Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace

March 2010 Letter from the Chair and President

2010-03-19T06:32:00.000-07:00

The following is the March 2010 Letter from The Overbrook Foundation's Board and President. It is reprinted directly from our website here.

In early 2009, the Foundation posted a letter from its Chair and President outlining steps being taken to address the impact of the global financial crisis on its grantmaking programs (Click here to read the 2009 letter). We are writing now to update you on Foundation plans for grantmaking in 2010 and over the next several years.

Our endowment experienced significant volatility in 2009 as financial markets continued their decline early in 2009 and then made a remarkable rebound. As of December 31, 2009, the endowment totaled $111.6 million as compared to $187.3 million just two years ago. (As of March 15, 2010 the endowment’s unaudited value is estimated at approximately $126 million.) We know that our grantees have experienced similar challenges; and, we are concerned about the implications for support for all nonprofits dependent on fundraising from government, foundations and individuals in 2010 and thereafter.

We seek to respond prudently to this very serious financial situation and change in our endowment, while at the same time remaining focused on the work of our grantees around critical concerns and the likely enormous opportunities in human rights and the environment in 2010 and over the next several years.

We will continue to play an activist leadership role in the philanthropic community. Our program officers are heavily involved in organizing and managing funder collaborative partnerships such as the U.S. Human Rights Fund and the Civil Marriage Collaborative; creating vital new non-profit organizations to advance change; e.g., Catalog Choice, www.catalogchoice.org, and assuming leadership roles in a variety of foundation associations such as the Sustainability Funders Work Group. Through these various efforts, the Foundation believes it is able to influence the direction of significant philanthropic resources to those issues most central to its human rights and environment mission. We will use all of these mechanisms moving forward to protect and strengthen the fields in which our grantees are active.

We believe that the impact of the financial crisis will be felt for some years to come and that as a consequence the Foundation’s grantmaking ability will also be reduced. This is despite a commitment by Directors to fund grantmaking in excess of the mandated 5% payout requirement. To effectively manage this reduced grantmaking ability, directors are committing the Foundation to a strategic review of its environment and human rights programs during 2010 with the objective of redefining its priorities for grantmaking over the next three to five years. We expect to announce the outcomes of that review by the end of the year.

Our expectation and our goal is that we will preserve the viability of the Foundation and continue to advance its mission as we work through these very difficult times. Despite these challenges, we look forward to working with you in the coming year to move forward a progressive agenda for change.

Sincerely,
Kathryn G. Graham, Chair
Stephen A. Foster, President and CEO

LA joins the cloud via Google

2009-12-14T06:12:00.000-08:00

Check out Cloud Apps, Big City: LA goes to Google.

"Starting today, Los Angeles will be equipping 34,000 city employees with Google Apps for email and collaboration in the cloud." While that in and of itself doesn't make me apprehensive, the article goes on about how they've been in talks with city officials for the past year looking to update all of their aging technologies. I'm worried about what we don't know. Its been confirmed that Yahoo offers data/digital evidence collection "spying" services when their price list and policy was leaked last week. I'd be willing to bet that's just the tip of the iceberg. The CIA has openly invested in and began utilizing internet surveillance tools since October.

I think that this is relevant to Francisco's UStream post - many people are using sousveillance as a way to subvert the "panoptical gaze."

Check out Scroogled by Cory Doctorow. Is this where we're headed?

ustream app streams live from iphone

2009-12-10T20:34:00.000-08:00

ustream app for iphone has just been released. any iphone, anywhere with a connection to a server. the implications for privacy are tremendous. nothing is safe from me being able to broadcast it live to other people, record it for future viewing and even share it on facebook and twitter. it is not the first time we can stream from a phone, but now it is all bundled ever so pretty in an iphone app. any iphone, including the iphone which i was told had no video...a product that has been ripping the multimedia industry apart can now stream live video to the public.

this is a huge step towards real-time technology.

francisco.

Yahoo: new ad-interest manager

2009-12-07T09:23:00.000-08:00

Hey guys,

Something big just happened in the world of online advertising; Yahoo just release its new ad-interest manager which allows users to see how they're targeted by online advertising and more importantly, to turn targeted advertising off. This is probably a preemptive move to protect themselves from Government scrutiny because of their Microsoft partnership, according to VentureBeat.

I hope that this becomes the rule rather than the exception. It's about time that we've had some government intervention on matters of privacy; so much of our data is virtual these days that precautionary measures are necessary. Our presence on the net should be protected. Google Dashboard is a bust; it doesn't share any targeting data and it doesn't allow you to manipulate your search data, which is the bread and butter of the company. Thoughts?

the metaverse inches closer to reality

2009-12-07T07:22:00.000-08:00

Google's new project, liquid galaxy, is kind of like The Veldt. Once large-scale, flexible AMOLEDs become affordable, this can be more or less seamless.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/07/google-liquid-galaxy/

Brazil, where hearts entertaining June

2009-12-05T10:24:00.000-08:00

Can I say that the song "Aquarela do Brasil" is stuck in my head after watching the movie Brazil. Sorry for the delay in the response, but I finally managed to get a netflix account and got the movie. I chose this because well I recalled friends talking about it and i've seen some scenes here and there and I recall thinking it's an interesting, perhaps slightly scary movie. It struck me while watching it that there are a lot of 'fantasy' scenes were similar to Pink Floyd's 'The wall' film which featured similar breakaway scenes, I also kept thinking that if this movie was produced with today's technology the effects would be amazing! But for a movie produced in the 1985 it still holds quite well in terms of special effects.
The World that Sam Lowery lives in is quite the distopia or Orwell's 1984, filled with surveillance, military police and control by a government we don't actually see or meet in this film. The fact that this movie features examples of computers, and security or surveillance cameras is fascinating, seeing that the computer it self was still a rather new concept in the market and well quite different than the computer we know today. So in some sense this Sci-fiction/futuristic movie was able to predict the use of technology as instruments of control and surveillance. Can I add that I love how the screens are so small that they require a magnifying glass! From our readings for our surveillance class we got to see how technology, not only cameras, but also computers and online social networks have become tools for surveillance.
What also struck me in this movie is the concept of the terrorist and level of hypocrisy in the film. Though Hypocrisy whether in plastic surgery (strange and scary procedures in the film) or handing the promotion to Lowery is nothing new to our world, and I found interesting to see in a Orwellian like world. But what really caught my attention at first and saw it's significance towards the end is the idea and concept of the terrorist. I don't want to give out any spoilers but the way the movie progressed with the terrorists that emerged gives this idea that perhaps there are no true terrorists, whether it was a mistake from Information Retrieval (Buttle/ Tuttle) or even towards the end. Perhaps it is the people that think outside the box or a different are deemed terrorists for their otherness and their threat to the system.
Anyway, I enjoyed watching this movie, even though at times I felt it got lost in a lot of fantasy scenes, I also thought it interesting to compare it to the 21st century, with all the talk of terrorists, and surveillance. Oh and it wasn't till I did some research on the song and well the title of the movie that I understood the significance of the song in the film, it's interesting how Lowery wanted to escape this world by singing or humming the song from the start.
I must mention that there are a lot similarities with the film "V for Vendetta", but then again most 1984 like movies tend to be similar.

They're Listening

2009-12-02T13:29:00.000-08:00

After watching The Conversation (twice..it was that good, or my Thanksgiving was that boring), a 1974 film by Frances Ford Coppola starring Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, a paranoid sound surveillance man running his own business in which people pay him to record conversations. After recording a conversation between two young "lovers," Caul becomes engrossed in their conversation and begins stalking them in order to solve what he thinks is a plot to murder the woman's wealthy husband. Caul is reluctant to hand over the tapes to the man who hired him, because he is afraid the man will his adulterous younger girlfriend and her lover. It turns out the situation isn't what Caul had thought, but I wont spoil the ending.
Caul himself is very secretive, taking precautions to protect his own privacy. He has several locks on his door, uses pay phones, and doesn't even share much information about himself with his girlfriend. Yet by the end of the film, his own apartment becomes wire tapped (by the "aide" of the man who hired him to spy on the young couple), and Caul tears apart his residence to find the source of the wiretapping (which he doesn't), proving that no one's privacy is ever completely safe.

Caul's paranoia and the film's ending remind me very much of Lessig's Code, which argues (among many things) that no one is ever completely anonymous. It turns out that Caul's phone was being used to listen in on his apartment, and that there was no actual bug. The idea that the technology you use to connect with the outside world can monitor your actions is something very relevant in the digital era. Government's using Internet records in court cases is all too common. How often to we hear in a news story that a murderer Googled "how to strangle someone" before actually doing it?

Although The Conversation was somewhat slow, I absolutely loved it and would recommend it to anyone interested in sound/music studies and/or surveillance.

Hacker or Hero? WarGame would tell you

2009-12-02T12:53:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the late reply. I lost my laptop in the library last night!!

If it weren’t the book Hacker Culture that I wouldn’t want to see the movie WarGames. Since most of the classmates did not choose the movie, I’ll first simply introduce the plots and conclude what I think about the movie. This is a movie about new school hacker who is , base on the definition of Douglas Thomas. Mathew Broderdick played David Lightman, a curious high school student who accidentally invaded in the military simulation system called WORP(War Operation planned Response) which is designed to constantly replay world war in an effort to maximize the effectiveness of U.S. missiles by playing what he thinks as a game—global thermonuclear war. This made a scene in which U.S. soldiers in missile silos were ordered to fire their weapons at the Soviet Union, beginning what they believe will be the third, and undoubtedly the last third war.

My favorite part is the end when Lightman found out the ways to persuade the NORAD(North American Air Defense Command) not to believe the information that WORP sent to it by playing ticktacktoe with it in an infinite loop sequence. The computer than finally learned that the nuclear war is unwinnable because the only winning strategy is “not to play”. Lightman saved the world but the movie disclosed the major fear that people had in the 80s—can we really trust technology in controlling our lives? But the intricate leading character Lightman deserves more attention. Thomas thought Lightman was a contradict character in the movie—a dangerous hacker and a smart hero. Lightman represented the nexus between the challenge of authority and the promise of the future of technology.

On the other hand, Lightman demystified the biased imagination of “bad” hacker by letting people know it could be any one of their boys that were capable of hacking and hacking was not the intension of crime but the curiosity of explore the unknown arena. I like the movie. It reminds me of the series movie Back to the Future. They were all movies without super hero but teenagers who solve the problems with their courage, energy, and wit. However, in Wargame, Lightman played the role who convinced the audience that even the technology seems getting more and more important and irreplaceable in our everyday lives, it is human brains that guide it to the future. There was anxiety and hope--that human still dominates-- that the movie tried to express. but that was 1983’s modem time when the broadband , internet, and PC prevailed. What happens now wasn’t the fear anymore. Technology, especially the communicative and informational ones, has been the master of our lives. Can human guide the computer anymore? Or the basic question would probably be: does it still need to guide? Everybody could be Lightman in the future, but definitely not solve the question by playing ticktacktoe.

The Genius of "Lawnmower Man"

2009-12-02T09:13:00.000-08:00

Lawnmower Man – A 1992 film loosely based off of Stephen King’s short story (1975) is (surprise surprise) a cautionary tale about technology. However, one thing to appreciate about this film is that it is both literal and metaphorical. The genius in the story lies in the fact that the metaphors continue to strengthen and evolve as technology does, sort of like the Constitution does with the law.

To give you all a bit of back-story, there is a doctor who is experimenting on primates with virtual reality games. This is sort of an homage to our video game class; the doctor believes he can eventually make humans smarter with games, and help them to overcome mental handicaps. Think of it as virtual stem cell research, except the diseases would be equated to mental disabilities. His first human subject, Job (the “lawnmower man,” who mows lawns for a living), seems like he probably has Asperger syndrome. Once he begins treatment, he becomes a “normal” human being. People are no longer able to hurt and take advantage of him; but he essentially loses his innocence. He continues to evolve from hearing peoples thoughts to telekinesis to causing people to spontaneously catch fire. At one point he even plants a virtual lawnmower in a man’s head that simply destroys his brain – reminiscent of snow crash!

After going back to destroy everybody who has caused him harm, Job decides to take over and cleanse the world. He decides that virtual reality is “the utopia we’ve been dreaming of.” As he carries out his mission cyberspace infringes on the real world. Instead of supplementing it, however, Job uses this technology to physically kill people, proclaiming that soon, everybody will be hooked into him. “I’m sorry you hate what you’ve created!” he says. At this point, it seems that Job is a physical embodiment of what we call the internet. It expresses the idea that the internet as we know is fantastic, however there will come a point where it ushers in a dystopian future. Cameras everywhere, zero privacy. It reminds me of the quote from We Live In Public; “At one time the lion was the king of the jungle, and then one day they wound up in zoos. I suspect we’re on the same track.” It brings about notions of regret and the captivity/enslavement that may occur when machines become self aware and self-sufficient.

The metaphor seems to change as Pierce Brosnan confronts Job, screaming “All this shouldn’t be under one person’s control. This is supposed to expand human communication!” It would seem that cyberspace is still cyberspace, but Job is now an oppressive government seeking to centralize control of it. Does Job represent Big Brother?

To wrap it up, the moral of the story is that “If we can keep this technology out of the wrong hands, it will free man and not enslave him” with a side serving of “centralized power breeds corruption.” If you have a chance, check this film out. The truth is, I think all of these metaphors and more are at play.

press play, speedmaster

2009-12-01T20:13:00.000-08:00

Yikes, sorry ya’ll about not making it to Lorelei last Wednesday— great place though, last time I was there, Obama had just won the election and every Swede, Fin, Dane and German in my vicinity bought me a shot of jaegermeister (apparently, the officially liquor of We Thought We Could)…and well, the dawn of the new era never felt so poisoned haha…oh I only knew. Ok! Cynicism aside, hope the gobble gobble was turkeylicious for everyone!’

So, film assignment—growing up, perhaps because my reading comprehension of English wasn’t the greatest til 4^th grade (polish- dobze! French- meilleur!) when my mother realized I didn’t know what the English word conjugate practically meant or why there were no declensions, I was self-possessed movie nut. Not just popular movies (I used to brag I had seen Major League 4 times by the age of 6 or Ferris Buehler 9 times, hahah, by the age 8) but really obscure art-house things that even know would be considered a feat. Seventh Seal, Jules et Jim, Blow Up, Witness for the Prosecution & All that Heaven Allows, all by age 9. So, when I saw the face on The Conversation jacket, I knew I had seen it. How or where? Meh – but, as my 7^th grade literature teacher said, “always read things twice”, so I decided I would.

The overarching theme of The Conversation is one that most global denizens living in a post-WWII world have either personally or anecdotally encountered; whether it be some of our parents’ experience with Watergate, the Soviets & their Satellites, Mao-an Communism or Pinochet-ian Chile (and the gamut in between), the contemporary era is horrified yet eerily comfortable with the government’s insertion into the private sphere. However, it has become popular in the cultural narrative to believe it’s adulterated government regimes that are solely responsible for such intrusions.

Yet, with The Conversation, The Man isn’t the government—it’s a privatized company (albeit a rather secretive one) that spearheads this plot to murder the Union Square couple. To me, in sensory terms, this film’s interwoven auditory & visual unfolding of Harry’s psyche was probably the most compelling aspect. Much like Antonioni’s Blow Up, the cinematographic syntax and directive editing vicariously evoked the gripping tension and vaporizing anguish of someone responsible for enabling atrocity and unjustness. Coppola definitely didn’t need to quit his day job for the vineyards.

Yet, to my intellect, what was so egregiously unsettling was the reminder of the callous admonition of today’s environment, where big business AND the government boast their technical abilities to not just inject their talons into our lives but have virtually demolished the private sphere. Yes, the good ol’ naggin theme of surveillance, of course, freaky, discouraging, ire-inducing -- but duly unavoidable. Money & Politics got the power As my boys in Chelsea would say, we’re all getting train-wrecked and we didn’t even sign up for it. Except we did. We were born. And bought cellphones. Computers. And walk down the streets. Take a plane or two.

Most people, when introduced the astonishing prevalence of surveillance in quotidian settings, are flabbergasted. But, what about those of us who know – and cannot do anything about it. The film’s answer is to literally rip it all apart, resort to melancholic lamentation twinged with the hope of subversion but that will soon melt into feeble acquiescence. Even in films that deal with similar themes, such a the direct parallel of The Lives of Others (which I’m sure studied this piece closely) and Diva (probably the best French film of the early 1980’s), the protagonist may physically live but the result is bleak. The human condition is bleak enough to begin with (lord, as I was unassumingly reminded this weekend by reading Linneus’ Nemesis Divina, pass the Prozac PUHLEAZE), must the fight for power really be the operative still? Has 5000 years of the human social narrative not provided enough repetitious evidentially support that happiness aint a construct but power is?

Minority Report

2009-12-01T19:17:00.000-08:00

Aside from the allusions to technical determinism and power gone wrong, what I found most striking about Minority Report were the gadgets and "futuristic" imaginings of contemporary items. First I noticed the Sixth Sense-like tool that the pre-crime officers use to manipulate images and scan through video streams. It's practically and exact replica of the MIT-born gadget we saw demonstrated a few weeks ago.

Then I noticed the ubiquity and hyper-targetedness of the advertising in this vision of the future. Much like Google scans our emails and our search inquiries to spit out advertisements tailored to one's supposed interestes, the ads in Minority Report are customized based on eye scans to the point that they say your name to you as you pass them.

The electronic newspapers that flash alerts about runaway cop Anderton reminded me of the Kindle or Apple's highly anticipated Tablet--constantly streaming information and pushing up to the second content to users in the friendly form reminiscent of a paper book or sheet newspaper.

Its really eerie to me how sci-fi works take seeds of burgeoning technology and accurately predict the forms that they will grow into in the distant future. I can't believe how dismissive I have been about science fiction in the past. I guess its a cultural bias--in the US sci-fi is conceived of as nerd fantasy for pathetic bathrobe-wearing shut-ins. But why? The link between science fiction and technological fact is clearly strong. Maybe the important question is who is behind the shaming of sci-fi fans and for what reasons? I don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it seems that there must be some larger reason why science fiction is often seen as a lesser form.

I don't know, just something to consider...

Another one for The Animatrix...

2009-12-01T04:01:00.000-08:00

It was never my intent to watch The Animatrix. Never a fan of animated film shorts (even as a child I disliked cartoons) I scratched this off of my list and went to Broadway’s Blockbuster to purchase anything but this film. At Blockbuster I searched the stacks for The Conversation, Brazil, Alphaville - everything else with the intent of sitting comfortably at home to watch an intellectually stimulating film and consider course motifs. But of course, the only movie that I was actually able to find was this back-story to The Matrix, (which I loved BTW) so I figured at $3.99, why not?

And so I sat down with my own preconceived notions about how I was not going to enjoy this cartoon all the while considering aspects of our class discussions that I might be able to distinguish from the film. I am happy to report although I am not a newly converted fan of animation; I was pleasantly surprised with this showing. From the very beginning I was impressed by the technology utilized to create these shorts; reveling in the fact that talented artists had designed each of these visual treats. Each film held varying aspects of animation; The first The Final Flight of Osiris, featured incredibly life - like characters identifiable by the fluidity of their bodily motions while in 'fight': their veins and muscles bulging with each step simulating human movement. So realistic we could almost feel the softness of their flesh. While all of the shorts had their own verve, I was most interested in The Second Renaissance Parts I and II series in relation to our course assignments.

It would be easy to discuss the overt symbolism and overtones utilized in The Second Renaissance Parts I and II for example -“in the beginning man created machines"; The Million Machine March for civil rights; and the recognition of other legalese that have defined our world through political action. It would also be easy to analyze the inclusion of a multicultural cast of humans presented in any Matrix production denoting the end of racial prejudices and inequalities in humans following the rise of machines (maybe that's how the internet will finally bring us all together); or question if are we are slowly being plugged into some kind of weird pog – bound together by our computer use. All of these questions are based in reference to our class discussions but I am most interested in the following.

The Second Renaissance's focus on the relationship between man and machine reminded me of Dodson’s The Net Shapes up to Get Physical, Berner's Lee, The Semantic Web and Brin’s The Transparent Society. Having read these articles we can easily recognize plausible societal entries where the microchips or semantics in these articles can progress into the machines that are identified in The Animatrix. I believe the rise of the machines against the human creators were indicative of the fears we have of new technologies. As noted from historical content, society are sometimes fearful of technologies – from the now traditional staple of television and its social implications of that time to the new media phenomenon where we are traced by our computer usages - all at our own hands and for our comforts and enjoyment. Unfortunately in this movie, man’s attempt to use machines for their own purposes only led to his demise. Shall we question these innovations in relation to our lives as we move into the future?

My Minority Report

2009-11-30T16:38:00.000-08:00

Full disclosure - I am not a big fan of contemporary Hollywood cinema. I have however seen most of the films that were assigned - Brazil, The Conversation, and Alphaville, which I consider masterpieces, many times. Despite the fact that Minority Report is a Spielberg movie, I thought I should give it a try mostly because it is loosely based on a Philip K. Dick story.

I liked the premise of the movie: the question whether we should trust a system that can predetermine crimes before they are committed, even if I immediately had to think of the Bush administration’s “preemptive strike.” While philosophical questions regarding free will and determinism are interesting, the viewer was given little time to ponder the paradox that once somebody knows his/her future behavior, s/he can alter it. Instead, as it is usually the case in Hollywood, the plot is undermined by the spectacle. Sure, the visual effects, the computer graphics and the synthetic environments are dazzling but once it finishes with the cliché happy end, what actually remains?

Hollywood is predominantly interested in entertainment because that is what sells. While I don’t doubt that Spielberg had an interest in the script because he is fascinated by the subject, it is clear to me that he lacks the critical perspective of a true auteur. The blatant product placement from Aquafina to Pepsi serves as a good example. If Spielberg really intended this bombardment of brands as a form of criticism of advertising, then why did he not just make up some new brands? Because it is oh so ironic that some of these companies paid handsome sums to be included in the film? Do you really trust a Hollywood blockbuster to make critical statements about capitalism?

For me, less is always more. If you have not seen it, take a look at Chris Marker’s 28 minute black and white science fiction film La Jetée (1962), which also deals with changing the present by knowing the future and past, and tellingly does not endhappily. (I prefer the French version with English subtitles but could only find this version on-line). http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8796749344506734237#

The Animatrix

2009-11-29T15:30:00.001-08:00

Unfortunately, I ended up not being able to make it to class on Wednesday despite my initial certainty that I would be free. Because I’ve already seen most of the other movies on the list and I recently saw The Matrix for the first time since high school, I watched The Animatrix. The Animatrix isn’t so much a single movie, but a collection of nine short animated films which center around the The Matrix universe. While the very fact that they all operate within the same general universe calls for some necessary similarities, the films were incredibly diverse in content, theme, and style.

The first skit, Final Flight of the Osiris, was entirely CGI and focused on events which “set the stage for The Matrix Reloaded movie and Enter the Matrix video game” (I really wouldn’t know, I’ve neither seen that film nor played the game, so I’m trusting the back of the DVD case…) and thus seems tied directly into the storyline of the film series. Other shorts obviously exist within the universe but are not tied directly into the storyline, although they cull deeply from that fiction to propel their own stories. Probably my favorite short, Kid’s Story, fits into this category, as it starts and ends with a “kid” communicating with Neo, using these brief encounters as tests of faith which *spoilers* ultimately lead to the “kid” committing suicide. It was quite emotionally evocative; I enjoyed it a lot. Then, there were shorts which never referenced the matrix at all, such as Beyond, which essentially borrows the basic idea of manipulating space-time for some interesting physics-defying stunts that tied into more general themes of abandonment and the nature of childhood. Personally, I thought the most fascinating aspect of many of these narratives wasn’t some new mind-blowing manipulation of cyberspace but rather the attempt to understand how cyberspace becomes appropriated into the human experience in broader terms--how it alters our perception of our own existence, reconsidering what it means to live a human life.

The vast array of visual styles is also worth mentioning, as none of the shorts looked remotely like any of the others (except the two which are basically two parts of the same whole). Only one of them was CGI, but I actually found it one of the least visually interesting, which I think testifies to beauty of the set. In general, a couple of the shorts were reminiscent of an animated version of freewheeling pop-philosophy coffeehouse talk, but I also found some of them surprisingly sophisticated, and every one was at least visually stimulating.

Minority Report

2009-11-28T18:54:00.000-08:00

I picked Minority Report for the same reasons that Elizabeth did (yeah blockbuster!) and also because I have seen this particular film discussed frequently in a variety of academic articles relating to technology, surveillance, privacy and the politics of advertising. After seeing the film, I feel I can throw my own thoughts into the fray on these topics.

Technology: The opening sequence spends what now feels like an inordinate amount of time watching Tom Cruise move windows around on a large interface while he wears multi-touch gloves. At the time (2002) this was super-cool, and I suppose interesting to watch. However, we've seen videos this semester about multi-touch gloves and the Sixth Sense device, and many of us have personal experience with multi-touch interfaces, even if it is just two finger scrolling on our laptops. What does this mean for the rest of the technology in this film? Maglev cars, jetpacks and iris scanners? They make versions of these too. The film aimed to be set just in the future (to seem more realistic than a very remote future), and they achieved that by hiring a consulting team who incorporated ideas that were already in development and therefore more plausible.

Surveillance/Privacy: Any fan of science fiction or even action movies will be familiar with retina scanning. In Minority Report these retina scanners are powerful, and everywhere. There is no need to carefully align your eye, the sensors seem to have a wide range to quickly detect when an iris is in range. While many people have commented on the idea of Pre-Crime (refer to Elizabeth's post for a summary of the film) and the problems/possibilities of that kind of surveillance or invasion of privacy, I am more interested in the fact that it seems everyone is on file. Today, fingerprints are used to identify people, however if you have not been finger printed you are not on record. In this film it appears that everyone has been recorded (the only Jane Doe in the film is not actually a Jane Doe, although the fact that people accept her existence proves there might be some people who are not registered) and their information is on file both for the government and for advertisers. In this future, it seems that the government has gone further than labeling everyone with social security numbers, but has uniformly linked those numbers to corresponding iris prints. The underground trade in eye balls that develops is a highly physical means of identity theft... decidedly more visceral than Will Smith melting his fingerprints off in Men In Black.

Advertising: A small element in the grand narrative of the film, but incredibly interesting to questions of privacy and consumerism is the retina scanning done by advertisers to tailor advertisements to specific individuals. While walking down a main street the lead character has multiple advertisements shout his name, and while walking into the Gap the in-store ad reminds him of his last purchase and suggests new purchases based on that. At first, it seems crazy and a complete invasion of privacy. Did the government give the advertisers this information? Did the companies record iris scans at the register of the last purchase? Or did the consumers willingly give this information to the advertisers? I would suggest that is all of the above. This is already happening. When I go to amazon.com, they greet me with a "Hello, Kait!", they remind me of my last purchases, what I viewed last, and what I would like to look at this time, based on my past "shopping trips" to amazon.com. The site also reminds me of my family's birthdays in time for me to ship them something. This is because I voluntarily gave them this information, so that I don't forget to send my Mom a present on Mother's Day. In one of our previous classes I argued that I like ads that are tailored to me better than ads that have no relevance for me (like the ones in gmail). However, if the future includes ads and stores literally shouting my name, perhaps I would prefer the more generic version. I had not thought about the fact that as tailored ads become increasingly useful, they also become increasingly harder to ignore.

The Conversation

2009-11-28T15:04:00.000-08:00

The Conversation (1974), directed by Francis Ford Coppola, portrays the life segment of a “bugger,” Harry Caul, mentally haunted by the capabilities, and possibly its potential, of his own expertise: audio surveillance. He is a well respected professional in his field, however socially awkward while in a shared context, with a group of friends or his lover. He is also extremely private, having three locks in his apartment home, and making calls through payphones claiming he has no home phone, though he does.

Caul is hired by “the director,” a corporate businessman to wire the conversation of a couple walking down a park in San Francisco. Because of other previous jobs Caul had done with audio surveillance, three who were targeted to surveillance had been murdered. Though he claims that his wire tapings have nothing to do with the murders, he becomes obsessive and involved with the conversation he successfully recorded. His sense of guilt rises as he seems to be a highly devoted Catholic. His paranoia also increases throughout the film speculating that if he turns in the tapes, the woman on those tapes would be murdered as well. In the end of the film, he tares his whole apartment down, including pealing off the floorboard suspecting that he has also been bugged.

The year The Conversation was created, it was not commonly heard that while out in a public setting, one is being watched carefully, or much less in the privacy of one’s own home. Unless maybe if the person is wanted by the FBI, or such government authority figure. Caller IDs just became a common service during my teenage years, then latter caller ID spoofing, to lie about the name and number appearing on display. Now we have the internet that has taken another spin on how one can monitor another person.

This movie reminded me of the article, “Transparent Society,” and our discussion held on that week of class. Because Caul understood the dimensions of surveillance, this made him exaggeratedly cautious, and even crazy. Like the two societies pointed on David Brin’s chapter, if we lived on society number two, where individuals monitor their neighbors, spouses, friends, etc., it would probably cause many to go mad as well. In another perspective, this also made me think of those individuals who are highly involved in their work in an obsessive manner, isolating themselves from society and going mad. Linking similar patterns of creativity, or genius, to madness has occurred to famous individuals like John Nash, Van Gogh, Edgar Allan Poe, Syd Barrett, Nietzsche, to name a few.

Minority Report

2009-11-28T13:55:00.000-08:00

Since I hadn’t seen any of the movies that were suggested to watch this week (had anyone actually seen all of them?), I decided to watch Minority Report because I think it had been referenced in class a couple times and because my Blockbuster had it in stock. I’m probably one of the last five people in Manhattan that still uses Blockbuster. Anyway, I really liked the movie and had a couple of thoughts.

First, I think that some of the technology that was in the movie didn’t seem as shocking to us, almost eight years later. Even in just that relatively short amount of time, some of the tools that he had probably didn’t seem as crazy as they did when the movie came out. For example, with respect tot the touch technology that Tom Cruise uses when watching the visions. We are so used to touch technology now, from very basic ways like iPhones to more complicated ways, like the video we watched last week from the TED, we are clearly living in a world where this kind of “Sixth Sense” technology has been invented, and will be coming into the market shortly, if it hasn’t already. So it appears that the future is coming a bit faster than year 2054!

The whole concept of pre-crime made me think back to a lot of the issues that were discussed in Orwell's 1984 and its relationship to what they call in the book “thought-crime”. I found myself conflicted in general about the whole notion of pre-crime in general, and I think that’s the movie’s intention to some extent. Just because something is going to happen, does that necessarily mean that it will? And it also brings up the whole issue of free will and determinism and the relationship to technological determinism. I of course don’t really believe that the technology itself is driving everything, and I think that’s one of the key points that the movie makes. But for me, I simply think that if you change the future, then it’s no longer the future. That no matter how iron-clad you think that a certain technology is, when it’s up against the human experience, it seems to be no match for it. The interesting things to think about are how we relate to this technology, and how we as a society choose to embrace it, reject it, or regulate it.

I haven’t read the short story that it’s based on, but I’m going to try to find it and read it in the next few days, to see how the movie compares.

As the Cloud hovers over

2009-11-19T17:44:00.000-08:00

Google has released Chromium OS into the wild.

I am very excited about it. What I am most excited about is that one of the most essential components of the computer is being taken out of the laptop, the operating system. Computer architecture has always married hardware and software, this is their divorce without an annulment. What is to come when the operating system is no longer considered when buying a laptop?

As the article mentions, Google is not interested in making hardware, rather this proves it is only interested in the hardware that runs its software. I am eager to see how this effects the "Internet of things." The interactive and representative design of everyday things has always been considered as something built into the hardware. As "things" become networked without a built in operating system, it can lead to "active operating systems." In other words, the interactive design of hardware(computers, refrigerators, lights) is no longer held captive to its original built-in operating system or future updates but rather real-time manipulations and synchronicity.

francisco.

no stars for you!

2009-11-18T14:14:00.000-08:00

*** jeepers! this didnt manage to post the first time around, yikes****

hardwork and seamless access to information:
woah, these two entities seem to be at major odds with one another upon reflection.
in anda's game, the Fahrenheit compatriot Lucy reiterates to Anda that the way in which you accrue power (from money to social to physical) is through hard work and those who acquire things through other methods are, in essence, cheaters.

this is a pervasive global attitude--albeit there are some cultures who don't esteem the value of hard work (for example, Roma, eastern european gypsies), over all there is a global sense that through diligence comes reward.

enter the SixthSense-- a device, created by hard work without a doubt, that promises to facilitate the ease of acquiring information. information, perhaps traditionally viewed as the refinement of knowledge (implicit: some notion of work), literally at your fingertips-- available without search, without labor, without experience. the device, which is programmed off one's own personal preferences, will do the work for you-- wanna know if the latest Gaga video is good? wave your fingers, zing! 5 stars on amazon. wanna know which celebrity the Russian prime minister secretly had an affair with before it makes it to the front page? dooddodo! Lindsay Lohan! Wanna know if that toilet paper is gonna scratch? YES IT WILL. you get the point.
However, what if you dont agree with everyone that Bad Romance is the sickest thing ever, or you dont wanna know abt the Russian Bear and the Loca Lohan (baaah), or wanna experience the true meaning of a lil pep in your step...the device doesn't allow for the personalized experience of converting knowledge into information.
The work involved in eradicated.
Why is this troublesome? Well, i dont know about you, but I like my mind. I like it's individuality. If the choices you are making are directed by a limited set of criteria, then your individuality is ultimately stripped.
Sure it's insanely cool that you can dial a phone on your hand w/o ever reaching for your phone, or if you really need to know where Long Beach is (yes, i did learn that lesson the hard way...apparently it's NOT in NJ...) to map in out in front of your eyes is quite a spectacle. but it's just that.
I really actually loathe DeBord, no doubt, however, this device seems like the perfect paradigm of his fear when he wrote the Society of the Spectacle. true reality usurped by a fake one mediated through images. If we know what know through a series of images derived from the largest database humanity has ever known, we run the risk of not having first hand experience. the ultimate source for knowledge. we will not work for what we know. and working for it is not only the tactile memorization process but it's also fun.
your chaffed A might not be, but there are plenty of other first hand experiences i've worked for that i know would be sorely missed should it be replaced with a stock image.

2009-11-18T07:05:00.000-08:00

Being that meatspace is the counterpart of cyberspace, the practical theme of this week would be when technology and cyberspace infringe on the real world (is it already too late to use the word interchangeably with meatspace?).

Last week a teen was exonorated from comitting a robbery in Ft. Greene due to a Facebook update made at his father's residence (in Harlem) minutes before the crime occurred. Facebook was subpoenaed to prove that the update occurred from his father's residence. More important than the ruling itself is the precedent that was just set. The judge basically ruled that your IP address is personally identifiable. We know that's not entirely true; still, I'm worried about a legal system that has not evolved as quick as the technology that permeates our society. We obviously need to bring about updated policies and even laws to address such (previously unforseen) issues; will be all be required to have a personally identifiable IP address when IP6 hits? *Misadventures in MeatSpace*

"Big games have computers inside them, not the other way around." The concept of the big game is exciting. The educational and health possibilities arising from them are simply incredible. The commercial purposes are obviously making a splash as well; I would consider Foursquare a sort of perpetual big game (class debate?).

The scenarios of virtual sweatshops in Anda's Game are both disturbing and definitely happening. I believe the conference that just passed addressed the subject of the digital world as a factory. We should have a class discussion about how we could possibly address this.

This "sixth sense" in the video is dependant on the cloud of information surrounding his. Seems pretty cool I suppose; the only real function I see that goes beyond current mobile technology is for surveillance. I immediately thought of Doctorow's Scroogled. I can't think of why this would be beneficial at all unless you're in the business of law enforcement or intelligence.

2009-11-18T04:01:00.000-08:00

After reading Doctorow's "Anda's Game", The Big Game Manifesto, Laura Forlano's article and viewing the TED conference's reveal of The Sixth Sense invention I began to consider ways in which cyber life has so influenced "real" life that even the term "meatspace" (which is supposedly in direct opposition to cyberspace) is imbued with this concept. How concerned should we be when we adapt elements of cyber life to Meatspace instead of vice versa? What are the negative or positive connotations we encounter when we knowingly transfer components of cyber life into the physical realm?

All of the materials this week were thought provoking in that sense. The TED conference’s Sixth Sense invention brings the cyber into the real world, further blurring lines that barely exist. As a society, we are enthralled with new technology before we consider the consequences – our fascination facilitates its constant progression. But the case that In 10 years these will be common and a chip will be accessible to implant into brains (did she say that?) is a bit alarming. And yes, I do and would rather take the time to Google a product on my phone before purchasing than have a chip implanted into my brain …what can I say? Pac-Manhattan confuses me because although there is face-to-face time spent in the company of others – should we have to adapt that time to a cyber game? Does it further exacerbate the blurriness in attempt to make things real?

Finally, I was drawn to the Doctorow story for several reasons; mainly due to its showcase of types of effects gaming and cyber life can have on a person - more specifically a child. In this case "the game" cost her a substantive social life in the physical world - perpetuating the lack of face-to-face social connections (although Anda used her salary from gaming to basically buy friends - which causes yet another social dilemma in and of itself) and the quality of life that these connections bring in building self esteem, confidence and socially acceptable acumen. We can't ignore Anda's bad health (her "podge", rash and diabetes) associated with her game playing and the turnaround witnessed when she was banned from gaming; what happened to the days when kids would go out in the yard (or street if you're from an urban area) and just play games they've created themselves? Run until they were sweaty, thirsty and dirty but healthier? Doctorow offered subtle comparisons between Anda and her father and was curious as to if he was offering something to the case that sedentary lifestyles motivated by the innocent enjoyment of 'media technologies'- (her dad was a couch potato, living life in front of the "telly" which was the great media technology of his time just as gaming is to Anda) is something we should be concerned about but is not actually a new premise. From this story further questions can be extracted for debate: the nature of the cyber life and the effects on youth; are their playing experiences complicating their abilities to manipulate the difference between game and real life (the violence in this game was ridiculous); can there be lessons applicable to real life through the game that will help them to become productive individuals as was the outcome with Anda? I think these are a few of the great debates of between cyber and meatspace today.

Undistinguishing the real and the cyber

2009-11-17T22:53:00.000-08:00

This concept of meatspace is cyberspace in our physical realities! My initial thought on this was that it was something far from cyberspace, or the opposite, and definitely like something out of a science fiction book. Cory Doctorow’s “Anda’s Game” pointed out many interesting points about kids who obsessively game either cannot separate their perception from the game and reality, and the other was that they have almost completely separated from real life and severely decreased their basic necessities like eating; or Lucy’s guardian deliberately suggesting at her to get off the game and do something “healthier,” like playing sports and going outside. While recalling the discussion we had on video games, these games can be very educational in multi-purposes. Although, those games that allow the user to create avatars are fairly modern and many older generations are very unfamiliar with it. For those who have opposing ideas about advance technology, and those who favor it strongly, gave me the notion that there are many levels of disconnections between them. This is because he or she who is heavily, or to a greater degree, involved in using video games or other cyber technologies brings the cyber into the “meat” world, which is invisible to the person who does not have a relationship with such technologies. And this brings the topic of “the sixth sense”.

Technology has definitely become extensions of our human bodies. This has been apparent since basic inventions like tools, typewriters, computers, etc., have emerged. They become representations and/or reflections of ourselves by giving us further “powers” and abilities to put to use our docile bodies. The six sense video’s feature devise is something that I imagined watching sci-fi movies now come to life. Humorously, because we recognize how much visionary ideas are set as video games or technological devises, the basic and what seems much simple games, like pac man, are taken out of its digital context and embody the physical reality.

What very interesting about the cyberspace, is that many of its ideas came from science fiction stories. Like discussed in our class topic the metaverse, Ted Nelson’s “Computer Lib/Dream Machines,” the memex/mushroom cloud, and Borge’s library were all “predictions” of the future.

Whose space?

2009-11-17T21:22:00.000-08:00

I thought the contrast between the players and developers of the PacManhattan game, and the young Mexican girls working/playing in the MMORPG was excellent. It brought to mind something that has been continually bothering me throughout the semester. Namely, who makes/controls/produces/designs all of these new technologies, and who (or do) they exploit anyone to achieve their goals? Who gets left out of the equation? I plan to explore this topic further in my paper, and hopefully I will have better, more tightly aimed questions by the time it comes to presenting my paper topic.

Isn't it wonderful that University students with enough resources and leisure time can invent a technology and time intensive game to be played for recreation? Or that anyone who can afford a $300 Sixth Sense will have an immensely easier time choosing ecologically safe toilet paper? While I am purposefully being overly cynical and ignoring the various potential benefits, I think that the writers at Wired and CNET will take care of listing the benefits for me. I am not anti-technology either, but I do want to responsibly understand the people that are left out of this equation or those who have been brought in with very little understanding of how the entire equation works. The goldfarmers in Anda's story have had their meatspace affected by cyberspace, but in quite a different way than the rest of us have. They have not willingly decided to dress up as Pacman and run around Washington Square Park. Instead, their meatspace consists of sweatshop like conditions where they produce virtual goods for tangible money.

The potential for the Sixth Sense project to aid differently abled people could be immense, as long as they can afford the price tag, and learn how to operate the device. Simple prototypes of this device have existed for years to help blind people coordinate their wardrobe or other daily tasks, but this obviously can have even greater effects. So, while technology will march ever onwards, bringing with it benefits and responsibilities, I think it is part of our job as academics to try to fully understand the implications for everyone, not just the ones that have the ability to play the game.

2009-11-17T20:22:00.001-08:00

Entering the reading, I was skeptical to the idea that meatspace would be nothing more than what we consider “reality” from the perspective of an internet junky, with little new insight on how cyberspace could actually alter not only our conception of reality, but our living of reality. I was happy to find this was not the case, and that instead I think of meatspace as a kind of revisiting physical, lived, real space with the harnessed experience of cyberspace, and the appropriation of cyber-ideas in a real-life setting. As implied by the breadth of what the reading covers, the limits seem to only end with the limits of the physical world combined with collective imagination.
There are the game scenarios, where certain kinds of cyber imaginaries are acted out in the physical realm, and I kind of question the tangible benefits of these activities--probable increased physical activity, increased sense of inclusion in various social imaginaries, maybe decreased stress levels, etc… (I’m not saying I don’t like them and I’m not at all trying to imply I hold a negative stance towards them, but I wonder what the effects of them will be, and if those same effects couldn’t just be gotten out of a mix between networked video games and physical activity--in short, if they do become a part of mass culture, how will we consider them once they are popularized?). I also wonder how many of these games will mimic video games--games which, many would argue, were created as video games because they are best actualized in video game form (a reverse kind of criticism has been levied against realistic sports games, claiming that to better suit the video game medium, certain changes need to be made which differentiate the video game version of a “real-life” sport from the “real-life” sport itself).
But most interesting to me was the sixth sense video. The implications for the kind of technology even on a superficial level are paradigm-shifting, and probably for a lot of people really, really, really frightening. Seeing it mostly in relation to consumerism it seems like the benefits are enormous. I wonder how it will effect advertising and product quality in the long term. I think of the role of cell phone technology in the hanging of Saddam Hussein and I imagine the something similar demonstrating the power and pervasiveness of this. It will be fun to see how long it takes to get on the market, how the technology shifts over time, how mass media appropriates it into television shows or whatever, how we attach a narrative to its evils or its blessings, etc.. As a general theme which compliments all the readings for the class and the class itself that I was reminded in my engagement with this week‘s readings that I think I look forward to “the future” more than at any other point in my life, even if my optimism is cautious and on some level I feel as if I am battling an eternal fear…

Adventures in Meatspace

2009-11-17T19:19:00.000-08:00

The Sixth Sense video was an amazing reality check on how quickly technology is enveloping our lives. I have to admit that the idea of basically becoming a cyborg makes me more than a little uncomfortable, but the possibilities are exciting and seem to open up the infinite world of accessible, useful information. I also like the fact that the technology is highly tailored to fit "seamlessly" into our daily lives, rather than us having to adapt to the constructs and physical limitations of new gadgets.

Similarly, I like that the "real-world" video games use technology to foster face-to-face interaction in social, active settings. Who needs virtual reality when you can use technology to manipulate the physical world? At this point, I'm not sure how feasible it is for these kind of game to catch on and become easy to participate in, but I'm sure that if there's interest, the technology will follow.

The Big Games manifesto and Anda's story also point to issues of community and social change through the hybridization of cyberspace and meatspace which I find especially compelling. There has been such an emphasis on the ways in which technology is pulling society apart and destroying traditional forms of social interaction that I think people become blinded to the opportunities to organize and socialize in meaningful ways through the use of the Internet.

In my experience working in the Internet communications department at a non-profit, 90% of our mobilizing efforts were done through emails asking activists to sign petitions or donate money. If I remember correctly, our click-through rate was about 14% (about industry average), which means that only a tiny portion of our activist base was taking the thirty seconds to enter their email address and click send. I think that the low response rate has everything to do with the activists feeling removed from the issues and not being engaged in an exciting way. Both of these articles give examples of innovative ways to foster community and social change with fun, technology, and real world concerns. Hopefully these kind of tools continue to develop and grow in popularity.

2009-11-17T18:35:00.000-08:00

This weeks readings were rather interesting, in some way it does sum up a number of readings we did in the past. Bringing the cyberspace and meatspace together.
I had watched the sixth sense video in the past and thought it was amazing, especially with all the available information one can get with just a press of a button or a move of a finger in this case. Though i've been reading McLuhan, Heidegger and Manovich for the core class this week, a red warning light went off in my head. Although I'm a huge fan of how information has become available today, there is this fear that this availability is actually making us stupid. With all the information out there we now get to choose what we want, which threatens putting our knowledge and information into a limited box of our choice.
As for the game world, it's rather fascinating how it's impacted our lives or the lives of others around us. I recall how big Counter-strike was in the West Bank a couple of years ago, young men/ teenagers would spent hours in internet cafes and infront of the computer playing against each other. I would like to believe that in some way this game helped become an outlet to all the aggression and violence that they witnessed on a daily basis. It's just interesting how people become really invested in a game, investing time (a lot of it), money and sometimes health! Also how these game can become much more than a game, but become a livelyhood for some, i.e. goldminers.

Governmentality

2009-11-17T16:08:00.000-08:00

First of all, I like to mention that I went to the Digital Labor conference this weekend at the New School and was surprised to not have run into any of my classmates - given the fact that many of the papers related very strongly to what we have been discussing in the past weeks (Laura Forlano who had come to class a couple of weeks ago, and Jonathan Zittrain whose article about the cloud we read, were some of the participants). I will talk more about the conference in my presentation tomorrow and keep this blog entry brief.

From the assigned readings, the Cory Doctorow story struck me as most pertinent in the discussion on implications of new technology in 'meat-space.' Ironically, I have to admit that this was also the last article I had read because the illustration and the style of the first paragraph had thrown me off. I didn't know anything about the writer and had assumed that this is a journalistic essay not science fiction. At the end of the story, however, I was amazed how eloquently he had managed to address issues related to globalization, immaterial labor, exploitation and even childhood obesity within a few pages. As I had mentioned previously, I prefer the term 'meat-space' to reality because as the story shows, what takes place in virtual space can be very real, with consequences equally grave within that world and outside of it. One issue that was brought up during the conference was the need for some kind of governance within games and other virtual spaces.

See 'gold farming' http://vid eo.nytimes.com/video/2007/06/14/magazine/1194817114277/the-wizards-of-warcraft.html

Laura Forlano's article that discusses her methodology and describes her fieldwork was not only interesting, but also helpful because I am also working on an ethnographic study. While it was insightful to learn how wifi mobility influences our utilization of public space, I was surprised to see that she had mostly interviewed men (she was asked about it at the conference - her answer may surprise you - I will let you know in class). Just as a side comment -the paper also made me look at Starbuck's in a different light (more of that later as well).

The two essays (well, one manifesto) about the Big Game were benign in nature, but showed that when technology is utilized in ways that it is not originally intended, a lot of creativity is let loose. I am a big fan of the Situationists' idea of the drift (something that can be done without any technology) but equally appreciate the subversion of so-called public space by any digital street game because as Warren St. John stated, it pushes "the bounds of accepted behavior." While participants of these games most likely will not get in trouble with the authorities, it is interesting what happens when similar technology is utilized in demonstrations as was the case during the RNC in 2004 in New York City or recently in Pennsylvania during the G-20 meeting (more about that also in class).

"Podge" and Factory Workers

2009-11-17T15:21:00.000-08:00

I loved all of the readings and the Sixth Sense video for this week, but "Adna's Game" hit a little closer to home, having played MMORPGs in the past (the summer before my senior year of undergrad. was the "Summer of WoW," and I haven't played much since) and reading Play Money by Julian Dibbell for this class, I really loved this story.

Before playing MMORPGs, I was completely opposed to the games, thinking that they were a waste of life and that eveyone who played would end up looking like that middle aged fat guy from the South Park WoW episode, much like the girl in the story. After playing, I realized that many other players were women (one of my closest girl friends got me into it, actually), and that it whatever I did well in the game made up for whatever I couldn't do well in real life (mainly social stuff).

The girls' health (re: weight, since apparently health is equated with weight) issues in the story were something that many people consider to be the main danger regarding children and video games (after violence, of course). Adna's body image is awful, which is sad, but the empowerment she feels while playing the game ("We're bad-ass, you and me") somehow makes up for it. I could go on about the discussion regarding health and body in this story, but I'll save that for a more appropriate class (o hai, Women's Studies 101).

The girl's health issues weren't the main thing that referenced "meat space" in the story, but the guilt she felt after realizing the "noobs" she killed were poor factory workers being used to generate items and gold to sell for real cash on sites like Ebay. This was one of the main subjects of Play Money, and the fact that many of Adna's clan-members were mobilizing to stop this exploitation (of both the workers and the game play) made me wish that this story wasn't fiction,

Adventures in MeatSpace

2009-11-17T07:56:00.000-08:00

I remembered watching the Patti Maes The Sixth Sense video several days after the TED conference because one of my colleagues had sent it to me in a group e-mail. At the time (last spring) I thought this was just about the coolest thing I had ever heard of or seen. Even if the user-friendly version was still “10 years” away (as she says it might be in the conclusion of the video), I still thought that was pretty close and it was a marvel of technology. It was almost to me like I could say, “The future has arrived!” After the past few months in this course however, I’m not so sure I think that this is necessarily such a good thing. I'm not sure if I'm becoming more cynical or just perhaps a bit more critical about how this technology is affecting our society.

This kind of futuristic technology brings up a whole lot of questions in my mind and a lot of them have some negative connotations. What is all this information and choice doing for us? Is it really improving our lives? There are absolutely examples of how this kind of information can benefit us as a society, allowing us to choose more environmentally responsible produces for example, but at what cost? Do we literally need all of this information at our fingertips? Is it a serious invasion of privacy? What is really gained from the idea of drawing some sort of virtual “watch” on your wrist and being able to tell time as opposed to just having a watch already on your wrist. What beyond it just being “cool” is really so important? I agree that it’s amazing that the technology allows us to do all of these types of things, but I have yet to be convinced how it’s going to improve society. Also, without regulation, it's hard to tell where this is all leading us. And of course, the wrong kind of regulation could be drastic!

With the whole “big-games” concept, I think it’s an interesting idea, and I think we as a society are definitely moving towards the concept of convergence when it comes to virtual reality games and adding a “virtual component to the physical world.” One only has to look at the success of social media tools like FourSquare to see real life examples of this. One can also look to the success of any Wii game to see that we as a society are interested in combining both the physical aspect of games with the virtual. It’s interesting to note as well the extent to which these interests bridge demographic sectors (for example the popularity of Wii with senior citizens and in retirement homes where many games including Wii Sports are used for therapeutic purposes and to encourage activity in sedentary individuals). It seems people of all ages are interested in these kinds of inter-active games. The idea of “big-games” that interact with the real life cities are also interesting because they relate back to last week’s readings around surveillance and the semantic web however, again I still have to wonder about the invasion of privacy. Sure it’s fun to run around Washington Square Park playing a real life version of Pac-Man (we should try it!), but the ability to track and trace people is still kind of a scary concept to me that I’m not sure we as a society really understand the consequences of just yet.

Real Digital Spaces

2009-11-16T19:38:00.000-08:00

"Untraceable" starring Diane Lane

This movie entails the meatspace and how there is a pendulum of real that moves back and forth from reality and cyberspace, ultimately creating a codespace--- a new world---- a “new” reality”. In this particular movie there is a killer who uses his site “killwithme.net” where he has a live stream of him killing his victims (in very sadistic manners). The kicker is that this net has a commentary section, and a visitor counter where each time a visitor enters the site to view the killing, the closer the victim comes to its death. For example in killing a drowning man in a closed container, water is added each time a visitor is logged onto the site. The FBI agents spend the duration of the movie trying to track the killer down.

This movie is very relevant to the theme of this weeks reading. In each article (Forlano, Doctorow, and Warren) there is the concept of reality being constantly redefined by the humans’ interaction with the digital world. Forlano specifically discusses how the Wifi determines one’s workspace, worklife, and ultimately their preferred physical location. Wifi and its accessibility from free spaces such as Starbucks, Bryant Park, and JFK airport (actually cost), becomes a major factor in people’s decision in location selection. In a more interactive playful manner, Warren’s article shows the merging of space between digital worlds and real world where students play in the Pac Man Big Game, bringing the virtual game to reality. They dress as Pac Man characters and simulate the Pac Man maze right in the city of NY; using their cell phone devices to control game play. A rather different case with Doctorow’s illustration of girls (Anda and Lucy) Avatar gameplay is where we see a constant negotiation between the virtual world and real world. The avatar world allowed the players to foster friendships, collaborations as well as create a space to politicize individuals to create change in the reality of harsh situations (such as Mexican girls in game “sweatshop” situations). Furthermore, this virtual world transcends to reality in allowing the girls to gain real cash rewards according to their virtual mission accomplishments, yet it also has its adverse effects on Anda’s health, gearing her away from health practices (PE and exercises) that would help her Diabetic situation.

In reading these articles, I was immediately drawn to the Untraceable movie, where the virtual world of the Internet, was/is so viral that although something as unlawful as killing a human being was the content, the world was continuously drawn to this sick game. The cross relationship between digital and virtual world is not only shown in working and gaming situations, but also in virtual relationship platforms. Just as back in the day, there were Pen Pal opportunities, today social sites allow for a virtual Pen Pal system where people can visually communicate from across the world, eventually meeting, vacating, or even living together.

Where is Josh Harris today?

2009-11-16T10:25:00.000-08:00

Last class we discussed Harris' project and film "We live in Public". We also found out that after the project he sort of disappeared from the scene, well for those wondering where he disappeared to, here is an article that might be of interest.

HDT Had It Right

2009-11-13T12:39:00.000-08:00

I found the Surveillance Self-Defense website to be incredibly informative and helpful, as I'm not someone who has any real in-depth knowledge of the law. I especially liked how the SSD site emphasized that there is no perfect security, but protecting our privacy is a trade-off. After reading about what information our government has access to, and watching the "we live in public" video Jason posted below, I was very hesitant about Berner-Lee's vision of the Semantic Web/Web 3.0. The idea that the Internet will be able to read itself the way people do and relay that information to people seems amazing, but embedding real objects with IP addresses (what happened to good ol' fashioned farming, Japan?) is very, very scary to me. I don't want my personal belongings made traceable.

Birn's outlook is a little more bleak, arguing that it's too late for us to escape the world of surveillancem and individuals have to choose how they want to live and interact in such a world. City Number Two does not sound very appealing, although I understand that Birn is trying to emphasize that our fears about privacy (or a lack of) are overwhelming us, and we should instead be focusing on how this surveillance is improving public safety.

All of this honestly makes me want to abandon society and go live in a cabin in the woods, Walden-style.

'They' are Watching.

2009-11-13T09:52:00.000-08:00

The question who is they? in Brin's article he posts two options surveillance owned by the state or security and another owned by a socially responsible society. The article itself was written in 1998, years before 9/11, the Patriot Act and the War on Terror. It seems surveillance today is taking a more Big Brother role! Here is an article I read recently in the NYTimes, which gives us an idea to what extent surveillance has been used. It's no longer a question of terrorism but an invasion of privacy!

It also seems that there are further steps that are being taken for surveillance and control, such as the possibility of everyone owning their own IP address, that I'm sure has a positive side to it, but it seems, if in the wrong hands it can cause a lot of damage.

On the media 09/18

2009-11-13T09:10:00.000-08:00

If you guys have the time I would suggest listening to this episode of on the media from 09/18/09. Very relevant to this week's reading materials; might help to put things in context.

Everyone can be a reality TV star. Literally.

2009-11-12T22:05:00.000-08:00

You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. - The Matrix (1999)

So Jason's post about "We Live in Public" made me think about the Brin article in a new light. At first, I was with him, and I still am on many of his points. I agree that technology is unstoppable and that it is "too late" to change the surveillance techniques already in play. I also believe that the two scenarios he describes are plausible. Both futures have heavy surveillance, but one you know and one you don't. The future where the public is unaware of the level of surveillance being conducted on them is easy to imagine as nefarious. Its the Matrix with many Mr. Anderson's or Big Brother keeping everyone in line, and content - that is until they find out they are being watched. This makes the other future seem much more inviting. The idea is that with everyone watching everyone, the government or police force will actually be more accountable. However Dr. Brin does not go into the psychological effects of constantly being without privacy. To be fair, from what I have garnered from various reports on Josh Harris (the guy who decided to film him and his girlfriend 24/7 live streaming on the internet) is that he was a bit crazy (had an alter-ego named Luuvy, who was a mad clown). However, not everyone is perfectly mentally stable, and Josh ended up suffering from depression, which is quite common. How about paranoid folks? Which would be worse, knowing they are always being watched or thinking that they could always be watched? I know that Brin was trying to pick between the better of two evils, but I think we could flesh out in class what "taking the red pill" could actually be like.

The other articles on the Semantic web and "The Net Shapes Up to Get Physical" reminded me of going to Disney World in 1997 and this past June. Particularly the "Future World" of Epcot. In their "Innovations" lab, they showcase up and coming technology that actually works, but it is usually still under development and too expensive to mass produce. Its a nice little win-win, as Disney provides an exciting and memorable experience, while the electronic/housewares companies get to pull happy consumers in for a demo. In 1997, I was floored by the computer that could take a picture of you, and then email it to a friend. I remember really wanting to do it, but having no friends with email addresses. This past year, the demo was what I will now call a "Semantic House". It was a small guided tour of all the rooms in the house and as our guide went through he would talk to his appliances and explain the multitude of ways they could be self regulating. Pretty much exactly like described in the article, including lighting that adjusted based upon readings of ambient light, so as the sun slowly sets the lights slowly turn on - but only if you're in the room so as to save electricity. "Green" and "energy efficient" were big terms for the whole show. I admit that I was impressed, and even more so because I had seen this 12 years ago and everything had come true since.

So, while convenient, it's also creepy. Or at least its the plot for a Sci-Fi movie where your house comes alive to trap you when the government takes over. I think Issac Asimov would be impressed. Just think, the Brave Little Toaster could be remade I, Robot style. It also makes me think of our class discussion last week. How many senses will the Internet acquire before it becomes self aware? In the words of Keanu, woah.

Down the Magic Highway...

2009-11-12T18:24:00.000-08:00

Sean Dodson's article reminded of this video. Everything is connected and linked through a web of connectivity. Efficiency is the new era(and power word) of technology and linking our daily activity seems very logical for increasing our productivity. I would also prefer that the links do not turn into chains.

Francisco.

.opacity 1, transparency 0.

2009-11-12T15:30:00.000-08:00

In our capitalist world, the very one that in which the internet was created, developed & disseminated, the prevailing ruler has been consumerism—the guise of proletarian free-will. Sure sure, the polemic political ruptures of the capitalist age have been painful, lasting and difficult to overcome; however, they also have been the gripping distraction from the silent but salient locus of power, consumerism. Political strife is central and inherent to the human condition—it’s the physical struggle for control—thus it’s violent, brash and overtly obvious ramifications. One mustn’t confuse that I am undermining the severity of meaning and impact of political strife, no no no. However, consumerism is the shady, behind-the-scenes manipulator ho deceptively charms while destructs. The attempt to control through inequities and the compulsive have/have-nots, which drive human behavior to inflict atrocities against one another, is egregious (everything from kids beating each other up in school for not having the right kicks to advertisers compulsively watching people’s behavior in order to sell a product). I am not attempting to bring morals into this argument so I will not make bold claims about which is worse than the other; they both ultimately result in unjustness, inequality, depravity and death. I mean, one cannot say that Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme is “worse” than Taliban killing sprees in the Swat valley or visa versa. They have different value equations but they are equally awful.

So when evaluating the Internet, and its foundational trifecta of government, academic and big business, developed in that Western (Plato-thru Hegel) sense of logic, it’s slightly jarring that so many technological advances are premised & distributed through a consumerist lens and so many advocates refuse to acknowledge its inherent duplicitous nature. Sure, Semantic Web is a conceptually beneficial idea, without a doubt—a reorganization of building blocks to mimic the capabilities of the human mind to facilitate a more cohesive & functional Internet capacity. However, its presentation of uses both in the academic and journalistic setting (in this context, the Scientific American and the Guardian Articles) seems to entirely pander to the consumer ideology. Its premise is based entirely on objects, things we buy, the consumer cradle. Yes, this system will be revolutionary, but how? In a consumerist fashion. This is particularly troubling on many a level; first of all, it doesn’t actually break down any of the encumbering mechanisms of control that the Internet always lofty rhetorizes that it will/can, secondly it continues the model that has enslaved the ‘modern’ era (however you want to define it, I’m going with post-Marx 1848 through contemporary day) and lastly, it ignores the very notion that consumerism is a mechanism of control akin to political surveillance.

Somehow, culturally, since the political regimes physically restrict and devour the human body, we assume that the immaterial entities do not have the same opportunities to control. Only until very recently has there been a mass-sweeping backlash against big-business and that was prompted by the major economic global economic crisis, a result of that consumerist greed. Because Wall Street and Big Business weren’t killing bodies in stadiums or enslaving hordes of people to work camps, few flinched and attempted to restrict their actions—where many of the essential transactions at the top of the hierarchy occurred in immaterial forms. Furthermore, the ultimate immaterial entity today is the Internet, which was created with the ideologies of materialist framework—it’s reflective of the consumer society in which it was built and which it serves—and this point cannot be forgotten.
The issue of control has been central to human since the inception of formal societies. Today we face both the physical and the intangible threat of control—however, since we still maintain the ‘see it to believe it’ empirical mentality of traditional Western thought, the immaterial threat is often missed by many. We think that the two-way flow of information makes us free or grants us the possibility of attaining freedom, as David Brin grapples with in his piece, because culturally we maintain the Baconian premise that “Knowledge is Power”—where that power is often confused for self-empowerment not centralized control, in the Machiavellian way.

The playground in which we’ve aimed for this infusion of freedom to occur (the Internet) is rife with the same insipid mechanisms of power and struggle for freedom that occurs in the physical world. Why? Because humanity cannot transform overnight—this dialectical thinking is one that shaped our society and thus our resulting institutions reflect this— ‘old habits die hard’, ‘cant teach an old dog new tricks’, these proverbial maxims highlight this exact conundrum. Just because we created a new blank landscape, doesn’t mean it’s void of the shackles and conflicts of its creators. Furthermore, the control of consumerism is barely recognized in the physical, and thus it is more unchecked in the immaterial. This is the problem that needs to be urgently addressed and not the privileging of information flow.

I can see right through you!

2009-11-11T22:09:00.000-08:00

The articles on surveillance and technological advancements have portrayed what would seem as a futuristic image of the future, or what many of us would think to be as a sci-fi novel. The piece “The Net Shapes Up to Get Physical” published on The Guardian on October 16, 2008, gave me the notion of what seems to come out of conspiracy theories. The IP on every computer has literally become not just the computer’s “physical” address, but a permanent identification for monitoring what information us individuals have in it and what we access. Anyone who wants to know basic information about anyone such as what political and religious views we incline to, what sexual preference and activities are of our interests, what thoughts are in our minds, and so on, can quickly obtain this by searching our IP history information. This is nothing new, as marketers have been using our internet history search to advertise specific products that most likely would appeal to our interests. What does shock me is that our electronic devises will also maintain an IPv4 address of their own as of next year. What catches my attention is a comment made by Geoff Mulligan, chair of the Ipso (IP for Smart Objects) Alliance. Quoted in this article, he suggests, “Wouldn’t it be cool if your smoke detector goes off and it told all of your gas appliances to turn off?” I would say, this phrase is precisely an indirect way to persuade most individuals who are easily influenced by media that “it is cool” and almost necessary to have this system in our homes. And even more surprising, Japanese cows grazing in the field will have an IPv6 address embedded beneath their skin! Again, returning to the conspiracy issues, or maybe not so much anymore, the next step of monitoring and a form for identification would be to implant the chip on humans!

Anyhow, Dr. David Brin’s “The Transparent Society” was exactly that sci-fi novel I was talking about, though the scary part is that society seems to be moving that way as in my lifetime, technological advancements have seemed to increase exponentially. The question now becomes, as it seems we have no choice from the two, to be monitored by the State in subliminal ways, or be communally monitored by any random person who decides to see our actions. Of course, I would personally prefer neither, but cameras and surveillance equipment are on every corner and can be pinpointed at anyone walking down the street. His mentioning of reality show “Big Brother” is an institutional technique again, like Mulligan’s suggestion, to make it desirable for any person to be chosen to participate in a reality TV show and give them an opportunity for stardom. As these people’s every move is being monitored, and judge, by almost the whole nation who is into mainstream media, is a technique for those in control of cameras to tell us that they are here to stay and they will see right through us, hence Brin’s transparent society becomes evident.

We Live in Public

2009-11-11T17:05:00.000-08:00

Being that 1984 is one of my favorite books, I'm loving the references in the post below. Felt I should add one of my own. With the rapid advances in technology, it seems that this book becomes more prophetic by the week. How long before we have a government mandated project that condenses our language into a limited number of prefixes, suffixes, and route words? This country already has the revisionist history of oceania down.

The transparent society raises a number of questions. Would you rather live in the city that's honest about it's surveillance, or would you prefer the delusion of privacy? The choice seems obvious. I can't say in good conscience that I would rather live under the delusion of privacy. But an important thing that's left unadressed in Brinn's reading; the psychological effects of constant surveillance.

I immediately thought to of the movie We Live In Public after this reading. One of the pioneers of the digital revolution had every aspect of his life taped. Cameras were everywhere throughout his home (he lived with his girlfriend). Their relationship was ruined, and you're able to see their gradual mental deterioration as time presses on. I think that privacy is a fundamental need for the human condition. In a society where everything is constantly surveilled, I feel people would be incredibly on edge, acting as an animal with its back against the wall. Nobody would ever be at ease.

While the semantic web can be incredibly useful, Berners-Lee was not very critical about what such a world might become. The effects of technology are, unfortunately, irreversible.

"If there is hope it lies with the proles"

Welcome to Oceania

2009-11-11T15:43:00.000-08:00

After having read David Brin’s essay “The Transparent Society,” two things are clear: 1.technological developments can not be reversed and 2. the responsibility for any development lies not in technology but in the human utilization. In other words, just because scientists were able to build an atomic bomb, the United States did not have to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As this example shows, the abuse of power is always to be feared. Should we trust the government with surveillance technology? And if we don’t - who is surveying the government? Of course we need more transparency, but as we know, and as the booklet of the Electronic Frontier Foundation shows, after 9/11 with the installment of the Patriot Act, all kinds of infringements of privacy are committed in the name of the “state of exception.” Secondly, marketing companies, through cookies and other tools are watching every step of consumer activity on the internet and in supermarkets and try to manipulate them accordingly. Hence, it is not surprising that citizens distrust not just their government but also corporations. Suspicion has even entered the domestic sphere. Apparently, even regular civilians spy on other citizens to ensure that they do their job (i.e. ‘nanny-cam’). What’s next – spying on your family? We certainly need to question authority, but we should be equally aware that this new era of surveillance undermines what Brin refers to as “the older” social systems of reverence and trust. Even though there is no one-size-fits-all definition of privacy, I agree with Brin that both accountability and privacy are interdependent.

"The Semantic Web" and Sean Dodson’s article indicated another troubling development for contemporary society – the heightened dependence or even enslavement of humans to their electronic devices. Sure, it might be helpful that some machines are able to communicate with each other in the case of an emergency, but do I really want a microwave that “talks” to my frozen food? I am concerned that if our devices operate entirely independently from us, we could not just loose control over them but also loose some of our most basic brain capacities. Well of course if I can delegate a search for a doctor’s office to the semantic web, I would appreciate the time it will give me to focus on something more important, but I am skeptical of the claim that the semantic web can bring groups together. As Berner-Lee and Hendler pointed out, the coordination of actions across large groups takes an enormous amount of communication, but there is also something very valuable in this long process - humans learn from each other.

Modders Unite!

2009-11-11T08:39:00.000-08:00

Although the Microsoft Xbox is still trying to recover from the Blu-ray/HD-DVD battle, it remains strong with its huge library of games and large number of committed users. Today, it has segragated a whole group of users, that I argue, have been critical to its sustainability as a competitive gaming console.

Today, after the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, it has blocked users from Xbox Live who have been modifying or "chipping" their consoles to play pirated games. Believe me, I understand... razors and blades, consoles and video games. If you can't sell the video games at full price, you are not profiting from the transaction, but what about future transactions. I ask, can you place a short and long-term value on a modder? Does modifying a gaming console, allow for the gaming industry to further develop? In my opinion, I would much rather have a modder as a customer than one with a "ring of death." The modder is pushing the gaming field, searching for new games and spreading the word about the games and consoles. I have never met a modder who didn't brag about new titles and their gaming level. They are examples of free, hardcore, publicity for the gaming industry.

This week, Apple decided to release an update to Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.2) with the added benefit of locking out your hackintoshed computer. I was about to sell my Asus EEE PC, buy a Dell Netbook and install Snow Leopard, when I heard they might do this in their next OS update. While Apple's interest might have been linked to improving hype on their mythical Apple tablet, it has eliminated modders from their market. How are hackintoshes different from "chipping" Xboxes? Furthermore, is Apple disenfranchising the birth of a community? How do different sales models (razors/blades, free-ware...) benefit from and/or loose from the hackers and moders. Can modders unite to use their brain-power and passion for gaming good?

I give it a week, before someone finds out how to hack both the Xbox Live Wall and Snow Leopard Hacintosh. Modders unite!

Francisco.

Security and Hackers in the Cloud

2009-11-10T20:44:00.000-08:00

This article reminds me of our previous discussion on hacking within cloud os environments. While it is debatable whether or not you want to call it hacking, the article exposes the anonymity that is created from an online social environment. In other words, we might never know who these guys are. Is it possible to track someone without the person having a digital fingerprint? You hack if you are not caught. Will online networks and cloud environments create the perfect foggy venue for hackers and users? And is that a such a bad thing?

Francisco.

2009-11-10T18:12:00.000-08:00

Last week while trying to grab a cheap lunch in the area (personal pizza and 200z drink for 3.99), I came across this sign and immediately thought about surveillance and how common it is for us - yet we overlook it. After noticing this I considered a few things spanning from the use of 'new media' to survey us VS. older technologies (no more tapes???) - to where seemingly innocent information is stored. Returning to my office after getting my meal, I walked through Washington Square Park and noticed how many people snapped pictures with their cameras and filmed movies for personal/professional use. I was also reminded of the camera surveillance system established throughout the park and considered how we are constantly captured on camera - without considering the implications regarding our own immediate privacy - yet we fight when it appears a 'bigger' organization or movement infringes upon our "rights". Are those the only times we are threatened enough to move? Anyway, enough of my rant; the sign on the door of Domino's Pizza on 8th Street:

Surveillance, Sensors and Semantics

2009-11-10T08:07:00.001-08:00

Reading the articles out of the order that they were listed on the syllabus led me to have an interesting change of heart this week. I first read Sean Dodson’s The Net Shapes Up to Get Physical” and had the initial reaction of wow, this is really cool stuff! Who wouldn’t want me toaster to be able to connect to the internet? I also so great potential for energy savings applications (I work for a family foundation here in New York that does environmental conservation work so I’m always looking for ways in which new media systems and the environment intersect specifically when it comes to climate change and sustainable consumption and production). In Dodson’s conclusion he writes “…the internet of things promises to reshape our lives as fundamentally as the introductions of the railway, but with less public consent or even debate about its arrival” and that got me thinking as to whether or not all of this “third age” of the internet was a good thing or a bad thing.

Switching over to the David Brin’s The Transparent Society, I completely did a reversal in my thinking. I think in many ways the problems he is talking about are definitely here, especially with respect to surveillance. We have iphone applications that allow us to track our moves, and the locations of our friends, companies are tracking this data for “research purposes”. What’s most surprising to me with respect to this notion of surveillance is the degree to which people are volunteering this kind of information. You just have to look at people’s status updates on Facebook, or people’s Twitter accounts, to recognize the degree to which people are self-documenting important and often extremely private information about themselves.

Reading the piece for Electronic Frontier Foundation made me wonder about the nature of regulations and how to best protect yourself against this invasion of privacy, since it seems as Brin suggests, we are already living in a society where this is commonplace and it’s unlikely to recede anytime soon. Where should these regulations come from? Is it government (this seems very scary to me)? How effective is it to discuss these issues primarily through non-profit sector through advocacy groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation? And perhaps most importantly, how do we engage Americans in this process? It’s easy for us to sit and debate these issues in class, but my guess is that average Americans aren’t aware of many of many of these issues and are simply overlooking these issues which are key to the concepts of civil rights in the 21st century. It’s interesting that we as a society have a history of understanding that our civil liberties such as privacy and freedom may be threatened when we are seeking more “security” (eg in a time of war), but now this dichotomy is being talked about more and more with respect to technology.

The Cloud (Yahoo) dissipating history...

2009-11-09T19:12:00.000-08:00

Ok, so it's official, the historical webpages, from the beginning with primitive web design and homepages, just been erased by Yahoo. October 27th, Yahoo turned off the servers that housed over 7 million home pages without backing them up. Yahoo was one of the first to offer home pages to us, and now in the blink of an eye they are deleting and erasing them. I didn't receive any mail, notifications nor PSA's regarding. There are some digital historians (Archive Team) such as Jason Scott that tried to download and save as much as he could. Here is the article CLICK HERE.

So here is the problem we posed in class, who determines what history stays and goes if everything is in the Cloud? Is there an "FDIC" for webpages that can secure our historical home pages? Well, today empirically we can say NO.

Privacy, Freedom, and Secuirty Debate by 000.LA.QUA.NA0

2009-11-09T18:53:00.000-08:00

Two roads diverged in the digital world; and I took the one filled with Privacy. Brian Brin’s daunting tale of two cities made me frantic in knowing that today, we are nearing the loss of privacy and freedom and some ways. At times, I am “gung ho” pro-security, at the loss of my very freedom. I say this because I do not have the time nor energy to secure myself at ALL times. At the airport, I want to trust Homeland Security to assure my safe flight--- by any means necessary. Yet there are other times, I just feel like security is like an overbearing parent, watching me at all times. I personally feel that we are in the times of City One, of those who simply do not know and are not aware of “Big Brother” watching. Coincidently, there is the Surveillance Self Defense (SSD) created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that has taken the proactive job of informing us, making us aware of different devices and sources used by corporate and governments to store our information, reveal our identity, and tap into our worlds; yet EFF also provide ways to protect ourselves as well. Those who are in fact aware, through informative projects such as SSD (such as City Two), are usually super paranoid as myself at times. I find myself not wanting to connect to just any Wifi, not wanting to check my bank information on my cell phone, etc. I feel as though the government are not the only ones watching, but most of all greedy corporations are finding ways to steal your data searches, etc. to better “tend to your needs” AKA smother you with advertisements. Furthermore, Brin’s articles introduced the concept of the concerns over “freedom and privacy” reduced to ownership and flow of information. He uses certain real examples such as the Meagan’s Law that provides teachers, parents, virtually the public with a list of sex offenders and where they stay. Another example he uses is the Kindercam, which parents use to baby-sit the babysitter. Both of these examples inherently carry the importance of accountability; therefore does accountability determine exposition of information?

This article also reveals the universal acceptance of surveillance in examining freedom and privacy in the hands of the privileged (from priests to Kings) that secured and monopolized information. Consciously, and theoretically we have accepted the loss of our freedom and privacy through subtle usages of governmental and corporate “bate”: such as our cell phones and all its amenities we use, which in turn collect data from us; EZ Pass that save us time in the tolls, but in turn our location, time, speed, car make/model is tracked. On another note, I found Sean Dodson (“The net shapes up to get physical”), and Time Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila (The Semantic Web) articles menacing. First Dodson’s article examines an IP-enabled appliance world and soon human world as well. In a “Mark of the Beast” allegorical manner, Dodson illustrates how technology, specifically IPv6 is moving towards assigning IP addresses to appliances, cows, and soon people. The technological innovation is heavily considered for managing and conserving energy. The article also presents a modern day implementation of IP-enablement in how today fields of Hida Takayama has embedded chips in their cows, providing them with an IP address to track. As I, we as humans are far away from such tracking; today our passports have embedded a Radio Frequency ID (RFID) chip inside. Therefore, we are tracked at all times. Government and pro-security groups find this as a way to ensure our safety across borders; yet others see it as a way for governments to infringe on our privacy. Just as Dodson piece, The Semantic Web article is presenting a logical new-programmed web that can do virtually all of the thinking for us; restructuring the computer and web and making it “make meaning”. The ideas seemed more of improving search algorithms, yet in a manner that may become problematic. If we as humans have not found universal meaning across cultures and societies, how will a programmed web be able to? Meaning is not constant, and is ever-changing. The Semantic Web offers an ontological approach that will group meaning and formulate a response, but again, just as culture and society change by the second so does meaning. A program must be able to continuously be updated to adhere to these changes. They use the example of Semantic Web already in play with the preferences web content; but in contrary of that concept, my preferences changes as I age, therefore the Yahoo.com that open with sports news, will no longer be my preferred interface as I pick up a new hobby such as knitting.

The relevancy of these articles appears to encircle concepts of surveillance, information, and security. Their tangled web of relationships is what makes it hard to choose a side of freedom versus privacy. Especially when I have already sold my privacy for information and leisure applications and resources.

Are you getting scammed by Facebook games?

2009-11-06T11:06:00.000-08:00

We touched upon this subject in class, thought this article might be of interest:

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1935698,00.html

Still a Little FUzzy About "The Cloud"

2009-11-04T13:46:00.000-08:00

After reading the articles for this week, I'm still a little confused about The Cloud. I've never used Google Chrome or Google Docs. before, and still store most of my files on my hard drive. Although, things like my pictures do end up being dumped onto photo sharing sites like flickr, where I usually delete them from my computer afterward (and then re-save them if I need them for something later). So perhaps I do have one of my limbs in The Cloud.

Like our discussions previously about ownership and copyright, The Cloud brings up many of the same questions. If you're using and contributing to a mass entity, and not storing your materials on something that is physically yours, you run the risk of losing access and rights to those things, even if you paid for them (or perhaps even helped create them). This makes the whole hippie-esque idea of collaboration on the internet seem somewhat scary. I'm especially skeptical of data security, and how this could be regulated.

Goodbye Blue Sky

2009-11-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

The ever emerging technological developments and our relationships to cyberspace and typical daily interactions of it have left most individuals, those “privileged” with internet access”, drifting further away from the “meat space”. The budding “cloud” shows very interesting resemblance and analogies from other occurrences. As Downes points out, “The cloud reinforces the way with which we have attempted hitherto to organize ourselves.” Nowadays, in the typical work settings, we use Google documents, work space, linkin, and son forth. For academic settings, we use blackboard, edu accounts, etc, and for our social, personal, and self-made business profile settings, we use myspace, twitter, facebook, blogger, hi5, Wikipedia, among many more. Because of such dependency on these digital spaces Harvard law professor, Zittrain criticizes on the New York Times, that heavily decency on these online sites can be dangerous for the fact that if a service provider can decides to discontinue the service, users may loose all their data and material, and even more risky is that anyone can get hacked, therefore expose our information or maliciously misuse it. Despite users getting “locked in” and “controlled” by the cloud, or the security and privacy of our data and information become more vulnerable. On the other hand, Golden bashes Zittrain’s article, and hilariously calls him being on a “twenty-year snooze.” He praises various aspects of the cloud particularly its innovation such as the networked, “data-rich”, shared environments such as the iPhone application, AroundMe, as it uses the GPS which tracks down anywhere the mobile owner is. This informs the owner certain attractions nearby for the user to consume, as well as to twitter or such. This is definitely something very innovative in terms of technological and digital advances.

The role of the cloud it is impressively cool and interesting, but at the same time I have complete mixed feelings about it. At times I kind of agree with Zittrain’s “lost cloud” because the fact that anyone who is anyone decided they wants to learn, invade, or browse through one’s webpage can freely do so and already know more information about that person. It is exiting at the same time, as Downes suggests because the consumer of whatever product or service no longer stays behind the line of consumer/creator, but also becomes the creator by having the opportunity to advertise or provide any good or service through various free sights; also as he implies that these roles become more indistinguishable and most importantly, so do the roles of master and servant. As I am definitely interested in the music side of the advantages for the artists because of the cloud, the lines do definitely become more blurred with the relationship of artists and audience. This leads the superstar artists on major record labels to have to be more innovative because now the armature artists can compete with them if they know how to strategically navigate the cloud.

Talkin' Bout My Generation: Indie Music as Labor

2009-11-04T06:38:00.000-08:00

Stanley Aronowitz, David Harvey, Sheebani Patel, Marc Ribot, Matana Roberts & Others TBA

Monday, November 09, 7:30 pm

Brecht Forum

451 West Street (between Bank & Bethune)

This forum will address the question: can collective economic action effect positive change in the post-modern music industry, and, if so, what form(s) might that action and the collective that organizes it take?

Writer/political economist/geographer David Harvey has argued, in “the condition of post-modernity”, that post-fordist industrial restructuring has created conditions under which collective economic action by workers is difficult or impossible. "[outsourcing] for example, opens up opportunities for small business formation, and in some instances permits older systems of domestic, artisanal, familial (patriarchal), and paternalistic ('godfather', 'guv'nor' or even mafia-like) labour systems to revive and indeed flourish...". (p.152)

"Indeed, one of the signal advantages of embracing such ancient forms of labor process and petty capitalist production is that they undermine working class organization...Class consciousness no longer derives from the straight class relationship between capital and labour, and moves onto a much more confused terrain of inter-familial conflicts and fights for power within a kinship or clan-like system of hierchically ordered social relations. Struggling against capitalist exploitation in the factory is very different from struggling against a father or uncle who organizes family labour..." (p 151) [or against bandleaders, producers, local club or indie label owners who position themselves as fathers or uncles.]

And indeed, there has been a decline in the labor movement- in terms of both numbers and power- that is coterminous with the restructuring Mr. Harvey and others have described.

Writer, sociologist, professor and green party candidate for Governor of NY State Stanley Aronowitz, has demonstrated (“The Irony of the Indies”) that the indie label phenomenon represents Post-Fordist industrial restructuring in the music industry: basically, an outsourcing of production by the large capital formations which still control most distribution. His findings are in marked contrast to the marketing of indie labels and the subjective consciousness of most musicians who identify as ‘indie’- both groups tending to represent the ‘indie’ phenomenon as alternative or oppositional to corporate capitalism, rather than its latest and most successful adaptation (hence the “Irony” of the study’s title).

Musician/activist, Marc Ribot has argued (in an unpublished local 802 position paper ) that a form of unionism corresponding structurally and strategically to the post-fordist situation- an outsourced, ‘indie’ union, could potentially create leverage in situations where traditional structures and strategies have failed. He has, over the last 15 years, attempted to create a praxis based on this idea through several organizing campaigns involving ‘indie’ identified musicians.

A trend towards something like the above mentioned ‘indie union’ already seems to be appearing.

Sheebani Patel is a policy organizer for ROC NY, a group organizing collective action on behalf of restaurant workers. ROC NY has, as a group organized separately from the restaurant workers union, been able to effectively utilize tactics of struggle that would be risky or illegal if used by the official union. They have not, however, attempted to supplant the official union, but rather, entered into a mutually beneficial relation with it- the signing of a contract with the official union is the goal of many of ROC’s organizing campaigns.

The period and areas of decline in music unionism (and its accompanying ideologies) have not been empty in terms of musician self organization or ideology.

AACM, a group of Black, working class musicians involved in playing and composing Great Black Music (or “creative music”), organized to combat the effects of institutional racism in and neglect by the larger music industry and to create positive conditions for their own creative and economic survival. Although the AACM did not itself organize collective economic action against employers it did, in its mid-60s beginning, assume and support the existence of a musicians’ union that would perform these functions. In addition, the AACM’s adoption of a Do It Yourself model of struggle influenced several generations of jazz, rock, and experimental musicians, including punk trendsetters MRR (Maximum Rock and Roll) magazine, who in turn helped establish DIY as a political ethos of the punk movement and beyond.

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Storm clouds ahead???

2009-11-04T05:04:00.000-08:00

The authors of this week’s readings all disclosed opinionated commentary on something I have never heard of before this class: clouds. Often considered foreboding or ominous; dark with connotations of rain or storms to come – one must question if the same can be said for cloud computing. It’s all according to whom you ask. The most compelling arguments were from Jonathan Zittrain and Bernard Golden. Zittrain seems to think there are warning signs for “rain” elaborating on those thoughts by calling attention to the perils of Internet use to store information. He has valid points (or at least to himself) as he presented his evidence for and against the cloud; while supporting ideas likened to the “good ole days” of Microsoft Windows computing. Golden’s response to Zittrain reads like an old school vs. new school hip-hop battle song. Seemingly out to prove that Zittrain is living in a dark cloud of his own, he pretty much berates his ideas by presenting material that I found not exactly direct in disproving the statements made by the previous writer. “Soft Passwords” does not address the issue to which Zittrain implied when discussing security.

In the end, there are pros and cons for both arguments. While I agree with Zittrain that we must be careful with this new prospect, I disagree with his assessment that the freedom to innovate will be subdued - which is where I agree with Golden. The Internet is an evolutionary device and will progress as we are frequented with new portals for exploration and opportunities to ‘tinker’ (an example being the cloud itself). Competition for consumer dollars within these realms will never allow innovation to die as outlined by Cory Doctorow. While Golden may appear a bit more literate in contemporary computer prose and innovation, I am afraid he is a little abrasive in his defense of the cloud and may be a bit more unyielding in considering former applications who’s back the necessity for the cloud was built upon. Where we can all agree is defining security and privacy measures to be taken in this new paradigm and what that will entail. I believe there is some darkness in this cloud; darkness that presents a shielded front to what we really can expect when we allow others access to this information.

Asperatus, found!

2009-11-03T19:42:00.000-08:00

I’ll admit, I seem to be a bit suspect of all the identity-related issues that super progressive Internet culture thinkers have displayed before us (not just in class but rather in intellectual thought). It’s not that I’m not progressive, in fact I might even argue I’m post-progressive where I think the only thing that really ever changes are the hands on the clocks, aka time is the only thing that really moves forward. Sure the human biological physiognomy has developed since the early days of Homo Saipiens, yes culture has transformed globally since the beginnings of Homo Sapiens, continuing from the first records of scribed human societies and naturally, so have technologies (no, we didn’t have the telephone 150 years ago and back in the day, the wheel was a pretty big damn deal). Yet, I fundamentally believe the human mind is no more biologically sophisticated or smarter than it was when the brain developed in the same composition as ours now. Yes, we have developed skills that seem inherent to our functioning that were actually learned behaviors (like texting! Jk…no but really, procuring food, speaking a language or even smiling) and our skills are rather adroit and complex these days; but I would really argue that we are no more smarter.

So, when Bernard Golden writes, in regards to his pro-Cloud critique of Zittrain’s piece on the glory days of the PC and the perils of The Cloud that “The human mind is not set up to understand the power of exponential growth that doubles capacity and power every couple of years”, I have to gawk and remark. Besides being both disconcertingly elitist & bleak (and not in the alluring Nietzsche-an way), I find that there are two main issues that need to be grappled here—the first being an epistemological/ethnographic conundrum and the other being related specifically the Cloud.

Well, ok, first up—the human mind. Correct me if I am mistaken, but I do believe that the human mind conceptually conceived, technically tinkered and effectually executed the technological feast that we’re currently scrumptiously gnoshing. If the human mind was able to create & produce all of these innovations, then how could we not comprehend the multi-faceted features & functions of these phenomena? Yes, not everyone will understand everything about any/everything (yikes, to this day, I cannot tell you the difference between Pissaro & Hassam, but I could make your eyes bleed on the nuances between Bonnard & Renoir…wear goggles!); however, to make such a bold claim that the master of technological innovation cannot compute its own creation sounds like the methed-up red-headed step child of the Wizard of Oz & He-Man…aka ludicrous and fundamentally frightening (n.b. love to my red-heads all around, step children are the future of the global family and yes, two men can & should have as many babies as they so desire…hell, any two consenting adults of human DNA can bricolage a family however they so chose.) Now, people smarter & more dedicated than I have argued epistemological projects in more cogent presentations than I could do justice here; yet, regardless of your philosophical bent, it’s a pretty safe claim to say that in our human centric “life-world” (lebenswelt), our conscious understanding is an essential component in our constructed reality. Without the human, there would not be a Lebenswelt. So, for Golden to claim that our minds cannot comprehend our own constructions is ultimately incoherent.
Yet, this issue with its relationship to the Cloud is an vexing one – this particular technological entity seems to have representatives from each facet of society either schvitzing like a schlumpah or bewitched like a Narcissus’s own reflection. From the so-called experts on the issue to the ‘amateur’ commentators on the blogs & articles (and everyone else in between), there seems to be a contentious perspective as to the Cloud’s place in society, not only on its merits or abilities. The Cloud here is acting as a threat that potentially fulfills Golden’s statement. However, it really is not—it’s rather a delicious zeitgeist-y example of where we are in our societal standing.

It’s not that we don’t understand the technology we create at such rapid speed, it’s that we never can codify a universal fashion & function for these innovations…and that’s what complicates matters. Since it’s impossible for an entity to even have a unified singular identity other than its existence, the very identity politics that complicate the Lebenswelt, is reflected in our technological innovations. It’s not so much a dialogue (errr, war) of opinions but rather that pesky issue of different perspectives of comprehension (Ah-ha! Hassam was American! Pissaro, French... take that, Duck n Cover!) However, internet technology is something that has been created in an interesting framework, one which reflects both old & new social orders—something like the Cloud is reflective of this bridge position—conceptually its analogous, to say, a safety deposit box in a large bank (concept: OLD social order) but its an non-tactile tangible form/function of quotidian life (form: NEW social order). Therefore, since it has this inherent ability to fluently operate in the many strata of current social orders (aka, to speak in the native tongue of whichever audience it is addressing) its identity within society is wholly advantageous to maintaining social decorum. If someone thinks its effin crazy, then they don’t need to participate. If someone thinks it ameliorates his/her daily routine, multo bene! If someone wants to back his/her muzak & books up on to it, but keep her/his bills in paper statements locked in the carved-out safe behind the Turner-esque landscape in the living room, done and done.
Whatever opinion there is, the Cloud can accommodate. This should be the model for the next wave of technological innovations: an inherent chameleon nature that can function however its Interactor/Director chooses to operate it in. This reciprocal relationship between the human mind & our technologies needs to never be undermined – if we create it, we will adapt. If it adapts, we will understand. You listening, Golden?

Without Vision, a People Perish

2009-11-03T15:45:00.000-08:00

The concept of the cloud has always been a bit of a head-scratcher for me. I understand the basics, but the details of how it actually functions are beyond me. Turns out, I'm not the only one. Even "experts" can't agree on how to define it. But consensus on a definition aside, the cloud is part of our day to day lives, and according to some it will eventually make the Internet look "tiny."

But the more I read about the cloud, the more I see parallels with the readings from the first week of class. Is the cloud another manifestation of the Tower of Babel? Is it a solution to the tower? Is it all hype? Or is it the wave of the future? Is it the path to harmony, cooperation and world peace? Or is it the key to unlocking totalitarian rule over all man kind? Beats me.

I'm reminded of the quote, "without vision, a people perish."

I think about this quote a lot in our class. I often feel like mega-corporations are mindlessly proliferating technology with one eye always focused on profit margins. And it's evolving so quickly and growing at an exponential rate that no one has the time to think about consequences or ways to harness our collective power for the 'greater good.' Who's steering the boat here? It seems like, in an ideal world, an informed public would be at the helm. But its tough for the public to be informed about something that is so amorphous and obscure.

Shouldn't there be some kind of mission statement? A goal that we're all, in our own little way working towards?

Maybe it's a naive an underdeveloped thought, but there is something very ominous to me about charging ahead full-speed not knowing where you're going or why. I guess that's how we live our lives in some sense--que sera sera. But maybe if we pulled together some kind of vision, society wouldn't be in a constant state of trying to fix problems of the past (global warming, financial crisis, ....).

In this article I read from Business Week, one of Google's cloud hot shots made an off-handed remark about his pet project that really struck a chord for me. He said, "it's far easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission." Is it though?

The Cloud of Data

2009-11-03T14:57:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of the semester, I had a very naive and narrow view of the cloud. I hadn't seen it beyond the scope of such simple applications as web-based email and Google Docs, for example. However I think I'm getting the bigger picture.

In The Cloud and Collaboration, Downes assesses the analogy as people in the world as neurons in the brain. It's a viable analogy on a visceral level, but it can't account for factors of collaboration such as a shared mind state, emotions, etc. However it does raise some valid questions as to how, when, and why we tend to congregate for a specific purpose.

Zittrain and Golden are respectively anti-cloud and pro-cloud. Zittrain's perspective seems more three dimensional, albeit not entirely accurate or current, and with some major misgivings. However, he brings up some valid points.

"some purchasers of Orwell’s “1984” found it removed from their devices, with nothing to show for their purchase other than a refund. (Orwell would be amused.)"

-Am I the only one who hates the idea of any organization being able to do this?

Zittrain also addresses the issue of password security, and the fact that data in the cloud is inherently less private. I agree with this.

Golden is vehemently "pro cloud" and seems to outline the benefits of cloud computing without bringing a critical perspective to the matter. He dismisses everything Zittrain says as ridiculous and disillusioned. He has some valid points as well.

“My data inside of Facebook is only useful on Facebook; I want my data somewhere where any social media functionality can get at it and add value to me.”
-cool prospect

Golden doesn't seem to think the data in the cloud is less private, and that the primary issue is password security. As long as you have a great password, then you should be entirely safe! Unfortunately, this is not entirely true. Zittrain thinks that we may need to develop access barriers such as biometrics and finger printing. The question I propose to them is this:

When does it all become too invasive? If I have data that I deem so entirely private and insecure that I need to scan a body part for access, I'm probably not going to put it on the cloud. While the possibilities of the cloud are quite incredible, and its pitfalls quite menacing, I hope that we don't make the mistake of following one extreme or the other. While the cloud becomes more complex, it's not imperative to put the entire contents of our personal data in the mix. I think the model of cloud computing and personal device storage is pretty damn good.

Here is an excellent lecture by Alan Greenfield -

Adam Greenfield at PICNIC08: The Long Here, the Big Now, and other tales of the networked city from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.

I highly recommend watching this. It illustrates the cloud of data that is perpetually circulating, and brings the perspective of how people will interact with the environment as a result (not just with their personal devices). He also brings up such critical ideas as the invisible wall - datacentric or virtual safeguards that exert some form of social or physical control on us (Amazon removing 1984 from users reading devices!) The Cloud is really an all encompassing flux of information that's invisible in our atmosphere, but ever-present and incredibly influential.

2009-11-03T12:26:00.000-08:00

Probably what I most liked about the reading this week was how it all fit together, filling in different aspects of the same idea, so we end up with a rounded notion of that idea while only reading a small quantity of pages. I had never heard of the cloud before the fist day of this class, and never remotely understood what it was until the after the first few paragraphs of the first article, but because the articles explained it in a clear-cut manner devoid of unnecessarily minute technological details or an academic flaunting of word banks, the cloud comes across unclouded. The centers of debate which surround he cloud are tackled from contrasting perspectives in the different articles, so that we have the varying perceptions of the plusses and minuses of the cloud, and from there we can generate our own opinions.
Conceptually, I really like the idea of a cloud. What remains to be seen is how much the cloud lives up to the utopian concept I’ve constructed in my head versus how it will actually exist in a world where it will be forced to compromise as acting as another source of revenue and another means of regulating the realm of privacy. In regards to the issue of privacy, I imagine a lot of Orwellian fiction pointing to itself in an “I warned you” kind of way. I also wonder about the short-term clouds and the long-terms clouds in economic terms, like when we say we are concerned about the price model suggested in the articles, and the ways large companies sift money from our pockets through installs, is this the kind of business model that can exist long-term, or will competition drive the price down to something negligible? And when will we see newer forms of legislation pass that take into account the privacy issues surrounding the cloud? And as a fun side note, when will we see the cloud play a major part in a horror or romcom, being appropriated in the same way blogs, cell phones, and emails have in those genres?

"I look at Clouds from both sides now..."

2009-11-03T11:28:00.000-08:00

The Cloud or cloud computing has always seemed like a vauge, dense topic to me. Most recently it was dragged into the news due to the Microsoft/Danger T-Mobile Sidekick snafu. For those of you who didn't see the news last month, Sidekick users (a type of smartphone geared more towards social use than business) lost all of their data. Like all of it. The reason they lost all of their data is because it was not stored on their individual phones, instead it was stored in the cloud. I admit, I used to be jealous of my old roommate who had a Sidekick. It was the perfect phone for her, since she lost it approximately once a month and constantly had to buy a new one. However she never lost her data (including contacts, pictures, videos, settings) because she could just call T-Mobile and they would upload (download?) the data to her phone. However, when Microsoft/Danger lost the data, everyone was incredibly unhappy. A decent overview can be found here: http://bit.ly/1qYYe2

The dangers of placing your data in other people's hands, and the financial implications of that are discussed in the Zittrain and Doctorow articles. They worry about privacy concerns as well as malfunctions like the Microsoft/Danger one. I think Doctorow gets the picture right. Cloud computing can be incredibly useful as a collaborative tool. I have used Google Docs (and plan to use Google Wave if I could get an invite) almost exclusively for collaborating on budgets, presentations, to-do lists and spreadsheets that benefit from being updated by a variety of people. However I could not imagine letting go of my desktop based programs like Office or OpenOffice, as they work better at this point in time, if one is not interested in collaborating. I liked Doctorow's suggestion of storing files locally and backing up important files on the Cloud. While the cloud can be subject to data loss, if both your computer and external hard drive burn up in an apartment fire, its nice to have a file storing system not based in one physical locale.

I also thought that this article from CNET was helpful in disambiguating The Cloud from cloud computing, which gets completely mixed up in many opinion pieces, and frequently by APwire style newstories. http://bit.ly/3Xymrk

Also, apparently Mr. Zittrain has checked our blog out? He commented on a previous post, and left a link: http://bit.ly/4tJfmD to his response to Mr. Golden. I'm crossing my fingers that he will be our guest, so we can debate his concerns as a class.

The Cloud

2009-11-03T09:27:00.001-08:00

I thought Zittrain’s Lost in the Cloud hit on the key issues of privacy, control, security and innovation, all of which are issues that are at work in “the cloud.” I have to admit that until I read Bernard Golden’s Cluelss on the Charles: Zittrain’s Cloud Missive Got It Wrong, I didn’t necessarily see any of his ideas as problematic, rather I thought it was a well thought out article that detailed issues to be wary of as we “transform personal computers and handheld devices into sing-purpose windows to the Web” (as Zittrain puts it). Golden definitely had some good points when he was contrasting Zittrain’s ideas, particularly as it related to the “lock-in and control” section. In other sections I think he just attacks Zittrain’s examples without really discussing what lies underneath his assumptions about those examples (like the Google Voice example). Golden to his credit however admits that he agrees with Zittrain on the issue of data privacy. I think the jury is still out though on the degree to which innovation will be stifled or spurred by the cloud. I don’t think either said made a necessarily convincing argument one way or the other.

Just as a side note, I have to say I was totally put off by Golden’s tone. He obviously had good points that were in opposition to Zittrain, but his tone seemed just so snarky and borderline rude, that I had a hard time reading and taking his points seriously. zEspecially when I considered what his motives might be in terms of promoting the idea of cloud computing (there is clearly a financial incentive that can be read into what he writes). In a way I think it's almost easier to trust an outsider, someone who may not have a lot at stake in the outcome. I really think that he was often disrespectful at certain points the way he referred to Zittrain and his ideas. I think there would have been a better way to make his point that wasn’t so confrontational (especially the last line, “Professor, I have a proposal: I won’t do any lawyering if you won’t attempt to be a technologist.”)

I myself don't really have a strong opinion on the concepts of cloud computing. For most of the semester I've had very strong initial reactions either against or for certain concepts, but on this issue I feel sort of on the fence. I'm very concerned about the issues of privacy that Zittrain mentions, and that would be my number one hestitation to truly embracing the concept. Also if anyone is interested, there’s a great talk by Zittrain where he talks about the future of the internet and its relationship to civic technologies. You can watch it here: http://ow.ly/udCG. It doesn’t mention the cloud specifically, but it talks about several issues relating to digital technologies, safety and privacy. It’s also just entertaining. He also wrote a great book The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop it: http://ow.ly/ue57, which details how the internet is essentially on a path to a “lockdown” which could end its cycle of innovation and could bring about new unsettling kinds of control (there are clear parallel’s to Lessig’s work here as well).

A cautionary tale

2009-11-03T07:34:00.000-08:00

Bernard Golden’s harsh criticism of Jonathan Zittrain’s article in the New York Times, seemed like the classic argument between a technophile from the industry and a cautious but possibly misinformed layman. Yet, let’s not forget that Golden and Zittrain have very different stakes in this. While Zittrain is a law professor who is obviously concerned about legal implications, Golden is the CEO of a consulting firm which specializes in cloud computing, where he is protecting his turf and facing the prospect of loosing money. In July when both articles where written, the authors could only agree on issues related to data privacy, which is much harder to guarantee as today, data can be located everywhere.

After having read this week’s readings regarding the storage of data “in the cloud” I had felt informed but nevertheless ambivalent about this new development. Then, Sunday, I spoke with a computer-savvy friend of mine who brought up the recent T-Mobile Sidekick disaster (a joined project between T-Mobile and Microsoft where apparently all personal data that customers had stored on their devices i.e. contacts, photos, calendars, etc. where lost). Looks like consumers need to be cautious and better have some kind of back-up before they entrust all their data to others.

http://www.infosecurity-us.com/view/4600/lawsuits-fly-over-tmobile-sidekick-cloud-data-loss/

http://www.mediabistro.com/mobilecontenttoday/tmobile/tmobilemicrosoft_sidekick_customer_data_loss_fiasco_a_cloud_cautionary_note_for_google_users_139851.asp

Stephen Downes, in his fascinating paper “The Cloud and Collaboration” takes the discussion surrounding the cloud to a more philosophical sphere, where he compares the cooperation between people with the collaboration of nerve cells in the human brain. Although, this analogy as Downes admits, is at times a little too far ‘stretched’ (i.e. neurons, unlike people do not share a vision, understanding or belief) it still provides a useful model for comparison. For Downes, the process of forming links or connections is not based on collaboration but cooperation (interesting distinction that emphasizes the autonomy of the individual). What sounds at first a little like Jenkins’ vision of the “knowledge community,” is made more complicated by the constant need for negotiation. Language is interpretational, and therefore Downes uses the term “learning community” which indicates the potential for knowledge but does not assume it. So far, so good.

Downes then cautions against judging the contributions of members in this new “global collectivist society” by content, since to him this kind of evaluation is guided by attributes of capitalism (better & more, i.e. valuing one person's contribution over that of another or valuing most those who have the highest amount of connections). Instead he emphasizes the importance of communication in this new paradigm - no matter what kind. He concludes that since the role of creator and consumer becomes indistinguishable, the difference between master and servant will also soon be eliminated. Well, isn’t this prediction a little bit too utopian?

The Cloud???

2009-11-02T18:46:00.000-08:00

Last spring I managed to attend a one-day conference that was held by Google, and within the conference there was a brief presentation on The Cloud! it was quick, brief and described the cloud as something in the works that would help people save their data online, "wouldn't it be nice if we weren't constricted to a computer anymore?". There were no details, no talk of security, payment..etc. I eventually went up to one of the Google employees and asked her about the Cloud, I asked her about security, especially when it comes to the Patriot Act and having governments access any private information. She like the presentation was very brief, and almost dodged the question, with a simple, like all Google applications the data would remains private.

The readings this week also confused me as to what exactly is the Cloud. I was surprised to find out that the service would be offered with a fee and not actually free (as is the case with most of the Google Applications). Yet, Golden's article helped clarify some of my confusion, and raised some interesting issues related to how the Cloud functions, and what it's actually good for. Though I still fall back to the security issue, that both Zittrain and Golden discuss and agree upon. How secure will a person's data be on the Cloud, with all it's 'uses', is it safe? Hackers have been hacking into computers all the time, according to Golden the Cloud is worth a shot since PCs don't have the best record in that sense. Yet, I ask again is it safe?

Then comes in the consumer/ commercial part of the Cloud, with things becoming extremely commercial, how can we escape this commercial aspect of the Cloud, Why would a person pay a fee to store their data in a possibly insecure place, when the data could be 'safe' on their PC?

All in all, what I'm trying to say is that I would wait till the water has been tested before I dive in.

Today's forecast is CLOUDY

2009-11-02T17:18:00.000-08:00

I have to say, before these readings I have never heard of The Cloud. To my understanding the Cloud represents the online utilization as a hardware and software tool; where a computers’ hardware and software no longer have to be built in the modem. The Cloud is a virtual machine allowing users to transfer data, store files, and use applications all on the web. “The Cloud and Collaboration” provided me with analogous meanings that range from ideals of brain neurons to the communities of meaning. This particular article seemed to resemble the ideologies around globalism; yet it seems as though it tries to differentiate from such thoughts. Other readings presented those who oppose, and those who celebrate its existence and emergence. Zittrain caveat “Lost in the Cloud” article reveal the pitfalls of The Cloud. He reveals the Cloud as a mere thundercloud that will: cause users to lose their data from others (companies); weaken security by leaving the users’ information open to hackers’ who may hack passwords; users’ information will be open to the government where they will lost their privacy to F.B.I audits etc.; oversea spies will have access to users’ bank information and other communication; application development and code creativity will cease; and gatekeepers such as Facebook and iPhone will determine web usage. Likewise, Doctrorow’s “Not Every Cloud has a Silver Lining” article harmonize with such warnings revealing that the Cloud is a strategic approach by investors and other capitalistic bound entities who want to control all pecuniary endeavors through the web (free Internet). He also reveal the expense of The Cloud emergence and states that its users would most likely be those who use supercomputers and need massive storage; yet everyday Microsoft Word and Excel users may not consider, perhaps only for backing up critical files. On the contrary, Golden’s boisterous toned rebuttal to Zittrain article exposes his affinity for the Cloud. Perhaps his only agreement with Zittrain was the loss of privacy; other than that, he negates all claims, demeaning Zittrain and urging him to stay away from discussions dealing with technology (Internet) and to make himself useful in dealing with the legal ramifications. His utopian views make the Cloud as an opportunity for innovation “in networked, data-rich, shared environments, where he alludes to Google Voice (cloud based telephony app) and iPhone’s Around Me App (GPS that displays peripheral companies). Furthermore, Google’s Chrome OS introduction attempts to befriend users and introduce this open source browser for those who spend most of their time on the web---which is pretty much EVERYBODY in some way shape or form. Chrome OS can be used on any platform, and makes itself to be very user friendly. Surprisingly, it does not address any of the issues that are heavily in debate right now. Maybe avoiding them is the best way to go while in its nascent stage of development.

Overall, the Cloud discourse brings a nostalgic debate concerning the emergence of the computer age transitioning from the primitive print catalogue of storing information. Earlier we were discussing Nelson and Busch’s prophetic views of the Internet and Cyberspace where man’s memory is stored, and the possibilities of hypertexting through information and knowledge. Likewise, what I see is evolution and the debate that usually come along with any new technology that can alter and change the norms. The Cloud is a battle of the old computer age versus the new Web 2.0 computer age. At the end of the day, I am curious how far the tug of war will go and to what extent. Would love to hear from software developers both left and right. The Cloud and its ramifications are not easy to simply grasp in one sit down; we, I, and even academics such as Zittrain must first visit its core, understand its essence, then derive an argument. For starters, I found a great video, in a simplistic, Gerber food manner, where I can take in and digest.

The Cloud 101

Configurability meets Cinema

2009-10-31T08:05:00.000-07:00

Here is one of my favorite movies which visually display what convergence and configurable cultures are about. The movie is called "Brown Sugar", although on the outside it reveals a love story between 2 people from childhood to adulthood, its embedded theme is about the love of "real hip-hop" and those who want to stay true to its essence. Here is a small clip illustrating a performance by the epitome of hip-hop--Mos Def.

Brown Sugar Scene

2009-10-28T12:04:00.000-07:00

Henry Jenkin’s Convergence Culture is a far cry from traditional media and culture analyses that feigned passivity of the viewer (especially in regards to children) and the shipwreck that can be made with their lives due to their inability to make educated decisions for themselves while viewing programming helmed by consumer driven media producers. And while some may disagree, I believe he has made legitimate claims in his dissection of the changing paradigms within media, creating plausible theories most realistic to what we are witnessing today. Citing convergence as a “process” not an endpoint, Jenkins takes us on a journey utilizing popular culture ‘hit’s and various participants within those arenas (for and against) to build a case of how these convergences affect our culture - legally, educationally and financially to name just a few. Chapter 5 was the most compelling for me as Jenkins confronts media literacy and religion as stirred by the world of Harry Potter. I also found his notion that convergences are in part constructed in our brains over a series of medium; not just through consumerist corporations noteworthy.

While I agree with much of what was presented to defend his claims, there were several areas within this book that caused a bit of concern for me. I disagree with his statements concerning the ability of participants to manipulate and create their own media. While participants are indeed able to become more involved in the production of what they wish to convey, in the end corporations own media technologies (down to what we can forecast on our own podcast) and will continue to be gatekeepers as such - even to the smallest degree. Viewer constructed media displayed on websites must agree to the terms and conditions of the technology vehicle that will host it. We must also consider the disenfranchised a bit more. Although he stated these perceptions were based on early adopters of media who meet a certain criteria and standards, we cannot fully gauge where the ‘process’ will take us without their input. Overall, I did find the book fully engaging and a great perspective in outlining what we now face in our media laden world and how it may be shaped by our participation.

Here's a Video from Henry Jenkins on convergence culture where he even mentions President Obama's use of media:

http://vimeo.com/4672634

I Love the Trashy Parts

2009-10-28T08:00:00.001-07:00

..of media, that is. The parts that most people don't take seriously, and usually brush aside. Two things made me realize this. One of them was Joshua Gamson's book Freaks Talk Back, and the other was pretty much everything ever written by Henry Jenkins. Which is why when I first read Henry Jenkins, I was blown away by the fact that someone could look at things like Star Trek, the Beauty and the Beast TV series, and The Matrix (gag) in an academic light. I was completely smitten, and to this day I've made it my goal to study with this man.

That being said, and Kaitlin already having posted on fan culture (damn) in Convergence Culture, I'd like to apply that to Jenkins' idea that because of the internet, fan culture isn't as shameful as it might have been in the past. On the internet, no one is going to tease you for being a Trekkie, in fact, there are communities that will embrace you with open arms. And TV shows and films that have been forgotten by many are still celebrated within various online communities. Film and TV are migrating onto the internet in order to keep their spot in media history and maintain and develop their fan base. This is also an aspect of what Jenkins calls transmedia storytelling, where content exists within more than one media platform. For example, The Matrix was primarily a movie, but was also a video game, comic book, and animated series, all of which added to and expanded to the original story told by the film. You cannot get the full story of The Matrix just by watching the films, and doing so (like I have) might leave you wondering why there's so much hype.

Configurability and the return to collectivism

2009-10-27T22:31:00.000-07:00

Professor’s Sinnreich book, Mashed Up, brought to me a new discourse how we perceive music and how it is viewed by the audience, the artists, and the music industry and how they make sense of musical codes and practices. As a musician, former ethnomusicology student, and fan of the classic rock, folk, and ballads, I believed so for almost my entire life to define “real” music as authentic, played by music instruments, composed for the sake of creating “art” by the musician, meanwhile spreading its aura with liveness. It is not to disregard other forms of art such as rap, hip-hop, DJing, and other forms of configurable music as not as authentic as that of “real” artists, and only being copies of original work; though this did not take away my likings towards these categories. On one of the seven opposing binaries, artist versus audience, the question of talent rises whether it is a necessary component for artistry. What came to mind, for example, is one who plays an electric guitar and uses distortion pedals, the wa-wa, volume equalizer knobs, while keeping up with rhythm and adding a few riffs here and there versus DJ’s synchronization, smoothly transitioning songs, scratching, looping, while using all the other gadgets the apparatus, requires similar knowledge of handling and skill. I suggest it becomes talent when it is handled smoothly, maybe with signature style, and is able to move the crowd. I am very much enjoying reading this book since it brings various elements of how music intertwines with the politics, legal, ideological, aesthetic, technological, and social elements. In regards to the binaries, it is very interesting to read about how the opposing binaries, with the emergence of configurable music, become grayer and grayer leading to a mash up. However, I would have enjoyed reading more about interviews with musicians outside of the configurable culture and hear their perspective in terms of configurability and the opposing binaries. Meanwhile, it is very intriguing to read about Sinnreich’s deconstruction of the traditional musical discourse and reconstructing its framework to that which challenges today’s conservative music theorists, connoisseurs, elitists, and so on. This reinforced the music of configurability returning to the people, for the people, by the people; folk, making it accessible to all; a collectivism.

Authenticity and Musical Culture

2009-10-27T21:47:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed reading Sinnreich's book Mashed Up. It provides an extremely interesting framework for looking at musical culture; particularly hip hop. When the author speaks of his initial discovery and interactions with music, I feel as though with a few date changes this could have been a narrative about my childhood. I discovered recording with a fisher price tape recorder. If you ask my mother, she'll tell you that the recorder was easily my favorite toy of all time; we were inseparable. I graduated to making mix tapes by recording radio selections onto blank tapes; and then eventually singing, rapping, or talking over music while recording. I was fascinated by the aspect of interaction; to me, music had become a read-write culture, if you will. Its not terribly different from Lessig's notion of the internet evolving into a read-write culture (of course the implications are quite different).

The development of my musical tastes seem to run counter to the authors, as my first musical love was hip-hop, and I initially rejected the non-structured and less rhythmic rock music of the 1960's (that my parents so often listened to). However I grew to appreciate such music. My passion for hip hop seems to mirror the author's. I've always loved this music, however I began listening in the "golden age," the early 1990's when hip-hop and jazz fusions were ruling the scene (lifelong tribe called quest fan here). Similar to the author, I never have much appreciated the more simplistic and less listenable hip-hop of the late 70s and 80s, other than realizing it was a precursor for the music I loved.

As I grew older, I made it a point to broaden my horizons. I grew to love the alternative and grunge rock from the 1990's almost as much as I loved hip-hop. To this day, these two genre's in that particular time period remain my personal gold standard; my musical "home" if you will.

What I've been most fascinated with in hip-hop is tracking it from a small fad, to a movement, to the development into a legitimate culture. A piece I read recently (Tryin’ To Make It Real: Live Performance, Simulation, and the Discourse of Authenticity in Rock Culture by P. Auslander) has inspired me to write a paper (or possibly my thesis) of authenticity in hip-hop (as well as other aspects of the culture). It is my opinion that, just as Auslander asserts in his paper, the notion of "real" hip hop is largely ideological rather than stylistic. In terms of authenticity, I would imagine that rock and hip hop are very similar, although I see hip hop as being more complex. For instance, a hip hop artist's authenticity might depend heavily on socioeconomic status, area of residence, race, lifestyle, even (once upon a time) internet access, and more - where this is not the case with rock music. The standards of authenticity are constantly evolving. I would to love talk about this in relation to configurable culture in class.

Admittedly so, I was unable to finish Mashed Up this week (I continue to plug away, and I will most definitely finish). I will probably be using the book as a source in future work. It's funny - as much as I love music, I'm more attracted to understanding the culture around it rather than creating it. Perhaps I have a natural inclination to be a critic

Fan Culture

2009-10-27T21:23:00.000-07:00

Henry Jenkins' thoughts about convergence culture seem to stem from the way that fan culture has worked for much longer than the present reiteration of it. Even in the 1970s when most households only had access to a few network TV stations, the Star Treck fandom was established. Fandoms seem to be essentially convergence cultures as they are typically, if not always, transferring work from one medium into another in a shared way. Whether the work is done collaboratively or not, it is only a fandom if it is a community with a vested interest in sharing products with one another based, in some way, off the original work.

Jenkin's mentions that fandoms have been in operation for some time, but it was the Internet that brought them into the public sphere and allowed them to grow, flourish, and attract legal attention from the studios. Prior to the fandom existing in a public space, Jenkins says that while corporations might have heard or guessed what was going on with their material, they turned a blind eye because the repercussions were minimal. Now that the fandom has come into the public sphere, companies are worried that there material will be misrepresented or that other people will profit from their intellectual property. I think this is ridiculous, as does Jenkins (although he uses more words). Fans participating in the Harry Potter fandom expressedly state that they are not trying to make money off of their work, so theoretically this should not harm the company. It can only serve to promote the company, as it can be seen more like free publicity. However, the corporations are worried that the "wrong image" will be portrayed by these unlicensed fans. I find this especially intriguing, as parody - which would ultimately show an image against the studio's beliefs - is protected, but promotion is not. I suppose the fear is that the fan produced work would possibly be even more popular than the original? Or perhaps the fear is that no one is making money at all? I would hope that case law on fan fiction will eventually prove that it is a legitimate form of fair use, as long as the fans are not profiting and are clearly stating that they are not representatives of the copyrighted material, only fans.

While fan culture is nothing new, it has now been opened up to a wider audience with new technologies based on networking and sharing. Jenkins argues that this convergence culture is reshaping our world, and he hopes it's for the better.

Convergence Culture

2009-10-27T19:48:00.001-07:00

For the Star Wars fans:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5058529870025933880#

Henry Jenkins "Convergence Culture" discusses the convergence of media in our modern day, how various media mediums are being used by both consumers (fans) and marketers. Though Jenkins uses specific examples such as American Idol, the Matrix and Harry Potter to get his ideas across, I think that his arguments tend to scratch the surface. In other words, Jenkins tends to focus on specific relationships between the fans/ consumers and the media industry and advertisers, which is only half of the story.

Though it was written in 2006, which is considered a recent book, the internet and media age is shifting so fast that certain examples Jenkins use seem to be slightly outdated. especially in his last chapter where he discusses the political relationship between the audiences and the media, which has changed dramatically under the Obama 2008 presidential campaign. A recommended read: "Bloggers on the Bus: How the internet changed Politics and the Press."

Yet, I still believe that Jenkins was able to trace a valid shift in the traditional relationship between the audiences and the media, which is constantly shifting with the development of the internet and media. Convergence exists and is constantly changing the dynamics of media.

Convergence Culture

2009-10-27T19:33:00.000-07:00

I've been mulling over Jenkin's "Culture Convergence" for a few days and I'm still not sure what to make of it. He talks about grassroots empowerment of the people through technology, which I'm all about, but something in the way he talks about it irks me. Maybe it's the fact that his conception is so tightly tied to consumerism. Or maybe its just that the book feels like it was written more for media executives than for the spoilers, fans and photoshoppers out there.

On the other hand, I do like that he discusses convergence culture as an exploratory process that is helping to hammer out the details of online participation and democratization. I think that these kind of popular culture negotiations of boundaries between consumerism and creation are very important to the future of society. In the afterword, Jenkins begins to delve into the downside of convergence culture, citing issues of racism and sexism. I wish this discussion had been woven through out the book rather than tacked on to the end with a simple cop-out answer of, "that's democracy for you." The consideration of the downside is just as important to working through the implications of convergence culture.

I'm interested to see what the other reading will bring to the table, maybe expand the conversation.

But in the mean time, I thought that I would share some links that got me thinking about consumerism, social justice and remixing/converging culture. Fodder for the google jockey at the very least.

Interesting that DJ Hero launched the day before we talk about remix culture...

Let's Be Intelligent About Social Media Intelligence (HuffPo)

Slideshow: Mud Stencils, the Non-Toxic Graffiti (Utne)

Barbie loves rock 'n' roll (Salon)

say hello to my little friend...

2009-10-27T18:49:00.000-07:00

stop, before you go any further (and have 20min to spare. entirely worth it)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03u_6DadGms

ok, I know I’m rather lucky— and growing up in New York City is definitely the reason why. While most of the anecdotes from friends or pop culture always harp on the difficulties of sneaking out of the house, I really didn’t have too much of a problem. I never had to drive, no nosey neighbors to bribe and no sneaking out through the window. Just wear your socks in the house and quietly close the door. And at age 14, at the peak of the mainstream drum n bass techno revolution, the sickest raves were only a cab ride away. Sure, sure, my friends & I had to score fake id’s and often flirt our way into clubs (woooot, sound factory! The tunnel! Avalon!) but all of the risks were worth it. New York City club scene in the mid-to-late 90’s was as fantastical as the urban legends made it – and interestingly, since then the club scene has drastically changed. The 90’s was all about segmented lines, the segregated yet profound exploration of subcultures, which was in tandem with the overarching trend, in the age of post-political correctness and culture war confusion. In America, in an attempt to erase the culture lines, we in fact, landed up drawing even deeper ones that allowed for little transference or exchange. Yet, things have departed from the pre-aughts philistinic transgressions (does Max Martin even have a job anymore?).
We have arrived in an curious and evocative new era of music construction and expression. More so, the identity politics of the club has changed --- much like the disco revolution of the late 1970’s in New York, where race, sexuality, gender or subculture identification were erased once you made it through the golden gates (this is no bold claim: a loooong line of musicologists have often remarked on the dissolution of identity politics against the backdrop of the disco beat, a genre of music that drew from both traditionally Black and Latin musical styling’s, making it one of the first synthetic musical genres. A great source, Peter Shapiro’s “Turn the Beat Around”…), the club scene now reflects this opportunity for freedom of identity inside a contained and defined space.

Victor Burgin, the consciousness critic, once remarked that fantasy was the “space between public and private lives, between consciousness and perception” and I think that thanks to configurable culture, as defined by Dr. Aram Sinnreich, we are experiencing the enactment of that very inner space between public and private lives into reality. Configurable culture or mash-up creates the final product from a multitude of sources thanks to the open shared format of technology. In music, it’s most easily defined through the new genre of music that incorporates different styles of music in a singular composition—particularly, as configured by a DJ, or the master of the project (much like the Producer in Disco). DJs, whose arena is often dispersed between the confines of their studio and the audience of the club, have been pulling music samples from different genres and blending them in to a set or a song. And this mash-up is even linguistically obvious…thanks to “slash” culture, aka, defining a genre by segmented slash. For example, whenever anyone asks me what music I am into, I always say “something along the lines of electro/(slash) disco/ techno/indie/anything with a electronic-y beat”. Just as pop culture loves to joke about the fluid identity of entertainers “model/actress/musician”etc, music has arrived at the same fluidity of identity politics. This slash/mash up has been on the lips of music followers since, probably, post-Napster (although, I could be wrong so...feel free to interject).

So, now on any given night, when you enter into a particular music space, you expect to hear & experience a musical performance than incorporates the multitudes of genres. In fact, my mother, who is a active member of the “new music” genre (in simple reductionist terms: the update of classical music), has recently been asking me to attend concerts and gigs with her as she knows that I love music, but particularly electronic-based music. New Music has long been searching how to inject classical with freshness, and often the technique is to incorporate a DJ and a set of electronic sounds. While I think it’s gimmicky and detracts from the poignancy that classical music so often emotes, this is a clear example of the relevance and pervasiveness of mash-up culture.

However, there exist fecund examples of mashup culture and its prevalence, yet what is most interesting about mashup culture is the identity discussion that it beckons. Music styles have long marked identity lines (and should I need to drop a source, I would love to honor one of my favorite books, “Let’s Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste” by Carl Wilson. Just trust, and go read. Or dammit, just think about high school—did Metal Heads talk to Popettes who scoffed at Country followers? The chain of derision and segregation is so cemented into our social myth that it’s part of our collective consciousness)—our social imaginary has long been constructed by musical styles. Yet, there has been a major shift due to mashup culture- hiphop is mixed alongside dub, next to disco, next to electro, next to classical; this is possible thanks to technology, but what is so fascinating is that the space in which one goes to experience the music now is peppered with faces across all social boundaries. Black kids dance with white kids, gays dance with straights, boys next to girls, flannel next to ballers, popped collars next to air force ones, the list continues. Much like the smooth integration of the musical styles, so too are the people seamlessly weaved together. Unlike the disco era, where yes, sociopolitical lines were almost dissolved (as I referenced before), there were still segregations on the dance floor—the black kids were breakin in the corner, the gays clustered in the center, the richer whites in the seated areas etc etc (see the brilliant video posted above)…But nowadays, the blend is undeniable.
Recently, on a Saturday night, I went to a underground Chinatown party, where the DJ spun the breadth of electronically-produced beats (electro/disco/funk/dub/techno/drumbass/grime/Bmore house/hip hop) and I looked around, and my best friends (who are Iranian Fashion Girlie Girl & Kashmiri HipHop Journalist) both remarked “holy shit, have you ever seen such a diverse crowd?” and it was true. I was one of a few blondes, standing in my nautical stripes & combat boots—in a sea of latin chulos, hiphop jews, black Chelsea gays, east asian thugpreps, white hipsters, south asian bankers, I could go on…but a combination of every color & youthful subculture was represented (soon we're going to have to redefine the linguistic boundaries all of these labels represent, as they're almost becoming obsolete). White kids breakin, black kids discoing, latin kids wallflowering, etc etc. It was a sight to be seen—the traditional sociological post-modern ideals of convergence and divergence had momentarily been shelved for a few hours of freedom.

However, expunging on this foundation of the club being a place where the politics of identity are subverted, the modern day phenomena almost takes it one step further. Thanks to mash up culture, we have also simultaneous overturned the gap between private and public spheres. Even Matt Wand denotes this in an interview with Sinnreich, “The private has become public. The music itself has become just a background.” The transience between private and public is reflective of the configurative culture, and if we apply this to Burgin’s idea of the fantasy being the space between public and private, one could make the argument that we have arrived at the enactment of the fantasy as reality. I mean, who ever thought that the average person could become a crowd-bumpin, master of creation in the comfort of her/his home without any formal training and congregate a sea of blended color, styles, attitudes & socioeconomic individuals? Exactly.

So, I beckon this: not to sound Hegelian here, so if we’re living the thesis of fantasy, what’s the other side of the equation (antithesis) that will produce our next synthetic evolution? Can we ever really anticipate the synthesis? I mean, we never expected the age of configuration to come about…

From Consumer to Citizen via Convergence Culture

2009-10-27T17:20:00.000-07:00

Henry Jenkins' analysis of recent media history - the emergence of convergence culture - draws mostly on popular culture, while already anticipating in 2006 its political potential. It seems as if the Obama campaign staff read the book - participation being one of its main strategies, and the utilization of multiple media platforms in the dissemination of information being another. Yet, while these strategies were very effective, I have doubts whether the political participation was not hinged on the gravity of the election. Now that Obama is President many will probably return to being mostly consumers rather than politically engaged citizens.

Unlike Jenkins, I am also more skeptical towards games, reality tv or other popular culture products as vehicles of knowledge. I find it problematic when Jenkins calls the spoilers a "knowledge community" because in my opinion they are sharing INFORMATION - knowledge on the other hand is more comprehensive, encompassing experience, analysis, methodology, know-how, etc., and is applied to interpret information or data. In other words, I don't see what kind of knowledge one gains by being able to identify who will advance on survivor or even what the 'true' meaning of the Matrix is. While members questioned the accuracy of ChillOne's predictions, they never questioned who actually profits from their debate. The same holds true for viewers of American Idol who criticized voting procedures but never critically looked at who sponsored the show. Hence, where do consumers learn critical thinking skills to assess information?

Further, I have to disagree with Jenkins on the question of the effectiveness of blogging versus cultural jamming. Most blogs are read by people who already agree with the author, while jams often reach a wider more diverse public. Ironically, I also just learned that it is customary in Germany that bloggers receive cease-and-desist letters from companies who take offense in what is being stated about their products. Most importantly, Jenkins points out that while grassroots media is effective in reaching a particular strata of people to mobilize their dissent, mainstream media is still needed in national campaigns (yet networks will refuse to air spots that are critical of certain industries of capitalism in general).

ICANN to move toward Internationalized Domain Names

2009-10-27T10:37:00.000-07:00

Thought this would be a little interesting...
http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=96E03140-1A64-6A71-CEAD9482266712F8

Convergence Culture

2009-10-27T06:41:00.000-07:00

I couldn’t agree more with Jenkins about the importance of consumer participation and how we are in a media world that is dominated by the idea of convergence. I think even more recent examples of new media technologies like Twitter have only proven his point to the nth degree about where we are as a society with respect to digital convergence as we see the combination of several form of medium. While reading Jenkins I also recognized very close parallels to some of Lessig’s work around copyright law and intellectual property, as those two areas in particular affect very much the sort of remix culture that Jenkins is advocating for. (Although I didn’t have time to read Lessig’s Remix and I think we actually took it off the syllabus, I plan on reading it to see how he addresses these issues more directly than he did in Code V. 2.0).

My problem with Jenkins (although I think his ideas are really revolutionary and there’s a significant amount of truth to them) is that I think I’m ultimately in the camp that he would call “critical pessimists” (identifying media scholars such as Mark Crispin Miller, Noam Chomsky and Robert McChesney as being typical of that movement). I just don’t think that Jenkins places enough of an importance on the issues of media consolidation and conglomeration and the extent to which it chills free speech. This is a problem that he admits exists and does indeed spend a few pages talking about, but he just sort of washes over some of its biggest problems. He doesn’t necessarily convince me that with the explosion of citizen participation is necessarily a good thing. He gives some examples of how it creates an opportunity for creativity and political participation, but he downplays some of the bigger problems that it creates, such as racism, sexism etc. I do agree however, that it is important, and I love the examples he gives of fan fiction, and the collaboration that comes from the Survivor spoilers, and I think these are key notions to have in any kind of public participation in the marketplace of ideas. That being said, I think he is underestimating the power of the established media system. There are evidences to the contrary of course in our modern day society (for example the rampant decline in newspaper readership) and I think the book would absolutely benefit from an exploration of these ideas as well.

I know it sounds like I’m being a bit pessimistic about his work and/or this book, but I actually think that this was the best book I’ve read that attempts to describe from an academic viewpoint the effect that the digital revolution is having on media culture. I think his examples are relevant, easy for the readers to understand and feel involved in, and they typify much of what’s going on with consumer culture in the digital age. His coverage of issues that range from social to political are relevant and important as we look out towards the future of our digital landscape. This is without a doubt one of the best books I’ve had to read for this program so far, I really can’t recommend it to anyone enough who cares about the issues that we’ve been discussing in class.

Modern Framework's Nemesis: Configurable Culture?

2009-10-26T21:56:00.000-07:00

This is definitely a book you must read over and over again in its entirety to absorb everything. There is so much here that can be discussed. Presumably, the trajectory of the previous readings are great segues to some main concepts here. The methodology alone for this is innovative and unique: a combination of multidisciplinary studies from critical studies to information sciences (critical information studies). This approach allows a more focused yet universal look into music. Since its inception, music has been regulated and controlled by powerful social institutions. Aram’s first chapter delved into how and by whom the regulation of music was maintained. Whether as overtly as law, or covertly through ideologies, and technologies, we see the regulation of music maintained through different institutions. Through the anecdotal of Berlioz and the French musical, Aram conceptualizes the “modern framework” (system of thought, which strongly defines and draws the lines between dichotomies such as: Art/Craft, Artist/Audience, Original/Copy, Performance/Consumption, Figure/Ground, and Material/Tools). Furthermore, these dichotomies are solidified and validated by social institutions such as music industry and legal standards of licensing, news shows and commentaries defining what “is hot”, and so forth.

Although the modern framework appears to be immovable and unshakeable at times, there is a crisis arising--- the “Crisis of Configurability”. With the advent of technology and new cultural music forms, things are bound to change. These new communication devices such as: new editing applications, DVD’s, MP’s, PDA’s and so forth is paving new ways for society to interact. Thus the configurable culture arises. In addition, new and old technologies are being use in new and innovative ways; manipulated by a myriad of cultures. Such as Aram discussed, these technologies and its various usages is what drive innovation (and more money into commercial pockets by the way). Take the first handheld camera as an example. Documentaries altered the compatibility of the camera due to the users taking filming to a whole other level in shooting “in the crowd”. They became lighter and more discrete. Configurability is gradually changing these modern frameworks’ dichotomies. Aram speaks of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” song and “Snakes on A Plane” film, which was driven by resistance to the modern frameworks (through audience as composers and new remixing and mash-ups).

To further validate this social, political, academic concern, Aram discusses the binaries where configurability strokes a gray area between the two, lending an area of examination (though legal ramifications, interviews with DJ’s, and other musical relatives). Interviews with DJ’s illustrate their attempts to resist Legal, Commercial, and Ideological regulations through their aesthetic approaches of mash-ups, artistically including content that is political and funny, and even underground music staying true in maintaining untouched by the mainstream. Even so, these restraints and their attempts does not stand completely 100% against the regulators, for some underground is acknowledged by mainstream as popular, some DJ’s mash-up’s are genre-regulated by radios stations, and even some are financially sponsored.

Ironically as a video gamer, I ran across an upcoming interactive game called DJ Hero. Conceptually the same as Guitar Hero, just has a turntable and buttons, etc. (See below for an overview and link to the website) DJ Hero, DJ AM, DJ Jazzy Jeff, DJ Shadow all are promoting this DJ hero game as experts and as game players. Linkign some concepts regarding the restraints of the commercializing regulation where does this game place DJ’s in the modern framework? In addition, through learned body reactions of DJ’ing how will the future (youth and/or DJ enthusiasts) of DJ’ing and restrainers be affected by this? Borrowing from Parisi’s paper, through technology, a formalized DJ style is being learned and consciously accepted. The interview with the game developer Jaime Jackson worked with the DJ’s as “fans and developers”. Just as Aram discussed in the restraints of the configurable artists not completely being free of the modern framework, here is an instance where DJ’s mash-ups and styles become commercialized and further learned by the mass and mainstream.

DJ HERO™ Overview

The makers of Guitar Hero introduce an entirely fresh and innovative way to experience music. DJ Hero features an amazing variety of music across genres – tracks that you love and reflect who you are. Using an authentic turntable controller, you will spin and scratch more than 102 songs into unique mixes and become the life of the party. Get ready for a whole new phenomena in music.

Access Unprecedented Music Variety: Mix and scratch over 102 individual songs, highlighted in over 93 exclusive new mixes that blend genres of music, including hip-hop, electronica, R&B, Motown, pop, and rock. DJ Hero brings the hottest artists including: Black Eyed Peas, 50 Cent, Justice, Marvin Gaye, Beastie Boys, N.E.R.D, and more.
Experience Music in a Revolutionary Way: The DJ Hero turntable controller immerses you into authentic DJ culture allowing you to scratch, cross-fade, and beat match. Customize your mix with a variety of effects and samples transforming a face in the crowd into the life of the party.
Rule the Hottest Parties: Where Guitar Hero brought gamers into the world of rock ‘n’ roll, DJ Hero brings you into the hottest scenes around. Party in venues reminiscent of real world locales from around the globe including an ultra plush and sexy Hollywood Hills style mansion to an open air beach club in Ibiza.
Party with Your Friends: Features online and offline multiplayer competitive and cooperative modes.

The internet will host translated domain names

2009-10-26T17:10:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8326241.stm

This is a change in the use of internet, but how much will it affect it's users?

Hackers take over Times square

2009-10-23T17:34:00.000-07:00

http://campbellbrown.blogs.cnn.com/2009/10/23/hackers-take-over-times-square/

Interesting projects computer programmers (hackers) came up with.

Discourses surrounding Video Games. Some themes on readings

2009-10-21T15:52:00.001-07:00

Brathwaith, B. (2007). Joystiq Interviews - About sex and games.

http://bbrathwaite.wordpress.com/ (Brathwaith’s blog)

Author of Sex in Video Games. Lead Designer on Playboy: The Mansion

Shares that video game rating follows the same format as film ratings. Sexuality is appropriate.
Seabrook, J. (2006) Game Master. The New Yorker.

http://www.will-wright.com/ (fan website of Wright)

Will Wright change the concept of video games with the Sims. Can he do it again with Spore?
Nolan Bushmell
1960’s Spacewar. MIT grad students, Tech Model Railroad Club.
1970’s Atari’s Pong
Soon after, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command, Pac-Man, and others emerged.
1980’s what is known the God game. Computer animation, graphic art into 2D pixels. More Recent 3D
Will Wright – Master Game Designer. Creator of Sims and Spore.
Electronic Arts founded in 1982 by Trip Hawkins
Gamers worry about the industry’s future.
1990’s coin operated games started to decline, and home-video games began to take rise.
Shigeru Miyamoto, designer of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros.

Bogost, I. (2006) Playing Politics: Videogames for Politics, Activism, and Advocacy.

How can video games make political statements? The answer is underlined by the concept of “procedural rhetoric” which represents the way a videogame embodies ideology in its computational structure.
• Procedurality
o A static course of action, an established way of doing something. Linked with laws and procedures. It is tied to authority, structured top-down. Sometimes relates to ideology, it can cloud our abilities to think outside the hegemonic system.
• Procedural Expression
• Videogame Histories
o Games become documentaries because they take on real historical events. Therefore it invites us to reflect and empathize with the particular event
• Procedural Rhetoric
o Playing these games gives players a political impact that otherwise without playing may never experience since they are embodying a particular political event with the role in association.
• Playing Politics

Parisi, D. (2007). Playing the Interface: Video Games as Bodily Techniques.
• Bodily interfaces – (interfacing – different electronic devices attached
• 3 interconnected aspects of these interfaces that are used to reorganize the body in relation to the game
o Capture – Interfaces ability to “read” the user
o Mode of capture – e.g. Wii Remote, depends on a sensing apparatus in the remote to track its movements through space relative to the light emitting diodes (LEDs) in the sensor bar.
o Remapping – Control games that demand a new bodily configuration of the user. e.g. Dance Dance Revolution & Guitar Hero.

• Bodily Techniques
o The Biological
o The physiological
o The Social – the place were the biological and physiological are produced.

• Video Game – Action-based medium characterized by a set of material processes that occur at two levels, the “operator” level and the “machine” level.

o Photographs  images
o Films  moving images
o Video Games  actions

• Main Focus
o Bodily interfaces
• http://us.wii.com/
o Aspects of Bodily Interfaces – Mode of Capture
• The mode of capture structures the mode of bodily interactions with the interface.

Goal – To inspire educators to thing about the new paradigm in gaming for learning.

Ito, et al (2008). Living and Learning with New Media. pp. 18-39

o Transformations in the Meaning of “Friends” and Friendship
o Media and mediation between generations
o Messing around
o Getting Started
o Tinkering and Exploration
o Social Context for Messing Around
o Transitions and Trajectories
o Geeking Out
o Specialized Knowledge Networks
o Interest-Based Communities and Organizations
o Feeding and Learning
o Recognitions and Reputation

Smuts, A. (2005). Are video games art? Contemporary Aesthetics.

Art, according to historical, aesthetic, institutional, representational and expressive theories.

o Intro
o Video Games should be considered art.
o 3 candidate games
o Max Payne
o Halo
o Splinter Cell
o Where’s the art?
o Video game art: a historical narrative
o Using Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
o Video games and every major theory of art
o Conclusion

Gee, J.P. (2003) What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

Games should be read in different ways.

Bing and Google search Twitter!

2009-10-21T14:26:00.001-07:00

We've been talking about how this needs to happen, and here we are!

How will this change searching? And it sure looks like Google doesn't want Microsoft to get any kind of edge with Bing.

2009-10-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

Is gaming mainstream in our culture? One would think yes with reports on 1010Wins this weekend about Electronic Arts’ production of more games for women just in time for your Christmas purchases (I see a long tail somewhere in there); and when the venerable family channel QVC offers a Sunday afternoon presentation with the "latest" in gaming - you know you've hit big-time! Our readings this week all encompassed different aspects of gaming in our culture, but although the NEW Yorker Magazine’s GAME MASTER shed some light on the creation and popularity of games (albeit more focused on the life of Mr. Will Wright) - I still do not know much more about video games than I did before from these readings: Are they Art or Not? (The burning question from Aaron Smuts which he fails to answer the in its own merits); The production of games of sexualized nature and volatility (parent’s worst nightmares) in gaming and digital distribution (the retail middleman’s worst nightmare) per Brenda Braithwaite’s interview with Joystiq.com.

These are all questions I encountered from the readings this week. Although interested in many aspects of gaming and how the critical processes involved with playing them can stimulate creativity (or not) in its participants, I considered the implications of the social networks created by youth's interactions with gaming more interesting information. Culture, identity and status are all qualifiers in access and interactions to youth involvement, but I strongly contend learning capacities garnered from these interactions should be explored as social media tools continue to play a major role in all of our lives, but especially those of young people. Agreeing with the findings of Living and Learning in New Media, a cultural shift towards experimentation is necessary in educational programs in order to maximize the potential of students who while having technological access and a developed sense of maneuvering through ‘messing around’ – are still subject to formal (I’d like to say archaic) teaching structures that have been instituted for ages and sometimes a constraint to their learning capabilities. Even Will Wright noted this in his experiences.

Living and Learning In New Media further awakened my pursuits in determining connections between traditional media tools and their progression and sustainment through today’s society as displayed in new media. For example, In Game Master, John Seabrook alludes to Mr. Wright’s strong influence of traditional literature and novels and those connections were heavily purveyed through the multimillion dollar games he created. These points were also displayed in Smuts’ article in his attempt to compare and contrast video games as art with more traditional modes of media. All in all, I believe there is much to consider as we move forward with the advancement of new media and the hands of its producers in our society – especially as those producers become younger and younger.

Dibbell, I want the past week of my life back.

2009-10-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the late post. I just finished Play Money, which I didn't finish as quickly as I would've liked because, well, I re-installed WoW (after only 20 pages into the book). My partner and I share an account, and after the desktop died last year, I haven't bothered to reinstall the program on my laptop (for good reasons). I missed my pathetic level 11 Blood Elf.

Play Money brought up several ideas that struck me as interesting, but I'll only mention a few here (don't wanna spoil the presentation, right?). The first we discussed after we read Boudrillard, the idea of money as simulacrum. The paper dollar we call money has value because we give it value, and does not actually exist beyond a physical piece of paper. The second was the idea that play is nothing but a distracting waste of time, and nothing productive (re: capital) is created from play. He cites dozens of historical accounts of old white men who discuss play as unnecessary, while also mentioning societies in which play is integral to production. The third, which I can definitely relate to, is the feeling that once you try to make play productive (re: try to make a living playing a MMORPG), you are disconnected from the game in a way. You might spend more time playing, but you are no longer immersed in the game, you don't develop relationships with other players (no one can be trusted), and you're not the same type of player as the teenage boy playing purely for leisure. Although I've never played UO, I have several friends who play WoW and I've constantly heard it described as "like work, but slightly more fun." The more time you invest in the game, the more responsibilities you have (i.e. as a guild officer), and the more it seems like work. This can also happen if you make the decision Dibbell did.

I was also surprised that Dibbell decided to report his UO earnings (not much, although he was receiving a lot of press) on his taxes, and even more surprised that the IRS considers anything with monetary value (i.e. if you get paid in kittens, those kittens can be sold, etc.) worth mentioning on your taxes (hey, I'm 22, I've only done my own taxes like twice). Dibbell mentions that if this is true, MMORPGs could tax their players (after all, a virtual gold coin can have value just like a green piece of paper). Scary.

Activism and Video Games

2009-10-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

The ways in which activist mobilization takes shape online are very interesting to me so I was especially excited to read Bogost's Playing Politics article. But I have to admit that I found it rather disappointing because it served to almost reaffirm my thoughts that video games are not necessarily useful or practical in campaigns for social justice. Though i did find his discussion about practicallity illuminating, I have yet to see an example of a political video game that serves its purpose. I think it has to do with a couple of things. First, people are always suspicious of online content with alterior motives. These games are not just for fun or education, they exist primarily to get you to take action (donate to a campaign, sign a petition, etc.). Second, video games thrive on stereotypes, especially when trying to simplify complex issues for a quick game. Take for example this video game I came across a year or so ago about the crisis in Darfur:

http://www.darfurisdying.com/

The primary purpose of the game is to engage people in the crisis in a more personal way so they feel compelled to take action. The heart behind this is good, but the execution is, in my opinion offensive and ultimately counterproductive. By transforming the suffering of these REAL people into a video game exaggerates the distance between video game players and the Darfuri's by turning the war into a cartoon spectacle. The game also minimizes the scope of the issue by toning-down the brutal truth even as it tries to educate people about the realities of life in a refugee camp.

This is not to say I think educational video games aren't effective, quite the opposite actually. I grew up on educational video games (Sim City, Sim Safari, Super Sleuths, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego) and have always thought that interactive games are a great way for people to learn. I liked Gee's article because he shows that video games don't have to be educational, per se, to be learning tools.

Smuts' article about whether or not video games are art gave me a lot to think about interms of the aesthetics of art and about how the definition of art will be changing as more technology arises. But it left me with an important question: why should we care? Why is it important if a video game is art or not? It seems like a vain argument to me, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe establishing some video games as forms of art could boost the legitimacy of political games.

Video game as marriage proposal

2009-10-21T10:03:00.000-07:00

http://www.asylum.com/2009/10/19/a-geek-tastic-mario-wedding-proposal/?icid=mainhtmlws-main-ndl7link3http%3A%2F%2Fwww.asylum.com%2F2009%2F10%2F19%2Fa-geek-tastic-mario-wedding-proposal%2F

...We've come a long way since Pong.

2009-10-20T19:50:00.000-07:00

After this week's readings, I had the irrepressible urge to bust out the emulators for some 8- and 16-bit nostalgia. From the simplicity of the original joy-stick to the visual-tactile interfaces of now, we've truly come a long way since Pong.

I thoroughly enjoyed studying the evolution and socio-cultural implications of video games. In terms of interactivity, the video game might be the perfect medium. They're just plain fun. Fortunately, they are also much more complex than they may appear. For instance, Mario is more than an ill conceived game about two italian plumbing brothers that dig the Princess and stomp on menacing turtles... it's an engaging simulacrum of an alternate reality in which the player must learn to function through the manipulation of a fictitious character. This fictitious character and the environment have certain functional limitations; the player must function within the confines of these limitations in order to have a successful experience.

Despite the bad rap that video games receive, critics overlook the fact that they are incredibly effective educational tools. They involve logic, reasoning, motor skills, rapid cognition, memory, and more. In Gee's critique of the education system, he writes about how many of the educational theories in place in our public schools are dated, and conceived in times infinitely different from modern reality. He asks "Is it a wonder, then, that by high school, very often both good students and bad ones, rich ones and poor ones, don’t much like school?"

Video games (and even Alternate Reality Games) are a possible solution to this problem. Its rare to find a medium more engaging than video games. Malcolm Gladwell explores the topic of video games in this piece, asserting

Indeed, video games are not games in the sense of those pastimes—like Monopoly or gin rummy or chess—which most of us grew up with. They don't have a set of unambiguous rules that have to be learned and then followed during the course of play. This is why many of us find modern video games baffling: we're not used to being in a situation where we have to figure out what to do. We think we only have to learn how to press the buttons faster. But these games withhold critical information from the player. Players have to explore and sort through hypotheses in order to make sense of the game's environment, which is why a modern video game can take forty hours to complete.

Despite the fact that video games teach the user a game-specific skill set, I would argue that by engaging the player in a vast array of problem solving, such games may even make the user smarter (and better at problem solving in general). Perhaps this cannot be said about games like Pong which are now obselete; but today's games are incredibly complex. Instead of criticizing video games as a mindless, sit-back medium, educators should work to develop games that contribute to education and whatever subject matter they are hoping to teach.

The potential of video game technology

2009-10-20T18:39:00.000-07:00

I was excited to learn more about video games from the readings assigned last week, since my own experience with them is very rudimentary. As much as I wanted to believe in their potential, I have to admit that the examples given in the readings left me rather unconvinced that video games can or should be anything but games.

Whether functioning as educational tools, being perceived as art or serving activism, I wonder what is at stake when writers seem so desperate to elevate game culture into higher realms. The most common criticism hailed at video games is their propensity towards violent content, which among other things, has negative influence on young players. Secondly, there are a variety of games that are used in the recruitment and training of soldiers (none of the authors address this fact except Robert Jones, who mentions America's Army & Battlezone). In this context the question of whether video games can be perceived as art can be affirmed with Joseph DeLappe's video game intervention: Dead in Iraq - an on-line memorial inserted manually onto the screen of America's Army, recording the name, age, service branch and date of death of each service person who has died in Iraq.

http://www.unr.edu/art/DELAPPE/Gaming/Dead_In_Iraq/dead_in_iraq%20JPEGS.html

Would Aaron Smuts, who analyzes games as a philosopher, not as an art theorist, and approaches the subject from an aesthetic point of view recognize DeLappe's piece as art? Philosophers of art often forget that since Duchamp, art has taken a conceptual turn. Hence, any analysis of "games as art" has to consider whether the game questions or undermines its own structure to become socially relevant. The practice of "modding" that Jones discusses, seems comparable to other forms of appropriation that can be found in visual art. Cory Archangel's Super Mario Clouds (2002) eliminates everything from the original game except the clouds. Video games can be read as a metaphor for the rat-race in general because the premise of most games is that the players, despite their encounters with various obstacles and opponents, strive to win. Here, the video game is not action but contemplation, all we are asked to do is watch the clouds drift by.

http://www.mediaartnet.org/works/super-mario-cloud/

Gaming to Learn

2009-10-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

I found this week's readings incredibly difficult. How is one supposed to read about some of their favorite games and not find themselves sitting in front of their computer/tv eight hours later with no work accomplished? I compromised by first reading, and then trying to apply my newly critical lens to my experiences while having a lot of nostalgic fun in the process.

I thought the Parisi article and the Gee article complimented each other well even if Gee was not specifically discussing learning particular body techniques in the way that Parisi was. Gee's introduction to gaming was interesting, for most people I've encountered have grown up with video games, and if they have not, they show little interest in learning any complex games. The Wii, as Nintendo hoped, has changed this, but out of my friends and relatives who play the Wii, they play the basic sports games they already understand the rules to and therefore do not necessarily encounter new ways of learning like Gee discusses in his article. When Gee mentioned that his son, who has ADHD was able to concentrate on a video game, but could not concentrate in school I was intrigued. I think the dominant belief on this subject is that video games somehow cause ADHD, since the integration of graphics, sound and tactile response cause the attention to be continually diverted. On the other hand, perhaps it is the process of memorizing multiplication tables, whereby one looks at a sheet of paper for thirty minutes, its the problem. "Learning games" for preeschoolers have developed their own market, but there are few learning games for middle or even high-schoolers. Gee theorizes that video games introduce many new ways to learn, so imagine the possibilities if someone could produce an entertaining first-person fighter game based on Shakespeare's tragedies. The 'uncool' and 'boring' part would have to be overcome, but I suppose until someone breaks the mold (Sims style) it will not be considered financially feasible. Games like the Sims suite or Civilization, which are already popular, could be modified to include small economic lessons (macro and micro) as well as some cultural education. Spore is already a quasi-lesson on evolution. Educational games can be done well, as I know many of my contemporaries learned the perils of contracting cholera while trying caulk their wagon's across the Mississippi in Oregon Trail. The games would not have to provide the entire picture, but perhaps as an introduction to the topic, a much more interactive setting than the introductory video.

I think Parisi's article comes at a great time in gaming, and I would hope that he continues to research this topic as even more games and systems debut that take their input from the entire body, instead of only hand-controls. These are much more akin to educational simulators like NASA has been using for decades. The difference is the lower price-point (I wonder how much it would cost to have a full-scale simulator of the space shuttle in your backyard?) and therefore the ability for large portions of the population to own a system. I think it will take some time before non-gamers can adapt to playing complex games, even in these systems, as I mentioned earlier. Gee is correct in saying that gaming requires a different way of thinking and learning, and that hurdle is too large for many non-gamers. However, like we already see with the Wii fit, video games will continue to expand into offering virtual versions of activities we already do, or at least understand in the physical world. For example, while my Dad has never ski-jumped before, he enjoys playing it on Wii Winter Sports, because he is familiar with ski jumping. He cannot ski-jump in the physical world, since the investment in learning to jump well enough to survive would require an immense physical and financial investment but for $300 and 10 minutes he can try it on a video game. While someone who ski jumps in real life would probably not be satisfied, my Dad is entertained. However, this does not mean he will pick up Call of Duty III for the Wii anytime soon, as its too confusing (even to ski-jump, he needs my little sister to get him through the menu screens).

Finally, I want more Brathwaite! Sex in video games gets a very negative reputation from non-gamers, however sex in the movies used to be considered a vile, base form of entertainment only for the low class. Now, relatively explicit sex scenes can be "artful" and important plot points in Oscar-winning (accepted by the industry) and high grossing (accepted by the populous) films. It seems that with some video game sex activism and the emergence of a generation raised on games containing sex, it will eventually be considered okay.

Video Games: Identfication and Pedagogy

2009-10-19T20:30:00.000-07:00

Sadly to say (meaning I should have been working), last week I spent some quality time with my husband playing Sony Playstation 3’s UFC Undisputed, and Rockband 2 (along with family). Common ideologies that circle around UFC consist of a male dominated, hyper-masculine arena where EVERYTHING goes. Without going into the social and political implications of this game, I will just say there aren’t any female characters, nor any females that I personally know whom play. Despite those matters I am rather good at this game with a lot of UFC cultural valued knowledge, which in essence leads to my undefeated record. On the other hand, there is Rockband 2, where I have a complete band—“Green Lettuce” comprised of a bass guitarist (hubby), electric guitarist (brother), vocalist (interchangeably mother and cousin), and yours truly as drummer. Rockband allows a space for both male and female to identify within play in giving a gender choice upon customization. I bring up my individual experience this week to illustrate my personal linkage with salient points brought up by David Parisi, James Paul Gee, Brenda Brathwaite, and Ian Bogost. They all in some way illustrate that anti-video game advocates must move beyond general ignorant perceptions of video games being violence invokers, time wasters, and the “death of childhood”.

David Parisi’s “Playing the Interface: Video Game as Bodily Techniques” revealed a rather unique academic evaluation of video games. His argument is founded on the theory of Marcel Mauss’s “techniques of the body” stating that the body interact with the mediums according to culture codes in which it is associated with. For example, society’s hygiene necessities require us to brush our teeth. The toothbrush is made where the brush is extended to the very end of the object, hence yielding us as “brushers” to brush in a back and forth, up and down motion. In addition, cultural practices repetitiveness in movies, television ads and commercials continuously illustrate this standard to us. In this case, Parisi’s argue that the physical make-up of the console, it’s placement in our hands at play, the haptics (“interfaces that invoke a sense of touch”; actively touching the controller through mashing buttons, stepping on pad, etc.), all are key factors in our bodily interactions and learned habits through video game play. (5) Video gaming, unlike other medias is not about just watching and cognitively drawing meaning, yet video games involve muscles, thumbs, and moving. (8) The gamer must acquire grammars of bodily action, meaning, when I play Rockband as a drummer, I must learn of the grammar and lexicons of the controller where each signifier button, signifies reaction needed to complete a function on screen. In my case the red, yellow, blue, and green indicators on the pad ushers me into the acquisition of learned actions as each pad has a color that I can memorize and hit the mark whenever the interface requires me to. In doing so, I must grab a seat, and my body must be in a manageable position to the drum set to achieve this. (12) Just as Travis Barker, I mimic his real life drummer moves to assist in my simulated experience as a drummer, in hopes that I will pass the board and receive more fans. This leads to a valid point Parisi made regarding video games as an active educational process where touch in cognitive development is possible. I cannot say that I am a renowned drummer, but I have learned basic drummer knowledge in terms of timing, rhythm, and importance of syncing with my band.

Likewise, James Paul Gee, illustrates the educational possibilities of video games (both good and bad). As an academic who took theory to practice, he engaged in a video game upon drawing conclusions. Although he definitely lacked video game skills, he immersed himself into game-play which helped him effectively drive home his points. He discusses the identification that takes place in games. Earlier I discussed my personal experience with UFC Undisputed; although only given the options as a male, I was able to customize my player to help shorten the gap of connection and identification with my player. In adding personalized features and clothing, I was able to simulate my real self for game play. Likewise, Fight Night Round 4 allows you to take a picture, download to your account, and the game will then create a face in accordance with your picture. If you sit there long enough and tweak with perfection, you will have a boxer with exact facial features as yourself. (Unfortunately this I do not have time for.) Identification in game play is important for it connects the player and further immerses them into the simulated reality. Gee also talk about the challenging yet do-able nature of video games. With that concept he further discusses the (closely related to cognitive science) “theory of human learning built into good video games”. (6) As today’s school system is more about standardized testing and drills, some youth are disinterested in school school; yet on the other hand with the advent of emerging technologies of MMO’s and RPG’s youth are found investing a considerable amount of time playing games on the computer, video game consoles, and cell phones. So why hasn’t schools caught onto this phenomenon? Just as Ian Bogost discussed in his piece, video game designers are creating games such as Ghost Recon and Call of Duty 4, whose content and narratives pedagogically usher the player into historical knowledge, illustrating the importance of the military as active participators in writing this history. Bogost bring up important factors regarding the manner in which “docu-games” (games including documentary like footage within the narrative play) reenact and recreate historical events. I found the JFK Reloaded game interesting where it allows the gamer to actively illustrate their perception of how JFK was murdered. Through simulation the game prompts the gamer derive their own conclusion of JFK’s death.

Synonymous of such political implications of video games, Brenda Brathwaite interview illuminates her stance in regards to sex in games. Just as film and television have adult narrative, so does video game. The film industry follows the MPAA rating system; likewise video games industry follows their ESRB ratings. Although they share similar industry standards, video games receive more slack concerning sex inclusion within the story. This is part due to youth’s large consumption of the video games. Brathwaite suggests designers to be aware of and consider their audience, in addition to entering sex naturally into the content of the game. With the emergence of digital distribution, games are immediately and readily available for download, conveniently dodging the bureaucracies of the heavily policed store retail market. In this case it is somewhat free reign over content design. Although this may appear true, creativity and adherence to audience will still remain the determining factors of the game success; just as Gee mentioned, the game must be “do-able” with a creative (learning) purpose.

Ultimately, just as Parisi, Bogost, Gee, and Brathwaithe writings illustrate, video games has a lot to do with learning and human development. From identification, to cognitive development, the video game interface introduces a new and creative way of learning. Schools and other institutional learning facilities need to cease negative commentary regarding this platform and consider embracing. If our youth are interactive and emerging in this game play, then why not take advantage (I mean everyone else is). Am I suggesting video game play for Homeroom and 6th period in school? --- No. I am merely suggesting recognition of video game capabilities and find ways for transcending its inclusion in school as it is out of school.

Play Money

2009-10-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

I have to say that I actually laughed out loud at the very end of the book where Dibbell describes his encounter with the agent at the tax office. After Dibbell describes his selling of virtual goods, the tax agent responds with “That’s so weird.” It totally rang true for me because throughout the whole book (which I enjoyed and thought was quite entertaining although it deals with more serious issues as well), I just couldn’t get over feeling that the whole experience of Dibbell, was well, to put it very plainly, somewhat odd. Now that very well may be because I have no personal experience with MMORPGs. That being said, I thought it was a fascinating glimpse into this world without being too technically or judgemental to people who think this stuff is just “weird”. For me however, I still don’t necessarily understand why people would be willing to spend so much time, energy and money on something that exists only in a virtual reality, although I realize that those worlds aren’t necessarily considered “play” for me. I actually think that’s one of Dibbell’s strengths in writing this book is the extent to which he describes the relationship between work and play and how he sees that fitting into his one-year experiment.

If you haven’t read this book and are interested in some of the key messages, I suggest reading the epilogue. Although the majority of the book is worth reading, the themes that relate to this class are pretty well defined in the end of the book. The issues that were particularly include the problem as to whether you have to tax virtual goods, and defining their “worth”. The same applies for the trade of virtual items, whether for currency or not. It’s not quite accurate to say that these virtual goods don’t have a value just because they aren’t “real”, because they do have real value to people who are willing to pay for them. It forces us to ask the question, how do we define what is valuable in our society. It makes me think about my own spending and what kind of abstractions am I exchanging when I buy something, such as a service like a haircut, or a ticket to a movie and I put it on my credit card, or I pay cash for it. This reflects back to some of the readings from Baudrillard and his discussions of simulacra and simulations.

I wonder if there have been any developments on this front, or if the IRS has made any statements since the book has been published on any of these issues regarding to taxation. I wonder what would have happened if Dibbell had filed the ruling and what the response would have been. I think he should have paid the $500 and considered it an expense for his yearly total! I think as MMORPGs continue to grow in popularity, these issues are only going to become more and more prevalent and will ultimately require more regulation.

2009-10-16T22:53:00.001-07:00

The “Living and Learning with New Media” piece explicitly reminded me of some of the topics we dwell on in my class on Integrating Media in Education. The structure itself is reminiscent of some of the UNESCO reports I have to read most weeks, but the content was also similar in its focus on how digital technology is changing standard thought on the learning process and blurring the line between formal and informal education, both inside and outside the classroom. Specifically because thoughts on “how to teach” have been swirling around my head recently (I’m currently a TA and loving it, so I‘ll probably rally for a teaching position next year if I can…), I realized that the format we use in this class would probably be considered quite progressive in our consistent use of technology for the sake of learning, our peer-based structure, in which Aram is basically responsible for the set-up but we play a fundamental role in influencing the trajectory of our class discussions, and our ability to our readings, which allows for a sense of customization and agency students rarely obtain. I try to follow this model as much as I can in my recitation section, and the students tangibly appreciate it. Granted, it’s always going to be different with undergraduates who are taking a course because it is required of them than with graduate students with I a particular interest in the subject, but I think it ‘s working out really well.

Anyway, I thought the “Game Master” piece was all right. It’s always fun to read about designers and their relationships to their next big games, but ultimately I sensed Seabrook wasn’t particularly well-rehearsed in all things videogames, so it was fun to see him sum up EA history and settle into Will Wright’s quirkiness and try to describe a Guitar Hero peripheral. Also, this particular piece caused a few professors at Berkeley to confront me on the subject of Spore and basically ask me if I thought that game was going to change the face of the gaming world. After I told them that I didn’t think so, they recommended I read this piece, which I never did, because I didn’t think I needed to. Retrospectively, I think I was right, but I probably would have liked the more personal side of the article nonetheless.

And just brief thoughts on “Are Video Games Art?” I kind of detest this question because it seems most discussions about the validity of games are valid forms of art end up being more about people standing ground than actually trying to understand the perspective of the other person. This is a debate I’ve found myself in too many times, and it is one of the few game-related issues where I am uber opinionated and am liable to unleash hell’s fury on those who oppose me. I made a ridiculous amount of notes in the margins of the article while I was reading it because of the extent that the issue hits home. Even the games he chooses are crazily important to me--Max Payne was the subject of one of my first in-depth narrative analysts a few years ago (and yeah, I argued for the game as art, kind of), Splinter Cell was a focal point on a piece I wrote about the Metal Gear Solid series, and I used to play Halo and Halo 2 semi-competitively when I was in high school. So, I have a lot to say about this article from both the perspective of an academic and well as a fanboy. And, sure, I did have some problems with it, but I appreciated its ground-up, simplistic approach and especially thought its comparisons to aesthetic sports and chess helpful entry points for thinking about the topic at hand.

2009-10-16T17:47:00.000-07:00

My favorite reading for this week was probably “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.” The entire article was written in a refreshingly frank voice and with an awareness of its anti-academic qualities that I usually find fun to read. And, as anti-academic this claim itself is, I am always a fan of making broad claims and drawing thin tangents which call for a lot of “a-ha!” moments. It usually seems to signal the cutting-edge nature of the material, and also usually tends to be coupled along with an approachable, even colloquial writing style, as it is here. Anyway, I’m not huge into social networking, but I also thought I noticed broad socio-economic disparities between myspace-users-as-a-group and face book-users-as-a-group, so it was nice to see my personal thoughts validated. Cooler, though, were the thoughts on aesthetics, which start on page 3. Usually I find academic studies regarding parallels which run between social groups and media preferences to be obvious (yeah, teenage boys do like first person shooters and they probably aren’t into Golden Girls--it‘s a good thing you surveyed three-hundred of them so we could find that out!). But all the article’s concern with how different social groups prefer, say, different color backgrounds, was fascinating, even if I’m not sure exactly what these trends mean.

For shorter commentary on the other pieces I read, the “Top 10 dot-com flops” was fun--I think I may have run across it before. There were a couple companies I hadn’t heard of, and, because of the amount of time I’ve spent watching old Disney movies with my niece over the past few years, I wasn’t even aware Go was so dead. “Know It All” was also interesting. As a frequent wiki-lurker, I’ve often wondered who shapes the content I take as fact. Now I know (though my feelings are mixed)! Lastly, “Intellectual Value” reminded me of some of what we talked about in class last week. As a side note, I went to Memefactory last Friday, which was a pretty fun experience and basically served as a super-efficient rapid-fire introduction to 4chan’s /b/ for my roommate. I also spotted our guest speaker from last week there and I got to watch him “kind of dance.” PS I had a meeting which overlapped with class time this week, which is why I wasn't there.

Google Wave

2009-10-16T14:42:00.000-07:00

Humorous demonstration of Google Wave.

NEWS: World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee admits web address error

2009-10-15T14:35:00.000-07:00

Here's the URL to this news.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2009/10/15/www-hat-a-fool-i-was-115875-21748174/

Tim Berners-Lee admitted that the 2 slashes after www are redundant. To me,this is not just a joke but a serious topic to think--who can decide the internet structure and why we accept as it is. To be more specific, the internet world is not perfect. It reproduced the power structure from the physical world and transformed it into a different(or not different?)architecture. What shocked me the most is that if there's someone doubted the formula on the internet? Or we are accustomed to accept the internet just as the way it is?

WaPo article on FB divide...

2009-10-15T13:44:00.001-07:00

how apropos!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/14/AR2009101403961.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2009101500563

Being Digital Discussion Links

2009-10-15T11:18:00.001-07:00

Discussion links:

10/GUI

World's deepest trash bin

Rolltop

Microsoft calls for new data storage laws.

2009-10-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8308490.stm

The question is what's in it for the internet giants?

Digital Music Marketing of the Future

2009-10-14T23:01:00.000-07:00

The Music Forecasting 2001 Jupiter Research journal by Prof. Sinnreich provides strategic models and forecasting of the expectations of marketing and revenue in the music business with the rise of digital music distribution in 2006. It provides how the digital music businesses have imitated the models of the physical distribution chain. While the music industry as a whole when through major transformational processes with the emergence of digital distribution, major record labels had to also extend their services to the online market. I feel this move was necessary for physical distributers as many traditional channels have declined as innovative and new growing channels have emerged. As various sources of music commodities had their place online, such as internet radios, music downloads, file sharing, online music shopping, and so on, the value of music went through extreme rocky roads, as the “freeconomics” model was highly popularized online. Record labels began partnering with online channels. MusicNet and Pressplay are some examples that were crafted to continue giving the labels the control of distribution and usage behaviors. These services are applied in this article to provide the landscape of digital music. The method that was utilized to provide a solution to the music business for the intention of making profit was presenting the functionality of customer subscriptions to music websites. Even though $1 billion came from subscriptions (from 2001 to 2006), and $5.5 billion was calculated for the online music market, the demand from online retailers was way to high than what digital music subscriptions, like MusicNet and Pressplay could actually manage. There was also another problem that kept unbalancing the flow of money in this new growing music distribution channel, which was retention. Even though rankings showed customer satisfaction on the qualitative aspect of these services, many subscribers would then cancel their subscription once they experimented with the services; reasons being that the music was not portable nor couldn’t be copied. Therefore, the services became a short term solution for profit, rather than being a long term investment, however, favored strategy yet. Retailers and media sites would compete over subscribers as subscription continued to be the dominant digital music sales booster. Besides all this, these music subscription services became all scrabbled and complicated with the flow of revenue. It is suggested from Sinnreich that the music sellers must remix distributions in order to allow the participating online services to work at their potential: being creative, producing, and then successfully marketing – would be a long term asset to the company. Additionally, Jupiter research suggests a different approach, top-down, in terms of revenue distribution that would benefit both ends of the spectrum.

I strongly feel it is crucial to maximize value not specifically to sell and make profit, but to make the customer feel valued, therefore creating loyalty and establishing a relationship between customer and business; the customer would pay more for this. The music industry should focus on providing solutions by not being impatient and extremely competitive, but providing meaningful choices and personalizing items for customers. In terms of various online music services such as Amazon, eBay, FreeMarkets, Kazaa, and so on, it is also important to also have deep differentiation in products. In the end, Jupiter’s methodology was pretty good. It may have gone beyond the strategic business unit, but possible collaborating with digital and global market driving distribution channels as a solution. Brand portfolio rationalization is also a great one by filtering out the gunk music of the industry.

Soy or Duck Sauce?

2009-10-14T20:36:00.000-07:00

After trolling the response critiques/criticisms of Danah Boyd’s MySpace/Facebook preliminary ethnographic study, it struck me that while, yes, her piece was hastily written and had many a hole that beckoned to be filled, the responses were also subdivided into the same hegemonic & subaltern social classifications that she brazenly categorized in her piece. Yes, her piece was not academic but rather a substantiated anecdotal exploration into a phenomena that necessarily reflects the stratum & substratum of physical quotidian society & its many nuanced identities– for example, the issue of class in America is not one that is easily broken down into neat categories, a point she highlights almost immediately into her piece. However, I thought it interesting that Danah solely chose to examine the spaces that were codified as Social Networking Sites without questioning other spaces online that inhabit those same fluid identity politics that she eagerly polemicized in her introduction. Site spaces which don’t contain the same neutered conformist interface as MySpace & Facebook are often overlooked as phenomena external to the Social Networking Sites; however, sites such as 4chan or SecondLife do exist in a capacity as a social networking site, even though they don’t contain the same formulaic approach to “social networking” that these other sites capitalize. Youth culture participates equally in spaces as 4chan(Boxxy, much?) or SecondLife just as much as they do in Facebook & MySpace—and while, I have neither empirical evidence nor ethnographic data, I’m sure there are lots of transference & crossovers between the users who utilize a combination of these sites. Thinking about identity & its many incarnations and actualizations requires an examination of all the spheres in which the same values are enacted.

Danah upfront also indicates that the behaviors on these sites reflect those of physical society, something which I entirely agree, so I guess what sort of leaves me at a bit of a loss is that why do we continue to separate the analysis of both on our physical & online habits? Since we’ve clearly never been able to conclude & mandate progress in the physical world, why do we believe that we can find some sort of answer from the online world, regardless if you look at the Internets either as an external facet or internal extension of human society? By analyzing that the kids of color & lower economic status identify with MySpace versus “upwardly mobile” kids of privilege of the Facebook usership, we’re just merely adding to the abundant bank of examples & faces of polarization in this country. How many years of Western Thought will it take for us to realize that by demarcating a problem never actually leads to its solution? Imagine if you went to the doctor, who at your visit announced “looks like you have cancer” – should this doctor not suggest myriad solutions, legally you could sue for malpractice. Why is this responsibility & accountability not applied to the cultural & social realm?

Is Web 2.0 all it's hyped up to be? Do we need moar internetz?

2009-10-14T19:59:00.000-07:00

So, after reading some of the articles for this week on Web 2.0, and after having just watched "Steal This Film" and reading this article for another class, I'm a little bit skeptical. Perhaps the reason why so many Internet startup companies that formed in late 90s and early 2000s failed is because of this excitement. After all, anyone can succeed in the wonderful Web 2.0. I know the main point of O'Reilly's article is to discuss the differences between Web 1.0 and 2.0, but he does seem to believe that Web 2.0 is an improvement because it has created a movement towards what Lessig would call a "read/write" system from a "read only" system.

Users can now create their own content and interact with the network rather than just absorb content. This is referenced in Anderson's article (regarding Amazon's rating system) about the "long tail," which I very much agreed with (also, it reminded me of this Jenkins piece, specifically the niche audience parts). Because of the ability to host essentially unlimited amounts of information (given you have the resources), the Internet is a haven for niche audiences. It's easily accessible, mostly international, and allows people to access things they might not be able to otherwise find. By providing as much information as possible (i.e. A music site expanding it's collection), you're guaranteed that there will be someone out there who will be interested in it (remember that internet rule "If there's not porn of it, there will be, and someone will have a fetish for it"?).

Of course I think it's great that Web 2.0 fosters a read/write system of communication. But what happens when big companies buy out smaller Web 2.0 communities that were founded upon this DIY ethic (Google/YouTube, Yahoo/Flickr, Fox/Myspace)? Does the content change? And if it hasn't yet, will it? Will we come full circle, back to a read-only Internet?

Regarding intellectual property, I don't think the mass influx of creative content on the internet hinders expertise (like that one girl who dropped the class after the first day suggested..), and I know that the majority of the user-created content online never gets touched, and probably isn't that great (no one reads you blog except for you), but that doesn't mean its harmful or somehow clouding the bursts of amazingness that people spew into cyberspace. And as for compensating users for their creative work, CREATIVE COMMONS!! Allow your work to be distributed and have others share it (not for profit, though, that's just kind of stupid), if it's good, you will get paid, whether it be a homegrown YouTuber getting sponsorship or job offers, or a band generating a larger fan base and more revenue from live shows. I think this is a really good example of a "business strategy" involving CC content.

The Dot Com Bubble

2009-10-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

The main theme of this week's readings seemed to the trends, predictions, and the general mind state prevailing around the time of the dot com bubble. It was quite interesting to read reports (Morgan Stanley & Jupiter), predictions, and opinions from that time period. As was mentioned in the Stanley report, "the Internet is chaotic and can only be described clearly in hindsight." That turned out to be the best prediction possible.

That particular time period was fascinating. Technology had really begun to change society. People were communicating differently, and computers were even changing peoples' discretionary spending habits, buying computers instead of cars in some cases. The Stanley report was almost laughable in some instances. For example, they mentioned that there were about 3,000 ISP's around 95-96, and that the number would rapidly rise. This is obviously false, as the number of ISPs underwent an extreme consolidation.

The biggest issue was the shift towards digital media. New business models were needed to accommodate all of the available content. As the Jupiter article mentioned, the models in place in 2001 were digital mirrors of the physical business models in the music industry; there was a push to completely change the existing business model. The issue of intellectual property was central in all of the readings.

The Dyson article "over-predicted" the way content would be valued, but he was on the right track. Much of the content out there is definitely free, however the main media conglomerates remain (though copyrighted material is not difficult to maintain free of charge). I'm curious to see if nearly all content will be as marginalized as Dyson hypothesized. It's hard to imagine, but given our shift towards a service economy, its definitely not out of the question. The prevailing business model with high traffic sites seems to be ad revenue - I wonder if the Chaos Scenario could ever play out.

Gender and Gaming (from Jezebel)

2009-10-14T16:33:00.000-07:00

Since our video games week is just around the corner, I thought some of you might be interested in this post:

Why Is Marketing To Female Gamers Considered Challenging?
"Gaming marketers still don't know how to appeal to women. Here's a thought: segment the fucking market!"

2009-10-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

Here's a short response to the article on Facebook and Myspace. The article doesn't really prove much but it's an interesting insight as to where Web 2.0 is today, and how Facebook has evolved.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30FOB-medium-t.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Facebook makes money:

http://money.cnn.com/video/fortune/2009/09/15/f_mpw_sandberg_profit.fortune/

It's interesting to see that though today's internet has more and more freedom of speech and 'free' information out there. A lot is still controlled by advertisement and money and as Dyson clearly pointed out that though content may appear free it's not. The question still remains, how will people be compensated for their work/ labor online?

Being Digital

2009-10-14T07:09:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital did a great job of explaining certain concepts that are key to the digital revolution that I was familiar with, but didn’t particularly understand all that well, particularly as it related to bandwidth, fiber optic cable and HDTV. I also felt he touched upon several issues that we’ve discussed more in depth over the past few weeks, including the outdated nature of this country’s copyright law, as well as how cross-ownership can impact the media landscape which very clearly makes the case for net neutrality. I also enjoyed his distinction between computer networks and televisions networks. I thought it was interesting to contrast how digital television ignores information-packed headers and the flexibility of a heterogeneous system like the internet. I think that a lot of his predictions have come true, for example the way many people now are watching televisions shows on their computer (either for free through the networks websites or with services like Netflix which allow you to stream content directly to your computer). That’s not to say that this process wasn’t slowed down due to things like copyright and bandwidth issues.

Clearly this book is a bit dated, but I think it was still a good grounding in the history and function of how digital life operates in our lifetime. I loved his description of the stupidity of faxes – he’s so right and to that end I can’t remember the last time people in our offices used our fax machine. One thing I wish he’d discussed a bit more was the implications in our society for all of this. He does discuss them to some extent, but I think he focuses primarily on the ways that being digital is a good thing, rather than discussing some of the dangers that can come with this transition.

Lastly, when he discusses the globalization of the internet, he writes, “Nobody knows how many people use the Internet, first of all, it is a network of networks.” His figures are clearly 10 years old, but I think that we do have some information about how people are using the internet, who is using it and to what ends. He guessed that 1 billion people would be connected by the year 2000, and now in 2009, according to this website 1.6 billion people use it (with 251 million users in North America, 402 million users in Europe and 704 million users in Asia). Negroponte was absolutely correct when he predicted that “The Internet,…is not North American anymore.”

And although I didn't read danah boyd's article this week, I've seen her speak at conferences. CNN.com ran an article mentioning her work yesterday: it can be found here http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/10/13/social.networking.class/index.html and just mentions briefly her research which is outlined in the article that was assigned.