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.