Rebecca Case - Blog on Emerging Media

Final Text Response to What’s Mine is Yours

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 10 May 2011 23:58:00 +0000

What’s Mine is Yours stresses the importance of peer-to-peer relations through new technologies. The authors, Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, define Collaborative Consumption as “traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping, redefined through technology and peer communities. Collaborative Consumption is enabling people to realize the enormous benefits of access to products and services over ownership, and at the same time save money, space, and time; make new friends; and become active citizens once again” (xv). As far as they are concerned, we are in a new utopian age where freedom of exchange defines the contemporary market. Now that people have the ability to access one another without impediment, they will utilize their resources for a greater good.

They claim, “The status quo is being replaced by a movement. Peer-to-peer is going to become the default way people exchange things, whether it is space, stuff, skills, or services” (xiv). In other words, our new networking and technological abilities will drive away the need for a pre-existing institution to facilitate our consumption. However, a lot of their sentiments seem to have been presented without objection. We are not heading towards a utopia of individual self-interest trumping corporate greed; we are simply moving into the business of connecting buyer and seller. Even if you get rid of the institution that previously offered the service, and thereby disrupt the traditional distribution model, there will still remain a new “collaborative” institution that will take its place. You no longer need a travel agent to book your hotel room for you, because now you can reach out directly to people offering up a place to sleep on Couchsurfing.org. But the authors don’t address the fact that Couchsurfing.org still generates revenue (yes, it is a non-profit) in exchange for offering a service. Airbnb.com is probably a better example of this “new economy:” it charges 9-15% of the nightly cost to rent a space. Clearly this is a self-sustaining business with a profit model—otherwise it wouldn’t exist.

Funnily enough, Facebook’s status as the de facto example of a new model of peer-to-peer discourse has ultimately sparked unending speculation as the to the specific amount in billions and billions of cash revenue it earns by selling every single piece of information it can gather on its members. No one would deny that the number of companies that buy and sell personal data is growing, and the scope of the data collected is widening. Does anyone believe that Facebook is more altruistic than the next $50 billion dollar conglomerate simply because its business model encourages peer-to-peer interaction?

The Huffington Post has been widely regarded as politically-progressive, independent news blog. In the book, it is mentioned that “collaborative consumption will sit side-by-side and eventually may go head-to-head with the old consumerist model, must as blogs such as the Huffington Post now compete with hundred-plus-year-old newspapers such as the New York Times.” However, this too, is not the idealist news source it has claimed to be. What started off as a liberal blog with a small staff has grown to a worldwide publication that rivals its traditional news counterparts. Although some of their news is aggregated from other sources, they now invest more in original reporting and writing, hiring experienced journalists from The New York Times, Newsweek and other traditional media outlets – the same “big dogs” they were lauded for eschewing. Not only that, but it was announced a week ago that AOL was purchasing the Huffington Post for a cool $315 million. According to the New York Times, “$300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.” More proof of how much money can be made off this online community of readers with tens of millions of people.

The truth is, to offer a product widely and with a certain degree of quality control requires many hours of labor, even if the business model does not involve the sale of a physical good. Without a model for business that produces a profit, none of these collaboration websites could exist. Couchsurfing.org generated more than $1 million through fees and donations in 2009 and spent nearly all of it administering the site. It is unfathomable how much Wikipedia must expend to continue it operations (I’m assuming it’s a lot since they are always requesting donations from their users). As any space grows—physical or virtual—the cost to maintain it increases. As individuals come to rely on the space for their livelihoods, the incentive to drive revenue increases.

Many of the most popular peer-to-peer distribution models have achieved sustainable financial success and a sufficient user base only to be bought or merged with established businesses. The truth is that the egalitarian opportunities are rapidly being commodified and consolidated by traditional media elites both socially and financially. The examples abound—Google usurped YouTube, AOL bought the Huffington Post, eBay owns or holds a large stake in Paypal, Craigslist, Skype, Meetup.com, StubHub and StumbleUpon (and many others).

The Internet absolutely has the potential to give a public voice to an individual and to link together people who would have no other means of finding each other. Certainly, there are discourses that take place amongst small community are marked by a great deal of altruism and which function without requiring a strong central organization. The author’s postulations on the abilities new technologies can provide us are not all wrong. However, they are guilty of an overly optimistic tone researchers often take toward new technologies. It’s imperative to remember that the digital age is not a perfect one. Human behavior is slow to change and we cannot truly give up our self-serving nature. At the same time, we should also question whether a “greedy” business interest is always a negative prospect. Presumably the Egyptian protesters who organized via social media could have done so through other traditional social networks—revolts have succeeded prior to twitter—but the true inherent worth of the networks that were utilized, is not the method that they use to connect peer to peer, but their broad adoption across the population and their always-on status. It’s probably impossible to fully remove the element of greed, and it’s naïve to think that a particular technology can do it alone. But keeping the lights turned on at Facebook keeps a lot of other people happily poking away.

Resources:

Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. New York: Harper Collins, 2010. Print.

Peters, Jeremy, and Vern Kopytoff. "Betting on News, AOL Is Buying The Huffington Post." New York Times. 7 Feb. 2011. Web. .

Final Image Response for Digital Textuality

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 10 May 2011 19:52:00 +0000

(Double click the image for larger view)

What's Mine is Yours Response - Digital Textuality Final Paper

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 10 May 2011 19:10:00 +0000

Rebecca Case

Digital Textuality

Spring 2011

There is no doubt that the change in media has had its effect on culture. From the invention of the written word to today’s communication technologies, such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, the medium greatly affects how ideas and resources are shared. A common theme has emerged, that today we live with the promise of a new utopian age of the Internet; that because the technology for egalitarian access to information exists, there is equality in the access to information amongst all people. The Internet and key Internet programs have revolutionized communication and organization of the public sphere, but the truth is that the egalitarian opportunities are rapidly being commodified and consolidated by traditional media elites both socially and financially. Wealthy, white males and the financial control they have traditionally possessed still retain their power over shaping communication in the Internet age. This paper explores the connections between the utopian portrayal of new media technologies in Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’ What’s Mine is Yours and Jurgen Habermas’ “Public Sphere.” Though the Botsman and Rogers’ of today will say that this moment in time marks a new era in the public sphere, it is not without its problems.

Habermas’ public sphere is a conceptual, not physical, public arena where people come outside of their private lives to discuss and debate the ideas of the day. He states, “only when the exercise of political control is effectively subordinated to the democratic demand that information be accessible to the public, does the political public sphere win an institutionalized influence over the government through the instrument of law-making bodies” (73). The public sphere is key in understanding the democratic age we live in here in America. At it’s best, it affords people the opportunity to connect to political authority and government and act as a place where the needs of the people can be discussed and made known. In the age before the Internet, this was commonly represented by people protesting in the streets, attending a public lecture series, or a town hall meeting. Habermas claims that the public sphere is a not a result of natural evolution, but is historical. The public sphere came to be out of bourgeois culture, where for the first time in history, the private individual came to discuss publicly the issues of the day, but not in political arena. This is unlike the old idea of feudal power, where the head is sovereign and represents power. In a democracy, people become caretakers of power and the ruling class evolves to serve the public. Habermas characterizes modern constitutions as “the catalogues of fundamental rights [that] were the perfect image of the liberal model of the public sphere” (76). They gave society a guarantee of private autonomy and restricted the public authority.

Doubtful, few will argue that the Habermasean ideal of the public sphere resembles the public discourses of the 20^th century. Marked by media conglomerates, the pursuit of ratings and a one way method of cultural distribution, the private individual has had very little say in the shaping of his society, unless he was a wealthy, educated white male; outside of this elite class exists few exceptions. Can the Age of the Internet rescue the ideals of Habermas’ public sphere? What’s Mine Is Yours claims that modern social tools, made possible through the advent of the Internet, remove obstacles to public collaboration. Botsman and Rogers attest collaborative consumption is “traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping, redefined through technology and peer communities. Collaborative Consumption is enabling people to realize the enormous benefits of access to products and services over ownership, and at the same time save money, space, and time; make new friends; and become active citizens once again” (xv). There are sites such as Freecycle, Couchsurfing and Zipcar make the sharing of resources possible for anyone with an Internet connection. Flickr makes the publication of pictures possible and, on MySpace and Facebook, one can do the same with both text and music. Putting ones possessions thoughts, or work in a public arena is no longer bottlenecked by conventional publication and marketing.

This power of the amateur to connect with one another in new ways can ignite social change. What’s Mine Is Yours cites the example of the “Let’s do It” grassroots campaign. In 2008, Rainer Nolvak, Tiina Urm and Ahti Heinla, masterminded a national clean-up day in Estonia. These three people were able to get “720 volunteers to scour the country and photograph sites using mobile phones to pinpoint more than 10,500 locations where rubbish had been illegally dumped” (53). Fifty thousand people joined forces to clean up illegal dump-sites. They were able to use the resources of today break into public consciousness without the barrier of traditional press. Everyone now has the ability to access the public and make a difference. This is why Botsman and Rogers see these contemporary Internet tools as a venue for anyone to have access to the utopian public sphere.

However, the true, modern public sphere is not utopian or free from outside influence. Habermas notes this happening as early as with the growing influence of newspapers. He notes how the editorial staff of a newspaper has the power to wield public opinion. The slant individual newspapers take on the issues becomes intrinsically linked to the view the public takes on those same issues. “The publishers insured the newspapers a commercial basis, yet without commercializing them as such. The press remained an institution of the public sphere itself, effective in the manner of a mediator and intensifier of public discussion, no longer a mere organ for spreading of news but not the medium of a consumer culture” (76). As commercialization increases, the public sphere becomes more about growth in capital and less about making the needs of the people known.

Today, with mass media and the Internet, instead of seeing an improvement in open and fair communication, there is, in fact, a greater manipulation of the public sphere. The clamor for ratings has become a clamor for “hits.” The public sphere becomes dominated by advertising and instead of fostering discourse; the news has become a perpetual sales pitch and an echo chamber of sensationalism. The idea that the Internet provides a kind of digital utopia where we are all informed and our voices are equally heard is theoretically true. But the truth is the Internet is often only a dangerous evolution of traditional media outlets. There is a huge difference in being involved politically and being involved with new technologies. Habermas’ public sphere is based on reciprocity and face-to-face communication. Despite growth in Internet, we’ve seen decline in public sphere and rational public discourse. In addition, we see an increase in commoditization, more external influence from market into public sphere and more ability to inform decisions. Freedom via the Internet is a fictional notion and it is a dangerous one because it encourages the illusion of true egalitarianism. The elites still maintain power and we can actually see this in What’s Mine is Yours.

Botsman and Rogers open with the story of Airbnb.com. Joe Gebbia, Nathan Blecharcyzk and Brian Chesky started Airbnb in 2008 with the intention of renting out an extra room in their San Francisco apartment during an annual design conference. It was later developed into a larger version of that, allowing many people to list their extra property for rent. The site quickly grew as more and more people became attracted to the notion of reasonably priced accommodations with a local flair. This story is meant to show the goodness exhibited by the people that use the site, simply wanting to meet new people and earn a few bucks from an otherwise dormant investment and clearly, Botsman and Rogers lead with this story to point out the significance of the collaboration in the Internet Age.

The story shows the changing climate of today’s communicative realm, but it also shows that there is still a power bias in our “utopian age”. First of all, these three men have to be well-off enough that they could afford to take the time necessary to put this site together, not to mention, they are doing it to rent out a room in their over-sized loft in one of most expensive real estate areas of the country. Consider the most significant barrier to entry with this service. One needs to own a property that is desirable to strangers and large enough that the owner doesn’t need use of all of it. Additionally, and possibly most important, one must note the education level required to take on such a task. It is mentioned they are graduates of the incredibly prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. Blecharczyk, the web developer, needed considerable prior knowledge of Internet tools, both how they work and how to best utilize them. Someone with little exposure to the Internet would not be able to do this. They also needed necessary capital to buy all the technological instruments needed to own and maintain a website, such as a personal computer and the cost to own a URL. Also, it is certainly the case that an individual able to own a personal computer, and therefore spend the most time using one and learning what one can do with it, would be better able to fully utilize its tools. Although they claim to operate for the “everyman”, they are, in fact, only catering to an elite group – those who have the resources to afford travel. No matter which mode of transportation one employs, getting from one place to another is very costly in today’s economic climate. Perhaps, most importantly, is that motivation for the site. Airbnb take a 3% cut of all transactions; this site would not exist if it was not yielding the owners a profit.

When we look at the history of groups and social development, the activities that hold the most importance are group activities. We have to look at social groups to understand history. Karl Marx thought we could understand history by looking at the way we manufacture our ways of existing. Jurgen Habermas felt we could understand it by how we share information. But Botsman and Rogers says the way to understand it is by the way we form groups and collaborate with one another. This moment is so crucial because the way we create groups has radically changed. New media technology offers unprecedented opportunities to share and discuss with millions of individuals but it is disproportionately utilized by the cultural “haves”. The cold truth is every new technology championed as an outlet for the "have-nots" is quickly appropriated by the traditional media outlets and those with a financial interest in their success. Many of the most popular peer-to-peer distribution models have achieved sustainable financial success and a sufficient user base only to be bought or merged with established businesses. The examples abound—Google usurped YouTube, AOL bought the Huffington Post, eBay owns or holds a large stake in Paypal, Craigslist, Skype, Meetup.com, StubHub and StumbleUpon (and many others). The Internet and key Internet programs have revolutionized communication and organization of the public sphere, but the truth is that the egalitarian public sphere Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers describe is an illusion.

Work Cited

Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. New York: Harper Business, 2010. Print.

Habermas, Jurgen. "The Public Sphere: an Encyclopedia Article." Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. 136-42. Print.

Peer-to-Peer-to-Profit

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:24:00 +0000

What’s Mine is Yours stresses the new importance of peer-to-peer relations. They claim, “The status quo is being replaced by a movement. Peer-to-peer is going to become the default way people exchange things, whether it is space, stuff, skills, or services.” In other words, our new networking and technological abilities will drive away the need for a pre-existing institution to facilitate our consumption. However, a lot of their sentiments seem to have been presented without objection. We are not heading towards a utopia of individual self-interest trumping corporate greed; we are simply moving into the business of connecting buyer and seller. Even if you get rid of the institution that previously offered the service, and thereby disrupt the traditional distribution model, there will still remain a new “collaborative” institution that will take its place. You no longer need a travel agent to book your hotel room for you, because now you reach out directly to people offering up a spare room on Couchsurfing.org. But the authors don’t address the fact that Couchsurfing.org still generates revenue (yes, it is a non-profit) in exchange for offering a service. Airbnb.com is probably a better example of this “new economy:” it charges 9-15% of the nightly cost. Clearly this is a self-sustaining business with a profit model—otherwise it wouldn’t exist.

Funny enough, Facebook’s status as the de facto example of a new model of peer-to-peer discourse has ultimately sparked unending speculation as the to the specific amount in billions and billions of cash revenue it earns by selling every single piece of information it can gather on its members. No one would deny that the number of companies that buy and sell personal data is growing, and the scope of the data collected is widening. Does anyone believe that Facebook is more altruistic than the next $50 billion dollar conglomerate simply because its business model encourages peer-to-peer interaction?

The Huffington Post has been widely regarded as politically-progressive, independent news blog. It is mentioned in the book that “collaborative consumption will sit side-by-side and eventually may go head-to-head with the old consumerist model, mush as blogs such as the Huffington Post now compete with hundred-plus-year-old newspapers such as the New York Times.” However, this too, is not the idealist news source it has claimed to be. What started off as a liberal blog with a small staff has grown. Although some of their news is aggregated from other sources, they now invest more in original reporting and writing, hiring experienced journalists from The New York Times, Newsweek and other traditional media outlets – the same “big dogs” they were lauded for eschewing. Not only that, but it was announced a week ago that AOL was purchasing the Huffington Post for a cool $315 million. According to the New York Times, “$300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.” More proof of how much money can be made off this online community of readers with tens of millions of people.

The truth is, to offer a product widely and with a certain degree of quality control requires many hours of labor, even if it is just running Couchsurfing.org and the business model does not involve the sale of a physical good. Couchsurfing.org generated more than $1 million through fees and donations in 2009 and spent nearly all of it administering the site. How much does Wikipedia now expend to continue operations? As any space grows—physical or virtual—the cost to maintain it increases. As individuals come to rely on the space for their livelihoods, the incentive to drive revenue increases.

Many of the most popular peer-to-peer distribution models have achieved sustainable financial success and a sufficient user base only to be bought or merged with established businesses. The examples abound—Google usurped YouTube, AOL bought the Huffington Post, ebay owns or holds a large stake in Paypal, Craigslist, Skype, Meetup.com, StubHub and StumbleUpon (and many others).

Maybe there are some good things that can be done through our new collaborative networks that aren’t profit-driven. In What’s Mine is Yours, the “Let’s Do It” clean-up campaign is mentioned. Through social networking sites, fifty thousand Estonians gathered to clean up their country, “an operation that otherwise would have taken the Estonian government three years and cost an estimated 22.5 million euros” to do. However, this was not merely a collaboration of people online; it required broad support from many traditional social institutions.

The Internet absolutely has the potential to give a public voice to an individual and to link together people who would have no other means of finding each other. Certainly, there are discourses that take place amongst small community are marked by a great deal of altruism and which function without requiring a strong central organization. The author’s postulations on the abilities new technologies can provide us are not all wrong. However, they are guilty of an overly optimistic tone researchers often take toward new technologies. It’s imperative to remember that the digital age is not a perfect one. Human behavior is slow to change and we cannot truly give up our self-serving nature. At the same time, we should also question whether a “greedy” business interest is always a negative prospect. Presumably the Egyptian protesters who organized via social media could have done so through other traditional social networks—revolts have succeeded prior to twitter—but the true inherent worth of the networks that were utilized, is not the method that they use to connect peer to peer, but their broad adoption across the population and their always-on status. It’s probably impossible to fully remove the element of greed, and it’s naïve to think that a particular technology can do it alone. But keeping the lights turned on at Facebook keeps a lot of other people happily poking away.

Resources:

Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. New York: Harper Collins, 2010. Print.

Peters, Jeremy, and Vern Kopytoff. "Betting on News, AOL Is Buying The Huffington Post." New York Times. 7 Feb. 2011. Web. .

The Future of the Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 03:02:00 +0000

This week’s reading was The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain.

I could not help but feel from the very beginning that his comparison between the generative Internet versus the appliancized Internet was elitist rhetoric. Zittrain assumes the vast amounts of technical skill required to program at a fundamental level and criticizes consumer-based software as a tool of authoritarian control. While I recognize Zittrain’s point—that as we abstract the software development further and further from the producer and toward the end-user it becomes increasingly less configurable—I don’t find anything in the way of a solution. That doesn’t mean Zittrain’s call to arms is without merit; it means that he is circumventing the real debate: how much control we will allow the end user—by crying foul.

Obviously the answer is not to train the citizenry in web-based coding. Short of that, what can we do? Zittrain seems more inclined to pinpoint how a compromise will not work rather than consider what sort of regulatory measures, safeguards of industry, and legal restrictions might integrate “the Internet” into our daily lives.

I am not sure what to take away from this text. I understand that the potential for abuse is rampant; that seems to be the case in any adoption of new technology. I doubt any of us today would feel comfortable using a credit card in the late 1970s or early 80s. Did we need a Zittrain then to tell us that the solution was an individual-credit-based-liability system? No. We required intervention, standardization and penalties for laws that were violated.

While Zittrain raises a lot of interesting arguments, he seems to rejoice in throwing up his hands at the problem as though he has uncovered some fundamental fissure in our society. What really are his complaints? That what was once a hobbyist’s pursuit is now the avocation of the mainstream? That interconnectivity is lost on the amateur who fails to recognize the consequences of sharing data?

Zittrain raises interesting insights but seems satisfied to remain a classifier of “the good old days.” For those willing to give Zittrain the benefit of the doubt, I would ask they turn their attention to the three page introduction titled, Solutions. Herein, Zittrain outlines the apparent dilemmas faced by contemporary networks: as the medium becomes more mainstream, the requirement for standardization and ossification increases. Zittrain describes the future of the internet as follows: “Developments then take a turn for the worse: mainstream success brings in people with no particular talent or tolerance for the nuts and bolts of the technology, and no connection with the open ethos that facilitates the sharing of improvements” (150). Perhaps I am not as elite as Zittrain but the sharing of code seems to have begun in a substantial fashion in the 2000’s with the mainstreaming of Linux; hardly a system embraced by the average user.

Perhaps the most baffling exhortation is Zittrain’s insistence that we not adopt “a strategy that blunts the worst aspects of today’s popular generative Internet and PC without killing these platforms’ openness to innovation” (150). Precisely whom does Zittrain believe is developing the PC platform; developing popular websites? The greatest condemnation I can levy against Jonathan Zittrain is that he appears to have no faith in the organic, grass-roots organism that birthed the modern PC. He is quite ready to declare the Linux OS an endangered species only because he ignores how much innovation occurs outside the Windows Intel/Mac OS spectrum. In my opinion Zittrain describes a world that was never so ideal and contrasts it with a world that is not nearly so dire.

The Exploit - A Google Search for Myself

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:32:00 +0000

In reading “The Exploit” by Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker this week, I was prompted to look at the way the current state of the internet allows one to communicate their true selves. The book is a study of the effect of networks on communication and the internet is the network that takes a leading role in a lot of the arguments in the book. I would like to examine the effect of the internet on interpersonal relations as t relates to our interpersonal network.

“The exception is that one is either online or not. There is little room for “kind of” or “sort of” online. Network status doesn’t allow for technical ambiguity, only a selection box of discrete states” (126).

The social nuance we all take into account when meeting a new person and giving the presentation we deem appropriate cannot be provided for in online communication.

According to Carole Wade and Carol Tavris’ textbook “Psychology,” body language is an integral part of communication between persons. We use body language (different in most every culture) to judge is people are being sincere. According to “Psychology”, “When people are talking to each other, a mismatch of body languages will make a conversation fell ‘out of sync’; they may feel as confused and emotionally upset as if they had had a verbal misunderstanding. In contrast, when people’s gestures and body language are in synchrony, they feel greater rapport and emotional harmony” (415). We cannot account for the vital part of communication in an online forum, unless we are communicating via live. Streaming video, and even then, insincerity plays a major role.

“It is frustrating, ambiguity is, especially from a technical point of view. It works or it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, it should be debugged or replaced. To be online in a chronically ambiguous state is maddening, both for those communicating and for the service provider. The advent of broadband connectivity only exacerbates the problem, as expectations for uninterrupted uptime become more and more inflexible. One way to fix the ambiguity is to be “always on.” Even when asleep, in the bathroom, or unconscious, all official discourses of the Web demand that one is either online and accounted for, or offline and still accounted for” (126).

Of course, the rigor necessary for an accurate display of persona online in entirely unrealistic. I would be surprised if I was able to update the different venues of personal advertisement I ascribe to (such as my blog, Facebook or Twitter) more than once a week. Unless you have spent a moderate amount of time with the in-person Rebecca Case, you are unlikely to grasp any real idea of who I am. The interesting thing is, however, who’s to say the representation of myself any one person has seen is anything close to accurate?

In terms of web demand, “The Exploit,” describe it this way:

“Search engines are the best indicator of this demand. Bots run day and night, a swarm of surveillance drones, calling role in every hidden corner of the web. All are accounted for, even those who record few user hits. Even as the Web disappears, the networks still multiply (text messaging, multiplayer online games, and so on). The body becomes a medium of perpetual locatability, a roving panoply of tissues, organs, and cells orbited by personal network devices” (127).

We are to conclude that even if we are not reached through the Internet directly, there are many networks that still link us to the world. I would argue, however, that no matter the venue, there is no means of communication, even direct eye-to-eye communication that can truly relate who we really are to the other individual. One can argue that, the best way of expanding our personal network in a genuine way is through direct physical interaction.

6 Degrees

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:05:00 +0000

Duncan J. Watt’s “Six Degrees” describes a model of modern technology that explains how we are all connected. Like some of the other readings we have studied this semester, he offers few concrete conclusions (not unlike danah boyd). Watts attempts to research and study the nature of complex connected systems. He begins his analysis with the small world phenomenon. He describes the paradox of the small-world problem: “That two people can share a mutual friend whom each regards as ‘close,’ but still perceive each other as being ‘far away’ is a facet of social life at once commonplace and also quite mysterious.” This is one of several aspects of connectivity that he touches on, but does not provide a remedy for.

The main concept of the book is this notion of “six degrees of separation.” Watts states that this idea was first conceptualized by fraternity boys at Albright College, who were movie buffs and noticed a connection of all actors to Kevin Bacon (93). There was a system devised and people were given a Bacon number that corresponds to how closely they are linked to Kevin Bacon (hopefully, my Bacon number is a 6 plus).

Although this assertion would lead us to believe that this system of separation may only work for the world of actors, Watts claims it is true on a much larger scale. He states: “First, the science of networks has taught us that distance is deceiving. That two individuals on the opposite sides of the world, and with little in common, can be connected through a short chain of network ties – through only six degrees – is a claim about the social world has fascinated generation after generation.” Watts offers many examples of how this is true and how we are linked. He notes a power blackout on the Western Coast of the US caused by different lines of cable being connected and dependent on each other. He also talks about epidemics and how they are spread though our connected world. Watts argues that, when networks have been disrupted by either a collection of minor events or major shocks, we traditionally have tried to understand the disruption by re-creating events rather than studying the network’s structure. If he was writing today he might discuss the recent recession and how we may have better understood it by looking at the economy as a whole and the connections in that network.

However, true to form, this is not the end of the argument. Watts goes on to show the counter point to this line of thinking by pointing out: “But even if it is true that everyone can be connected to everyone else in only six degrees of separation, so what? How far is six degrees anyway? … So as far as extracting resources is concerned, or exerting influence, anything more than two degrees might as well be a thousand” (300). So, I guess when we look at networks on a micro-level, we are not as closely connected as we thought. As far as getting a job or causing influence, being a mere 6 degrees away from another person doesn’t mean anything. Watts notes the difference as being on a “first name basis” versus being on a “can I borrow your car” basis.

What I struggle to understand is, what exactly is Watt’s point? He seems to undermine each observation by the assertion that what he has described is largely meaningless, unpredictable, and novel. The world he describes is meaningless, the connections he describes are endlessly contingent. I have to ask: What is his point? It seems to me that in an effort to be excitedly pro-new media he has inadvertently reaffirmed that new media rests upon the socioeconomic foundation of good, old-fashioned capital.

Teen Identity Online

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:13:00 +0000

This week’s reading was from danah boyd’s dissertation “Taken Out of Context.” She writes about how MySpace and Facebook have played a part in the identities and social lives of American teens. She puts much emphasis on the presentation of self through a media that is very complex. One of her essential points is that a person cannot control how they are perceived through these sites. She opens up the fourth chapter with a bio on a seventeen-year-old girl named Allie. Boyd states that Allie’s MySpace profile is “a social oddity, in the sense that hers is the first generation to have to publicly articulate itself, to have to write itself into being as a precondition of social participation.” I would argue, however, that this is not the case. I am six years older than Allie and I also used an Internet portal to describe myself in a short paragraph. It was my profile for AOL Instant Messenger and I spent countless hours coming up with the perfect combination of quotes, jokes, and personal information to present the “best” version of myself. This was my personal precursor for how to relate over Facebook. I already had a sense for what was appropriate to put in a public forum about myself and what would make me look unfavorable. And I would argue that we have had to write ourselves into being long before the Internet. For example, when writing a resume, one puts as much effort into the wording or the editing of what should be left in and what should be taken out. Also, newspaper biographies are another example. In order to participate in the society of those who are published, one must create a text that describes them without the benefit of a face-to-face meeting.

One key difference is the number of people who participate in this practice. I would agree with boyd that “while creating a tangible digital identity is relatively simple, negotiating the technology to engage in acts of self-presentation and impression management is complex and different from how these acts play out in unmediated environments.” There was no way for me to know that even though I was painstakingly thorough in producing my online image, I had no way to know if I was being taken out of context. And maybe that contributes to why I have always been so motivated to continually update my profile, whether it be Facebook, AOL Instant Messanger, or Twitter. Boyd states that “teens often do not want to let their profiles get stale because they think that this leaves a bad impression” and think this is true of adults as well.

The other part of boyd’s dissertation I wanted to touch on was the section about deception online. Boyd states: “Some teens seek to create rich profiles, while others maintain profiles that provide little information. Yet among both groups, uncountable teens respond to requests for name, age, location, income, and other demographic information with responses that do not accurately reflect the teen’s “true” identity.” Part of her reasoning as to why some are intentionally deceptive related to a sense of safety. For example, I may say I’m 18 even though I am only 13 in order to appear more mature and less able to be taken advantage of. But I would like to note that, at times, in my generation, lying about age was done for an opposite reason. I’d say a lot of teens lie about their age in order to qualify themselves for more “adult” behavior online. Such as the pre-teen that claims to be twenty-something in order to engage in a mature chat room conversation.

While boyd’s dissertation is interesting, she struggles with the same sort of accountability and documentary issues we all are grappling with today. Her work amounts to online ethnography, and it is hard (for me at least) to accept any online cultural artifact without full documentation. Admittedly we read only a small portion of her work, but several of her claims could have been more fully developed.

This is a movie poster for a Lifetime original movie concerning children chatting online, which I think is funny.

Cybertyping

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:18:00 +0000

The focus of Lisa Nakamura’s article “Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction” is the way that the Internet “propagates, disseminates and commodifies images of race and racism.” She coins the term “cybertype” to define this idea; in other words, it’s the new media version of a stereotype.

I think she makes a lot of interesting arguments in her discourse. It is easy to think of the Internet as a utopian entity, where everyone has equal and homogenous Internet presence. But this is clearly not the case. I know personally, whether I intend too or not, I continuously purport myself as a middle-class white girl in her twenties. What will I do when these are no longer true descriptors of myself? I am always able to chose representations of myself that make me look smarter, richer, wittier, blonder, and happier than my true self. On the Internet everything is a copy and I’m doing my part to be the best version of that “copy.”

Nakamura states that her research has shown that “when users are free to choose their own race, all were assumed to be white.” So not only are we falsely representing ourselves on the Internet, but we are falsely perceived.

Another interesting idea she has concerns the “targeted” web content available today. Although, there is more and more content out there that supports people from every subset of society, much of it is manipulated for commercial reasons. Nakamura notes of these specialized sites “view women and minorities primarily as potential markets for advertisers and merchants rather than as coalitions.” I have found, in my own experience, that this is absolutely true. When I worked as a Sales Rep for CBS Radio in Dallas, we would hold twice-weekly brainstorm sessions to come up with ways to put our clients in front of their desired demographic. This included creating websites dedicated to beauty tips and fun activities for “Women 25-34” to participate in simply so we could sponsor it by Cadillac. It’s amazing how much of what we are exposed to was creating for the sole purpose of getting us to buy something. And all this does is perpetuate our “cybertypes” because we continue to support it.

So, does one propose we have a Black Google? Do we give every race and gender specific web portals so we no longer assume everyone is a white male? Rushmore Drive was a search engine that was created as a destination for Black people. However, this concept proved to be a failure and it was shut down a year after it’s launch. Indeed, marketing content by race has proven to be more difficult than one might expect. Despite the existence of countless race-based social networking sites, none even remotely compare to the popularity of Facebook.

This fact has some bearing on the Foucault piece we read for this week: as the internet itself becomes more complicated and involved, the easy methods of dividing people up, categorizing them and controlling their online experience becomes more difficult. The truth is, a search engine for Black people sounds rather absurd today. Yet, I don’t know what the answer is for dealing with the question of race or gender in relation to the Internet. Do we assume everyone is a white male or do we force everyone to pigeonhole themselves within their own stereotype?

Here Comes a Couple of People

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:03:00 +0000

This past Sunday, I volunteered to be a part of a group of EMAC students who were all collaborating to document the PAC-WE gathering. The idea behind the event was both a unique and noble one; one I was excited to be a part of. In brief, the idea was to gather all the Dallas area artists for both networking purposes but also to make a statement about healthcare. It is more difficult to obtain insurance when you work as a freelance contractor. Pretty cool idea, right? Unfortunately, the turnout was somewhat below expectations. I understood that something like three thousand ponchos were ordered for the participants and I would be shocked if there were more than two hundred and fifty people in attendance.

Why is this? Well, I bet that a lot of people who intended to show up didn’t because they were hung over or too tired or any of those other excuses we have for skipping out on our weekend obligations. Also, one may argue that we are in the conservative South and getting a bunch of liberal artists to come out and support health care reform is just not as easy as it would be in, perhaps, Chicago. Plus, being we are in Texas, let’s face it, Sunday morning is when “most folks go to church”.

Now, apart from these crass stereotypes, why was PAC-WE not a great success? I may be a terrible cynic, but I found myself more interested in capturing on film all the participants who were capturing the event on film. There was this great push to artificially manufacture something much bigger than it actually was. I would guess that of everyone who showed up and donned the yellow ponchos, fifty percent or more were walking around with cameras and interviewing their fellow participants. (“Okay, I’ll interview you first and then you can interview me…”)

What makes some “flash mob” attempts more successful than others? They took advantage of the primary networking tools in today’s communication landscape. There was a Twitter feed, a Facebook page, and of course, a website to drive the whole thing. Maybe it’s all perception, maybe to those whom orchestrated Sunday’s event, it was everything they hoped it would be. As the main organizer noted, “It’s a start.”

Clay Shirky touches on flash mobs in Here Comes Everybody, noting they have been a more recent phenomenon. We have new methods of organizing people in a relatively effortless and timely way. This kind of collective calls for no formal invitations or RSVPing, the time it takes to send the message out is instantaneous, all you have to do is have an idea and a couple of friends to help spread to message, and best of all, there is little to no cost. However, because of these attributes of flash mobs, the organizer can never know how many people to expect and perhaps that has to be considered when perceiving an event’s “success.” (That also may explain why there was about one police officer for every twenty people there, which is overkill if you ask me.)

It is probably worthwhile to consider just what sort of flash mobs we have seen documented. In the US the idea is really a novelty and that is what PAC-WE felt like. Regardless my feelings about the need for healthcare reform, putting on a poncho and trying to make a human Pac-Man in a parking lot in Dallas was basically a joke. To the few Youtube viewers this event might attract, I wonder what the arcane stickers on our ponchos will mean to them. I doubt they will take very much away from the experience that relates to healthcare.

By contrast, it was only a few months ago that thousands upon thousands of Iranians took to the streets in vocal protest of what they believed was a sham election. These people regularly organized, shared information and encouraged one another through “flash mob technologies.” That flash mob was not a joke, or something to do before free beer was served. It wasn’t hokey or something to do to “have a lot of jokes about later,” as I heard one girl remark to her friends. And above all, it wasn’t something that existed to be filmed.

On that note, I will close with what I thought was insultingly ironic: the main organizer, closing his debriefing pep talk suggested we read Guy Debord. Yeah, that’s right: the guy who is most famous for writing The Society of the Spectacle. Perhaps I misunderstood him, but I took his tone to suggest I read this book, if I haven’t already, so that I might better understand all of the manipulation that exists in our media and culture today. If he did, then that man is a hypocrite. If he did not, and he hopes that I buy this little book and suddenly realize that I spent my Sunday morning not saying a genuine word about anything, but manufacturing a spectacle, I would rather he keep his jokes to himself. Those people without video cameras were there because they cared about healthcare reform. The rest of us probably can intuit most of Debord’s thesis by our behavior on Sunday. But what a disappointing spectacle it was. . .

Oct 20 - Notes on Habermas, etc.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:21:00 +0000

I don't know if this is helpful to anyone (I know I have a hard time reading other people's notes), but here are my notes from class this week if it helps fill in any gaps for anyone.....

Oct 20 - What happens to Democracy in the age of the internet/new media?

-rise of internet in post-cold war era. Internet will bring democracy everywhere. But provides both challenges and opportunities for both demo. And authoritarian regimes.

Public sphere – central idea for today. Conceptual, not physical.

- have to understand public sphere to understand demo. There is a public arena where people come outside of private life to discuss/debate ideas of the day

1. private – connected to political authority (government) thru public sphere.

- civil society is diff than what the government says is the needs of society. Public sphere mediates between government and private. A place where needs of the people can discussed and made known to government. (people in streets protesting; public lecture series; town-hall mtgs. No intervention from outside (autonomous realm). Think of this as how we go from individual opinions to public opinions. Reason.

Habermas – key figure in public sphere.

-central question – how despite growth of rationality, age of enlightenment, scientific method, historical trajectory toward large public sphere, one gets hideous social consequences. Ex. Holocaust.

-Enlightenment is an unfinished process, rejects post-modern notions.

-think about institutions that are unique to humans – government.

-key – communicative rationality – if we believe in universal impulse toward communication, than we believe in reason?

-says what we have now is not natural, its historical – like Marx.

-tells a version of history of the public sphere developing & production and transference of information.

-this was published before growth of digital. General negative toward it.

-public sphere cam to be out of bourgeoisie culture. Where 1^st time in history private individual came to discuss publicly the issues of the day, but not in political arena. Unlike feudal power, where head is sovereign, represents power. In democracy, people become caretakers of power and the ruler must come to serve the public. Pg 74.

-printing press makes info widely available to literate public. Pamphlets where people have opinion and then discuss. Rise of middle class – 1^st time you have people with no political power but have money – feel they should have power. Decline of religion as determinate. Rise of science. People question religion. And growth of salon culture – places that were private (not government owned) but public and affluent white men could come and talk about the issues of the day. And growth in human rights related discourse – John Locke.

- Hab. Position is that this culture reaches height in 18^th century, despite white male centeredness. Egalitarian and inclusive. The public sphere was mainly determined by political concerns of this subset. Public sphere was free from outside influence. But as commercialization increases, public sphere becomes more about growth in capital.

–pg 73 – idea behind freedom of information act. People have to have free access to information in order to form their own public opinion. Circulation of accurate information in primary.

-How do you know your “American”? culture and media produce a national togetherness. We watch the news and then know what an American sounds like. Ex. Watch 90210 and know what high school is like. We imagine ourselves as a group, separate from other groups – French. This starts with print culture establish nation language and sense of identity.

- Rise of mass media- negative role this plays in destruction of public sphere. Commercialization and entertainment take precedent. Ex. News networks moved from social service, making news at a loss. Now, what is in news is motivated by profit (ex. Goodnight & Good Luck). Primarily - not informing but entertaining. -Can see this in newspapers, too (Pg 76). Telling you how to interpret the news rather than just delivering it and letting public opinion form organically. Editorial decisions are increasingly moved to preproduction (the public wants to know about this...)

-Public sphere becomes a place dominated by advertising. Revenues drives the interests of the programming. Public relations manager – signifies death of public sphere. Everything becomes a sales pitch. One manipulates news to control consent rather than foster discourse.

- We now associate corporate identity over national identity (“what’s in your wallet?”). Becomes a public sphere in appearance only. Pg 78. Ex. Balloon boy. Not important news story but one everyone will watch, so it is covered. Media manufactures the event. Proven as farce, then media covers the covering of event, etc. The story is there because they covered it.

-even if we don’t agree with Habermas, use it to understand public sphere in relation to democracy.

- idea of digital utopia (we are all informed, log online and vote) vs. mass surveillance society (i.e. 1984, Smartmobs)

-could argue that internet is a poor substitute for public sphere. There is a huge diff in being involved politically and being involved with new technologies. Habermas’ public sphere is based of reciprocity and face to face. Despite growth in internet, we’ve seen decline in public sphere and rational public discourse (one has to seek this out). 80-90% are trolls “haha, I agree” stuff.

-do see increase in commoditization; more external influence from market into public sphere, more the ability to inform declines. The way to be on the internet is to buy. Often on internet, you just get series of choices (blue v. black background), rather than long discussion. Identities on internet are just as much about consumption as they are about political (these are my top ten songs to buy).

- freedom by internet is fictional. Élites maintain power. White affluent man can pose as something other than white affluent man.

-Now people can consume entire news cycles without knowing what going on worldwide. People share only with other people that consume what they consume. We don’t all tune in at same time, for the same news. But instead we have constant, breaking updates.

Poster-

-internet actual reinvent the way we think about community. pg 265.

-talk about public sphere, but distance ourselves from old idea.

-internet does not supplement, but creates something entirely new.

Oct 13 – Notes on Marx & Hall

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:35:00 +0000

I don't know if this is helpful to anyone (I know I have a hard time reading other people's notes), but here are my notes from class last week if it helps fill in any gaps for anyone.....

Marx & Hall

-harder to understand – b/c we don’t understand the specific cultural moment he’s speaking about

-language- complex/ contradictory

-nothing directly about media studies

-thinking about context, content, etc

-he’s performing intellectual critique; not looking for rioting in the streets

-materialist concept of history (historical materialism) – how man organizes society to produce things matters; affects other things (economics)

Basic thesis:

1. who owns means of production matters, enough that it can be considered above all else

2. social consciousness affects individual thought (seen as opposite before)

-broad interdisciplinary approach – philosophical, economic, political science, etc...

Theory of History (the history of economic struggle; history of class struggle): each successive moment in history is defined by who owns the means of production (factories, fields) & modes of production (capitalism, feudalism) – understand how economics are organized

How organized ultimately yields political

- history is a progression of economic systems - evolution

- tribal

- feudal

-capitalism – most concerned with this, this is where he is writing from.

What will come from capitalism? Will make a case for what will be fourth. Key to answer the end of capitalism – struggle between producers (laborers) and those who own the means of production (exploit laborers – have to in order to make capitalism work)

-exploitation- we produce $10,000 worth of stuff, but we cant take home all of this. We get portion and owner takes portion. Justify this by saying owner takes risks, puts forth capital, Marx does not argue with this. Says: fundamentally operates through exploitation. More exploiting, more profit for capitalist. Motivation to exploit more.

-classes develop. For Marx – bourgeoisie and proletariat. More and more people get put in labor class. Only thing proletariat can sell is their labor. Divide gets larger and larger – class struggle. Large pool of labor unhappy – have revolution, take over factory. Take away their labor. For the 1^st time in history, large collection of exploited people who are networked together. Industrialism – cities. They can fight back for the first time.-in this mode of production, people feel more free. Get to chose where they work, who they vote for, etc. part 4 pg 3. “thus, in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seems accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are more subjected to the violence of things.”

-history is not series of accidents and not driven by individual choice or nature (not natural) – history is a machine than operates according to its technological logic. Part 2, pg 8.

-This means we cant understand the internet separate from the global capitalism that fosters its growth and feeds off of it. Huge corporations that can be more powerful than countries.

-doesn’t mean internet is global capitalism.

-our interests on economic level affect interests on cultural level. Copyrights – Disney.

- base (economics) determines field of play – rules, structures.

-by looking at superstructure, we can better understand rules & terms.

-with division of labor, comes division of power. One class does not control the other, but one class benefits more from the structure. But class that benefits is not free to change the rules. Both classes are Equally subject to the rules. Difference of power can be seen in the media and art. Media reflects cultural logic of time and reproduces power relations – can sometimes see as transparent.

HEGEL –

history is progression on prior – progressing toward spiritual perfection. Young Hegelians were championing this idea.

-thesis – a way of thinking

-antithesis- the reverse of that way of thinking

synthesis – the conversation between these two things. Produces new thesis, then new antithesis, etc….

Marx: “Bullshit.” part 1, pg 2: all they young Hegelians are saying they are pursuing spiritual perfection but they are not actual getting there. They don’t know gravity.

-part 2, pg 3. Society works on man, not man on society. “circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances”

- there is no such thing as natural; only historical. They are developments of cultural. Applies way beyond economic.

- example: male homosexuality – men are effeminate. That seems natural, they are weaker version of men. But this is historical. But can imagine other world – “you are more effeminate because you sleep with women. I’m more masculine because I fuck men.”

- revolution not to change ideas but have one to change social relations. Marx makes fun of Hegelians because they are worried about ideas. Broader issue – individual thought is determined by social consciousness. Section 1, page 8. Consciousness is determined by the material conditions in which you live. (also a McLuhan argument).

-Adam Smith (wealth of nations) idea – people have natural moral ideas. People have natural propensity to truck, barter, and exchange. Marx goes the other way: because people live in capitalist structure, they develop the idea that its good to truck, barter and exchange. – the culture in which you live, determines the way you think. You end up with a contradiction though in capitalism – so many people still remain poor. The see this discrepancy, we have to look at superstructure (cultural) layer to understand base layer. Charles dickens comes to rise during industrial revolution.

-This means – everything is political. Sec 1, pg 12. – Marx focuses on language because artistic medium of time is the novel.

-ideology – part 2, pg 10. Doesn’t mean ruling class imposes their ideals, but rather that these ideals are taken as universal. Both classes participate in this universality.

- cultural is idea of politic rather than aesthetics (Benjamin) preferences about aesthetics are manifestation of stuff at economic level. Those that think are studying aesthetics sans politics are mistaken (critic of Bolton and Grusin).

- can not separate content from the way content circulates.

- no universal meaning. Must pay attention to historical moment.

- capitalism – demographic culture, rather than politics. Art is determined by economic implication.

Hall-

- hall is late Marxist theorist.

- look at how cultural context of message shapes its meaning.

-discursive production.

-can think of media as a question of consumption and production. But not as simple as saying how produced and consumed.

Media – production, circulation, distribution, and consumption.

-basic thesis – language or other media do not operate as transparent (coding of messages in art and decoding on other end) so message isn’t guaranteed. Get many different meanings.

- there is a range of interpretation from which we operate. Pg 164.

-166 – miscommunication happens, and is part of communicative exchange. Encoding moment and decoding moment are not the same moment. Absolute purity of message is never received. For an audience to understand message, it has to be within range of their understanding.

- violence in media? – media is not a way of programming people. Violence on television is not violence but a message of violence. Pg 166.

–to what degree can encoding and decoding be controlled. Advertisers would love to control decoding.

- pg 167. no such thing as connotative and denotative. Denotative (what everyone agrees upon – pass off as natural) is actually connotative that we have to investigate. Stuff we think is natural are the things that have to most power over us.

Habermas Lacking

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:30:00 +0000

What does it say about digital media that the Habermasian “digital commons” did not really get legs underneath it until 2004 (and only then as something heavily licensed and mined for profit)? Clearly, the ideal of the greatest good has yet again taken back seat to what earns the most money.

I think it is terribly shortsighted to excuse Habermas as something of a bourgeois apologist, and I feel the implementation of his ideas—stunted as they have been by a necessity of profit—betray the sort of idealistic marketplace of ideas that Habermas claimed to advocate. In short, the Habermas Commons is just as exploited and exploitable as any other marketplace, despite who he tries to leave as custodians.

Just as “the commons” in historical periods has been subject to appropriation by the “haves” (versus the “have-nots”), a similar sort of corruption is taking place in today’s “digital commons.”

Don’t get me wrong; I think that Habermas describes a really nice utopian society with a few ready-solved caveats. I would like to live in such a society myself. However, the means of production and the greed of individuals’ supersede any vaguely authoritarian body. Habermas never really explains why my giving him a few bucks wouldn’t garner me preferential treatment.

I hate to be the person regularly condemning efforts of shared intelligence and new-media commoditization, but I think essayist like Habermas prove my point in advance: we can really only conceive of a “communist”/ “shared”/ “egalitarian”/ “utopian” forum for ideas in vacuums where the implicit necessities of production are marginalized.

I appreciate Habermas’ ideas, but his work leads only to the sort of idealist apologetics of Poster, where real-world conditions of production are marginalized by high ideals where only if “what-if” were the case. It is certainly fun, but hardly productive.

Consider, for example the tale of Wikipedia. It has been largely regarded as a darling of new media concept, spawning books like “Wikinomics” that heralded the production of group content. I may be cynical but these sorts of texts seem to me to be exploiting the free labor of passionate participants, as though the Jews working for Ramses were not slaves because they believed in his deification. I will first admit that this is probably a rhetorical sleight of hand, but what is a dispassionate viewer to think when he cruises that back alleys of Wikipedia and sees so much distrust, power play and manipulation at work? We can’t debate the merits of “what really is truth” here, but let us not forget that lesson when we see viewpoints stifled out by controlling moderators. When/how did we decide what was truth worthy of Wikipedia? I would argue that in a certain sense a major quality of the website is lost when we can finally and summarily remove certain updates.

The reader no doubt sees all sorts of problems with such a militant egalitarianism. I agree. But what are we to draw from Habermas except such an ideal? We read Habermas with the understanding that we can no longer trust the Proletariat sentiments to reflect the most good and just ideals. Were we still reading Marx such a concept would be criminal. In a truly Marxian society, literally so. Thus I ask that we read Habermas with the same sort of credulity that any group of revolutionaries would consider new doctrine. I argue that his implications are vast and totalitarian. We are told to accept the will of the Bourgeoisie—why? Because they hold power. Because they develop content.

Why would we do this today? Because it is quaint? Because it is authoritative? I disagree wholly with Habermas and his ideal of the protecting Bourgeoisie. It lacks merit. I would rather struggle with an unanswered or frightening solution like the rise of the Proletariat, than rest on my laurels in favor of an easy answer where the “best and brightest” naturally hold sway. I have yet to see that historical condition. And I am still waiting.

Marx & Hall

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:00:00 +0000

It is clear from the reading, “The German Ideology,” by Karl Marx, that we are facing a time of upheaval not unlike that of Marx’s mid-19^th century. The whole premise of Marx’s work was to dispute the notions of the Young Hegelians of the day. The book is described as a collection of polemics. If you are like me, and did not know what that word meant, “polemics is the practice of disputing or controverting significant, broad-reaching topics of magnitude such as religious, philosophical, political or scientific matters. As such, a polemic text on a topic is often written specifically to dispute or refute a position or theory that is widely viewed to be beyond reproach” (thank you, once again, Wikipedia). So, this says a lot. Marx is setting out to dispute the, then, common German ideology of idealism.

Marx was making the case for materialism. He said that to produce and reproduce our material needs was a fundamental part of our existence. “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing theirs means of subsistence mean are indirectly producing their actual material life” (1A, pg 4).

Marx identifies several different stages of production in relation to the division of labor and internal intercourse, including tribal, ancient, and feudal. In each of these social stages, people interact with nature and produce their living in different ways. Tribal refers to an undeveloped stage of production. Ancient society was based on a ruling class of slave owners and a class of slaves; feudalism based on landowners and serf. He says capitalism is based on the capitalist class and the proletariat. The capitalist class privately owns the means of production, distribution and exchange, however, the proletariat lives by exchanging labor with the capital class for wages.

He points out just how crucial production and the intercourse of society are to the material life and the structure of society. As society moves from stage to stage, the old ways of production are thrown out and a revolution occurs. In the same way, Marx is suggesting the German people throw out their old Hegelian ideas and search for a new truth. He did not belittle the ideas of Hegel, whom he claimed to be a pupil of, but wanted to turn them on their head.

We are entering into a similar time of ideological change. With regard to communication, we have to completely rethink what has been the commonly accepted.

The second reading, “Encoding/Decoding”, too, points out a need to change a commonly accepted viewpoint. Stuart Hall, points out that traditional research on communication has been criticized for being too linear. Communication has been interpreted as a “circulation circuit,” consisting of only a sender, message, and receiver. Hall claims that there is a better approach, that was actually originally conceptualized by Marx. This approach utilizes a more complex conception of communication that includes production, circulation, distribution/consumption, and reproduction. In this new model, each element, although connected, is distinct and has its own special modality.

He goes on to talk about meanings and messages in communication or language. He asserts that encoding and decoding are fundamental processes in the communicative exchange. The message in its natural form must be encoded by the source and decoded by the receiver so that a symbolic exchange is produced. Because the broadcaster makes assumptions about the audience in sending the message, Hall supports the view that the audience is paradoxically both the source and receiver of the message. So, we must take a new look at how the meanings and messages are delivered and interpreted. . If the intended meaning of the decoder contradicts the meaning of the encoder, a misunderstanding results. A ‘misunderstanding’ may consequently arise as the meaning of the decoder contradicts the meaning of the encoder. Also, it is possible for the viewer to understand the message but purposely interpret it in an alternative way. If we are to look at these ideas in terms of new media, we see how the encoding and decoding of the present becomes increasingly more complicated. We have a whole dialogue on the internet where every point or counterpoint can be interpreted “incorrectly.” Ideas about communication will be (and are) completely evolving.

Both Hall and Marx saw a commonly agreed upon idea and turned it on its head. With the drastic changes occurring in today’s communication technologies, it will be time, too, for us to find the illusions in the American ideology. Like Marx, however, a lot of Hall’s ideas have been reconsidered and further complicated. Stuart Hall might be said to describe a classic Marxist conception of communication, while others (Roland Barthes, notably) would fundamentally challenge the idea of ‘misunderstanding’ in favor of re-appropriation—a much more “new media” idea.

The Language of New Media & Hypermediacy

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:59:00 +0000

This week’s reading was The Language of New Media written by Lev Manovich.

In Chapter 1, Manovich discuses the different principles of new media. One of the attributes is modularity, which Manovich describes as “the fractal structure of new media.” I was unfamiliar with this term and if you are as well, the definition, as given by Dictionary.com, is:

frac⋅tal

–noun Mathematics, Physics.

a geometrical or physical structure having an irregular or fragmented shape at all scales of measurement between a greatest and smallest scale such that certain mathematical or physical properties of the structure, as the perimeter of a curve or the flow rate in a porous medium, behave as if the dimensions of the structure (fractal dimensions) are greater than the spatial dimensions.

I thought this was an unusual way of describing media; we look at media from theoretical viewpoints or historical viewpoints, but seldom from a geometrical one. However, as he expands on the assertion, we can see he is talking about the different elements that contribute to an overall medium. “These elements are assembled into larger-scale objects but continue to maintain their separate identities” (30). Wait a minute… that sounds a hell of a lot like hypermediacy. If we recall Bolter and Grusin’s description of hypermediate media, it includes: something you look at, with lots of windows, it creates a fullness (by showing multiple views and information on one topic), the knowledge is based on the opaque, it requires multiple glances (like a montage), it shows many perspectives or shifting views, and the media itself is present.

If we come back to Manovich’s description, we cal draw more parallels. He describes, “in short, a new media object consists of independent parts, each which consists of smaller independent parts, and so on, down to the level of the smallest ‘atoms’ – pixels, 3-D points, or text characters” (31). We are seeing, over and over, the strength of hypermediacy in new media.

Another way in which Manovich’s depiction of new media parallels to Bolter and Grusin’s idea of hypermediacy is the variability factor. “A new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions” (36). I think this ability for new media to be liquid is another parallel to hypermediacy. Imagine the current way in which we watch football. The screen is crowded with stats and running scores from concurrent games. Similar to websites, in general, this screenshot has a template and the content can be interchanged depending on need. If a certain player scores, a bio of that player can be put at the forefront on the screen view. The ability to bring into play relevant knowledge is a huge part of hypermediacy.

However, infinite variability in new media is also laced with potential pitfalls. For example, the endless modalities available to every individual are dialectically isolating. In other words, the freedom to customize almost every experience quickly erodes the very sense of community that has been so heavily promised by writers like Manovich. I am reminded of another book, The Limits of the City by Murray Bookchin. Within, Bookchin charts the development of urban landscapes as they evolve beyond a concentration of human relationships, into the isolating, and alienating postmodern society where individuals relate to commodities more readily than they relate to each other.

In many ways, networked media is the ultimate fulfillment of urban planning, where countless cultures can exist in relative harmony within a small space. However, in entirely removing the spatial limitations of cohabitation, hypermediacy also severs the last socializing imperative: namely, the bumping heads of too many people in too small a space.

In its most extreme hypermediacy evokes in my mind the coldest corners of cyberspace. Where small groups of people cobble together esoteric affiliations by shouting over one another endlessly. Of course, much is to like about hypermediacy, but there is much that may well be a further source of isolation and social imprisonment in exchange for its superficially limitless mode of consumption.

Walter Benjamin

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:18:00 +0000

As early as 1935, Walter Benjamin intuited much of the issues we are dealing with in today’s digital landscape. Just as the printing press allowed the unlimited reproduction of the written word, contemporary technology has provided for the endless recreation of all media forms.

The endless reproduction of print is similar to today’s digital landscape, but unlike the situation in the 1450s when someone needed the money to buy their own printing press and set their own type face/font and bind and distribute their product… today, anyone with literally the cheapest computer or at least access to a computer can reproduce virtually any visual representation, be it print, photo, sound, film, or computer animation.

The ease with which any digital artifact can be re-appropriated is obvious when you look at the re-release of Toy Story. What was originally a very popular film, has, with a minimal of effort, been remade as a digital 3D version. Doubtless, whatever aura Walter Benjamin was writing about is obscured by this recreation of a classic Pixar film. For example, which version is to be regarded as the original? Surely someone will argue that the digital 3D version best captures the film’s spirit. And, since both were rendered on computers and designed by a team rather than any one individual, any coherent concept becomes the purview of a committee rather than the vision of an artist. Surely even the original Toy Story would be something of a curiosity to Walter Benjamin initially because we as an audience are asked to take that film and reinterpret it with the addition of new 3D technology. Is one version more authentic than the other? Does someone have to see both the original and the 3D version to completely digest the Toy Story experience?

For all of his insight, Benjamin does not offer anything in the way of a solution to artistic production in modern-day society. It is one thing to recognize a system of control, in this case, the bourgeois appropriation of modes of production. But it is quite another to offer an alternative means of production. For example, it seems self-destructive to encourage the downloading of television shows, music, film, and all other digital media, outside of any model of compensation for the artist or production company. Whether or not someone steals or buys media from the internet; the question goes unanswered, where does the artwork’s aura lie?

It is interesting to consider how the proliferation of the Christian Bible would have been altered it any individual had been able to recreate, modify, and reproduce biblical text on their own printing press. Because that is precisely the situation we face today. Walter Benjamin conceived of a world where business interests appropriated artistic texts for their own ends. In evolving beyond that, what has occurred is a system of almost self-destructive egalitarianism. Today, there is no incentive for preserving the aura of an artwork and there no incentive for protecting the vision of an artist. Rather, everyone is encouraged to make new any digital artifact that they access.

The critical thinker of today needs to consider both the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction – the artwork that Benjamin was specifically concerned with—and contrast it with the free-for-all that has resulted from the proliferation of digital media. While Benjamin’s work is quite apt, it highlights how dramatically technology has altered our lives. The principles that Benjamin outlines are quite sound, but the specific seem outdated to the point of irrelevance.

What is certain, the hackneyed discussion of the Mona Lisa’s representation on t-shirts and coffee mugs, grossly oversimplifies Benjamin’s thesis. Benjamin did not simply state that an artwork loses its aura through mechanical reproduction, his interests lay in the much more complicated question of what elicits human emotion and what constitutes art when the world is more eager to replicate itself endlessly than it is to preserve any semblance of uniqueness.

Printing Revolution & Making Mistakes

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 05:13:00 +0000

It didn’t take reading Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe to recognize the outstanding historical impact resulting from the invention of the printing press. It revolutionized learning and how information was presented and consumed by people. “A serious student could now endeavor to cover a larger body of material by private reading than a student or even a mature scholar needed to master or could hope to master before printing made books cheap and plentiful” (47). What an interesting time it must have been when printing was becoming the next big thing, yet hand-copying was still being employed. The old was mixing with the new in Western Europe. Yet, it could not be denied that the new would soon overpower the old and extend it’s supreme hold on communication to the whole world. Dare I say, it’s not unlike our current shift from analog to digital? Yes, of course it is. We still use books and understand their inherent importance (like scriptoria in the 15^th century) but we are learning to communicate in a new way.

The part of Eisenstein’s book I’d like to focus on is the excerpt on standardization. Although this is a pretty obvious component to the advent of print, there are many aspects to this I would have not likely considered before reading this book.

When we think of printing today, we can rest assured that every copy of a certain edition of a certain book would look and read the same. When a manuscript is written, it is submitted to a publisher. That publisher then will edit & revise and then has the responsibility to print a standardized copy of the edited original.

However, during the early years (and centuries) of print, publishing was an unknown entity. Original manuscripts may arrive at the print shop to be printed with mistakes already in them. It is true that many originals would have been hand-copied and could have variants resulting from the individual scribe. Also, who was there to regulate what was sent to each shop? There could be 15 different print shops receiving 15 different versions of an “original” work to make prints of. Additionally, each print shop owner was left to determine what he wanted to print and how much of it he wanted to print. Generally, he had full discretion with regard to the finished products that he himself did not likely write. This means he could put the time and effort he felt like putting toward making a good (and correct) product. Eisenstein addresses this, yet she states there was largely enough consistency in print to be effective. And where there were inconsistencies, these could be addressed if necessary. “[The printings] were sufficiently uniform for scholars in different regions to correspond with each other about the same citation and for the same emendations and errors to be spotted by many eyes.”

Now, even today, we cannot rule out human error as part of everything we encounter. One of the more notable examples in the book is one on a mistake in a print of the Bible that was not caught in time. Printed by R. Barker in 1631, the “wicked” Bible featured a sixth commandment that commands one to commit adultery, instead of abstaining from it.

One interesting thing about mistakes in print at that point in time, however, is how the mistakes were dealt with. “Press variants multiplied rapidly and countless errata had to be issued” (56). A list of errors and their corrections would have to be distributied to right the wrongs of the printer. “The very act of publishing errata demonstrated a new capacity to locate textual errors with precision and to transmit this information simultaneously to scattered readers. It thus illustrates rather neatly some of the effects of standardization.”

Today, mistakes in print usually result in a recall and a reprinting of the erred book. Or if this is not a possibility, it is much easier today to inform the public, who have already purchased the book, of a mistake because of the ever-expanding reach of the media. Think James Fray’s A Million Little Pieces. (Oprah was pissed!)

But now, in an age that is moving away from print, it’s even easier to correct mistakes. Everything is digital and therefore incredibly easy to manipulate and improve. Hell, I usually go back to make edits and corrections several times after “publishing” my blog posts. The same is true of any news source today. Address it, fix it and move on.

But one significant similarity between the advent of print and the global presence of the Internet is the idea of “transmitting information simultaneously to scattered readers.” This raises the rate of mistake catching exponentially because of the sheer number of people that have access to a certain piece of writing (collective intelligence). But what is even greater now that it’s all digital? That person not only has the ability to call attention to that mistake, but to correct it himself.

Remediation: Fashion Ads

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 04:20:00 +0000

Now, I know covering the subject of fashion in terms of its use of contemporary media is far to broad to cover in a singular blogpost. So, I will focus on the advertising side of fashion, specifically, print ads.

In terms of media, print ads are not a new venue. Not even close. In today's world we see print ads everywhere (and they are usually starring a beautiful woman). However, when I was reading the excerpt from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s book Remediation on digital photography, I could not help but think about the use of “air-brushing” in my favorite magazines. On page 107, the authors are disguising the Mexican photographer Pedro Myer. He exhibited his photos on CD-ROM. “As their labels indicate, most of the photographs have been digitally altered,” and the result is a variety of different styles. Some of the photographs are explicit digital collage. Others are realistic except for the appearance of a fantastic, presumably digital, element, such as an angel.” This is when I really started thinking about fashion (in all media) and its special relationship to reality.

I would claim to be an avid reader of Vogue and W magazines. In my eyes, these publications are true works of art. Flipping through pages of glamorous photo shoots and breathtaking ads for Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel give me so much pleasure; they have raw aesthetic appeal. Although reading these magazines is somewhat masochistic, for I could never afford to adorn myself in these designs (nor would it be realistic to dress in haute couture), I can not help but indulge myself in my fantasy world.

These magazine and their advertisers employ much more than air-brushing. For example, in Louis Vuitton’s recent campaign, featuring Madonna, one can see how parts of the photo are over-exposed and blended. The colors are muted in certain places and exaggerated in others. Without the help of digital photography and therefore digital manipulation, we would not have this beautiful photograph.

“Looking at some photographs, we cannot be sure what the computer has changed, for nothing in the picture is unambiguously impossible in the world of light” (107).

In this exquisite shot from Dolce & Gabbana the result of digital manipulation or is simply strategically placed tinted lights? We do not know; it could easily be both. What I find so intriguing about these particular examples are their ability to combine transparency and surrealism. “Digital photography appears to complicate and even mock the desire for immediacy that traditional photography promises” (111). There’s the immediacy that’s inherent to photography yet an other-worldliness to the message. As Bolter and Grusin noted, “digital technology may succeed in shaking our culture’s faith in the transparency of the photograph.” Also, their book was from 9 years ago; think how differently photographs are processed now in 2009. I would expect nearly all photos in magazines, newspapers, on television, and on websites to have been doctored in some way. Whether they’ve been cropped or the color has been enhanced, with our current media altering technologies, it’s almost to be expected that what we see on-air, in print or online, is not the true “original.” We can no longer expect a photograph to be an “immediate contact with reality.”

What is interesting, however, is the notion that just because we digitally alter photographs now, does not mean we didn’t alter them in analog form. “The process of digitizing the light that comes through the lens is no more or less artificial than the chemical process of traditional photography. It is a purely cultural decision to claim that darkening the color values of a digitized image by algorithm is an alteration of the truth of the image, whereas keeping an analog negative linger in the developing bath is not” (110).

Photography is an art form and as the technology progress, the media becomes a greater tool. Painting rolled in to analog photography, which has rolled in digital. The newer form is no lesser an art, it is an expansion of its former self.

Vogue cover from May 1939

McLuhan, Ong

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 06:10:00 +0000

This week’s readings were the introduction and fourth chapter from Walter Ong’s book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word and Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message as well as McLuhan’s 1969 interview with Playboy magazine. For the purpose of this week’s blog I would like to focus on McLuhan’s work.

Marshall McLuhan is a very intelligent individual and I struggled quite a bit understanding all of his intertwining thought processes in The Medium. . . Fortunately, his Playboy interview was a bit easier to understand than the work he himself authored. I think one of the primary reasons it was an easier read was that the Playboy interviewer was there to ask those “Can you explain what you mean by that?” kind of questions. I was left with the impression that had I been a student in a McLuhan class, I would probably have had hand up for the entire duration.

For example: McLuhan contends that watching television requires heavy usage of tactile sense. He postulates that sense of touch, rather than sense of sight, is the primary way one absorbs the medium of television. The reason, he argues, is the “low density or definition [of television] offers no detailed information about specific objects but instead involves the active participation of the viewer.” I assume he means that the viewer must “fill in the blanks” and react to the vague sensibility of a television program rather than “to specific objects.” I would argue, however, that this is not necessarily the case. Although I have never had the experience of viewing television programming in the 1960s, I certainly know what it is like in the 1990 and now in the 2000s. Today, watching television requires little to no effort or participation on the part of its audience. Certainly, other critics (for example, Theodor Adorno in On Television) have argued that television is characterized by an audience’s lack of participation in the events on-screen.

With the benefit of several generations of evolution in the technology of TV, I would argue that big screens and high definition programming and equipment has hardly changed the viewing experience in regards to whether or not the experience is tactile rather than visual.

Today, most programming currently broadcast could be characterized by as mindless television (and a lot of it is just garbage). Unless I am just missing his point, I think McLuhan was wrong in postulating that television viewing at that time required “short, intense participation and (was characterized by) low definition.”

Another point he made that I found interesting was the contrast he made between television and radio. Clearly, these two mediums are extremely different but the reasons he found them to be different were unconventional. As I mentioned above, he said that television is requires intensive participation and is low definition and he called this a “cool” experience. To contrast, he said radio is “essentially ‘hot,’ or high definition-low participation.” I would argue, however, that is no longer true. I think of television as our primary “hot” medium and now the internet/digital communication is our primary “cool” medium. It certainly requires participation on the part of the user. The interactive element is part of the message of that medium. Again, I would not maintain he was wrong in saying these things at the time, only he would be wrong if he said them now.

One this same note, McLuhan himself stated that he has “no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory” and would likely have evolved his understanding of television as a medium as soon as that understanding was no longer relevant. In short, to argue that the point he made in 1969 is no longer a relevant argument is something he would surely have concluded himself. In fact, another point he made was that “today, television is the most significant of the electric media because it permeates nearly every home in the country.” I would be interested to hear his thoughts on the internet because that is quite a pervasive medium now and certainly very different from the mediums he was acquainted with.

9/1/09 Plato; Saussure

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 04:29:00 +0000

Plato, Saussure

The readings from this week focus on communication and language. One reading is Phaedrus from “the Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1.” This work is a dialogue between Phaedrus and Socrates on love and philosophy; which also touches on the merits of speech versus written word. Socrates voices his opinion that the “art of rhetoric” is more effective through the spoken word than it is through the written.

The second reading was a “Course in General Linguistics” compiled from the teachings of Ferdinand de Saussure. This discourse focuses on language as a science and some of the ideas that explain that science. In truth, I found Saussure difficult to read and I had a hard time really understanding all it had to say.

The very fact that I found it difficult to absorb Saussure and even to some degree Plato really speaks to the fact that language today has evolved. Being of the “internet generation," I have become used to absorbing sound bytes or very short, concise concepts. A news headline, an instant message, a tweet, or a status update – these inform me in less than 140 characters. If they don’t catch my interest, I move on. Having been out of school for a year and a half, I feel I’m having to retrain my brain to comprehend larger sources of information. I mention this embarrassing tidbit because it directly relates to the issue at hand – the evolution of language and communication.

Plato’s Socrates argues that speech is superior to the written word. In some ways, it is. One can adjust the message they deliver according to the audience digesting the message. For example, Socrates stays to deliver a second speech because he “recognizes the oracular sign which forbids him to depart until he has done penance.” In other words, because he was present for the delivery of the message, he can interpret the audience’s (Phaedrus) insufficient understanding and stay to complete the message. Also, the orator can take “the inspiration of the place” they are when communicating their message and use this to their advantage. Socrates draws upon the inspiration from the nature around him to strengthen his message. However, how much of Socrates’ resistance to the written word is based on the fact that it is the newer form of communication and therefore less advanced or less prestigious?

This is similar to the current transformation from analog to digital forms of communication. Those of us that have allegiance to both worlds know that both have their own redeeming qualities. Analog has more credibility because society perceives published work as having gone through a process that deems it credible (i.e. editing and professional review). However, digital is wonderful because it can be so easily adjusted (not unlike Socrates’ view on the spoken word). If an idea is not understood in its current form, it can be adjusted in a matter of seconds. Another benefit to digital is the idea of collaborative intelligence. Many people can contribute to a work and therefore the reader benefits from the knowledge of many rather than the knowledge of one (as is the case with a book written by one author). Of course, the downside to this is the “Wikipedia quality problem”. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_problem/

With the ability of people to contribute to knowledge anonymously, there is little quality control that ensures that these people’s contribution is correct or if they are actually trying to contribute quality information. For example, I could easily add a string of curse words to one of these sites and it would not only be irrelevant but, to many, offensive. Collective intelligence can easily become collective garbage.

But what do we make of the so-called devolution of intelligence? Is Google making us stupid? http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

Like I mentioned above, I feel as though my brain has been re-circuited. I struggled through Saussure because I haven’t taken in content in that way in a while. I read in hyperlinks and headlines. As Nicholas Carr said, “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” It’s somewhat alarming to me that I can’t sit down with a textbook the way I used to. I think it’s especially concerning because I had a good mastery of this “skill” (being able to read books or informative papers) as few as two years ago. However, at the same time, am I unnecessarily holding on to the old ideas on communication? This is a new age. Just like how the ability to give speeches lost some of it’s value due to the prevalence of the written word, will the ability to read long works lose it’s necessity? Though we still cling to analog communication today, in the future will it be important at all?

One quick post for Frank (the dog)

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:14:00 +0000

My dog Frank in a Banana costume!!

I know this isn't class related, but I could not resist!!!

First Post!

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca Case) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:33:00 +0000

I've just created my first blog for Emerging Media & Communications 5300! I hope to contribute at least 5% meaningful content to this thing... Of course, once class is over, I'll probably only blog about my dog, Frank.