On Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" & McLuhan

I believe I had read this article before this class, but I remember when I first read it, I completely agreed and empathized with almost everything Carr said, specifically the part about the Net becoming a universal medium and it being the conduit through which most of the information that flows to me through.  McLuhan's assertion that all media, regardless of the message they communicate, exert a compelling influence on man and society.  I definitely agree with Carr that media and the way we access information does change the way we actually think.  An example of this McLuhan points out is prehistoric, tribal man.  He existed in a natural, harmonious balance of the senses, perceiving the world equally through all of his senses.  Technological innovations that have changed the way we perceive the world are merely extensions and alterations of our senses.

I don't think that this change in thinking due to various technologies is necessarily a bad thing, but I definitely think it's something that can and should be explored.  I also don't think that our focus and old way of sort of interpreting, thinking, and focusing is lost.  I definitely dislike the way McLuhan talks about the phonetic alphabet as sort of the beginning of the end of sensory balance in man.  It just sounds like he is automatically biased against the increase and advancement of technological mediums that we've experienced.  McLuhan's method of looking at the medium as the message without taking so much of the content into account is really helpful for examining the effects of technology.

-Daniel Francis

Youmans & York Six Strategies for Activists

I found Youmans and York's six strategies for activists interesting.

First, the authors suggest that activists can assert their power as consumers and influence market forces by mass migration into more activist friendly platforms. However, as they point out, such a migration would create activist-niche social networks and actually be counterproductive to activists' goals as they attempt to outreach to the greater community.

Second, the authors suggest that activists use legal systems to draw out parallels between existing legal protections in consumer law and social media sites.

Third, they suggest that activists can appeal to states which have expressed interest in protecting an open internet and encouraging democratization. The United States is given as an example of such a state the authors acknowledge that the United States lacks the necessary regulatory framework in itself and thus must first establish this.

Fourth, it is suggested that activists can advocate towards industry self-regulation. Yet, this option much like the third one doesn't look very promising since existing initiatives have yet to attract substantial support from the ICT sector.

A fifth option is to pressure popular social media companies through long-term advocacy to shift power towards users. However, the authors cite MacKinnon and reiterate that such a "citizen-centric" internet would require substantial participation and a sustained movement.

The final sixth option is for activists to embrace "civic technologies" with open architectures that evolve through user creation and participation. Wikipedia is one such civic technology.

I personally find the sixth option most promising since empowering and popularizing civic technologies could potential shift popular perspective on the internet. Wikipedia serves as an item of citation within Youmans and York's work and through its position as such this civic technology preserves a promise towards a more open and interactive internet. It is structurally promising as a decentralized site and has found mass appeal. The popularization of such technologies normalizes their permeation in  different functional roles. I think as we embrace civic technologies more and more, the restrictive qualities of corporate sites will appear contradictory to our new-normal way of operations and thus their appeal will decrease. 

Drones, Anyone?

Things move so quickly nowadays!  Once considered secret operation technology is now part of our daily use in the general public: personal computers, video games, mobile phones and drones.  Drones are used for destructive purposes, as well as, constructive uses.  They are used from law enforcement to taco delivery, take a look at Christopher Schaberg's article (link below), could one of these uses be transporting humans? Maybe.

Our current flying experience is such that one would wish for an alternative to commercial aviation, one would think. Perhaps it is not in the far distant future?  Could we possibly use Drones to transport ourselves?  If Drones have many uses, why not human transport?  We would not need airline reservations, maybe some kind of license, perhaps, and federal regulations for takeoff and landing with a flight plan from the air traffic control folks. Take a look at the article, (link below), courtesy of Alenda:

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/16/will_drones_replace_commercial_air_travel/

Galloway: Gaming

Playing the Algorithm:

Video games change the order of things, if we look back at how cinema affected the viewer we can see that cinema has total control and, with video-gaming, while there are rules to follow and code to discover gaming offers the gamer some control because they are offered the opportunity to change the outcome of a narrative, as long as, they figure out the parallel algorithm.  The control is still there..."controlled mobility", however, autonomously as an active participant.

In Playing the Algorithm by Galloway we see how the informatic age plays a role in today’s society.  He compares how film and video games have affected the viewer/player…with film, the viewer is controlled subliminally, while the effect of video-gaming the control is allegorical.  To know the game, its code, and play by its rule is to win.  This control he refers to as allegorical control:

“So today there is a twin transformation; from the modern cinema to the contemporary video game, but also from traditional allegory to what I am calling horizontal or “control” allegory.  I suggest that video games are, at their structural core, in direct synchronization with the political realities of the informatics age.” [91]

Let's have some cable, Mabel! (Blast from the past)

The story of FLAG made for an interesting read. The complexity and massivity of the engineering needed to create the global telecommunications system weren't really new to me, although I didn't know about FLAG specifically. This is an example of how hugely complex one simple aspect of the digital revolution is; and when you look at the world deeply enough, this level of complexity and massive engineering is everywhere. (The interstate highway system is a good example, but there are many others.) The industrial revolution made the world an order of magnitude more complex, the WWII era increase in industry made it another order of magnitude, and the digital era is doing the same thing again. As the world's superstructure becomes increasingly complex, it's morphing. It's already at the point where it can't be managed without the aid of computers, or at least, not managed as well as we've gotten used to; how long will it be before it's so complex that AI's, or quasi-AI's, are necessary? And in that world, what will humans do? The old story of humans losing jobs to machines has played out for the last 40 years, it certainly won't stop as computers get more and more advanced.

Truth in photojournalism (blast from the past)

Reading the Baradell essay about photojournalism and ethics, and how that's changing as we enter the digital era, made me think of two things. One is this podcast: [http://www.radiolab.org/2012/sep/24/in-the-valley-of-the-shadow-of-doubt/] about a very old example of a manipulated photograph; another is that ethical reform is a great example of trying to solve a symptom rather than a problem. While certain ethical standards are necessary, and a good idea, relying on them to enforce journalistic "truth" is foolish.

The real answer is in the critical audience. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, readers of newspapers knew that what they were reading might be suspect; biased, incomplete, or manipulated in other ways. They knew that for issues they really cared about, they had to do more that accept what was given to them. People were still fooled by things, of course, but the mass acceptance that they were being presented with the truth wasn't there. That critical outlook has been lost, and its rebirth will do more to solve problems of the ethics of digital photojournalism than any amount of rules or standards.

VIDEO: "Jeremy Scahill: The Secret Story Behind Obama’s Assassination of Two Americans in Yemen"

This is pretty good.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/23/jeremy_scahill_the_secret_story_behind


"The Obama administration’s assassination of two U.S. citizens in 2011, Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old Denver-born son Abdulrahman, is a central part of Jeremy Scahill’s new book, "Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield." The book is based on years of reporting on U.S. secret operations in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. While the Obama administration has defended the killing of Anwar, it has never publicly explained why Abdulrahman was targeted in a separate drone strike two weeks later. Scahill reveals CIA Director John Brennan, Obama’s former senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, suspected that the teenager had been killed "intentionally." "The idea that you can simply have one branch of government unilaterally and in secret declare that an American citizen should be executed or assassinated without having to present any evidence whatsoever, to me, is a — we should view that with great sobriety about the implications for our country," says Scahill, national security correspondent for The Nation magazine. Today the U.S. Senate is preparing to hold its first-ever hearing on the Obama administration’s drone and targeted killing program. However, the Obama administration is refusing to send a witness to answer questions about the program’s legality. "Dirty Wars" is also the name of a new award-winning documentary by Scahill and Rick Rowley, which will open in theaters in June. We air the film’s new trailer. Click here to watch Part 2 of this interview."