It’s only Privacy, you aren’t sacrificing anything important

I never really thought about online privacy and how I felt about it until Facebook did those updates to its terms of service agree sometime last year. I can be naive at times, especially when it comes to new tech. I get blinded by the shinny newness of it and all the tricks it can do and forget about the darkness that lurks beneath the surface.  I too often give people or services the benefit of the doubt. I mean what serious uses could Facebook have for my information? Who am I, nobody too special. Then I begin to think about it in terms of appropriateness and how people should be treated and “A Bill of Privacy Rights for Social Network Users” makes too much since.

I wouldn’t say that all social networking sites are evil but it seems the bigger ones are willing to sacrifice their users for selfish reasons. Or maybe we aren’t looking at privacy in the right light anymore. It does seem more acceptable to live your life in the public sphere today. Personal conversations happen on twitter all the time and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen arguments within comments on people’s Facebook pages. These conversations aren’t necessarily sharing personal information but five years ago it wouldn’t be something you shared with the whole world.

An example I can think of happens not too long ago on twitter. A friend of mine is a professional singer, he tours a lot and makes regular updates to his twitter account about his location, when he’s leaving his house, how his holiday was, etc. His sister also has a twitter account where she talks about her children, home schooling and how she feels about being a mother. These two comment to one another about their tweets, share pictures of their lives with their followers  and have conversations about what’s happen within each others lives. This is sharp contrast to how they grew up. Their mother is from the British Isle and she is very aware of outward appearances and perceptions.  She choose her words carefully and never shares more information than is necessary. If twitter was around twenty years ago the information her children share isn’t the same information she would share.  Their mother would perceive them as being too open, sharing too much with people, even if the only people who read the tweets are friends they know personally.  I have had this talk with my parents about what I share online and how I need to be ‘careful’.

Privacy is something that has come up in class before this weeks readings. I’m of the camp that each person has to make a decision for themselves as to how much is too much. I fully believe this should be up the person, not the social network they use to share it. If you want to see which social networking CEOs agree with me, go to their profile pages and see just how much they share with the world.

My agenda: Unfiltered Truth

It is no secret I’m not a fan of politics. I don’t watch Bill O’Reilly or anything on Fox New really. I hear what Keith Olbermann says from time to time but I don’t make a steady diet of any one new source. I think its mostly because I’m skeptical of anything on TV. So much of what is on TV is used to sell you something why wouldn’t the news be used to coheres people into believing whatever truth you want them to believe? Megan Boler touches on this subject a little in her paper Digital media and Democracy. She quotes Mark Lipton, “One can argue that the sociability of new Web processes are producing new pathways for ‘truth’. The construction of truth, then, will probably follow two modes: ‘Truth’ as propagated as fact by corporate media and ‘truth’ as ideas that emerge from the sociability of new pathways of sharing knowledge.”

In the past, we have relied on TV news to provide us with non-biased accurate news coverage. Over the last two decades it seemed that those descriptions have been forgotten and the most important part of news is the agenda. Truth has become subjective and used to support this agenda. It’s hard to watch news coverage and not think to yourself “what are they leaving out?”

The rise of citizen journalism has been the saving grace for political news. Individuals who are first hand witness can give you the information without corporate filters. With the change in authorship being in the hands of the people, it’s harder to keep an agenda within the message of the news. The decentralization of the network that connects people together has aloud other smaller voices to be heard. Though big new is still the standard, it doesn’t have the power it once had. The best way to continue to break that power is to keep asking “What is being left out?”

Caution! Convergence Ahead, err, Around You!

One of my all time favorite pieces of media is the radio play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This is a story written by Douglas Adams about a series of events that happens to the last man on earth by the name of Arthur Dent. The story starts with Arthur lying in front of a bulldozer. His house is about to be destroyed so a bypass can be built. While he’s lying there arguing with the construction foreman about why a bypass has to be built, his friend Ford Prefect comes along to let him know the world is about to end and they need to get off the planet sooner than later. Just as Arthur is arguing with Ford about how silly that idea is, space ships arrive announcing that the Earth is about to be destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass. I won’t give it away, but what started as a six part series about the hilarious hijinks that ensue eventually became a twenty-eight part radio play, a series of books (that continue after the author’s death), a made for tv movie, a feature-length film, a stage play and a comic book. Of all the different version, I like the radio play best. You hear all the nuance that you miss in the book. One of the things the radio plays can’t do that you get in the book is some history about the characters. The same with the other versions. The way stories are told in comic books is not the same way they are told in novels or stage plays or films.

Henry Jenkins talks about this type of storytelling in his book Convergence Culture. His case study is The Matrix. In chapter three, he talks about the many aspects of the film, one point in particular was The Art of World-Making. Jenkins say, “the [Wachowski] brothers had to envision the world of The Matrix with sufficient consistency that each installment is recognizably a part of the whole.”

Each version of the The Guide gives you a new dimension of each of the unique characters within the story. In the books you sympathize with Arthur and the issues he deals with being the last human alone in the universe. In the radio play you find him irritating. I sometimes want to say,”Grow a pair man, it’s the freakin’ universe, it isn’t going to bend to you!”

Jenkins wants new story tellers to know that when creating a new story, thinking about your story line or characters isn’t enough. You now have to create a new world for your stories and characters that transcends medium. One story isn’t enough. Or one book. Or even one movie. I think this can be related to our societal shift in thinking from deep attention to hyper attention. I think in the deep attention mind-set you read the book and that’s the end of the story. You  might wonder what happens next but you wouldn’t ask the author to write you more stories just because you wanted to know what happened next. Now, because of the shift of authorship and ease of connection, fans don’t think twice about writing to an author about what happens next. Or writing their own endings to the stories.

I’ve not written any fan fiction but maybe you will after hearing the first episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy:

You have all, err, part, hmm, this piece of my attention

The video and this reading aren’t the first time I have read about this subject. I actually encounter the effects of our hypermediated society everyday when I go to work. I sub at a middle school in DISD and one of the most difficult parts of teaching is getting the children to pay attention for longer then five minutes. I hear teachers all day, “stop talking”, “look at me”, “put that phone away”, etc. I won’t generalize and say it’s all the kids but it’s probably 5 students in every class that acts as a distraction. It’s directly related to the amount of stimulation the school provide, which is minimal.

Most of the time when I sub, the teachers give the students worksheets to complete. I hate worksheets, they are the epitome of boring. If I hate them, you know the students do. The difference between me and them is I have learned to complete work even if I don’t like it, they don’t see the reason why they have to do the boring work. They are very much the M Generation as they are constantly occupied by listening to music online, searching for and playing video games, reading about their favorite singer or rapper, etc. I have yet to encountered a student reading twitter or wiki-hopping. I can honestly say I would probably not bother a student who was constantly reading Wikipedia.

I think the best way to describe the mindset is the way Linda Stone described this behavior in the video she made, May I have your attention, please? In the video she talks about the ways people pay attention and how the norm from the past was simple multitasking. This usually involved doing two tasks, one or both routine/automatic. The motivation was to be as productive as possible. Today we have replaced this with continuous partial attention, both tasks are cognitive because we don’t want to miss anything. We have to pay attention to everything and this has put us in a state of artificial constant crisis. I see this in the students I work with, they are seeking stimulation all the time, every moment of the day. What is even more scary is I have found myself being pulled into this hyper attention mentality.

I was sitting in church on Sunday and as the preacher spoke, I found myself falling asleep. I tried all the usual methods of staying awake, shifting in my seat, shaking my legs, taking deep breaths but I kept nodding off. So I pulled out my phone and started to read my email, which led to me reading my twitter, which led to web surfing and ended with me playing solitaire for twenty minutes. I felt guilty the whole time I had my phone out but I was awake and comprehended what my pastors preached about. I was kinda amazed myself at how much I retained from the sermon. I’m sure the people around me didn’t think I was paying attention but I found myself being more tuned in once my brain was awake enough to engage in another task.

The only reason I think hyper attention would be negative is because the state in which education is in. The way children our being taught today is nowhere near how they learn or retain information. If we are to prepare this generation for an uncertain future, we need to take advantage of the way they do pay attention and teach them the best way to use it. The future will be about adaptation and how well a person can do that. Teachers need to get off the soap box, stop romanticizing the past and realize that school will never be the way it used to be. Maybe novel-reading will be an elective my children will take in college, but by then paper books will be a novelty themselves.

What does playing the ‘Race’ card get you?

I started to write about Collective Intelligence. I wanted to. I found the Digital Maoism irritating and wanted to talk about the author’s lack of having anything really good to say other than the fact that he was mad he didn’t think of Wikipedia first so he has to find a way to undermined it. I was going to talk about this but then something happened today that I couldn’t ignore and it has been turning over in my mind since 4:30pm.

First a little background. While I am in school at UTD, I am also getting my teacher’s certification at Texas A & M- Commerce in Mesquite, TX. The first class I signed up for was a psychology class. I wasn’t aware it was a cultural diversity class until I received the book in the mail a week before classes started. I also had no idea what that meant until the first day class. My professor, Dr.Schroeder, told us would be talking about how a person’s culture, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status etcetera and this relates to the psychological/ educational assessments of students. I have already had some exposure to dealing with my cultural differences compared to my classmates. I have often been the only black face or one of the only black faces I see in a classroom. I went to a majority white school. I live in a majority white neighborhood. I grew up with white friends. I have come to terms with my blackness (nigrescence) and I’m quite comfortable with who I am. In my cultural diversity class this week we talked about the dominate culture of America, The White Race. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s get to 4:30pm today.

A co-worker and I where talking today and she asked me why America gets such a bad rap about slavery. “I mean Italy had slaves,” she said. I told her I think America has such a problem with slavery because we’ve never really dealt with the social consequences it has had on our country. I told her we talk about equality and equal opportunity but not everybody gets the same chances. There is no level playing field.  I could hear the question forming in her mind even though she didn’t give it voice because I could read it off her forehead. Every person of color knows what that question is, it comes in many forms. The questions is about privilege. This brings up the The White Race from before. If you ask a white person what it means to be white, what would they say? Most probably wouldn’t know what to say because it isn’t something they deal with on a daily bases. Being white doesn’t effect most white people in a negative way. Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans are reminded, sometimes daily, of their culture and how it is difference from the dominant culture in America.

I was reminded a few weeks ago.  I went to a gallery opening for a few friends of mine. Their photographs where in a show about photography done with the iPhone, I was totally excited. Geek art, what could be better? When I got to the show, the place was packed. The air didn’t work because there were so many people in the building. You had to squeeze by people, touching them in order to walk around because there was no personal space left, someone was in every space available. As I shuffled around looking at the photography, I noticed there where no artist plaques next to the photos, only numbers. I realized those numbers corresponded with a list somewhere in the room. I looked around and noticed people with a small book. I figured it was a catalog with a list of the artist and their pieces in the room. I retraced my shuffling, looking around for one of those small books. I worked my way back to the front of the gallery and then I spotted them, a stack of the catalogs. They where on the counter at the front. Next to this stack sat a sign, it read $20. Behind the counter was a lady. i assumed she was there to answer questions, but I was wrong.  I asked her if I could look at one of the catalogs. She said, “They’re $20!” as if this was some unattainable goal I couldn’t reach, actually having a whole $20 at one time. And as if reading was out of my scope as well. I picked up a catalog, found where my friends’ works where in the gallery and placed the catalog back in the stack. The time I held the book might have been a minute, maybe 90 seconds. The lady watched me the entire time I held the book. I wasn’t the only person who picked up a catalog in that 90 seconds, but I was the only person she felt is was necessary to tell the price and I was the only black person in the room. I took a few steps back, found a cool spot to stand in to people watch. I also wanted to see if this lady would be so kind as to help out anybody else she thought couldn’t read the sign. I saw other people walk by, pick up a catalog and she never made then aware of the price or asked them for the $20 she wanted me to pay for one. I left that gallery feeling very sad that in 2010 I was racially profiled.

I can’t figure out why in a time where people are more connected then ever before, the subject of race is still untouchable. You can video call me over the Internet in Japan FOR FREE but there are people who think I would steal something just because my skin is a darker color then theirs. What event has to happen for this conversation to start? When do we have this discussion without becoming defensive about the fact that a black man with a bachelor’s degree has less of a chance of being hired then a white man with a high school diploma? About the fact that African Americans make up only 13.5% of the total US population but make up some 40% of total prison populations. About how 25% of Native Americans live below the poverty line, how many live right above it and are told they make too much money for public aid? I could put more numbers up but I think that would only distract you from the fact that this conversation needs to happen and for the betterment of this country, it needs to happen soon.

Resistance Seems Futile

I decide to put all my thoughts in a short video this week. Something about copyright and patent law get’s me in a mood to defy law and make revolutionary comic books with all the Disney cartoons as the characters. It just seems so wrong that information is seen as an item used to make money instead of it leading to new innovations. I doubt any of the new forms of motion picture making would have been invented had those filmmakers not seen and copied previous ideas from other movies and books (I’m looking at you Wachowski Brother’s and James Cameron).

I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!

Castells’ Why Networks Matter seems to be the laymen’s The Expliot: A Theory of Networks. Here, Castells tells you why you need to know about networks and how they work. He starts by defining what he means by a network: the organizing of the form of live, including social life. Then he goes into why networks are becoming a big deal. He explains that with the rise of electronic communication, whatever shortcoming networks had before for growing have been reduced to a point of non-importance. Though we believe we live in an information society we truly live in a network society.

What Castells means by this isn’t the information it’s self, but the origination and sharing of that information that makes us a network society. Of course this has consequences but I’m not going to list all of the ones Castells talks about. I’m really only going to talk about one, the final consequence. Power still remains the fundamental force that structures and shapes the network but power is not in the hands of the power elite but rather in the network itself. The power is in who is connected not who is in control, but networks cannot be controlled (that’s another theory and another show, er, post). The best real world example I can give is the presidential election in Iran last year.

After the results of the election where reveled, people used social networking sites like Twitter to organize and attend rallies to protest the election. People felt the results weren’t true and that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad falsified the results so he could remain in office. The state police where used to suppress the protesters both violent and peaceful. People began to share raw information, photos and videos with the world about what was going on. Ahmadinejad kept assuring the world these people where only protesting a soccer match and that only necessary force was used to control the mob. I saw on the news a video taken with a cell phone that was truly disturbing. A young women was shot by a police office. she was unarmed and a group of friends surrounded her trying to stop the bleeding. It’s an image I cannot forget as their efforts where in vain. This information wouldn’t have been known to anyone had there been no network to connect to. If the only information known about the protest was the information release by the state approved media, we would think that Iranians are very passionate about soccer.
The network the protesters had formed out weighted the limited network of the Iranian government. In Castells’ words, networks fighting networks.

Knowing how networks work is important because our society is based on them. In order to manipulate something, you have to know everything about it.

If you want to see the video I’m talking about or read more about what happen, please click on the links below
2009–2010 Iranian Election Protests
Iran Election Crisis: 10 Incredible YouTube Videos.

No, it’s new media. I doubt you’ve hear of it.

Manovich explains what New Media is in this book. He feels it necessary define what it is and isn’t. I think this is an important step as people are quick to label something revolutionary just because it’s new.

He defines new media as all existing media translated into numerical data accessible through computers. With this being said, he list five principles of new media:

numerical representation
modularity
automation
variability
cultural transcoding.

He get’s kinda bogged down in the details after this but one interesting thing he brings up is really how Media became new. How Daguerre and Babbage invented new ways of recording data and people when crazy over it. It was essentially what laptops and iphone are today. Every geek wanted one of these machines so they could record their own POV of the world, have a record of their own data. Similar to how everybody wants to create the next viral video, this new form of keeping data become the new way of visually communicating. Granted the pool of videos to choose from wasn’t as large at Youtube videos now, people where able to record their data and play it back for others. The line between a consuming way of thinking and a sharing way of think was being thinned.

Today the line is very thin as the internet has made it possible for everybody to share everything with everyone. Granted you don’t really want all 6 billion people on the planet to see your grandma take that fall into your birthday cake at your tenth birthday party, you do want to share it with everybody in your network. Not something you would have thought about ten years ago. The idea of creating it is over a hundred years old but the sharing it, now that’s new media.

Being social being, we like to share everything. Stories about the battle have been replaced with stories about strange co-workers. The awkward slide show at Aunt Mildred’s has been replaced with awkward emails of her flickr feeds. The sharing of data had become some integrated into our lives, it hard to image how you would share this data without the New Media.

My new can out media your old = Remediation

I’ve read Remediation before and it has become one of those books I’m glad I had to read in school. I never would have picked this book up and read it given an entire bookstore to choose from. It would have remained on the shelve at Big Box Books until the world ended. It’s not because I’m not interested in what it between it’s page. It’s because the title of the book. Who knows what remediation is? Nobody (let’s assume you don’t know for the next few mintues). It’s kinda funny how we are constantly surround by it but the average person on the street wouldn’t know how to answer if you asked them to give you an example of remediation.

J. D. Bolter and R. Grusin define remediation as the formal logic by which new media refashions prior media forms. The key principles of remediation are immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy builds upon the idea of transparency and that the more unaware of the medium you are, the more of the message you get. As a viewer, you aren’t looking at a painting of a landscape, your looking through a window at an actual landscape. Hypermediacy builds upon the idea of opacity. The more aware of the medium you, the more you know it a representation of a message, not the actual message. You know your watching a video of a landscape on your computer, why would someone try to convince you other wise?

For years, film has been used to remediate oral storytelling and theatrical plays. Both principles of remediation have been used to tell stories. The most recent use of Immedicay in filmmaking has been James Cameron’s Avatar. Cameron invented new technologies so he could immerse movie goers into a world of his creation. With the uses of 3D cameras and a ridiculous number of computers, people where transported to his world. I remember news reports of people having severe depression and needing support groups for recovery after watching the movie because they couldn’t really go to the world he created. The technology was so immersive, people actually forgot they had paid to see a movie.

A movie that uses Hypermediation to tell a story is Snatch. A British gangster film, it doesn’t try to convince you that your on another planet, it makes you very aware that you are watching a movie. It’s filled with fast cuts, slam zooms, dream like moments of one character point of views and crazy amounts of coincidence. There is no way the chain of events that happened in this movie would happen in real life but it’s this style of storytelling that makes the film a good movie.
Just because the viewer knows it’s a movie doesn’t make you unaware of the story being told.

This is the subject matter of John Guillory’s Essay Genesis of the Media Concept. Here Guillory retraces the concept of communication through thinking and it’s relation to media. When he talks about media, he separates it from art as the term wasn’t always applied in this sense. He makes the connection between writing and it’s uses to transfer ones own thoughts to another person, as a communication medium. Guillory does a thorough job of recounting this transition/conversation through history and how communication came to mean the transferring of an idea. This is one of the reasons stories are used to teach core principles to other people, usually children. My father told me the story of who cried wolf when I was a child and I still remember the moral behind the story, don’t say there is a danger yourself and others if the danger isn’t real. The best movies are the ones that mentally engage you, draw you in and transfer that story to you.

Film is the remediation of literary print; print is remediation of writing; writing is remediation of theatrical plays; plays are remediation of the tribe oral storyteller. One of my favor films that uses hypermediation to tell a story is Amelie. Do yourself a favor, watch it.

Amendment:

My case study of remediation started with the presentation of GUILLAUME REYMOND’s PAC-MAN video art. In this video, Reymond remediates the video game PAC-MAN with the help of 111 human pixels.
The hypermediacy of this video brought to mind a few question I wanted the class to answer/discuss:
1. Is this video something beyond remediation?
2. Does the hypermediation of the video distract you or draw you into the piece?

I think I want to do my final project on the following statement.
So much of what we experience on a daily basis is hypermediated, are experiences we have that aren’t mediated still mentally viewed as ‘real’ life?

Benjamin is a War Machine!

I was excited to read Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
I’ve heard so much about the aura of art in the class last spring, I wanted to know who this Benjamin guy was and what he was talking about when he said aura of an art work. Benjamin starts by defining what he means by mechanical reproduction. Starting with the wood cut technique of print making, graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print.

After wood cut came lithography which enabled graphics to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. Photography surpassed lithography, freeing the hand of the most important artistic functions. Because the eye perceives faster than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated to the speed of speech.

But reproductions of art work lack one element, presence in space or time. This is also known as the aura of an art work. Benjamin argues that the authenticity of a piece of art work, the presence or aura exist outside of technical reproducibility. He makes the point that art can be everywhere because it can be reproduced and sent all over the world.

Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, it too is jeopardized by reproduction when longevity ceases to matter. What is really jeopardized is the authority of the object. Benjamin makes the point, “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” By making many copies we substitute copies for a unique existence.

This is where film comes into the argument. Film operates outside of the aura or historical presence of other art forms. Presence can not be replicated yet film is an art from. Benjamin compares screen acting to stage acting, the closest thing it can be compared to. When an actor on the stage is performing, he and the audience have a unique experience. It has an aura because it occupies one space and one time. This can not be said of a film experience. The audience take no part of the actors performance, they only view a replica of it. That performance is the only one they see and the actor is not impacted by the audience’s response at the time he gives his performance.

This discussion, film acting verses stage acting, was brought to the attention of the masses in 1952 when the movie Singing in the Rain was release. There this a scene where Gene Kelley and Debbie Reynolds talks about the validity of film acting compared to stage acting. At one point she refers to him as a ghost on the screen because she feels his performance given in the screen can not be feel like a performance given on a stage.

The problem with seeing film as an art form is the participation of the masses. This is reinforced by Duhamel who Benjamin quotes, “[a movie is] a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated wretched, worn-out creates who are consumed by their worries a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday being a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.” Distraction and concentration form opposites: One who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it, in contrast the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.

To end his argument, Benjamin states the only outcome of this way of thinking is War. The height of Mechanical reproductions can only be mechanical war as war is the only original work of art that can be produced mechanically.

I think this outlook is very bleak but so much of what he has written about has come true, it’s hard to argue that his thesis is unjustified. Ask any twelve-year-old what they want to be when they grow up and eighty percent of them will say one of the following: actor, singer, pro sports player. Perhaps if television hadn’t been invented and only films were made, this might not be the case. I know Benjamin is arguing for film as an art form but if he wrote this thirty years later, he would have included television. With the masses so distracted and disconnected, it is no wonder there have been several wars since this essay was written.