlooked when listing reasons for the success of a website.

It is my understanding that the first use of the term “Ghetto” was recorded during WW2(World War Two) in which Jewish americans forced to take shelter from the Nazi party who saw them as less than human. Ghettos were small arrangements of buildings in which living conditions were sub par, most times not including running water electricity or most of the basic necessities Americans have become accustomed to over the last decade. Coming from this definition, one would expect a term like “ghetto” to fade away into obscurity like most things of the past often do. However a recent study by Danah Boyd a prominent researcer and professor at Harvard Law School and all around scholar in the field of Information and Communication Technologies, she records a recent trend in internet use for highschool and college aged teens having to deal with this very term.

What was once thought to be a term set aside to describe unlivable conditions in which people forced to exist on the fringes of society, The term ghetto is now being used to describe the tenets or qualities associated with hip hop culture, and thus African Americans. However this is nothing new, as many of us know we all make assumptions about people based on our own observations. Sometimes these observations and the qualities we associate with them  are incorrect and sometimes they are correct but this is the very reason that they should not be used to make sound decisions. What makes the above case an interesting one is its connection to the internet and how the users of a certain social networking site are now being categorized by it. Though many of us use the internet for mundane tasks or for entertainment, never before has the sites e chose to visit placed a label on what type of person we are. In this case the teens in question have divided their peers into two categories, those who use Facebook and those who use MySpace. MySpace, launched in 2002 took the internet by storm with its flurry on social media innovations and the ability to play music over the web. However with the launch of Facebook for college students in 2006, the more educated of the teenage group in question flocked to this social media engine. What are your thoughts on this idea? SHould we be confined to the categories that people force us into based on which social media site we choose to use? Is this a wise decision?

Read the article here :http://www.danah.org/papers/2011/WhiteFlight.pdf

Andrew Keen, a well known British-American author and social theorist in the realm of information technologies and how they effect human beings interaction with each other and the formation of culture makes his distaste for user generated content clear in his book ” The Cult of the Amateur” unquestioned. Keen starts off with an introduction in which he explains how with the creation of web 2.0 and the implementation of a more user centered web experience through applications such as facebook, twitter and other recent innovations from the silicon valley is in fact making society worse. His argument stems from  a very similar argument made by the ancient philosopher Aristotle and the great American Composter John Phillip Sousa as we discussed in our previous reading. The argument that these three men share is that with the influx of amateur users created by the simplicity of web 2.0 that other more skilled processes which take time to cultivate like coding or playing and instrument  will eventually wither with time and leave us with a culture in which no new or original content can be created. Another of Keen’s arguments is illustrated within his defense of the traditional media related outlets who are being effected by the creation of more indvidually sponsored content . He believes that although giving individuals the ability to create content on their own can have potential benefits it can also reduce the amount of media literate people in society. The traditiional media outlets have resources to both gather information from vast sources and the ability to publish them in a professional manner.  Keens argument however is that then amateur are thrown into this situation without the same resources, the quality of media will decline. Many of us are aware of the saying that if you place enough monkeys in a room with a typewritter that they will eventually produce shakespear, for Andrew Keen however this statement does not hold true “with their infinite typewriters they are authoring the future. and we may not like how it reads” (Keen 9). What do you think? Are we just a team of monkeys aiming at some distant impossibility or are we actually making progress as a people?

Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford University and known for his various writings, politically outspokeness on issues dealing with Copyright Law provides a background for his research in his book “Remix”.  Lessigs belief is that Copyright Law in its current state does nothing more than stifle creativity of future artists and follows the misguided premise that attacks children who access illegal content over the internet though peer to peer networks.  Although this is a very quick summary of Lessig argument he does choose to go into detail about where the flawed Copyright ideology that society has come to accept and purport has arisen.Lessig speaks first about an American Composer by the name of John Philip Sousa who sought to recieve conpensation for his musical creations who were recently being played without his permission by the invention of player pianos. Lessig records Sousas argument for the protection of copyrighted content by stating the idea that once people are freely able to access content at any time they the consumer will lose the ability to generate their own content. This is a very similar to an argument made by Aristotle that the creation of the written world will eventually destroy the human memory because they will no longer need to memorize vast amounts of information.This eventually leads to the idea of a Read Only culture  versus a Read-Write culture.  In a Read Only culture, the society which Sousa would argue we as human beings are moving towards, the creators of content are a select few and nearly everyone else is seen as a consumer. The consumer in a Read Only Culture is only able to create content from others generated content and looses the innate ability to make use of tools from the past. An example of this would be contemporary music. Lessig speaks about a band by the name of Girl-Talk who specialize in the creation of music that utilizes components of other artists music but places different artists components into the same song. This is an example of creativity that Lessig believes is being stifled by currently pro copyright legislation. In the RW culture that supports creativity however everyone is seen as beingn a creator of content, although when comparing the two one can generally see Lessig’s argument.

The Huffington Post is an online Newspaper that main focus is online media dealing with political news posted on blogs around the Internet. The Except published by Tim O’Brien  “EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT: Wikileaks, Assange, And Why There’s No Turning Back ” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/09/wikileaks-assange-transparency_n_820348.html) was published by the Huffington Post because Wikileaks caused a lot of commotion on the Internet in the United stated during the begining on 2011. Micah L Sify the main author of this article is a researcher in the field of how the Itnternet is effecting politics and expands on this idea in his excerpt. Wikileaks is a Wiki dedicated to unveiling the truth about the United States Governments activities around the world . It is a a wiki because it is a site that is dedicated and maintained by its community of followers and as well as a network administrator. The main point that I gathered from this article was that the innovation of Wikileaks with the help of  Assange its Australian Founder has deeply changed society. Sifry talks about how Wikileaks is merely the first step in a monumental shift in politicics in which more people are now able to participate efficiently. Sifry calls this momnumental change becoming a more “Transparent society” where politicians and the people they represent are all represented equally and held accountable for their actions.