project proposal by Nimish, vijay and Guy-Richard

Mass media was once largely delegated to the responsibility of printed newspapers where an “elite” group of people determined what was newsworthy for the entire population. The written word with attribution constituted the principle medium through which information was disseminated. Now, however, the emerging networked public sphere offers several new mediums through which information is communicated. The purpose of our project is to investigate the differences in the way people behave when communicating through different forms of media. Medium investigated will include video, audio, written, email, instant messenger, and blogs.

In this project, people will be asked questions regarding controversial material. Possible examples include: (1) What do you think of the war on terror? (2) What do you think of the Bush administration? (3) What do you think of gay marriages? The questions will be posed to people in different forms of media. These open-ended questions are unlike multiple choice questions in that the interviewees are able to more freely express their opinion. We will then look to see if there is some correlation between medium and response; that is, do some forms of media lend themselves to responses that are more conservative whereas some forms lend themselves toward thoughts that more radical. The determination of whether a response is “radical” or “conservative” is somewhat subjective in nature. However, a criteria which allows numerical (objective) measures to be assigned to responses will be developed.

How do we make this objective?
What variables need to be controlled?
Whether responses are radical or conservative depend not only on the medium used, but also on the individual’s personal philosophy.
Can the same person be tested on multiple forms of media? Will retesting change their behavior?
The environment in which questions are asked should be controlled.

Differences between forms of media are expected. As Bleeker points out, people must act differently when they live in a world shared with “blogjects.” Thus people are expected to act differently when they know they are being “watched” by some camera or audio recording device. Thus, it makes sense to define the “control” in this investigation to be when people are asked questions with no (visible) form of media apparent.

The video recorder simulates television; the audio recorder simulates radio; the written response on paper (where name is required) simulates the newspaper. These are the conventional forms of media. The instant messenger, blog interface, or anonymous papers are the more contemporary forms of media that accompany the rise of the networked public sphere. For example, when people are asked to respond on a piece of paper and write their name on the top, they are simulating an interface such as Encyclopedic Britannica. When people are asked to respond on a piece of paper without writing their name, they are simulating an interface such as Wikipedia. If the latter results in more radical responses than the former, this would help substantiate Lanier’s claim that Wikipedia caters to the extremes.

The Theory of Everything: Strings or Cubes?

With the advent of new media, creativity is becoming increasingly derivative. Typically, new media parrots past creations and plays on their themes to create something new and different. Spoken in the parlance of our times, Rip, Mix, and Burn. We have not discussed this topic specifically in class, but the idea fits with the notion of becoming digital. In Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig explains that it is an American tradition to build on past culture to make new media, such as "Steamboat Willie." Today, however, we have new technologies enabling all kinds of new, peer-to-peer and derivative creativity that doesn't require a record label or publisher. Our project is to explore this new space by creating a PBS-style documentary about the Time Cube, a totally bogus “theory of everything.” Borrowing presentation elements from historical documentaries and the like, we will present this new material in a totally incongruous light and create something hilarious. The interviewer will maintain an air of absolute seriousness while his guest rambles on about completely and totally absurd gibberish. We also plan to try and make as many pop/nerd-culture references as possible to further demonstrate how old material can be mixed into new material.

The second part of our project is to post our mockumentary to the Internet five days or a week before the final project deadline and see if we can generate hype for it by posting to various link aggregation sites and blogs. After a few days, we will see if we have garnered any popularity and reflect on how the Internet works as a peer-to-peer knowledge community. Early in the history of the web, it would have been near impossible to publish and distribute media of this kind. With the rise of YouTube and the like, however, we want to try and measure how easy it is publish and market new media over the Internet. This project is basically a test of Benkler's graph theory discussion about how new nodes on the Internet quickly become linked in to the established core of the Web, reminiscent of the rapid and short-lived popularity of the MIT spam war video.

About Time Cubism

Time Cubism is a theory of everything similar to string theory developed by the self-proclaimed Dr. Gene Ray.

"Educators are lying bastards. -1 x -1= +1 is WRONG, it is academic stupidity and is evil. The educated stupid should acknowledge the natural antipodes of+1 x +1 = +1 and -1 x -1 = -1 exist as plus and minus values of opposite creation - depicted by opposite sexes and opposite hemispheres. Entity is death worship - for it cancels opposites."

(http://www.timecube.com/)

Project Outline

• 10 minute video documenting Time Cubism
• Website advertising the documentary with links to YouTube
• Submission to Slashdot, Digg, etc.

project proposal of Joe, John and Jim

John Williams
Joe Diaz


Project Proposal:

Objective: How are the expectations of a video game and finally the gaming experience affected by the players association with the game material outside of the game.

In this investigative study we will be looking at how two MIT Detachment 365 AFROTC cadets approach and play a realistic combat flight- simulation game. This will be compared with how 3-4 people not associated with any air force or other military branch evaluate the game.

Questions we will ask the ROTC cadets:
-Do you aspire to be a pilot in the USAF?
-If yes, what type of aircraft would you prefer to pilot?
-How many years have you been a cadet?
-What experience do you have with real aircraft?
-Have you encountered a USAF flight simulator?
-How important is realism to you in this genre of video game?
-Is it more important than having an intense and riveting (but unrealistic) gaming experience?
-Do you ever play these games on your own free time?
-What will you be looking for in this particular video game?
-What other games do you play on your free time?

Questions to ask non-cadets:
-Are you sure that you don't harbor any secret desires to become a fighter pilot thus compromising the neutral manner of this study?
-What other video games do you play on your free time outside of media studies surveys?
-Would you elect to play a flight simulator game on your own?
-What would you expect from the game? Is realism less or more important than the games ability to exhilarate you?
-Do you usually make connections with the real military services of the United States when playing military simulation games?


Questions after playing the game to consider:
-You were allowed to adjust all of the settings, did you make it as realistic as possible?
-Did you read about the controls etc. before even beginning the game?
-When flying, did you follow all of your objectives precisely without detouring or messing around?
-Did you ever find yourself saying, "it's not like that in real life."?
-On a scale of 1 to 10, how close did this game bring you to feeling like a real fighter pilot?

There will be background interviews held before allowing the selected gamers to even touch the game. These will be filmed. They will then be given the game, an instruction manuel, and instructions to adjust any settings they wish to. They will then be asked to play the game while being filmed. Afterwards, there will be a debriefing interview if you will which will also be filmed. Finally, us the testers will speak on camera about our conclusions.

Materials needed: 2 USAF ROTC cadets, 3-4 non-military associated gamers, camera, computer, game control, game (Falcon 2.6 Allied Force)

2000 Dollars on an Alliance Warrior?

I know video games are fun. My brother just bought an Xbox 360 a few weeks ago and every time I go home, we’ll play it for a few hours. Even in college, I’ll spend the occasional two hours playing guitar hero with my roommates. Video games are surely a part of my life, but they do not dictate my life.

World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs have become a huge success over the past year. While I don’t own any of these types of games, many people in my house spend their leisure time exploring virtual environments with a virtual character. However, until reading Dibell’s article on play money, I did not realize how time and money intensive these games actually are. For someone to spend 2000 dollars buying a virtual character seems ridiculous and just plain crazy.

We all pay a price for our entertainment. Some of us will buy a plasma TV for 3000 dollars so we can see the Patriots play in HD. Others will invest in video game systems so they can play Halo 2 against online opponents. I myself invested 70 dollars to buy Guitar Hero 2 so I could continue rocking out in the middle of my room. However, the difference is that all these investments are tangible items in the real world. What exactly is the point in investing so much money to buy a virtual “creature” that is not even real? Take Dibbel’s example of a Level 60 Alliance Warrior selling for 2000 dollars on Ebay. Whoever chooses to buy this Alliance Warrior is basically saying, “I would pay 2000 dollars to play World of Warcraft.” Perhaps there are people who are willing to pay such large sums to play a video game, but I for one cannot understand why. If you walked into a Best Buy and saw a video game selling for 2000 dollars, would you even consider it?

Another problem with using real money to buy virtual items is that it blurs the line between what’s real and what’s virtual. If someone is spending large amounts of money to buy virtual items, the game is more than just fun. To an extent, the player is simply living life vicariously through a computer game. He is buying upgrades so he can become the strongest player on Azeroth, but only because he cannot become the strongest individual in his town. Often times, the source of pride or power a player gets from a video game may substitute for the emptiness of their real lifestyle. In these cases, it is more understandable that a player would pay a large sum of money to obtain these types of satisfactions.

Finally, I believe the ability to buy virtual property detracts from the gaming experience as a whole. MMORPGs are supposed to be simulations that, to a degree, mimic real life. Economies fluctuate, alliances form and players interact much like we do in our daily lives. However, in real life, it is impossible to put a price tag on someone’s accomplishment. If a doctor has spent 10 years of training to become a renowned surgeon, I can’t simply pay 2000 dollars to take his place. The same should be held true for MMORPGs because the selling of characters detracts from the realistic qualities of the game. Just like skill must be earned in the real world, such should also hold true in the virtual world.

All this being said, I have still to lay hands on an MMORPG, and perhaps I should indulge myself before making bold statements about them. Maybe I’ll somehow find sanctity from my real world problems by immersing myself in the virtual world. I guess the next time I fail a test I’ll just buy myself a really really smart virtual character to make myself feel better. Maybe all this time I was wrong for thinking that I should be living life in the real world, when I can just buy myself a great life in the virtual one. Then again, where’s the fun in that?

The Futility of Futurism

In the world of logic, effect is always preceded by cause. An event never happens spontaneously, but rather appears as a result of surrounding circumstances. It is this fundamental assumption that allows our justice system to function: every crime has a cause, and we determine if this cause justifies the crime. Paradoxically, the entire theory of law enforcement is based upon the converse of this theory of justice. Instead of assuming the effect, and attempting to find the cause, police forces assume the cause, and attempt to prevent the effect. Yet, any mathematician would tell us that the converse of a statement is not necessarily true, which throws the entire morality of Precrime into question.

First, let us assume that effect implies cause and cause implies effect. In this scenario, Precrime is not only logically correct, but, indeed, may be more moral than its retroactive counterpart. Let me clarify: a world such as the one described resembles a world where the transition from thought to action is gravity. If a priceless porcelain figure falls from a tall shelf, do we let catch it or let it break and then assign blame where it is due? Obviously, we catch the figure, preventing such a precious object from being lost forever, for the reason that gravity is infallible. Such is the action of Precrime, an agency which prevents an otherwise immutable action from happening. However, what if we assume gravity is not infallible?

This perception lies closer to reality. In the real world, we assume abstract concepts such as “free will” can change the course of even the most linear sequence of events in an instant, not to mention the obvious time paradoxes created by the existence of the Precogs themselves. If one Precog predicts a murder happening, and thus causes Precrime to prevent it, then would not the new future be one in which the murder did not happen, thus causing the Precogs not to predict the murder at all? However, this ensures that the murder will happen; thereby causing a vicious time paradox that causes us to question whether or not a prediction of the future is possible at all, since any such reading would change the future, thus changing the prophecy. This is Heisenberg Uncertainty at its most malicious.

However, the situation is nowhere near remedied if we assume that the physics works. The existence of Precrime naturally precludes some measure of human free will, at least in the short term. This assumption may not be one which we are prepared to make, even if it were true. Could we handle the belief that our actions are even partially predetermined? Would this not undermine our ingrained concepts of human ingenuity and spirit? Indeed, even if Precrime were logically plausible, and human action were as infallible as gravity, we would never acknowledge or explore such a phenomenon. The philosophical repercussions of such a discovery would tear society apart, forcing us to admit that our lord is the cruelest of all abstract powers, destiny.

Why I think things matter?

Julian Bleecker is a visionary. His piece A manifesto for networked Objects – Cohabitating with pigeons, Arphids, in the Internet of Things, depicts in a very thought provoking manner a fictitious yet very plausible world. This is a world where the connection between humans and Things are redefined; where Things become blogjects or objects that participate in the social web. In this novel view, of the world the current “Internet of Non-Things” is upgraded to an Internet of Things “a network in which socially meaningful exchanges takes place, were culture is made, experience circulated through media sharing—only with objects and human agents.” Ultimately, this communion between human and things will bring a new dimension to both protagonists. On one side, unanimated Things will come to life when plugged into the Internet and participate in the social discourse. On the other side, humans will gain a better understanding of their surrounding world. Bleeker’s example of the blogging pigeon perfectly illustrates this. When flocks of pigeons are equipped with some apparatus to communicate on the Internet wirelessly, GPS devices for tracing where they have been flying, and environmental sensors to log the amount of pollutants in the air they fly through, one can talk about a true species evolution. From their status of public nuisance, they metamorphose into agents in the public sphere engaging discussion on environmental issues. One can also imagine other revolutionary applications of the blogging pigeons for instance, a website would publish in real-time the data sent by the pigeons and vulnerable people would be informed of the quality of the air in their locale and take precautions as required.
Moreover, the Internet of things will introduce objects that can download, upload, distribute, and stream meaningful and meaning-making content. Things and humans will participate side by side to the making of culture. Blogjects will noticeably change social habits, views, and interpretations of the world, as they will provide a new perspective. A telling example is the amount historical footage taken by online surveillance cameras. These cameras have contributed to the making culture.
Furthermore, the integration of objects with informatics capabilities in the networked world, will redefine how humans occupy and move in the physical space. In the “Internet of Things”, object will loose their inertia and gain a certain network mobility. A surveillance camera in front of convenience store that is not online is less likely to affect any human behavior than a battery of networked cameras disseminated in all the parts of a city.
In short, Bleeker’s attractive idea of an “Internet of Things” sounds like science fiction and seems to lack of scientific grounds. However, it is necessarily to remember that “Why things matter” is a manifesto whose pure goal is to present what is there to be done with the possibilities that the Internet has to offer.

When Play Money Becomes Real Money

I'd like to start off by saying that these two chapters of Play Money were great. I really enjoyed reading them and I will most likely buy the book very soon. I believe Dibbell does a great job exploring the very interesting phenomena that is the popularity of these MMORPGs. Many of the questions asked in the reading are things that I have thought about for a long time and I'm very glad to find a book written about these very questions by someone who has actually investigated the subject. In the process of writing this essay I have actually ordered the book from Amazon.

The sections of the book that we have read focus mainly on the question "What is it about MMORPGs that attract people so much?" Branching off of that question are other questions such as "Why is it that restrictions and scarcity are so necessary in these games?" "Why would someone be willing to pay real money for a digital item?" and "How do people's behaviors in these games fit with existing economic and psychological beliefs?" Each of these questions also branch off into a series of new questions.

Why are restrictions and scarcity so necessary to creating a successful MMO? Why aren't people happy with simply getting everything they want with a keystroke? How could an endless supply of everything ever get boring? The example that Dibbell cites in Play Money is Castranova's "puzzle of puzzles." Why is it that no one would buy a two piece puzzle? It's because a puzzle, much like a video game, isn't about having a finished product. It's about the journey getting there. This seems like common sense, and it is when you're talking about simple games like puzzles. As the games get more and more complicated, that statement becomes less and less true. While current video games are still based on restrictions and rules and there are plenty of people who follow all of these rules so they get the full experience of the journey instead of skipping straight to the completed game, there are also plenty of people that will buy a game and a cheat book and basically skip to the end. This is something I see all the time, but I have not yet been able to understand it. I don't get why someone would pay money for a game and then pay extra money for the book that tells them everything they need to do to get to the end the quickest and with the least effort. It reminds me of walking into a maze with a map complete with a big red line marking the way out. And yet, a large percentage of people who play video games do just that.

I would also argue that these are the same people that pay fifteen dollars a month for the privilege to go out and pay more money to buy a level 60 Human Paladin complete with all epic armor and weapons. I have so far been unable to understand this phenomena. Hopefully, I'll be able to find more insight in that book I just ordered.

A Pigeon Blogged This

I just missed the deadline to post and Blogger was down for server maintenence until now.

Bleeker’s A Manifesto For Networked Objects was frustrating to digest. From spimes to blogjects to the Internet of Things, the article it reads like an attempt to cram as many buzzwords into a description of an interesting, but not especially remarkable or novel idea.

Bleeker introduces the neologism “blogject,” a portmanteau whose cool-factor is enhanced by using the word “blog,” which has only a superficial connection to his discussion. Blogjects fail to be bloggers both the common definition of the word and his own definition as, “participants in a network of exchange, disseminating thoughts, opinions, ideas – making culture.”

A blogger is a person who shares ideas using the Internet as a venue. People read blogs because they find them to be more personal, insightful, and opinionated subjective than, say, a newspaper. Compare this to Bleeker’s example of the Pigeon that Blogs. The Pigeon mindlessly transmits information on its location and air pollution data – or rather, the GPS device does this, as the pigeon is unaware of its purpose. This is nothing new or remarkable. Radio tracking long predates the Internet and such real-time broadcasting of data could have (and probably was) done eons before the Internet age.

The key is the blogjects are stupid. As the article explains, “blogjects have no truck with the syntax of human thought.” There is no processing, no analysis, no “thoughts, opinions, or ideas.” Blogjects are participants in the exchange of ideas only marginally as the raw data that informs people and thus can be processed into facts, then refined into ideas. Bleeker exaggeration, “The Pigeon that Blogs now attains first-class citizen status,” is absurd. The pigeon possesses “agency” in the sense that it, obtusely and indirectly effects change, if say, a scientists tracks the data for years and notices increases in pollution levels, a molecule in a sea of facts that leads environmentalists to start a campaign, which leads Congress to pass more stringent corporate dumping laws. Here, the scientists, environmentalists, and congressmen effect change, not the pea-brained bird with a transmitter tied to its led.

Here’s another comparison. Random Hall has their laundry machines connected to a server so that one can check the status of a washing machine online. If the washing machine is indeed blogging, as Bleeker would claim, that woe to the blogosphere. Tomorrow, Joi Ito is going to be replaced by a dryer.

Nevertheless, after cutting through article’s sensationalism, it seems that Bleeker’s general idea – connecting physical objects to the Internet – is a good one. Getting raw data from objects is the necessary first step that precedes processing this data, extracting information, and forming ideas, although I believe that processing large amounts of data is a more difficult and interesting change than simply collecting it. Imagine having a constantly updated online database of traffic conditions, tracked with cameras at commonly-congested stretches of road along with image-recognition heuristics for recognizing and accident or foggy weather. Bleeker would be pleased to know that Google Maps has been put to use for environmentalists in tracking deforestation using satellite views. Or, as Bleeker would say, tree stumps are blogging.

Uncle Sam is Watching

I was just about to devour a healthy serving of ice cream when I found myself staring into the beady eyes of a fly that had found a resting spot on the handle of my spoon. Normally such an incident would not have alarmed me; I simply would have "shooed" the fly away with a simple hand motion. However, today was different. Today I felt the necessity to leap across the room and smash the fly into the wall; not out of vengeance for its having interrupted my ice cream eating experience, but rather because I was half expecting a trail of silver to be smeared on the wall – the remains of a blogject. Bleeker has made me wary of my surroundings – the birds in the sky, the insects in my room, and even the bacteria in the ice cream. The "Internet of Things," as described by Bleeker, is a growing network that will encompass all niches of society. Privacy will become a thing of the past, for escaping the constant scrutiny of the "network of things" means to embrace complete isolation.

Americans, and people of the world in general, now find themselves in age where the concern over terrorism perpetuates fear of government back home. This is evinced by the government’s passage of the Patriot Act. Such policies make it easier for the government to wiretap and eavesdrop on people’s private conversations. Governments spying on their people is nothing new; such activities are reminiscent of the actions carried out by the secret police organizations created in communist, fascist, or other authoritarian regimes of the past. The current world political situation is so exacerbating that now people within countries with strong democratic traditions are starting to embrace these surreptitious activities which undermine privacy. People are now willing to give up their rights in order to ensure more "security." In this current atmosphere, the prospect of an internet of things is quite terrifying.

Attaching GPS and sensors to pigeons and automobiles can turn passive things into blogjects that gather important information. Bringing physical objects into the networked internet under such circumstances has positive benefits with few negative consequences. However, the "Internet of Things" has already progressed beyond these humble beginnings. For example, the Sony Aibo dog can wander around and automatically create blogs of its random musings. Considering this, it doesn’t seem far-fetched that in the future there will be teams of nanobots that can creep through any crevice and publish their musings for the entire world to see. Such blogjects could be used not only by the government, but also by more malicious entities such as the creators of spyware.

The desire for security will cause people to support the existence of blogjects that permeate all aspects of society. There is a general trend of acceptance: people are willing to accept technological advances that diminish privacy rights. For example, no one complains that clothing stores (and perhaps even changing rooms in these stores) are under video surveillance. As Bleeker points out, people have to adapt their behavior when they know they are sharing the world with blogjects. The existence of a ubiquitous network of things would initially lead to a repression of free speech – people would be careful what they say if they were always in the public light. Eventually, free thought might be jeopardized too. Humanity would then find itself living in the world of Minority Report.

There is a place in my world for objects with agency, just not a very large one.

I was pondering in the shower this morning as I usually do about the assigned "Why Things Matter" article. I was looking at my shampoo bottle and thinking to myself, "No, I do not want a little micro chip in my shampoo bottle that reports to other shampoo bottles how much shampoo I used and when before posting it on the Shampoo Consumption Habits in Massachusetts website." There are bigger problems in the world that could be solved far more directly and cheaply than how Julian Bleeker suggests through blogjects. Aside from looking like he used the Microsoft Word "synonyms" option on every word to make them as big and hard to understand as possible, his essay did have a point, albeit a largely invalid one.
Having pollution sensors on birds or broadcasting micro chips in our car exhaust pipes isn't a half bad idea (although the pigeon-mounted sensors really should have monitored altitude too, but I'll let that slide). The way industrialized countries are contributing negatively to the environment begs for some sort of urgency in understanding and correcting the most imminent of our pollution related problems. I feel that the process of deploying and responding to blogjects and their reports is a lengthly one. A straight forward scientific study and report with the same funding might be a little bit less thorough than allowing the blogjects to do their thing over a period of years, but the time saved might be more important than the accuracy of the findings. The other side of the argument of course is that most people don't browse through scientific reports on their free-time, but they may check out the blogjects on pollution website. Getting the public excited about keeping the earth clean is probably the best way to go about cleaning up the environment. This is why I feel that blogjects will definitely have a place in our future, but this place still doesn't include my future shampoo bottles.
Actually, if I were doing a project on rising levels of shampoo usage on weekends, those blogjects might come in handy. But really, how often is that going to happen? I would argue that putting a blogject on a shampoo bottle is not much different than putting one on migrating whales. It interests only a small group of people, but costs a lot of money to implement (money that could be spent making Chinese production cleaner or feeding starving people in less developed countries). "Critter cams that disseminate a realtime video stream from a Kapok tree in the Amazonian rain forest or an RSS feed and podcast from a school of migrating whales showing all kinds of meaningful environmental data would definitely make it into my news aggregator," says Bleecker. If this actually happened to him right now, I might ask ten years from now how many times he actually took time out of his busy day to admire the migrating whale blogs, I suspect he could count the number of times on his right hand. We get enough junk mail as it is. Chain E-mails are fun to receive when you get your first one, but it's not so fun when you get your 20th. The fun starts to turn into bitterness. While blogjects might take the world by storm for the first few years, there might be a point when there is just too much internet clutter from the sheer amount of specialized and to most people, uninteresting data produced by the object-bloggers. Their great "agency" may start to get on our nerves.
I say we should send a hellish army of blogjects against our world's greatest problems. And if we suddenly suspected that using Head and Shoulders shampoo gives you and everybody around you cancer I'd be the first to turn my shampoo bottle into a soap dispensing, internet blogging, first class internet citizen. So far that hasn't happened yet.

There is no Virtual.

The Internet is no longer confined to boxes, cables and massive fiber optic pipelines tangling networks all over the globe... those days have ended. Here, on the fringe of the information age, we find that there is an increasing reliance on the connections made via the Internet. cell phones no longer simply send and receive phone calls and text messages; they can connect to the Internet; they began solely as a tool of communication, now they have become so much more. Increasingly, people are starting to use the Internet to store documents, photos, journal entries, thoughts, comments, notes. People are buying, selling, creating, destroying, editing, expressing and connecting with this vast network. On the fringe of this new era, it only makes sense that objects should become a part of the Internet too. "Blogjects" and humans feed real information into the virtual; it makes a real difference in the world to see reality made virtual--or perhaps the other way around.
People walk down the streets with ear bud necklaces laced around their necks, laptops at their hips, and the Internet hovering around them like the ozone from the exhaust pipes of perpetual network traffic. We are slowly, but inevitably converging with our virtual selves--the distinction between the real and virtual is already hazy: 'meeting' people does not have to occur face-to-face; instead we can meet others face-to-facebook, fingers tapping our keyboards well into the night with the person we fought alongside in a critical assault on a vicious monster on some forgotten server. The television, once poison to the minds of young people, blamed for baking couch potatoes, now begs for people to walk to the study: there's is so much more they haven't shown you... and its all online.
Online becomes a misnomer, people shed the wires and bathe in the wireless, untangled from the mangled architecture of web 1.0. We suffer when an access point fails; we lose the connection we have with ourselves, knowing somewhere deep down that in freeing ourselves from the cables we have bound ourselves with the Internet. Somehow, no one suffocates as they inhale the thick electrical fumes of the blogosphere. No one feels silenced by the entropic chaos that keeps the mouth shut and the keyboard open. We've learned to LOL silently in public spaces and filter gigabytes of listed information at a glance. We are really virtually evolving.
Every day, things that don't actually happen make the news, sprayed across the windshield of our monitors as we race toward a seemingly beautiful and unknown future. Large companies that have nothing hold so much about our lives and help up live with others and the nothing that fills the Internet. Laws pass; people go to court about replicas of nothing that have proliferated wildly over the Internet. Nothing matters. Nothing makes all the difference. Nothing has certainly become something. Data is no longer bound to the hard drives, the RAM, the floppies and CDs, the Flash ROM. It has begun to manifest itself in a physical way, unshackled by our ever increasing reliance on it.
What happened to the unreal? There virtually is none.

The Unfounded Future of Blogjects

Blogjects, at their core, are entities of raw information, and nothing more. Julian Bleecker, in her article, “Why Things Matter”, tries to portray the future of blogjects in a manner that is entirely unsupported. Bleecker speaks of the future of blogjects as “first-class citizens” who “participate in the exchange of ideas,” as a member of our social web. This statement is so blatantly farfetched that I expected the article to elaborate on some clear reasoning as to why this conclusion was drawn. However, I was surprised to find that the only backing for this assumption was given in the form of several poorly chosen examples that fail to truly pertain to Bleecker’s original thesis. Furthermore, some of her later statements went so far as to contradict her original ideas entirely.

Bleecker originally speaks of the future of blogjects in a way that is undeniably characteristic of human thought. By presenting them as “first-class citizens” and emphasizing the use of “thought”, she makes it appear as though these blogjects will be able to make conscious decisions representative of a human. Through this, they would be able to converse with people on a deeper level, as much more than a collection of raw data. She speaks of a transition from passive to assertive behavior. Her first and primary example of this is the Pigeon that Blogs. The Pigeon that Blogs is a perfect example of a blogject being a collector of raw material that is then presented to the world for our own interpretation and discussion…how does this even remotely pertain to Bleecker’s perception of the future of blogjects? Sure, the results of the Pigeon that Blogs can potentially be used as an instrument for change, but that in no way relates to the pigeons blog’s having characteristics of thought. They are still just providers of raw data, left to the open interpretation of the public.

As she further elaborates on the details of how these future blogjects will operate, she makes the statement that “Blogjects have no truck with the syntax of human thought.” This is a bold and direct contradiction of her original statements. As I quote from the beginning of her article in reference to the characteristics of blogjects, “Blogjects become first-class a-list producers of conversations in the same way that human bloggers do.” Yet this is simply not true if you disregard the fundamental aspect of thought!

In closing, I believe that Blogjects can play a highly beneficial role in our society’s acquisition of knowledge. However, I find this to be fundamentally true only for cases in which the blogjects sole purpose is to provide raw data left for open interpretation, as is currently the primary case. The issue of blogjects operating as producers and agents on the same level that humans do is currently so entirely shaky, contradictory, and unfounded that I see little relevance in discussing the specifics of its implementation. Bleecker’s article furthered my assumptions in its inability to present a conclusive argument surrounding the fundamental characteristics of future blogjects.

Spirit > Economics

After reading through the two chapters of Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot by Julian Dibbell, the only image that kept reappearing in my mind was this fairly recent Foxtrot comic strip.


In this strip, the character Peter Fox discusses with his sister, Paige, the motives behind people who frequent auction websites to buy online currency with real money in order to become more powerful in a game faster. He explains that people don’t rationalize that they are exchanging currency, but instead, they feel that they are actually buying “time saved” by not having to find the gold, money, or meat during their gameplay. However, the question raised is why people would pay more money to reduce the amount of time that they spend playing the game that they are paying to play anyway? The answer is the challenge of becoming the best at a particular aspect of the game, no matter what the cost. Contrary to Dibbell’s reference to Edward Castranova’s theory that economic forces rule all, the fact of the matter is that players in these MMORPG’s are willing to sacrifice much more than financial wealth in order to achieve the goal pushed forward by the natural human spirit’s desire to succeed.

According to Castranova, “we’re learning… that scarcity itself is an essential variable,” suggesting that in the creation of virtual worlds, scarcity is factored in purposefully in order to create motivation for economic markets to exist. It is true that a sense of scarcity is required to create a market. Without it, there would be no need to trade, barter, buy, or sell because all resources would be available to all participants at any given time, diminishing the forces of supply and demand. However, it is arguable that economics are the underlying foundation of the desire to play these games in the first place. Simply put, it is not the properties of wealth that create human motive, but rather, it is the opposite. Much like the question of whether the chicken or the egg came first (Don’t argue. We all have our theories.), many question whether economic properties were an inevitable truth that hung above human conception until our minds became developed enough to embrace the system. This cannot be true. Human motivations such as, competition, greed, and power grew to inspire the principles of the wealth system we have today.

How can this property be applied and proven in the world of MMORPG’s? We merely have to examine the sacrifice, or losses, that are given in order to progress in these virtual worlds. The most relevant one to consider is the pure economic loss. Most of these games require monthly fees to participate at all, but in addition to this cost, many players spend additional cash on items that get them to their intended goals faster. The compounded cost makes a convincing case to the theory that due to the amount of loss, it becomes unreasonable to consider that overall economic gain in the real world is the underlying force that drives users to play these games.

To further drive this point, other forms of sacrifice can also be mentioned. One such instance is personal health. It is becoming increasingly popular for news reports to focus upon the detrimental effects that these games have on the human body. Many users have such strong wills to complete virtual quests or tasks that days can be spent in front of a screen with very little nourishment or rest, effectively killing the body. Another aspect to consider is face-to-face social contact. While many players claim the fact that they are not antisocial due to the frequent contact between user interfaces, they lose focus in the natural facial recogniscent senses.

The claims that economic forces create human motivation are not false. It is irrefutable that economics can inspire a cause for people to make goals. However, it is necessary to understand that these goals are the foundation of all motivation. When this concept is grasped, it can be understood that the menial tasks involved in the game world are driven by something much deeper: mankind’s will to succeed.

Making Money: Fun or Work

After reading the two chapters from the book, Play Money, I feel like making money using MMORPGs is easy. The question I have is it really worth it? These games are made for users to have fun and be entertained. When turning a game into a business, would playing these games be fun or work. Play Money addresses these questions with some expert opinion from psychologists, but there is still no distinct answer.

The nature of the human mind is hard to generalize even in small subcultures. Some people such as Troy Stolle, an example used in Play Money, can do repetitive processes just to better their virtual character in order to make more virtual money. Is this really fun? I have done this a little bit for video games and it is fun for some time, but it gets tiresome after three or four hours passes. To me this actually becomes work without much reward. Money can be made in video gaming not just in MMORPGs but the time investment compared to the payout does not seem worthwhile.

I feel like the main difference between fun and work is how the competitive spirit of a person is affected. Winning is always fun and losing is never as much fun as winning. Competition can occur between multiple people, a person versus a simulation or a person versus themselves. I can see how MMORPG games fun even if they are repetitive, since I do just about the same thing in real life by playing varsity basketball. Going to basketball practice everyday and often doing the same arduous drills gets repetitive but there is competition implicit in the drills. I am trying to better both myself and my teammates. Once making money in a game it no longer is a game unless there is still a lot of competition is involved. Making money as a side affect of a game keeps it fun and may make it even more entertaining.

I have not played an MMORPG, but I have played RPG games where one can gain items but running around, fighting and doing tasks. A business like Blacksnow Interactive that plays these games for income, takes the fun out of the game for their employees. How does one tell the difference between their leisure time and work? I would assume employees of this company are very much obsessed with MMORPGs and video games in general. So would Lee Caldwell, a partner in Blacksnow Interactive, play a different type video game or another MMORPG that he is not as good at for relaxation or fun?

Basketball players that make money and are the best of the best still have fun in the game. They have this ultimate goal of winning a championship every year. They have the opportunity to prove each year that they have the best team after all the repetitive practicing. Other video games have championships over their own in which many gamers compete, but in many of these MMORPGs there is no ultimate goal. Making money by playing the game and selling items is not worth it since it takes away from the fun you get from the game. When as a gamer you get to the best of the best and all that is left to do is try to find rare items to sell, you should move on to another game and have fun getting better at that game.

Designers Are Us!

Bloggers are designers. Blogjects are not.

In Bleecker’s manifesto, he really romanticizes and celebrates the new rising of the “blogject.” He actually got me excited about blogjects too. It is fascinating to see this new class of information transmitters, blogjects, begin to shape and change our physical world. I would argue that blogjects are even more reliable than humans. Take the Pigeon that Blogs for example. If one were to look at the Pigeon’s blog, one would find that the pigeon has been blogging steadily every x minutes. Because of this, one could appropriately assume that if ever one needed to find out the weather in the future, one would be able to find a blog that was posted within x minutes ago. A person however, is too spontaneous to be a reliable source for updated information. A person could blog every day, and then decide to not blog for one week. People do not have that internal code that goes: “If x-t=0, then take temperature of surroundings and blog.”

However, although humans are spontaneous, spontaneity is also a celebration of humans’ ability to choose. Bloggers choose to blog and blogjects just do it. Not only that, Bloggers choose how they are going to display information, while blogjects just do it. Bleecker says blogjects can effect change. If you were inside your room, which would affect you more?


The Spontaneous Blog of Human Subject Blogger:
“YOOOO!! It’s freaking cold out here! It’s awesome! Me, Jon, Sally, and Eric are gonna start a snowball fight! WOOOTT!! Come out and join us….NOW!”


The Consistent Blog of Pigeon Blogject:
“ Location: Cambridge
Temperature: 26.675 Degrees Fahrenheit.”


The Pigeon Blogject would probably only make you stay in your room, while the Human Subject Blogger could potentially draw you out into the cold weather. It was the human who was able to design his blog to match the intent of his blog. He was able to choose to use CAPS, “!!!’s”, and give an inviting tone. The pigeon’s blog was just a regurgitation of information – no design involved.

Why is design important? A better question is, how is design not important? Design dictates how humans perceive, receive, and interact with information. The way the blogger designed his blog, the cold outside actually seems appealing and positive. The blogject’s blog could not have been designed with any intent, except to perhaps inform people with information.

Good design can be powerful. If the human subject blogger designed his blog so that he mentioned a few popular kids that were coming to the snowball fight, a lot more kids that are fans of the popular kids would come out too. On to other aspects of design, some humans have also designed lots of information to look like very little information, to make information seem more manageable – a movement called “simplicity.” A good example of this is the iPod. Good design has made the iPod into a touch circle and a dot, when in reality, there are thousands of invisible lines of running code that say “If this is clicked, then do that,” and so on. Because the touch circle and dot have made the iPod seem like such a simple information device to use, it has been madly successful; I give Macintosh props. Listening to thousands of minutes of music has never been so convenient in the entire history of humanity. Go, Apple!

However, my point is not to solicit for Macintosh or to say blogjects are not good. My point is to say that as humans, as potential designers, we can be powerful information transmitters, even more so that those non-spontaneous blogjects. If blogjects can effect change in our physical world, bloggers (us!) can effect super-change in our physical world by learning how to design well the information we transmit.

Web 2.0

The internet has evolved. A network that once began as merely a series of links between computers has now grown into an “Internet of Things” in which both users and computer programs manipulate and distribute information dynamically. This new stage in the development of the internet, one in which participation of both human and non-human users is highlighted, has been termed “Web 2.0”.

In this new form of the internet, we discover a new breed of information entities, Blogjects, which dynamically upload information about themselves to the internet. Consider the example of the Pigeon that Blogs, a project in which a flock of pigeons outfitted with GPS and spectroscopic devices transmitted their position and information about their environment to the internet. Like a human internet user, the Pigeon device, an inanimate object, is dynamically generating information that can lead to meaningful conclusions about how pollution or other environmental factors influence pigeon migration patterns.

This is a prime example of the internet modeling reality through data structures, an idea brought forth by Web 2.0. The term “data structures” refers particularly to the ides of Object Oriented Programming (OOP), a computer science concept in which “objects”, or meaningful units of code, encapsulate a set of data and functions to access or manipulate that data. The shipping industry as it exists today is a prime example of how OOP is used to model real world objects. Most packages are using radio frequency ID (RFID) tags or bar codes to allow for accurate tracking information. As far as the company is concerned, the information about the size, destination, and location of the package are all that is important, and thus this set of three values defines this object. This is the limited extent to which a real object is represented in the “Internet of Things”.

But to what extent will Web 2.0 lead to humans being “objectified”? Consider Amazon.com’s suggestion algorithms that take information about the items users have browsed and generate a fingerprint of that user’s shopping interests. Again, the website has determined the minimum amount of information necessary to define the user and actively manipulates the user’s web experience to suit the interests it believes the user has. However, in doing this, the website has focused the user on a certain set of products, gradually making real the assumptions made by the original suggestion algorithm. As the website becomes more dynamic, the user must become more static, or “objectified”. An extreme extrapolation of this concept appears in the film “2015”, in which people are classified to the extent of having their personal information and interests summed up in a few words on an identification card.

The evolution of the internet into a participation-based architecture of information has resulted in a far more dynamic representation of static objects and a higher level of classification of individuals, bringing into question the idea of a more intelligent, more “human” internet resulting in the objectification of its human users. If the Amazon.com model were to be extrapolated and used by every website that users visit, and if users gradually adapted to meet the profiles suggested by the dynamic websites, the fictional musings of “2015” could become a disturbing reality.

Has Bleecker talked to California's governor?

Julian Bleecker talks of a world where information can be readily accessed from entities on the internet known as “blogjects”. These blogjects communicate a small portion of the world to each other and as a result will interact with one another and with humans. This could result in rumors, inaccurate data, mass hysteria, etc… but essentially, I think that Bleecker begins talking about this system of nodes as its own, self-functioning world. Just think, a blogject about gold mines could report that a mine has blown up, as a result, a different blogject on the price of goods could pick that up and change the price of gold before people even get word of it. It’s a pretty crazy idea, right? Maybe not, it sure does make me think of the movie Terminator. In Terminator, humans created this unbelievable defense system that could link with all of its machines and weapons. If it recognized conflict in an area, using the internet it could route combat vehicles and supplies to that particular area, all while humans sit back and watch the show. Machines were making and controlling other machines, as a result, when the system came online, it revolted and started attacking humans. Am I saying Terminator was prophetic? Maybe, but for now it is merely an example of this idea of a self-sustaining world of information that can adapt to itself.

Bleecker seems to make some “far out” claims, but in some cases and to a certain extent, this sort of thing is already happening over the internet. Take me for an example. I am a senior and I am looking for a job. Sure, I want to find a project that is both interesting and rewarding, but at the end of the day I want to make money. My mother always told me “never to put all my eggs in one basket”, so I decided to register with monstertrak.com and see if it could help me get a job. There, I can upload my resume and use it to apply to hundreds of companies, and believe me I have reached the triple digit mark. That’s not interesting. What is interesting is the fact that I can use my resume to apply to many different companies, but monstertrak dissects my resume and doesn’t let me apply to companies that I am not qualified for. To think, an internet site is telling me who I can and can’t apply to. Even so, I have still applied to many companies that I had never heard of before, I merely read their description and if it sounded like I wouldn’t want to kill myself doing that work I applied. Right now I probably have somewhere around 150 of my resumes floating around the internet. Companies can login to monstertrak as well, but they don’t have to go through each and every resume like before. Monstertrak has already ensured that the applicants to their company meet a basic set of requirements. Now, the company exec enters a search word, let’s say “lithography”, he will get a slew of resumes containing that word, including mine, even though I may not have as much experience as the guy who put “photonics laboratory”, I have the buzz words.

That is what our internet has become, buzz words. Barely any one looks at an entire article nowadays. They simply google the word they are interested in and find every instance of that word. Computer programs should have no problem doing the very same thing, but we as the creators must be careful. At some point, on some level, giving this power to computers will in the end cause us to relinquish our control. Entire stock markets could be crashed from a single glitch, who knows what else could follow. I’ll tell you one thing though…I’ll be back…

Blogjects: 1984 All Over Again

It is incredible to imagine that there could someday be everyday objects that tell us more about the world than we could have ever before imagined. In Why Things Matter, Julian Bleecker talks about a world where information flows from things called blogjects. These blogjects would be able to post to the internet information about their surroundings and the interactions that the objects had with other blogjects. The information flowing from these many, varied inputs could then be used by humans. I think that having blogjects examining every detail of my life would quickly become overwhelming.

Blogjects seem to be a very useful tool for getting automatic information from the world around us. I agree that there is a great potential to get information for scientific research. On the other hand, the world would quickly become Orwellian because every action could be captured on camera, and the effects of our actions could be recorded. Our own blogjects would tell the whole world what we had done. I cannot think of a situation where this exposure into my life would be a good thing. In fact, I would be downright terrified to live in a glass world where nothing was private.

Even though blogjects seem to be very useful for sharing information, that information needs to be regulated in order to protect privacy. I think that blogjects can be useful to a certain degree. If birds are fitted with electronics to measure toxins in the air, that really cannot do much harm. If cameras lining the streets of major cities are linked to the internet that could possibly become a problem. According to Bleecker, however, this would only be the start. Blogjects would interact with people and other blogjects. They would basically do the exact same things that human bloggers do. The blogjects could ultimately compile their individual perspectives in such a way as to cause actions to be taken.

The idea that blogjects could eventually cause actions to be undertaken is slightly scary. It is easy for human bloggers with the ability to reason and explain thoughts clearly to change the opinions of others. Is it possible that blogjects could someday have a similar effect? If they do, that would mean that blogjects would collaborate and swing public opinion. This is a far cry from several simple objects reporting raw data for human interpretation. If blogjects were ever to progress that far, computer programs would have enough power to autonomously sway public opinion and the actions of the masses.

While blogjects can be very useful for automated science and information gathering, I think that it is going too far to allow blogjects to have an assertive voice on the web. It is ill-advised to give blogjects the power to project opinions. The only way that opinions should be formed with blogjects is through humans responsible for interpreting the raw data from these blogjects. If blogjects are allowed to share what they “experience” without any oversight, people will lose a large degree of privacy. Blogjects, although they have a limited role in society, should not be expanded to interact autonomously with the internet and human users.

The Ant Invasion

I hate ants. Currently, they are attempting to take my kitchen, my bathroom, and my bedroom by force. They are everywhere. When I open my chemistry book, little red ants stream from the pages. My cabinets have been stained red by all of the ant carcasses. I brush the ants off my toothbrush each morning and night. They took over my peanut butter and jelly sandwich but I ate it. What is one ant anyway? Besides, this is personal. These ants are more than ants. They are a worthy opponent. Individually, they are insignificant, but en masse they have added an extra dimension of aggravation my existence. Strangely, I am addicted to Facebook. Before I open my chemistry book I have to log on to check the current status of my friends. Facebook is in the background as I eat or go to bed. When I see others checking their Facebook, I can feel the need to visit my own. A single Facebook account would hold no value but the network of accounts that exists makes Facebook a force to be reckoned with. Much like the formidable red ants, Facebook holds its power in its numbers. The allure of Facebook is not easily pinpointed but the ease with which one can create and share in the collective human experience is certainly one of its attractions.

While this connectivity is appealing, social networking comes at a price. Facebook alerted me when my best friend broke up with her boyfriend before she had told me herself. Personal information that was previously somewhat guarded is now available to anyone who cares to look. The impersonal nature of this communication creates disconnect in an increasingly disjointed society. While I love Facebook for the easy perusing of lives it makes available, I must remind myself that what I am experiencing is superficial. The cost of mass access in the case of Facebook is a loss of the deeper connections with which the web of society used to be constructed.

Now, these ants, like Facebook, control me. As I give into their power as a whole, I lose my own autonomy. I do not recognize any of the ants individually, but rather their effect as a whole. My life is no longer my own, but it is shared by the ants and the networks as we tend toward symbiosis. I have found that I cannot fight this process. I no longer grimace as I flick the red dots off my toothbrush. To learn that my friend is in town through Facebook rather than the telephone is no longer jarring. The family of eight residing in my text book greets me warmly every time I leaf through to find a problem. My friends’ profiles have come to replace their emails and phone calls. My popcorn is there for the ants if they want it. My story has been offered to the network. I can only hope it does not swallow me as I swallowed the ants that seemed so insignificant in my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The Internet of Things in Practice

I once heard Bruce Sterling speak about the Internet of Things, and he sounded completely not credible. When I heard him pronounce with glee, “I call it, a spime!” I could only look down at my lap and close my eyes. Julian Bleeker in his article, however, presents less of a sci-fi perspective and a more practical interpretation of what smarter objects could do for us. Despite being more down to earth, Bleeker still fails to paint a concrete picture of how Things with agency would operate.

The best way to evolve technology and propogate changes in the way people use technology is not to make big changes. Nothing can be declared as “the way of the future” without being somewhat backwards compatable. I do not see the Internet of Things as some fancy new protocol designed to replace anything. Imagine purchasing a set of cheap stickers that you can slap on to any object and tag with its identity. You might have a variety of stickers to choose from, so you can record more information about your Thing. This idea is not outlandish, and it is immediately practical, useful, and desireable. If these objects blog, you can now Google your long underwear or old camp stove rather than look for it. These blogjets could tell you when they are lost. Taking this a step further, if this idea catches on, maybe manufacturers for electronics or power tools might report their status or need for repair. What if your iPod could blog the songs you listened to? Wait a minute, this idea already exists and has been implemented. Unfortunately iPods aren't wireless, but using amaroK, a media player for Linux, one can build an online collection of listening statistics, including what you play on your iPod.

These are actual concrete examples of systems that could be implemented. These ideas are important enough and useful enough that we should not be worried about the semantics of “agency.” Agency seems to boil down to a philosophical question of causality: who is responsible for the information, the Thing or its maker? Let us not be too stuffy about this and other questions such as, will the introduction of spimes spur a new, recycling and reusing relationshipt with our stuff? Right now and in the next few years, that's not practical. Right now, I want to tag my stuff.

Where are we going?

Great changes have affected Media through out history. From the invention of writing to the creation of the Internet, the face of media has been in a constant evolution. Important steps marked this evolution. The invention of printing by Gutenberg in 1500 opened a new era in transmission of written knowledge. The spread of the radio in the 1920s made possible the broadcast of news, music, dramas, comedies, variety shows, and many other forms of entertainment to a large number of people. The invention of television in the 1950s introduced moving images on top of the sound that the radio already provided. More recently, the internet has added a new dimension to media: interactivity.
Without any doubts, innovations that were brought to Media have shaped our modern societies. In a period of changes like the one we are facing today, in order to answer a question like “where are we going?” we have to start by asking the question “where is media taking us?”
In his piece, Jurgen Harbermass introduces the concept of public sphere that defines an engaged space, which activates changes in our societies. For instance, an actively involved politician is part of that public sphere. This is concept is pivotal to our analysis given that the influence of media on our societies passes through the public sphere. The traditional structure of mass media leads to a relatively controlled public sphere. Of course, the level of control greatly depends on the type of institution i.e governments or big corporations that exercises the control. In all cases, the debate in the public sphere is biased towards those who control the way of mass communication. Furthermore, the technical architecture that supports traditional media is one-way, organized around a centralized hub with unidirectional edges going from the center to outskirts. This type of architecture paves the way to a generalized passivity. People fail to be active in a public sphere, because they can only take in information but cannot react to it.
The internet as a new mean of mass communication appears to be a good solution to the above-mentioned problem. Its decentralized structure insures that nothing can control it. The information is freely shared among the network. Members of the network are all peers and there is no more hierarchy. In this sense, the public sphere is positively stimulated and the society ameliorated because a thriving nation is a nation where everyone is involved.
All in all, the rise and the spread of the internet as the main mean of communication lets us longer for a brighter future for our societies and gives a positive answer but partial answer to the crucial question where is the 21st century taking have in store for us.

The Death of the Public Sphere?

Sorry about the late post. I came down with a slight virus yesterday evening and stayed in bed for the night and forgot about posting my essay.

The Death of the Public Sphere?

As we know it, the public sphere is a doomed enterprise. Its very existence hinges upon the usage of mass media, which already fades as a priority in the eyes of the people. It has been replaced by a nodal structure, one which channels the energies of the civic into narrow spaces rather than letting them simmer in a larger plane. Instead of a focused, unilateral, yet at times dispassionate, nationwide discussion, we have constant, chaotic dialogues raging on countless disparate topics. Although some topics may attract more attention than others, such attention is monopolized by diehard enthusiasts whose numbers pale in comparison with the size of the public sphere of yore.

As with the destruction of many old ideas, the cracking of the sphere began with the invention of the internet. The innovation created a stark contrast with information of the past and present: whereas we were once funneled information in packaged goods created by major news networks such as CNN and NBC, we are now free to create our own news through the blogosphere. The result is a focus of interests. Rather than being forced to discuss a mundane topic which holds no personal importance, an individual can now comment on a subject of fierce ideological identification. Not only does the sphere diversify into a system of nodes, but human interest sparks, accentuating and polarizing the diversification.

Of course, this new arrangement may not be entirely incompatible with the notion of the public sphere, at least in the short run. As of this moment, mass media still controls enough of our attention to focus widespread interest on a particular topic, such as the nuclear crisis or Iraq War. The blogosphere, however, already partially subverts such interest. Highly opinionated blog entries that resonate with specific groups of people attract those sorts of people far more effectively than mass media, which attempts to stay inoffensive to all. As the number of voices on the internet grow, it become virtually certain that everyone will find some personality they would rather listen to than a mainstream media source, simply because they agree with what that personality has to say. Logically, if this process were to continue without bound (as it is doing now), it would mean each media consumer would prefer the internet over the newspaper and television, causing these latter sources to die out and effectively eliminating the public sphere, replacing it with the aforementioned nodal network.

Since this process, as of yet, may still be reversible (though not without significant effort), we must ask ourselves: is this what we truly want? Would we rather discuss passionately what we believe in with like-minded people or debate issues in a slightly subdued manner in public forum? Would we rather be composed of diversified but strong-willed interest groups lobbying for influence on the world stage, or of a unilateral yet lukewarm coalition force advantaged by massive numbers? Whatever we will decide, we must decide soon, or the choice will be made for us by human nature itself.

The Collective

Henry Jenkins’s essay “Spoiling Survivor” discusses the ability of the Internet to create “knowledge communities” in which many people from across the world can contribute to a single common set of information. The Internet provides the perfect opportunity to expand every participant’s knowledge, but Jenkins analyzes some of the social dynamics in a message board called “Survivor Sucks” that result in an uneven distribution of wealth.

The “Survivor Sucks” message board, despite its name, is home to fans of the Survivor television show. These fans have made a game out of learning all they can about the show, and they take pride in finding information out – spoilers – before an episode even airs. Forum members have even gone so far as to use imaging satellites to take photographs of possible filming locations and perform background checks on possible contestants. Because obtaining such information requires specific skills and connections, very few forum members have access to first-hand knowledge of the spoilers. This leads to the formation of a “gated knowledge community”, in which a few members obtain information and vet it before releasing it to the rest of the community. Ostensibly, this is because they don’t want to release information that might be too private, but it’s easy to see that human nature might also play a role.

Egotism in human nature often leads to problems with “knowledge communities” online when members begin to hide information from other members. In this way, information is not as distributed as it might be. This happened to the Survivor Sucks community when a new member, ChillOne, came onto the scene after claiming to have stayed at a hotel near the filming of Survivor: Amazon. His appearance in the Survivor Sucks community revealed very little information but promised that there was much more he knew. Traditional offline social dynamics suddenly disturbed the seemingly utopian community. The previous guardians of information were now overshadowed by someone who claimed to know orders of magnitude more information about the contest. Suddenly, the community’s very existence was unnecessary: their previous collaboration was unnecessary when someone could blow open the whole case. The whole purpose of the community changed; where they had previously tried to find out information about Survivor, now they solely tried to prove or disprove ChillOne’s information.

Knowledge communities succeed on the Internet when the members are each able to contribute approximately equal amounts of information. This is why the core Linux kernel, for instance, is developed by a relatively small number of coders. A minimum amount of knowledge and skills serve as a barried to entry to the knowledge community. People lacking the requisite skills aren’t accepted in the community and have trouble understanding what is happening.

Wikipedia is another example of a knowledge community. Wikipedia has succeeded because articles can evolve through individually small but collectively important contributions. Wikipedia is, perhaps, a knowledge community to end all knowledge communities. They aim to collect all information about anything important in the world, past or present. Because their knowledge spans such a diverse field, it is essentially impossible for one user to come in with a somewhat complete set of knowledge in the way ChillOne did. Thus, Wikipedia stands to succeed where Survivor Sucks failed.

The Public Wheel

The last time I sat in front of the big screen, there were hundreds of channels waiting for me to flick by, covering every topic from cooking to sports- of course, the guys around me stopped on ESPN, so we watched Monday night football. After the game, while we were flipping through channels, a CNN photo displaying all of New Orleans completely submerged riveted us.

That entire week, the television set grabbed the attention of the entire country, as it had done so many times in the past. Photos of the attacks on September 11^th, the floods of Indonesia, Princess Diana’s funeral, even Janet Jackson’s “mistake”, reached everywhere moments after they happened. But I never noticed any of that in my online forays. While searching for something on Yahoo, my eyes rarely stray to the headlines posted beneath the search bar- I’ve never been informed by Internet of anything concerning the masses before the newspaper or television. Mass media’s ability to address millions at once still holds a very central place in the public sphere, one that the Internet or any other form of peer network will be hard pressed to replace.

It’s certainly true that the Internet and its many peer-to-peer connections have taken a larger role in the public sphere. All the niche interests find homes in its tangled web in a way television will never match, and, as Benkler put it, the spokes of the wheel lead back to the hub in ways that make the Internet much more reactive and conforming to public opinion. The Internet’s role as a connective network brings together all the peer groups in ways that television can’t, letting anyone speak to anyone about any issue.

However, forms of mass media still and will continue to hold the center spot in the public domain, simply because as the hub it connects to all the spokes. Information presented through the radio or television spreads like a forest fire through networks, pervading the public sphere with the hot topic of discussion. Until peer networks can spread news as quickly and pervasively, mass media will always continue to exist at the public sphere’s nucleus.

Of course, that’s not to say that the Internet can be discounted in importance. Often, topics first presented by television become the substance of Internet debates, where peer network mediums rule as communicators of individual opinions. In the end, though, mass media will continue to serve as that hub to the millions of spokes. In an extension of that metaphor, the Internet and other networks might be seen as the rubber at the end of all those spokes, taking in and connecting all the spokes of media users to each other. However, no bicycle wheel is complete without its hub, and the public sphere as it exists today would not be complete or even functional without the hub of mass media.

The political playing field has been leveled and we have the Internet to thank

Could a more responsive and interactive form of media such as the internet really alter the political outcome of America? I happen to think it can. We live in a world where politicians treat politics as some sort of strategical power game instead of a device to uphold what is best for America it seems. The pollution from the tailpipes of our cars is killing us through wars and natural disasters, so why can't better legislation be passed to efficiently mitigate the problem? Unfortunately the companies that are staying afloat by holding on to the likes of the Dodge Ram and GMC Yukon were the ones who gave a boost to the the politicians who are standing in the way of progress for emissions and fuel efficiency.
If these politicians were truly savvy, they would realize that the internet holds a dear spot in the hearts of modern American media users and that it is not outrageously expensive to use it as a pillar of platform conveyance for their campaign. Take one look at this country's national debt or its crumbling Social Security plan and consider how bad the younger generations will have it in the future. Does it really make sense that 80 year olds are demanding and then getting the newest and most expensive health services and products and that the younger generation gets footed with the bill for it? Well, it would if they got all of the same benefits when they become senior citizens.
Somewhere along the line politicians allowed the current situation to happen, the situation where young people pay for social security but will never get to benefit from it. The politicians allowed this to happen for what it is in my opinion a selfish but perhaps necessary reason; old people vote while young people tend not to. Just imagine how much more attentive politicians would be to younger people if they all voted and imagine if these young people were excited to vote through the internet.
Yochai Benkler criticizes the one-sided dynamics of mass media. I feel that his ideas about news shows and newspapers being too un-diversified in opinion and too reluctant to showcase less sexy, yet important stories is spot on. The depth of internet content isn't restrained to the "lowest common denominator" nor does it all have to fit on a single page or into a half an hour TV slot. Because mass media does have to be centralized to accommodate all of these things while also worrying about the reputation and popularity of the news carrier, it will never be able to go into detail about both sides of a story or the complicated macro and micro implications of certain stories. The ability for the voting public to be able to easily juxtapose contrasting views about relevant political stories and then to analyze them in great detail if they wish is critical to a fair voting process. Fox news a classic example of a very biased news program that aims its sights at what Benkler calls the lowest common denominator. When the political mud-flinging starts it is unfair that Fox news, the public's vehicle of insight into the political workings of our government, backs one candidate or party more than the other. This is the reason why people vote for the wrong reasons, it is because the wrong reasons are fed to them over biased news networks. The internet tends to level the playing fields as was recently proven with the Mark Foley sex/E-mail scandal. The internet allows people to decide for themselves the important reasons to vote a certain way instead of having to wait for a centralized and often governmentally associated network to tell them.
The internet gives the public the means to make vastly more informed political decisions if they choose to exploit it to its full potential. Hopefully this will result in the getting the most competent leaders making decisions that affect us all fairly. All of the special interest groups that have learned to magnetize political decisions away from what is right and good for America had better watch out. The internet is here and the truths about our government, the economy, and our international endeavors are available for all to see. -John

The great political power of the internet

We are extremely lucky to be living in a time where anyone with internet access can easily say whatever they want to say and be able to broadcast their thoughts to the world. Just as Benkler said, the power of unidirectional communication is slowly deteriorating in favor of public conversation on an enormous scale. Individuals are now able to create and distribute media for extremely low cost. What gets seen by the most people now depends on the quality of the media instead of just who has the most money. This also makes it much easier to find extensive information and entertainment that focuses on subjects with a much smaller following. People are now able to find things that are very appealing to niche markets that they could never have found before.

An example Benkler discusses is politics. The internet allows people who are very interested in politics to learn everything they want to about any different aspect of politics. The internet allows for so much more information to be released and people who are looking for that information can be extremely prepared when it comes time to vote at the next elections. This is an extremely valuable resource that could change the face of politics forever.

Unfortunately, it won't. Only about 40% of the population of the United States actually vote for president and very few of those people care enough about politics to look up any of the information the internet has on political issues and politicians. It's become fairly evident that the politicians themselves don't even care enough to look up this information. The amount of information available about politics has little effect on political elections. What matters is the information that is given directly to the voters. The huge news stories are what affects politics and the internet right now doesn't have the ability to spread these stories very well.

This is where mass media comes in. People hear about these big scandals in commercials on tv, newspapers and radio. Mass media is the most effective way to capture people's attention right now. There is nothing on the internet right now that has the same power that television news programs have. This is one of the strengths of the unidirectional distribution. Mass media will keep going strong while it still has this advantage, but it might not have it forever. You can bet there are many websites out there that are looking for the best way to attract a critical mass of people who log on to the internet. That day may soon be approaching.

Life in a Bubble

The threat of niche media channels is that people will tune into channels that let them hear what they want to hear. Beyond self-selecting into a specific demographic, media users will form small bubbles – groups of common interest and point of view. As Benkler’s devil’s advocate puts it, “Individuals will view the world through millions of personally customized windows.” Nature lovers will read about nature, gamers will read about video games, and so on. This generic sitcom will die and will be replaced by shows targeting to small, specific groups of people. The cynic in me tells me that housewives will only watch cooking shows, nerds will only watch shows about nerds, gays will only watch shows with a gay lead character.

The most frightening implication of the fragmentation of the mass media is that, as Benkler phrased the argument, “there will be no more public sphere.” Democrats will teach news from the left and Republicans news from the right – or more precisely, people will seek out opinions that match their own existing biases as exactly as possible, taking the path of least intellectual resistance. There will be no asking a friend, “Did you hear about so-and-so on the news last night?”, because what is on my news may be nothing like what is on my news.

I deeply hope that people will not be so narrow-minded as to put on blinders to all events outside a small horizon. The networks that were supposed to connect us all threaten to trap each of us in his or her little box. Of course, it is only natural to tend to gravitate towards topics of interest. I enjoy reading the “news” on Slashdot much more than I would from a generic news source, not only because the discussion, but because the site is technology-oriented (with motto “News For Nerds. Stuff that Matters”), and so delivers news I find more relevant and interesting. This doesn’t mean that I ignore events of global and political consequence in favor of reading a game review. Nevertheless, no matter how much I’d want to exit my box, I wouldn’t read art because I find them incredibly boring.

The sad truth is that few people want diverse, intellectually stimulating content. People want to be told what they already believe and know. Mass media told people what they wanted to hear through bland and inoffensive material that catered to the proverbial least common denominator. Now, the Internet revolution will one-up mass media by telling each person precisely what he or she wants to hear. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 predicted this:

“Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, … all the minor minor minorities with their ears to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca.”

But is it a crime to give people what they want? What is it for a media conglomerate to tell a teenager that MTV is cultural rubbish and instead force him to watch a documentary on Bach? The viewer is happy, and the company gets ad revenue. Why rock the boat? The minority of people who want to think and be challenged and expand their interests will form their own niche. The short film EPIC predicted that the new generation of literati niche would news that was “deeper, broader, and more nuanced than anything before” while the rest of the world wallows in their own ignorance with content that is “a collection of trivia,” narrow and sensational.

The Convergence of Media

America’s culture is sort of based on convergence. The convergence of some aspects were more resisted than others, but still integrating cultures, people, and media is historically the American way. The convergence of media is evitable. As a young person with a laptop it is almost impossible for me not to use multiple Medias. In Henry Jenkins’ book, Convergence Culture, he describes what a teenager does probably on a daily basis. I find it funny since it is a great description what I am doing as I write this essay.

Jenkin’s writes, “media convergence impacts the way we consume media. A teenager doing homework may juggle four or five windows, scan the web, listen to and download MP3 files, chat with friends, word-process a paper, and respond to e-mail, shifting rapidly among tasks.” While writing this essay on my laptop, I am checking my email often, using Google for any terms I need to research, talking to some friends on AIM, downloading and listening to music by Easy Star All-Stars. The music by Easy Star All-Stars is also a convergence of cultures. They have made two albums, Dub Side of the Moon and Radiodread, both of which are reggae versions of the original albums made by rock groups, Pink Floyd and Radiohead.

There is a new craze in the sports world. It is fantasy sports. Fantasy sports are a convergence of all types of media. Many people including my friends and I who participate in this new phenomenon, use the internet while the games are going on to keep track of our real time fantasy points and scores of head to head match ups. This is the way I spend most of my Sunday and Monday nights during football season.

This convergence of media in a form of a game has become more exciting over the past couple of years because the athletes are becoming more involved. Some athletes actually openly care about their fantasy points and let their fans know. There is also more “expert” analysis information in different media devices. Newspapers, magazines, sports news television stations, and internet sites have preseason rankings and give weekly or monthly updates. ESPN is one of the leaders in pushing this multimedia usage. They now keep a record for every player in all major sports of percentage of leagues that has a team that owns that player and the player’s average draft position. So not only experts are communicating to the fantasy team owners, but owners nationwide get to communicate via this “survey”.

Though fantasy sports is only convergence of media that I use regularly , there are many other ways media is joined in today’s world to have the public more drawn into shows or sites. The internet has infiltrated much of other media audiences, such as television shows can now be quickly downloaded without effort and a slight cost. Movies and television use the media such as myspace.com to promote and give insider information about their product. Television and movie production studios have not yet gotten to the level of convergence of media that fantasy has, but eventually I believe this will occur.

The New Paradigm for Media

With the proliferation of the Internet and cheap access to a broadband connection, use of the Internet as a form of mass media has become a reality. This mass media, however, is somewhat different from the old paradigm and comes with its own set of rules.
In the past, large corporations fed information to a passive audience, telling them what was believed to be important and essentially dictating public discourse. With the introduction of the Internet, this is not always the case anymore. people have access to a nearly infinite store of free or cheap information, and have the ability to express themselves or what is going on around them as they see fit. This could not happen in the past. As discussed in class, this creates special interest "niche" groups: small collections of people that have more expertise in a particular field than the average person, and consume information catered to that interest.
At first glance, this seems like a threat to the stability of the old mass media architecture. If people want to consume information particular to their interest, they will no longer turn to the companies that have tried to please the most people; they will instead turn to their Internet communities. Not necessarily so. The mass media provides a backbone of validity that the chaotic structure of the Internet does not have. Information presented on the news has been carefully validated and checked for inconsistencies, because the survival of a mass media network hinges on this. The peer produced network on the Internet relies less on this and more on the fast, self correcting nature of its structure. An Internet community will likely have information out sooner than a mass media network, but that information does not have the backing from the validation process and may or may not be correct.
These two models are different and should be treated as such. It seems though, that the new peer produced system has not yet fully developed. This is clear when watching CNN. Since the explosion of blogs on the Internet, CNN has begun to report on the blogosphere, making note of what bloggers think about the issues. Also, in a recent article from class, it's obvious that the mass media still looks at the networked communities through the eyes of the old system. As CNN described it, the blogs "scooped" traditional media with the Foley scandal. I would venture to say that a blog cannot "scoop" traditional media because they operate on completely different principles. Yes, the blog may have had the information more quickly, but blogs bring the information to their audience in a different way than say NBC. Generally, this information tends to be laced in opinion and caters to a more specific audience, which may have a bias in one direction or another; more of a measure of what people think about what is going on than what people think is going on.
In the end, the rules of play are different but compatible. A cursory look at popular interactive new sites like digg shows that oftentimes, the information present in these peer-produced groups is really editorial of the validated fact that comes from the larger mass media network. It seems to me that the future lies in mass media collecting the information, and the peer produced media packaging it for the consumer in a less passive way.

The Public Foam

Are we at the brink of a radical shift in societal structure? In the twentieth century, what Habermas coined the bourgeois public sphere was replaced by a new body– a public sphere characterized by mass media. Today we witness the onset of new opportunities afforded by the internet and increased networking. I predict that the emergence of what Benkler calls the "networked public sphere" will be indicative of evolution, rather than revolution. In essence, the highly orderly public sphere typified by mass media will be transformed into semi-ordered foam; this new order will retain many qualities of the old.

Benkler describes the public sphere dominated by mass media in terms of the centralized and somewhat authoritarian hub and spoke model. Here information moves in primarily one direction: from the center to the rim. Given the nature of the hub and spoke model, it makes sense to describe the recipients of news as the "public sphere." The word "sphere" conveys the correct topological context in which Benkler views mass media in the hub and spoke model. The uniformity and symmetry of a sphere implies in some sense a uniform and homogenous community. By its very nature, mass media is orientated towards this type of society. The sphere’s shape also connotes a highly centralized structure. Because the internet and networking provide a forum in which almost any individual can express matters of public concern, there is no longer such a structure. At the same time, human nature prevents the complete dissolution of the hub and spoke model. The result is a foam-like structure that is still somewhat uniform in nature, but lacks an intrinsic direction for information flow. What we have is an amalgam of what Benkler calls the decentralized "networked public sphere" and the centralized "mass media public sphere."

The innate human desire for a sense of security provided by centralization and authority will prevent the decentralized grid structure of an idealized "network public sphere" from completely supplanting the hub and spoke model. For this reason, I do not believe that the twenty first century will witness the collapse of professionally produced forms of media such as television, newspapers (at least the online versions), and films in the traditional sense. In the future it is very possible that amateurs will find themselves able to work easily with such forms of media; however, there will always be a desire for the "professional" or "authoritative" voice. This desire is often implicitly expressed in the way that people attain information. For example, although a person might read blogs frequently, the information from such a source is always considered with skepticism. The reader looks for a "reputable" (or rather authoritative) source such as BBC that can confirm what has been read. The desire for centralization can be seen in the way society currently organizes information. Examples include sites such as Google, Digg, and other aggregators. People seek the existence of an "all-knowing" oracle; such an existence provides a sense of security.

Networking greatly increases the number of available sources of content. With more available sources, there will be sources of highly interesting information that target smaller groups of people. Hence, everyone will no longer receive the same information and news; instead, people find a "niche" that interests them. This does not mean that society will be completely stratified. In fact, increased globalization makes it more difficult for someone to seclude himself or herself in a niche. Afterall, a motivating factor for reading news is to be able to converse with other people in the community; thus, there must exist some overarching news that concerns all of society. News that would be relevant to an entire country includes presidential elections, war, and issues in world politics such as nuclear weapons in Iran and North Korea. The emerging "public foam" embraces the various qualities of the evolving public sphere. There is a sense of homogeny, but yet a sense of freedom to choose what constitutes important content; there is a sense of decentralization, but yet a sense of structure.