Try The Search Button, Newbie!

According to Lisa Nakamura’s Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction, the web brings down racism and discrimination. Although true to a point, I don’t think it will ever completely remove it. There will always be groups that hate on others, regardless of where they are or what they may be in person. For example, take any standard forum. Usually, there are a handful of constant posters on forums, and then a whole bunch of people who come and go randomly to post about questions and such. Every now and then, one of these people will post a really common question, and get an extremely harsh response from several of the constant posters, demanding that the “newbie” search around and find his or her own answer. Although this discrimination and harshness isn’t due to a person’s color or gender, simply being new to the forum is causing people to be harsh against him or her.

So even though racism via color may not be as prevalent, racism of knowledge is.

Derrida: A Word Document > Paper

Derrida’s chapter entitled Paper or Me, You Know … (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor) talks about how he feels that paper is dead for standard communication. Well, maybe not quite dead, but its surely on its way. He talks about how he feels that paper took over other forms of communication when it was introduced, and that its time is now over – computers will take over what paper used to have. He now feels that paper has been downgraded to the role of support – a good example is how people use user manuals to help guide them on how to use a specific program.

Derrida also talks about something called the “graphosphere,” which I took to mean the general everyday environment in which paper is used. I’m honestly not sure if I grasped this concept properly and I had lots of trouble reading this part, since I didn’t fully understand what he meant by the graphosphere, and by the whole “The Paper is Me” thing. I understand that a passport can be considered “you,” but I don’t see how it relates to anything other than that.

Democracy is Dying…

… as shown by Comcast controlling what people can access on the internet. An author at the InformationWeek blog wrote the following:

I do worry when ISPs start to block certain types of traffic on their networks. Sure, they may be blocking BitTorrent today, but they may block other Web sites in the future. And as a consumer if I pay Comcast for broadband, I want to be able to control my Web experience. Source

As you can see, by restricting Comcast users from using a certain type of software or protocol is hindering their web experience. If you pay for something, you should get the full use out of it, whether its a product or a service. What if the next time you purchased a car you found out you were only allowed to go to a select list of shops to have the car repaired when something went wrong? Some people wouldn’t be affected by that, but I know I would – especially since I do a lot of the work at home. What Comcast has done is similar to this – they’re stopping me from fully enjoying my purchase (if I was a Comcast Cable Internet subscriber). Next thing you know, it will be a crime to e-mail one of your friends who uses another internet service provider.

Foucault = Google Reader?

Michael Foucault states that an author is not simply the writer of a piece of work – but a collaborator. An author brings together different experiences in his or her life, and expresses it through writing. Understandable.. but can something like Google Reader be considered an author in that case, since it brings together content that other people are expressing through their blogs? It brings up an interesting point in my opinion, especially since we’re taught from 1st grade onwards that an author is simply the person who writes a book or piece of work.

For Poisons Only.

Mr. Yuk, the official symbol to denote a substance as toxic, is the center of a controversy in Minnesota. Someone decided to use the symbol as part of their campaign against a bill.

Bakken, a lawyer, defended his use of Mr. Yuk. He said federal law allows some use of copyrighted material for satire or academic criticism. He said he found Yuk-like images spread across the Internet. Source

This is what I would consider fair use – the “violator” isn’t trying to use the original work in an effort to destroy it or harm the copyright holder. He is, instead, using it to help people make a legal decision. Since people know that the symbol means danger, he uses it to sway the people into thinking the bill or law being passed is dangerous. The meaning of the symbol remains the same – danger. The copyright holders aren’t affected by it, since the meaning is the same as it was before he used it. And its all for academic use – to teach the public about the dangers of a certain law.

Corbis Is Nothing Compared To Flickr

In Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger points out that digital photos will eventually mean nothing to us – unless we can find the technology or time to start labeling them. Although he doesn’t state it explicitly, from his argument it sounds like he’s saying that Flickr is a better resource to get pictures from simply because there are more and are tagged better.

Like the iTunes Store, Corbis isn’t even a particularly good example of third-order organization… Corbis give us only a taste of the revolution that’s under way. Just take a look at Flickr to see one way this is unrolling… Yet it is remarkably easy to find photos at Flickr on almost any topic and to pull together collections of photos on themes that mix and match those topics at will.

So even though Corbis’ photos are taken by professionals, organized by professionals, the amateur photography is better? I don’t know, I would prefer to use a professional photograph for my projects and presentations than something taken by someone like me. Sure, he makes a valid point that its easier to search, but the point also shows bias as he discredits a larger, more well known authority on photography for a social photography posting site.

Engineered Talent

As I was reading The Good, the Bad, And the ‘Web 2.0′ article on WSJ.com, a part of Andrew Keen’s argument popped out at me. He claims that talent can be created by stating:

But the problem is that gatekeepers — the agents, editors, recording engineers — these are the very engineers of talent

I’m sorry to interrupt, but where can I find a local agent so I can go and buy talent? I’d love to be able to sing, play guitar, and play drums all at the same time. Is Keen saying that these people – agents, editors, and recording engineers – are talent gods?? That’s quite a statement, especially considering that a person who plays in a coffee shop can have just as much talent as a person who’s being paid millions of dollars. If we start measuring each others talent by measuring each other’s pocketbook, then by far Bill Gates is the most talented person in the world (as of 2/9/2007) – a college drop out. I know several people who have talent, whether it be musical, artistic, or anything else in the world, who don’t have nearly as large a pocketbook as main stream artists.

A little cleanup goes a long way…

When I first viewed the Wikipedia entry for Rohail Hyatt, it had a nice message at the top stating “This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards.” I managed to fix a handful of grammatical issues and reorganize some content, and add a few links. Although I removed the cleanup message myself, I’m hoping that no one will return it and basically tell me my work was useless.

Assignment Failure. Grade: Zero

Assignment Zero, although good in concept, wasn’t thought out properly in my opinion. The main issue was that it was basically thrown out there for people to start writing about to people who knew very little about journalism and how to write, ask questions, and analyze data. Sure, there were a handful of people who had practical skills like accounting to be able to analyze charts and graphs, but in general there weren’t many people who knew how to analyze data. There wasn’t much planning to it, as pointed out in the “Did Assignment Zero Fail?” article. According to the article:

Crucial staff members were either forced out or resigned in mid-stream, and its ambitious goal — to produce “the most comprehensive knowledge base to date on the scope, limits and best practices of crowdsourcing” — had to be dramatically curtailed in order to yield some tangible results when Assignment Zero ended on June 5.

When the staff themselves are resigning from such a project, it pretty much shows the lack of planning and structure put into it. Had there been a set of stricter rules and an easier-to-follow structure, the project could have been a success. In my opinion, people aren’t ready to develop content on their own – they still need guidance, and probably always will.

Watch out! Your mom’s on Facebook.

MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites are the new panopticon. Due to the growing popularity of sites such as Facebook, personal privacy has been pretty much forfeited — there is no guarantee of privacy online (was there ever?). According to the London Free Press, older people are starting to join these types of websites to help broaden their social life as well.

Some experts say Facebook and MySpace, along with photo-sharing sites like Flickr and the ubiquitous video sharing site YouTube, are a legitimate part of young people’s social lives. But as the idea of sharing your life virtually with friends and family continues to appeal to a broader and older demographic, you probably will end up Facebooking your mom.

Do you really want your mom to know what you do on the weekends? If its something you know she wouldn’t approve of, probably not. So if your mom is on your Facebook friends list, you will probably try and keep that kind of stuff off of your profile, even though she may not be watching you all the time. Simply put, Facebook is the new panopticon. Without constantly policing yourself to make sure you don’t put any type of offending or incriminating material on your profile, you run the risk of getting in trouble, whether it be with your parents or your employer. Big brother is always watching.