reading discussion for 4/22

I thought the article from the Washington Post on laptops being banned (wide web of diversions) was really interesting and I hope the class discusses it.  It reminded me of how many teachers complain about laptops and distracted students and expect full attention of students in classes where attendance is required or that maybe students haven't even signed up for voluntarily.  Especially as freshman, your class choices are limited and the university and college requirements force students to take classes that we might not be interested in-can the professors blame us for not being interested in what they're saying?  I've had both types of classes, some that I was forced to go to that I hated every minute of leaving me angry at the GER program and other classes that I never missed because I was actually interested in the class and didn't want to miss it.  This article was really interesting but I couldn't help but think that maybe teachers should stop blaming students for inattentiveness, we're paying to be in their classroom and it's up to us whether to pay attention or not

Shirky 10-11, epilogue

Shirky discusses how the wisdom of crowds can be a negative thing.  He says the more users something requires, the more skeptical people can be.  I feel like this shows in history with open source software how at first many people were skeptical.  I'm sure they thought Linux was a good idea, but doubted that it could ever be successful.  The same is true for wikis like Wikipedia.  I think the success of Linus and Wikipedia has made people much more open to open source software and while I think there are definitely lots of issues with open source software, we use it frequently in DTC 354 and it's really nice not to have to pay for software, especially for creative projects where it's necessary to try out products to decide if it's something you want or not.  Overall the wisdom of crowds is a positive thing, but I thought it was interesting how Shirky mentioned a negative side effect that I had not considered.  People are scared to try new things, and the more people involved the more potential problems will be pointed out.

In the epilogue, Shirky said that news of an earthquake in China spread faster via Twitter than any news source. This points towards the future of news-eventually (and even somewhat now) social media like Twitter will be the go to source for breaking news.  The internet allows people to communicate quickly around the world.  This makes me wonder about news and the constant concern about bias.  Does having the public create news make it more or less biased?  Obviously people experiencing a situation are much more invested in it, but then the wisdom of crowds comes in-isn't a large group of people smarter than one unbiased person?  I think it will be interesting to see where news goes in the future and see what happens with Twitter.  I wonder if they'll make a way for people to be more influential on Twitter, whether, for example, a famous reporter's tweets will be treated more urgently than those of the average user.  I think social media has definitely changed the world for the better and it will be interesting to see how allowing the public to disperse information freely will change news and media in the future.

Shirky 7-9

Chapters 7-9 of Shirky make me think a lot about the internet and social networking and how it has changed the way the world works.  On p. 163 he says "this kind of social awareness has three levels: when everybody knows something, when everybody knows that everybody knows, and when everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows," and how the internet has sort of brought the whole world to that third stage because everything on it is so public.  During the social media presentation, Nick mentions how saying something online is different than saying something in person and that it's often easier to say things online than it is in person. The internet gave people the ability to vent to seemingly nobody, allowing them to say what they feel because there's no real people standing in front of them, but at the same time the nobody they are venting to is actually everyone that owns a computer.  The election in Iran is a great example as Twitter got the world involved in an election that otherwise many people probably wouldn't have known was even going on.

Shirky also mentions the idea of social capital.  With open source software gaining popularity, reciprocity has become expected online.  There would be no open source software if many people didn't participate in the process from writing to using to editing it.  Social capital has become even more important and the internet continues to gain popularity.

Shirky also mentioned that chances are quite good you have a mutual friend with someone you sit next to on a plane.  This reminded me of WSU and how, on a campus of 20,000 people, I still manage to see several people that I know in one way or another daily.  Facebook has made this even easier as you see the friends in common feature.  I feel like if Facebook lasts for long enough, everyone at WSU should have at least one friend in common with everyone else in the WSU network just because, like Shirky suggests, most people know one person that has one or two thousand friends.  I've even found people that I have mutual friends with in other states because they know someone that went to my high school or people from WSU that I have a weird mutual friend that I happened to work with or something.  Social networking shows just how small the world really is.

Shirky 4-6

In chapter 5 when Shirky discusses Wikis, this reminded me of a conversation we often have in DTC 356 about how Wikipedia is becoming a more reliable source and that people in the net generation are more accepting of resources like Wikipedia than those in the baby boomer or even to a certain extent gen xers.  In my opinion, the more people that use Wikipedia, the more accurate it's going to be because of the wisdom of crowds.  It's like the ask the audience feature in who wants to be a millionaire.  Usually the crowd guesses right unless it's a really difficult question and even then, the answers are usually split over two of the possible options.  However, Shirky also brings up the point that there's no incentive to change a Wikipedia article.  Dr. Arola was talking about American Idol and said that somehow actually voting for a contestant is way more embarrassing than just watching the show every week.  For Wikipedia to be as effective as it can be, it needs to become more of a social norm for people to edit it.  Wikipedia has taken steps to make it seem more reliable to skeptical users by marking articles that aren't as credible as they would like and having citations.  In the future I hope that more and more people, especially in the academic world, edit Wikipedia as well as use it so that it can be taken to its full potential.  One day in the future, Wikipedia will probably be perceived at least as credibly as something like Britannica.

Shirky Ch 1-3

"[The story about the cell phone] demonstrates the ways in which the information we give off about ourselves, in photos and emails and myspace pages...has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public."

This quote reminded me of a lot of things that are going on in society today and how Facebook can be used both for good and for evil.  One of my friends lost her debit card and someone used Facebook to contact her to return it.  However, there have been numerous stories about how Facebook content has been used against people, especially photos.  I have so many issues with this because it sort of goes both ways, people shouldn't post stuff online expecting it to be completely private.  However, before the internet was so prevalent, a company would never go into your house and look through your photo albums to decide which person was a better hire.  Is the use of this kind of technology fair?

With the lost cell phone, convergence culture allowed a lost cell phone to become a much bigger issue eventually becoming national news through digg, something that would've never happened years and years ago.  However, convergence culture also allowed the phone to be located.  Is social networking working more for good or more for evil?  It's really hard to say especially since the cases where it has been used for evil are cited much more often than the cases where it has been used for good.  My friend's debit card wasn't much of a story, she told me about it and I just thought that it was cool and I wouldn't have thought of contacting someone that way, I probably would've just turned it in to the bank.  However, stories about people not being hired due to facebook content stick with me much more.  It is impossible to say which happens more often, but I feel like these days a lot of social media is being used differently than they were intended.  I'm sure facebook never intended to be used for hiring people-that's what LinkedIn is for.  However, one of the most important lessons we can learn is how giving the people the power (as the internet does) yields unpredictable results.

Tapscott Pt 3

On p. 294, Tapscott claims the Net Generation is the most social generation yet.  He talks about how many NetGeners prefer to talk via IM rather than in person, but that's making us more social and not less.  I disagree with this statement to a certain extent because my roommate prefers online communication to in person communication and it drives me nuts.  She never wants to go out with friends anymore, she'd rather be at home on facebook chat, skype, msn and her webcam.  I would define her behavior as antisocial rather than social.  The people she talks to online are not people that she has spent a lot of time with in person and few of them are actually good friends.  While online communication is helpful to keep in touch with people you don't live close to anymore, I believe that at times it does make people less social.  Talking on IM is easier than talking in person, just like texting is easier than calling someone on the phone.  However, I feel like talking to someone in person is a much more valuable experience and while IMing or texting can break the ice, I feel like in order to have true friendships you need to get out of your living room and experience new situations.  New experiences are fun, and the ability of people to become like my roommate and be able to talk to people instead of going out drives you to become introverted and scared to talk to people.  My roommate is only one example, but gamers are another.  They spend hours and hours on world of warcraft and they're talking to other people, but they're never leaving their house.  I think online communication is fine in small amounts but if too much time is spent online and not enough time is spent around people I think that online communication can become unhealthy and lead to antisocial behavior.

Tapscott Pt 2

In this section, Tapscott discusses how advertisers are scared that people in the net generation don't read ads in the traditional way.  We don't listen to the radio, we plug in our itrip, we don't watch tv, we dvr and watch hulu and we don't read the newspaper, we might go to a news website.  This was interesting to me because I've been hearing for a few years now that advertisers are worried about this problem, but it's starting to frustrate me.  If they are worried, they should be focused on advertising in a new way that will reach the net generation effectively.  All tv ads are really good for is making you remember the company name.  There are ways to do that visually, if you see Coke ads all over a website you will probably remember that it was there.  We've also discussed in some of my classes how the presence of an annoying ad actually deters you from the company rather than encourages you to buy from them.  You will remember the company, but in a negative light.  I think advertisers should be changing along with the times.  I'm excited because recently they have been trying to do this through online ads as well as social media.  While whether this is effective or not has yet to be proven, but I have to think it's equally effective as tv and radio ads and has the advantage that many online ads sit in the background rather than interrupt or annoy you.  I'm glad advertisers are finally focusing on the future rather than the past and are working to find ways to keep up or even get ahead of technology in order for ads to still be profitable.  Besides ads, there are few ways to find out about a company's existence.

Tapscott Pt. 1

I really like this book!  Our entire lives, my generation has been told that the internet and technology has made us worse-we don't really learn math anymore because we have calculators, we don't know how to spell because we have spell check and we can't find real information anymore because my generation looks to wikipedia instead of Britannica.  Tapscott tells us that this is ok, and in fact goes one step further, he talks about how my generation is changing the world.  He paints us in a positive light, saying we can change the world for better and not for worse.  The author also helps me understand a little better about why older people have the view they do, everyone's paradigms come from somewhere and while our generation cannot imagine a world without computers or the internet, our parents and grandparents had to learn to use the computer and the internet.  They were scared of it.

Tapscott really made me think when he talked about how his son went around to house saying that the refrigerator and the TV were technology as well.  It's true, but we don't think of them as technology because we've had them our whole lives.  To my generation, computers are not technology, they're established.  I can't remember the first time I used a computer.  The older generation can remember even Professor Arola remembers clearly-she told my class she was in college.  My parents majored in Computer Science before people had PCs in their house.  If you look around where you live, everything in your home is a technology.  When humanity began, we had nothing so we had to invent things to make the world better.  Computers and the internet happened to change the world in a big way, but so did phones, electricity, forks and everything else we use on a daily basis.

I also liked how he talked to Rahaf and she said part of the reason she changed careers was that she didn't like the hours she was working.  It's amazing to me how the internet allows people to break out of the 9 to 5 box that we've been raised to see.  That was one of the benefits of going into the field I chose when I changed my majors-I will most likely be working on projects that have a deadline but can often be done from home or not necessarily at regular office hours.

Overall, the first part of Grown Up Digital really made me think about my perspective and how lucky I am to have been born in this generation.

Baron 7-12

There were a few interesting points in the second half of Baron.  First was the idea that signatures have value, but why?  Really it's just someone's writing on paper.  Having their signature doesn't mean that you've met that person or that you know them.  He points out how a note from a friend has no value.  This makes me think about why we put value on the things we do.  A grocery list is trash, but a card from someone special might be a keepsake.  Email and texting doesn't really work like that.  Almost all texts or emails are trash.  Most people empty their texts frequently and wouldn't think of keeping one, no matter who it's from.  Online communication saves paper and also changes how we think of communication.  Written communication is becoming rarer and rarer, and may eventually disappear completely, but probably not for a long time.  However, I think it is likely that reference books like encyclopedias and dictionaries will disappear relatively quickly because it's much easier to use the types of searches that are available online to find the type of information you're usually looking for in a reference book.

Secondly, Baron says that people frequently ask if email, texting and IMing are destroying the english language, killing the art of conversation and rupturing social relationships.  I have mixed feelings about this, especially since presumably Baron is old enough that he did not have a computer growing up and possible not even in college.  Because of this, he spends an extensive amount of time discussing how computers are changing writing by making everyone an author and citing etiquette for email, IM and blogging.  For me, one of the big things about blogging is that there isn't really any etiquette for it.  Blogs are public, but the person writing them can write whatever they want.  I think that's the power of the online world as well as wikis like wikipedia and urban dictionary.  Lots of people can share their views for free.  If you don't agree with someone's view, you can write your own blog about it.  The internet opens up the world to so many different views and so much more information than books because it's so much faster and there's so much more room in it.

Baron 1, 3 and 5

One point that stood out to me from the reading was how clay is usually associated with art and not text.  This made me think about how much of art is derived from texts...cave art is called cave art and not cave communication or cave text.  Also, there were limited resources so clay was probably used for "paper" as well as pottery.  And pottery was a means of making dishes a long time ago, but now it is considered an art form and people buy pieces of pottery for hundreds of dollars with no intention of serving food or putting flowers in it.  Printmaking is considered an art form now too, but it's called printmaking which means that it's associated with print.  Printmaking is offered through the art department and not through the english department here at WSU.

Another quote from Baron that I found interesting was that "we don't notice our writing machines until something goes wrong" and how by fixing one problem we create another.  Before, if your pencil broke or the power went out, you were out of luck but you still had what you were working on.  A computer, especially a laptop, works in the dark and doesn't have a tip to break off.  However, if the computer crashes, you could lose everything you were working on.  It's true that in this day and age writing is natural to us, most of us in this class probably don't remember learning to read or write because we've been doing it for so long.  We might remember learning how to do math or learning geography though.  That makes writing different than many other subjects we learn in school.

Things Fall Apart

"Does the white man understand our custom about land?"
"How can he when he does not even speak our tongue?"

That quote stood out from me in the context of the class because it talks about what a cultural barrier there is between people of different cultures that even speak different languages.  I think that the difference between cultures is much more than just a language barrier, but in Things Fall Apart the language barrier is especially important because the Umuofians have an oral culture whereas the whites are literate, shown in the end as the commissioner plans to include Okonkwo's story in his book on how the Nigerian tribes were "pacified."  This particular scene also shows the difference in cultures-the white people did what seems like a completely ridiculous thing now by taking over these tribes and trying to erase their culture, but in their culture they had been taught that their way was best and all others must be pacified.  In the end, it's really not that different from how the Umuofia tribespeople thought, Okonkwo was willing to do anything to save his tribe and when it became clear that he could not do anything about it, he killed himself thus separating him from them forever.

I think that it is taught in everyone's culture that their culture is the best and that they should try to convert everyone else to it.  I think if you ask any American, most of them would be reluctant to ever move to a foreign country and give up everything they know and have been raised on.  The same can be said for most other cultures, oftentimes even when people were flooding to the United States it wasn't because they didn't love their culture, but because life got too difficult in their homeland for them to stay.  Once large groups of Italians and Irish and Chinese and other groups of people came to the United States, they lived in communities together and continued to practice the customs taught to them in their home country.  They then passed on these traditions to their children.  Culture is something nobody is ready to give up.  While I believe Things Fall Apart was meant to show the wrongdoings of the white people that came into Nigeria, I think it also speaks of how strongly people are attached to their culture.

Blog: second half of Ong

The point about criticisms of writing when writing first started being the same as some people's criticism of computers today was really interesting to me.  A lot of what was said hit home with me.  It is always interesting to look back in history and see what people thought at that time compared to today.  Today I feel that people would argue that the ability to read and write strengthens the mind rather than hurts it.  I feel like the same is true about computers.  People worried that if calculators were used, students wouldn't learn math the same way anymore.  That could be a downside, but think of how much further math has come since the invention of the calculator and how people can do things in seconds that would take hours by hand.

That said, there are benefits to oral and literate cultures.  It's true that a piece of writing or literature places a boundary between the person reading and the information.  In an oral culture, if someone is telling you a story about the history of your culture and you have a question, you can just ask them.  In writing, you have to look it up elsewhere or find someone educated enough to answer your question.  This reminds me of text messaging or emailing someone instead of calling them.  Texting may be faster or easier than calling someone, but oftentimes people get confused and things can be taken the wrong way.  I've seen many situations where someone is offended by a text message because there's no context.  If you had been able to tell them the same thing they could have heard your tone or maybe you could've explained yourself better and avoided confusion and hurting the other person's feelings.  However, texting is fast, easy and much less disruptive and distracting than making a call.  Oftentimes adults are upset by people texting in their presence, but I can often focus on a text message and what the other person is saying at the same time.  In verbal communication, all attention must be placed on the speaker and the listener.

Another example of short text changing communication is Twitter.  Twitter combines text and computers to spread messages fast.  I found out about Patrick Swayze's death as well as a tornado warning in South Central LA where my sister goes to school all within minutes of the announcement.  However, Twitter has limitations such as message length and some other downsides.

Overall, communication is changing all the time.  it's funny that a long time ago Plato thought writing might be the be all end all of the human mind when I think many would argue today that it actually helps and allows people to learn more.  Any new technology has its downsides and most people are reluctant to change, but oftentimes the upsides are worth the process of changing.

Ong Ch. 1-3

Chapters 1-3 of Ong brought up three very interesting concepts to me.  First, that writing makes words seem like things because they become a picture on the page.  I’ve discussed this in my classes before and I think it’s really interesting.  Words have no meaning until we as a society assign them one.  If we were to look at foreign languages like Hindi or Russian that use characters completely different from the English alphabet the characters would probably look like pictures to us.  Also, the writing is completely meaningless unless you speak the language.  Written language requires definition and interpretation.  Oral language does as well, but in an oral culture you would most likely be communicating with people speaking your own language.

The second interesting point was that thought requires continuity so in an oral culture you need redundancy.  In text, you can easily refer to something earlier in the text if you forget something or if you want to understand something better.  However, if communication is only spoken you have to repeat things to remember them.  Think of how many times you’ve asked someone to help you remember something.  I do that all the time if I’m worried about remembering something because the chances of two people remembering something are far greater than you alone.  This also relates to oral history where stories get repeated from generation to generation in order to preserve the history of a culture.

The third interesting point relates back to the first one.  Ong mentions that worlds are abstract and the word tree doesn’t represent a concrete thing.  Once again this shows how words need to be defined to be meaningful.  Language isn’t necessarily concrete and especially since words are more or less smaller visual representations of things, confusion can easily occur.  Without any explanation, there aren’t very many pieces of art that I would understand the concept of fully without having some explanation for the artist.  Words aren’t as open ended as art is, but they are still not concrete.  Every time you say tree you’re not talking about one thing, but many different things.