Final Post: Reflection on this class

For my final blog post I felt it would be a good way to wrap things up by just giving a little overview on my thoughts of the class.

I think that this class should be taught to people that are in any major. I think that the things that we learn here are much more important than two thirds of my other classes. The primary thing that this class has taught me that I believe any other student should learn is how technology affect our lives. As a DTC student this is pretty much what we deal with every day. We are learning how to deal with this in our own right and how to manipulate it to our own advantage as well as others. Tech is so pervasive that it has become essentially invisible to us. Taking this class allows us to get off from our smart phones high horses or look down from our Macbook Pro pedestals and realize that we are waaaay to dependent on things that aren't even necessary. A respect is important to instill in people for the technology that surrounds us. I feel that this class has done that, as well as heightened my awareness of how we communicate (obviously more so through technology)

By the way this is a great little bit by Louis CK...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOtEQB-9tvk

Nothing is Here to Stay

This will probably be a pretty short post and it is totally spur of the moment but I am writing this on the frustrating state of the mobile cell market as reported by tech blogs. Last year I was tired of the phone I had. It was not even a feature phone, it was as much of a dumb phone as you could have. I began researching new phones to upgrade to. Now at this point I am an avid listener and reader of a few tech blogs and I would check them for new info on the newest phones to come out. If you have ever read a tech blog lately you would know that about half of the information coming out today revolves around cellphones. I found this freaking awesome, I could look at all the cool new phones coming out and find out which ones were the best.

Looking back I realize that I was dumb for not heeding the obvious warnings then but I bit and totally dived into the news being generated online. Every other week a new phone would be announced by HTC or Sony or Sprint would get this new phone and Verizon would say no to rumors on that phone. It was awesome. Anyways I dont know why I did not foresee how these blogs sold their information. They really did say every week that this phone and that phone were the best and were light years ahead of others. But the next week it would be something different. Then the next, then the next...etc. Well I bought the Droid last year and though I was pretty hot shit for about three weeks before I started hearing from these tech blogs that there was something else new to destroy the Droid. They now began to see it lacking compared to New phone A and especially to new phone B.

I guess I am writing to vent on how it can be really frustrating when the tech you love so much outpaces you in development and leaves you in the dust. It especially sucks when the cell carriers loop you into a two year contract and make it so these new phones are way to expensive to buy without their... okay the word is totally gone(where a product is sold at a cheaper price because you are paying through a contract plan). The way phones are sold and packaged needs to change as does the way that tech blogs advertise their news.

The New iPhone Predicament

Probably the biggest news to hit the tech industry in the last couple of days would have to be the leak of what is thought to be Apple's newest iPhone. On April 19th at 10 in the morning the tech blog Gizmodo put up a post that showed that they had what is believed to be the prototype for what they are calling the iPhone 4g. The post as well as four to five others break down in great detail what exactly this phone is and how the blog came about to having one.

The original post "This Is Apple's Next iPhone" http://gizmodo.com/5520164/this-is-apples-next-iphone?skyline=true&s=i has since generated millions upon millions of page hits and has generated huge revenue for the tech blog. It has also been disclosed that the blog had paid the person who found the phone for it, a total of 5k dollars. In my honest opinion I believe that the posting of this phone and its specs was probably the best course of action for Gizmodo. I understand people's qualms about checkbook journalism and how it hurts the journalistic art but in all honesty stuff like this happens all of the time. We have not heard of the other people who have bid on this phone and for all we know other tech blogs were just not putting up enough cash; now they are seen as sitting on the moral high ground?

The one thing that I do no agree with is Gizmodo's leaking of the Apple employee who managed to lose his phone... on his birthday. "How Apple Lost the Next iPhone" http://gizmodo.com/5520438/how-apple-lost-the-next-iphone?skyline=true&s=i this post by Gizmodo goes into detail in exposing the person who happened to set down his phone and forget it. Gizmodo even displayed photos and the man's facebook page. I believe that in today's work specific snooping of personal information online that this Gizmodo has hurt this person's reputation. Sure people may claim that this was necessary to garner validity to the phone but as of 11:50 April 19h Apple had already sent Gizmodo a formal letter requesting the phone back. Doesnt this validate the phone as an important piece of hardware? I think they acted in the wrong and have hurt this man's ability to find jobs in the future. He will always be known as the man who lost the iphone.

Reading Assignment 10

Starting the Counter...

I am writing this blog post about the class we had this last Tuesday, the 12th I believe. During this class we were shown a counter by Prof Condon at the beginning of class that counted a number of statistics per second that had to do with social media and actions taken on the internet. The idea behind the counter is that at creation it gathered how many twitter accounts and post are being made per second, avg email sent per second, facebook accounts and revenue generated per second...etc and then compiled all of these times into an algorithm and converged them all onto this counter showing what has been done since the counter has started.

This counter is supposedly showing me the internet growing, or to be more specific, how these certain social media sites are growing along with information being sent between users. But, I guess that is how things like Youtube and Twitter grow, they only grow when users trade information. You upload a video and Ill watch it. Ill tweet and you read it, possibly retweeting it to other twitter friends. Ill link to a funny picture on Facebook and youll look at it. What this counter does is put something that we never really think about into perspective, it figuratively shrinks the internet. It is showing you the viewer what is probably happening in quasi real time. Here at this moment, this is what is happening.

It is hard to grasp at how big the internet is and this is obviously not a real check on how big it really is, but no matter it is still kind of frightening isnt it? Personally I consume information online as if I am the sole person looking at something at that moment. Even when on something meant to be social like reddit or Facebook I have this feeling where I am accessing a terminal away from other people. But to finally have shown to you the fact that millions and millions of others are doing the same exact things as you at that second is kind of mind boggling. While the numbers we are dealing with here are very big, just knowing that the entirety of these actions on social sites can be compounded makes this place seem just a bit more controllable.

Reading Assignment #9

Shirky's chapter on collaborative production made me think a lot about how Wikipedia has really changed the way that I have come to research things. In this chapter Shirky discusses at intense length the fundamental ideas behind a collaborative site like Wikipedia and how it is fueled through user submitted postings and how these postings are skewed to certain power users. I am posting here to say that I am not ashamed to admit that Wikipedia is easily the first and usually the only site I go to when it comes to looking up anything reference related. Growing up during the time I did I saw the way Wikipedia changed and the way it was interpreted by teachers and professors.

Wikipedia has been seen for years as the lazy students way of researching a topic. Your assignment would be to research the Everett Massacre, write up a small paper on it and cite four different sources. DO NOT USE WIKIPEDIA would be listed on the assignment sheet. My usual response to this is 'yea right' and go ahead and use Wikipedia to my heart's delight. The information there is solid, at least in the dozen times I have proofed it against other sites. As explained in Shirky the quality of these articles is amazingly high for the way it is developed and you can ask any student in this class (I can guarantee they have and do use Wikipedia) and they will tell you that it is a good and well made source of information.

Reading Assignment 8

Easychair Batmen (and batwomen)

The first part of chapter one in Shirky is something that I have experienced countless times online. I was one of that audience during the 'sidekick fiasco'. I spend a fair amount of time online, not as much as most people but definitely a good amount of my free time is spent perusing the web. My website of choice is reddit.com which is a website aggregate much like the website digg.com is which is mentioned in the article. The slogan for reddit is 'What's New Online' . It has a huge user base that upload links and whatever is voted up the most makes it to the front page. From here I am able to read things like "A New Dinosaur Was Discovered in Brazil" or "TED Talks by Gates" or even a funny picture of a Lego house. If you've spent as much time as I have looking at sites such as Digg and Reddit than you will begin to understand what will and what wont be upvoted to the front page. This is what leads me to what is discussed in Shirky's opening chapter...

One of the things that almost always become insanely popular on link aggregates or highly viewed blogs are stories of people having something stolen, needing advice in a bad way, or being screwed over. These stories, much like that of the sidekick, are followed by tens of thousands of people online in a very heated fashion; I should know, I am one of these people. There have been stories like that of the sidekick: a person setting up a site to show how he led on a Nigerian Prince scammer over the course of several months or how someone went into a Bestbuy and was scammed out of their money by Geek Squad. What these stories do to the reader is stir up emotions inside and often are the same three emotions: you either had something like this happen to you and are feeling for this person, you believe you have valuable knowledge of the situation and want to show it off, or you like watching "justice" in action. Either way these situations turn into, more often than not, intense cases of internet vigilante...ism. People like, no they love to see people get their "comeupins" and it is only sweeter when those people go down in front of an audience of millions like that of the sidekick girl.

This has me thinking though. This, while immensely entertaining, cannot be good. People are surely having their lives ruined over situations that do not necessarily warrant the kind of backlash anonymous people on the internet like to dish out. Take the sidekick girl, yes what she did was wrong but does that mean she has to be harassed by thousands of people who have no right to do so? Don't get me wrong I think that when people try to scam others they deserve to be punished, but there really needs to be a limit to the backlash that internet vigilantes deal out. It really does not speak well of our nature the way that people band together to destroy random strangers that we have never met and have only heard of through very biased channels. Are we really so easily manipulated? Is the mob mentality so powerful? Do we need to become asshole just because of our anonymity? I am of the opinion that people are not changing really, we have always been this nasty, but the internet as a tool is magnifying our ability to cause havoc in others lives where we really should have no say.

Reading Assignment 7

In part three of Tapscott he discusses the net generation's past and potential manipulation and motivations when it comes to politics. Tapscott spends a long time focusing, not surprisingly, on 2008's recent election and how Obama was able to utilize the web generation primarily into becoming the voting force he so dearly needed to win. Tapscott goes on and on about this generation's ability to change the old ways of politics and how we are hoping to change the face of politics to better suit this generation's specific traits. A couple of these traits are things such as immediacy and the ability to really connect with a politician such as through online forum ventures of "jamming" (really, thats the name?). Anyways, one of the more interesting things that Tapscott brings up that this generation has always demanded of it's politicians more so than any other is a trust.

It seems like something any generation would be striving to get from their government. Trust is a key thing between he public and a politician, if you do not trust what they say they will do then why the hell are they in such a seat of power? When you think about it, this idea of trusting what the person says boils down to if you can remember fully what they said and if you can successfully make enough noise to raise attention to a politician not following his or her promises. If you follow this idea, that in the past the promises of key political figures were not always cataloged or made public enough to truly motivate us to act on them not being fulfilled, then it makes sense. Today there are several tv channels whose soul purpose is to display political speeches. There are several more stations who constantly analyze and repeat these happenings 24/7. Now take the power of the internet, where people can post and say damn near whatever they want (and they do, constantly), and you have a perfect mix of media's playing to the publics eyes and ears. All you need to do is hop online or turn on a tv or open a newspaper even and you will be bombarded with political news. What is so different today about this versus half a decade ago is that we can now so easily return to this information and check to see if promises are being followed up on. We can so easily comment and chat about things like this and send notices and alerts spreading any events we so choose. We can blog and post videos, we can even get in contact with political parties instantly through the web. This is certainly changing the way politics operates. A new age of transparency is necessary for politicians to garner public trust and good opinion that they so need with this generation.

i am not positive if this will last however. It seems to me that certain things to get done really do need to be hushed up. Of course I am not saying that we should not be filled in on key events, but take health care for example. The public option has been bogged down in some of the most ridiculous political squabbling I have personally lived through and the way that the media portrays this on the internet and tv and radio just serves to help bog down the issue. I am certainly not as passionate about a healthcare bill as I was and I think I can attribute a lot of that to being over stimulated by news about it.

Reading Assignment 6

The majority of what Tapscott writes about in part one of Grown Up Digital is really flattering. The way he portrays the net generation makes me feel like I can go out tomorrow and influence the way the world operates, it really painted our generation in a light that made it seem as if we all held this power. Now if this is significantly true or not is still up in the air, however it did make me realize how big of a scope the way that our generation, through the net, is changing the world at large. Focusing on one of my passions and something that Tapscott spent a few pages on was the film industry.

Because the majority of what I have read focuses on 2007 and 2008 respectfully, many of Tapscott's portrayals of the film industry are not as relevant as they once were. Due to the speed at which the net is growing this is not very surprising. Much of what the first part of Grown Up Digital focuses on is the collaborative power of the net generation. It is our nature to be "prosumers", both consuming and producing our content constantly. Tapscott ties this into the film industry when he discusses sites such as OurStage.com in which thousands of creative minds join to create a community focused on film and music. He further goes on to say how films will turn towards shorter more independent oriented modes of creation, and that new forms of production will become mainstream. One example of this might be a film pieced together over long periods of time, made like those japanese phone novelas.
The net has certainly affected the film industry today, from marketing aims to release strategies the industry in in a transitional mode. Take for instance one of YouTube's most recent ventures with this last Sundance festival. Youtube, in a ballsy move in my opinion, offered to rent out to it's viewers several of Sundance's more popular and recent films. While a cool idea, this venture was kind of a bust, garnering only 300 rentals over a course of I believe two weeks. While this venture was not very successful it points out the experimental mood many of these distribution companies are in. The physical format of film is also in a very odd place at the moment, while rentals are at an all time high, many companies are looking to the net and digital formats for separate ways of renting movies (or even releasing them).

As for advertising film, the net has proven to be an invaluable friend as well as foe. People know weeks and even months before the release of a movie whether it has chops or not. Take for example Paranormal Activity, one of the most profittable movies in existence. This movie was created in 2007 and was only released wide in 2009 due to great word of mouth on the net. The distribution of the film was nothing short of brilliant. Being able to request the movie in your theater instead of being released on select screens was a big deal and it all took place on the net. Word of mouth for a movie is a big deal, it establishes staying power. Due to the immediacy of all information on the net, word of mouth is an even bigger deal now than ever before, and this is a very good thing to well-crafted films as well as a coffin nail to your average crappy movie.

Reading Assignment 5

I am currently typing this blog post at a speed much higher than the speed at which I would be writing this long-hand. I could go on and on, just babbling away about anything I want, droning on about every little thing that pops into my head and there is little to nothing hindering me from doing so. Technology has made this possible, for anyone with a basic idea of how to use the keyboard, to become a writer far more easily than any other time in history. Not only can people author different entries at a much faster rate, they can easily post these entries onto the net; thus allowing people to bypass the hassle and expense of selling their idea in a physical form, such as through publishing. This ability to become a writer has been passed on to every man and woman who has access to a computer and the internet, untold amounts of people have accessed the net and have not only consumed the information there but have authored some of their own. One of the most interesting things that Baron has brought up is the idea of the growing percentage of authors on the internet and the posing of the question, should everybody write?

Baron explains quite well that writers have always been in the minority. A major emphasis has been placed on reading, and probably rightly so, yet with the explosion of available writing modes on the net writing has begun to grow in popularity. People are now finding a place to voice their opinions online (about every little thing) and are becoming emboldened by the power of writing. Becoming an author online is very easy primarily due to the popularity of blogging these days. A part of me wants to side with the critics on this issue of writing on the net. I have a hard time finding meaningful prose in the heaps and heaps of Youtube comments and kitten blogs. I actually had a second paragraph already written before this one that was essentially a rant against the gargantuan amount of dribble online that is written/dumped and left to rust in the digital landfill that is the internet. Then a moment of clarity came to me, what is this blog that I am writing right now to anyone? It probably has no meaning to anyone else other than myself, and I would be one hell of a hypocrite to be shouting from my soapbox how people should really be more careful with what they write on the net, only to be writing from my own little blog. I believe that everybody should write, lets fill up this landfill till it bursts, lets bog down the net and clog this system of tubes till nothing can get through anymore. People should write, people should voice their opinions whenever they want and however they please. Everyone should be an author.

Reading Assignment 4

So far, after reading through A Better Pencil, I have learned some interesting things as pertaining to the development of communication technologies. Dennis Baron's book first focuses on the evolution of writing, the way it was first received by the Greek scholars (especially Plato and Socrates) and the way we perceive information. These ideas are similar in many ways to those of Ong, though they are more intent on pushing us the reader an opinion rather than a study. Baron is unlike Ong in that instead of showing us the more studious side of the study of writing and it's instruments we are being told that a technologies evolution pertaining to writing is a good thing. Now this might be an assumption on my part, I have only read three chapters, but the title A Better Pencil to me shouts that Baron is telling me a better technology has come to surpass the pencil in necessity and ubiquity.

An interesting point that Baron brought up was that of Thoreau and his critique of the telegraph. In a long history lesson on Thoreau and the pencil industry, Baron explains to us that Thoreau might not have been the unbiased aside philosopher we so imagined him being. Because of his large stock in the pencil trade we better understand that he has more to fear of the telegraph than the average lay-man. What this made me wonder is what exactly sparks the fear in certain people when a new technology arises to supplant the past ones? Is it only the people who have invested heavily in old techs (in Thoreau's case, the pencil), or does this fear have root in other people as well? Hopefully this can be answered later in the book.

Reading Assignment 3

Written by Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart is the story of Okonkwo. Okonkwo is the strongest and most beloved warrior of Umophia. He is the fabled wrestler who threw Amalinze the Cat. He passed his ill-respected father's notorious nature as being a debtor, growing to become one of the most titled man in all of the nine villages. Okonkwo's success and prestige do not last though, as the title so blatantly explains, things do begin to fall apart around him. Achebe's long revered novel has been excepted nearly world wide as one of Africa's greatest stories. I was made to read it Freshman year of High School as well as many other people I have met.

Things Fall Apart chronicles more truthfully the Ibo culture that Okonkwo grows up in, using the character of Okonkwo as the subject we most prominently see the change is this culture through. Okonkwo, being one of the greatest warriors of his land, believes very deeply in the traditions that have allowed him to reach such prestige. Due to the Ibo's strict rules on how to live one's life Okonkwo is very rigid in his manner and always stays fast to old traditions. Okonkwo also is very fast in becoming angry and is renowned for his fiery temper. It is through this very conservative person that Achebe shows the dismantling of an oral culture at the hands of a literate one. The first two-thirds of the book is set up giving us exposition on Okonkwo and the Ibo culture, showing us how steeped in tradition every little thing is in such an oral culture. The final third of the novel is where the title kicks in and things begin to go very wrong for Okonkwo. Okonkwo and his family are banished from his village due to an accident and are only able to return after seven years. In this time the white man has entered their nation and has begun to erect churches and convert the natives. This final third of the book shows the conflicts between those who wish to banish the white men and converts and between those who believe that the change is either inevitable or worthy.

Okonkwo quite obviously fights with all of his might the changes taking place in his life. These traditions that have so tightly held together his existence and have been part of his success are now being thrown by the way side. The futility of this fight is seen from the very beginning of the white man's presence. Things get worse and worse, finally culminating with our protagonist's suicide. The final paragraph of Things Fall Apart is truly harrowing. It discusses the District Commissioner's (the leading judiciary in the land) thoughts on the matter of Okonkwo's death. He quite bluntly states that he msut not show weakness to these savages in aiding the removal of a body, then goes on to pondering the notion that Okonkwo's death would make a very fun read, maybe a paragraph in length, in the book he is writing titled The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. It really drives home the idea that the summarization of such a tale as Okonkwo's into some blurb style paragraph is highly unjustified. The differences between these two kinds of cultures is as apparent as night and day here. After being in this class for only three weeks I definitely have read this book in a different light than I had previously.

Reading Assignment 2

I believe that people are essentially afraid of change. Change scares humans because we become accustomed to our current states of being; we grow comfortable with what we use and see every day and understand what dangers exist and how to avoid them. But change throws us for a loop, especially when that change happens in something so inherently tied to our lives as language, in all of its forms. As stated by Ong, writing and all of its offshoots are in fact technologies. These are artificial means, the use of tools, used to create or manipulate our environment into something different. All great technological leaps have been met with fierce backlash by many who fear this change. Plato feared the written word stating that it would make us lazy and inept (a common claim). With the advent of the printing press the abundance of books had people thinking that reading would become an unnecessary leisure and it would no longer be cherished as an important skill. Even the type-writer was criticized. In his old age, Friedrich Nietzche’s eye sight grew so bad that he could no longer write, so he was given a type-writer and learned to type by feel. Nietzche became an opponent of the type-writer, believing that it robbed him of some of his previous flair and wit.

My question is why do we exactly fear these changes in literate technologies? What exactly are these fears that we are so afraid might come true if we embrace newer and better tech? It seems a very prevalent theme that we criticize new technology with the claim that it will make us sluggish, reduce our dependence on our own memory and further distance ourselves from the natural act of creating prose or whatever it is you are in fact writing or marking. I think this question is rather interesting especially after reading some earlier thoughts by Ong. When comparing primary oral cultures and literate cultures there is a definite difference in the way the two think, clearly, but there is also a clear difference in the amount we are able to think about. It is believed that writing allows us to further expand the scope of our learning and philosophizing, thus making us literate types more prone to thinking up different outcomes and events past those of oral cultures. Is it possible that the dangers we so fear from the expansion of writing are only possible to foresee by a literate person or at least a person from such a culture, outside of a primary oral one? Plato feared the effects of writing, obviously the trunk of this great branching tree which has advanced into the computer age. But Plato had to study for years how to write himself before he could write Phaedrus, the work in which he states his fears on the effects of writing. I find it really interesting how many have adopted the technologies they so fear in order truly succeed in finding an audience.

Reading Assignment Day 1

I found the piece in Ong about the homeostasis state of primary oral cultures to be rather interesting. This piece explained that in primary oral cultures, if a word or term has lasted past its relevance in a culture, it does one of three things. It can change its meaning from an old definition to something different, more relevant to its current time of use. The phrase could die out and be forgotten by that culture, seeing as it is of no more use it need not survive. And finally the words could struggle and hold on, losing there inherent meaning and essentially becoming nonsensical due to the user's ignorance of the meaning.

This last piece is what really had me wondering something. Do we, and by we I mean Americans of our age, part of our generation, do we use words like this regularly without really understanding the definition? As stated by Ong this is not something really possible outside of a primary oral culture because in literate cultures we always have something to look back upon to remember what a words original definition or sue was. According to Ong, in a literate culture, "Words thus are known to have layers of meaning, many of them quite irrelevant to present meanings. Dictionaries advertise semantic discrepancies" (Ong p.46). So of course today we have the ability to trace back a words roots to fully understand its storied life, but is it at all possible for this kind of thing to exist in our culture?

It is hard for me to comprehend a phrase to have no real meaning but still be used today in certain situations. Ong uses the example of the talking drums of the Lokele people in Eastern Zahir. Some of the things said in this practice are completely unknown to the drummer. I think that this ability to have this sort of 'genealogical amnesia' is a great example of the differences between oral and literary cultures. It is hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that we can just forget what something means and yet have it still hold place in current practice.