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.