Extra Blog: Andrews a Victim of the Internet

            Throughout the term we have talked about the power the internet has and how it has evolved because of a high percentage of active participation. The participatory culture is responsible for spreading news at a very high rate whether it is a video or news story. Much of the time social networking sites can even be a source to gain information. However, there are many instances when this active participation can cause derogatory things to spread at a high rate as well. Erin Andrews, who is a reporter for ESPN, was the victim of a video spreading at high rate that compromised her reputation forever.

            Andrews who is frequently on the road for her job at ESPN was stalked by Illinois man who followed her on three different occasions. He was able to obtain a peephole video in which Andrews is nude and posing in front of a mirror. The man took the video and posted it online while also trying to sell it to TMZ before he was caught and charged. An active participatory culture caused this video to spread at a high rate with a large number of people viewing it and publically embarrassing Andrews while also sending her into a somber state. The internet held a great hand in this video becoming such a hit and it is a true shame. However, this is another example of what the internet has become.

            The man involved in the case was given a two and a half year prison sentence, but Andrews did not feel this was a harsh enough punishment. Her public image was sabotaged due to the number of views the video received. She was violated by a sick human being and he was able to gain popularity via the internet. This was a truly sad example of how this participatory culture can operate, but this is the reality we live in now with the internet.  

Extra Blog: Tanney's Rise

            In class we have talked about how YouTube is an extremely effective tool for self expression and also can be an avenue for an artist to gain attention or get noticed. YouTube has blossomed into one of the top sites on the internet because of its free nature and different videos on all subjects. It just so happens that the idea of gaining attention as an artist can work the same way for an athlete. Playing football at Lawrence, you compete in the Midwest Conference which includes teams from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa. We go up against some of the very best in Division 3 football in our own conference.

            Alex Tanney, a quarterback from Monmouth College, is one of the very best in the conference and the nation. He is regarded as a NFL draft prospect because of his big arm and great accuracy. It was due to YouTube that his popularity spread to the national scene. He made a video that included him making all kinds of different throws that seemed impossible. Whether he was throwing over the scoreboard at their stadium or out of his apartment, the throws were magnificent. His talent did not go unnoticed; ESPN caught wind of the video on YouTube and did different specials on him. However, being discovered by ESPN could make some players’ careers, he was not done. The History Channel saw the epic video and decided to a segment on one of their new shows which features individuals who have supernatural talents. This video truly took Tanney and Monmouth College to national prominence.

            The result of this video is not just increased popularity, but it also served as a springboard to Tanney gaining more attention from the NFL. His choice to make what seemed to be an innocent video could serve his checkbook large dividends down the road. As we talked in class about YouTube serving as an audition for artists, the same goes for athletes. This is especially true for Division 3 athletes, who are seldom talked about with Division 1 programs dominating the news.   

Smart Mobs

Smart mobs are groups of people that band together using different types of electronic media to conduct protests. They operate out of the governmental eye while planning their protests, quickly and easily spreading news throughout the population. Electronics, specifically applications like BlackBerry Messaging and sites like facebook, serve as a way to expediate the process of communication. In the London riots of 2011, people were able to avoid police intervention about their planned riots by spreading information on riots through blackberry messenger. When an issue arises that upsets the general population, they often use texting to spread the word about things. Anonymous is a group that does just that. They are an online army essentially, who enlist the public by announcing protests that they will hold. They use youtube videos and their website to gather people together, and by gaining the reputation they have as an internet power they are able to get even more attention on the internet. Apart from Anonymous, people can help organize protests by sending mass texts and creating a collective intelligence quickly so that they can band together to fight the issue that has upset them. There are other kinds of programs that help put people together for other reasons than protesting, such as Upoc which allows you to join different groups that have different interests. In the article Smart Mobs: Power of the Mobile Many, the author talks about his experience joining groups such as an New York City terrorist alert group, which “promised immediate messages in the case of a terrorist account.” (167, Smart Mobs) While groups like this are more serious and useful, there are also tons of groups for fans of musical artists to chat, and groups that people use to stalk celebrities by notifying the masses when a celebrity is spotted.
The Occupy wall street movement is a prime example of how media and technology can help band people together and organize groups. The movement started when people realized that 99% percent of the American public don’t have any power because they aren’t extremely wealthy. The only people that can have a real effect on Wall Street are the people who have the money to invest in the stock market, and that’s only 1% percent of the people living in the USA. The protests really took an intense turn when the police started physically assaulting protestors, which just angered people more. “During a demonstration in Lower Manhattan, 20-year-old Brandon Watts of Philadelphia grabbed a police officer's hat and was subsequently tackled and arrested, sustaining a gash to his forehead.”
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/occupy-wall-street-finally-gets-face-bloody-153643148.html
This event has finally given a face to the Wall Street movement, and this picture is now circulating on the internet and being passed throughout all kinds of smart mobs. Apart from pictures being spread, protestors also carry webcams to they can record police brutality and incite even more intense protesting. Watts has become the bloody face of what is appearing more and more to be a war. The picture of his bloodied face will incite even angrier protesting because the Smart Mobs involved in the OWS movement will spread it as far as they can to give their movement more power. Tons of groups on facebook mention places where people should show up to protest. Facebook allows people to create groups that even show maps of where people should go, and provide links to the site where more knowledge can be learned about the subject. There are also pages that say nothing more than “Occupy Wall Street, September 17th,” these groups simply provide a date, and then hundreds of people comment on the page and organize further. This simple page got over 2500 “likes” and over a hundred people commenting on it saying things like “good job, keep it up everyone!” There are also people from other pages about the Occupy Wall Street movement that post on this page’s wall to provide vital information to everyone interested in the subject.
Link to facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Occupy-Wall-Street-September-17th/136981243051090
In this way a collective intelligence is created and the movement can grow stronger. It even incites more anger among the participants because people use the page to spread word of police brutality. Since the London riots began with a similar incident, these kinds of posts could start a snowball effect that could result in rioting similar to London.

Technology is essential to communication today, and is far improved from its counterparts in the past. It is much easier to covertly spread word of protests with mass texts and other programs, which means that police cant prepare themselves to deal with the mobs before they begin. This leads to much higher scale rioting than ever before, and allows information to be spread incredibly quickly. Rheingold speaks about all of the different mobile communication groups he was exposed to in New York City, and nowadays there are tons of twitter groups that do the same thing he was talking about except in reference to the OWS movement. Smart Mobs use their mobile computers to check twitter posts to see whats going on and to record police brutality and spread videos of it to the masses. People get minute by minute updates on happenings, even during a protest, which makes people far more organized than they ever have been. While protesting is a main use of Smart Mob technology, it’s used for things like dating and meeting people with similar interests as well. What makes it so easy for these programs and smart mobs to form is the fact that so many people have smart phones and are thus able to do almost everything a computer can do with their handhelds. This means that people can constantly be monitoring sites like facebook and twitter for updates on issues like OWS, and always have access to any other internet programs they would like to use.

Smart Mobs: How Smart Are They?

Smart mobs are an interesting creation of technological progression. Howard Rheingold’s definition of smart mobs defines the entity eloquently, “smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don’t know each other. The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities.” These mobile devices have the power to people to create new forms of social power and foster new forms of interaction between social groups in new places. I really enjoyed Rheingold’s reading of smart mobs because the general tone of his writing offered a positive and forward-thinking theoretical analysis of what smart mobs of capable of accomplishing. At one point in his reading I felt like he was loosely referring to the issues we dealt with in discussing the repercussions of media convergence in this passage, “contradictory and simultaneous effects are likely: People might gain new powers at the same time we lose old freedoms. New public goods could become possible, and older public goods might disappear.”

The decentralized organizational structure, lack of hierarchy and dynamically self-organizing characteristics of smart mobs are, simultaneously, its best asset and worst enemy. For example, the Occupy Wall Street movement that has recently made waves in the headlines in the recent weeks (surprising, since it’s been going on for nearly two months) was organized by the power of the, to put in Rehingold’s archaic terminology, “personal handheld device.” However the biggest critique of the #OWS (Twitter hashtag reference!) movement is that its main political aims are not clear. The general consensus between the liberal student body of Lawrence University is that the movement isn’t achieving anything but slowing down the functionality of certain streets of New York. While I think that’s a bit of an over statement, a fair criticism of the movement is that collecting people with shared beliefs is the easy part—organizing action is another. This is an example of a smart mob initiative that reflects the effectiveness of technology in terms of gathering bodies to a physical location but doesn't reflect the potential for these groups to create change.  

Photo Credit: http://topics.gannett.com/wall+street+protests?template=argusleader&odyssey=mod%7Cdnmiss%7Cumbrella%7C4

Wikipedia

One of the main topics in class this week was Wikipedia. The question concerning wikipedia is how reliable the information is on the site. We read articles defending both sides: Shirky claiming it was great because people worked together to make the information correct as well as the grammar and other aspects. While Keen informed us that because it is not worked on by experts we cannot trust the information there. Keen argues that because a seven year old has as much authority as a scientist there is not a lot of validity in the information. Because we do not know who wrote the information, there is simply no way we can trust what we are reading. Shirky, however, argues that because so many people monitor wikipedia it is unlikely that any mistakes will last.
When I was in high school citing wikipedia was becoming a terrible thing to do. My teachers would often tell our class that we can not use wikipedia as a source. If we want to use wikipedia, scroll down to the bottom and use the sources the article cites because you might find something there. Basically, my school banned the use of wikipedia as a source. This is not uncommon; A New York Times article written in 2007 talks about how the history department banned citing wikipedia as a source when a significant number of students had misinformation for a quiz saying that the jesuits supported the shimabara rebellion. This information was wrong and when the teacher realized his students learned this information from wikipedia, he got it banned. This story is not uncommon with wikipedia, which is why it is not considered a creditable source in many schools throughout the country. I had an experience where I was looking up a type of fish and in the middle of the article someone had written poop. This shows that while there are people who inspect and look over wikipedia articles, they can not catch them all.
Wikipedia does, however, have some quality articles and it is true that people watch and inspect wikipedia for correctness and grammar. Wikipedia is a great place to start looking for basic information on a topic you do not know much about, but it is not a trusted source. I often look at wikipedia articles in my free time and I have learned a lot of good information, but I have also learned a lot of misinformation. So reading wikipedia is fine, especially for a basic knowledge, but it should not be considered a source encyclopedia to be used on research papers. The point is that both Shirky and Keen were correct: Wikipedia is a great website with lots of good information (this is what Shirky wrote) but it also is filled with misinformation (what Keen said) so it is important to remember this and take what you read on wikipedia with a grain of salt.

Identity and Self

In Sherry Turkle’s Aspect of Self, she discusses how identity and self is formed in a virtual world. There are many different ways to explore the identity and self in a virtual world, and Turkle argues that a common use is to explore parts of our identity or self that we cannot explore due to real world constrictions. She gives us an example of a man upset with his alcoholic father, and tries to be a perfect man in his virtual world (MUD). After some time, he realized that he is addicted to his MUD and his MUD character, and has a better understanding of what it means to be an addict to something. In another example, a high school student would start arguments in his MUD to blow off some steam to prepare for a test. MUDs have helped people to find themselves and to explore themselves in different ways because they are “an escape valve for anxiety and anger that felt too dangerous to exercise in real life” (Turkle 189).

When I was in middle school (junior high), I had a very interesting experience exploring identity through CMC (mainly Google Chat). I devolved a crush on another girl in my class, but she had a boyfriend. Her boyfriend, however, was mean to her and would break up with her about every month. I was always the shoulder that the woman would cry on (this sounds like a bad love story…lol). One day I confessed my feelings for her, and she admitted that she had similar feelings for me. She refused, however, to break up with her boyfriend, because she still loved him. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but about a month after this event we both created other identities. Mine was called Tom and hers Angel. These identities would ‘come out’ when we were too stressed or too fed up with something in our lives and needed an escape from the real world. Tom and Angel also lived out an aspect of our lives that we could not in real life. After about a month of knowing each other, they got together. They went on hikes and dates and all sorts of other romantic adventures. They talked about their feelings for one another, which often was a way for us to communicate how we felt about each other, but they never met in real life. These personal identities allowed us to explore what it would be like for us to be together, without actually being together. Our freshman year of high school, her boyfriend cheated on her and their relationship was officially over. Tom, and myself, were there to comfort her throughout the entire thing. About a year later, we ended Tom and Angel because we did not need them. We were together in real life, and have been ever since =).

Turkle describes how MUDs can be used to explore aspects of the self we could not explore in real life. In my experience, although it was not a MUD, my girlfriend and I were able to do just that. We explored what it would be like if we were together, it gave me a chance to show the differences between dating me and her then current boyfriend, and it gave her a chance to compare between the two experiences. While it was easy to be more romantic than is normally possible in real life, the experiences we had allowed us to know more about the other person and understand how our relationship would be. Just as Turkle mentioned the student who used MUDs to be a perfect man, I used Google Chat to try to be the perfect boyfriend. 

Week 5 ARGHHHHH!!!

Piracy can be defined as the unauthorized taking of another person’s content. It has affected several industries, especially the music industry where illegal downloaders will copyright and steal songs from a musician and then share it on the internet. Although most people consider piracy a bad thing, there are some cases where piracy can be good. In Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, Lessig states, “Many kinds of piracy are useful and productive, to produce either new content or new ways of doing business.”

            According to the documentary we watched in class, one musician quotes, “most good musicians do not imitate, they steal.” Weird Al is a famous musician who is known for his humorous songs that parody what our society listens to today. Weird Al uses the same melody and background music but only changes the words to the songs, making fun of the artists. Weird Al’s Don’t Download This Song describes the perils of online music file sharing and references several court cases related to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).  (Wikipedia)

            An album known as The Grey Album was created by the musician Danger Mouse. The album is a mashup that collaborates the rapper Jay-Z’s The Black Album with unauthorized instrumental samples from The Beatle’s The White Album. Despite that both Jay-Z and The Beatles said they were fine with the project, the album and its distributions came to a halt. According to the words from some wise individual from the documentary we watched in class, “if we had a more rational system this album would of made a lot of money.”

            In most of the scenarios, these musicians are not trying to be thieves, instead they just did not know. Nevertheless, I believe that if you are going to sample someone else’s music, you must have their permission first. Furthermore, I believe that sampling is good and leads to many great songs for the future. For example, the well-known MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” sampled Rick James “Super Freak.” The two are both GREAT songs!!!

            In the case of people who illegally download music on the internet: how harmful is sharing and downloading music for free on the internet? According to Lessig, “the RIAA estimates that 803 million CDs were sold, while 2.1 billion CDs were downloaded for free. Thus, although 2.6 times the total number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, sales revenue fell by just 6.7 percent.” How is this the case? Unfortunately, I do not have the answer to that, however, as we can see there is not a dramatic impact from downloading CDs online.