Don’t Be Shy

I think Mossberger’s article on the skills divide, which analyzes the gap between those that have internet access and those that do not, is useful in putting our Northwestern educations into perspective.
We don’t often stop to think about how lucky we are to be here. We have so many resources (library computer labs, personal computers, friends’ computers), such immediate access (wireless internet all day every day on portable laptops), such a strong support network (rescons, techie friends, Eszter!) the necessary experience (we’ve all probably been on computers since we were in 3rd or 4th grade…remember that Paws typing program??) AND we are graced with an immense level of autonomy of use. It seems so normal to have all these things, because for the most part, we’ve always had them.
But what is life like for people that don’t have computers? What is it like for people that have to go to internet cafes in their own cities to access web information? What is it like not to have enough money to check your own e-mail?? Or to even have and manage an e-mail account? Or to not ever have learned how to use a keyboard or a mouse? It’s such a foreign idea, that I’m sure many of us here forget how lucky we are, not just because we have the money to be online whenever we want, but because we have the freedom to be online and say what we want! If we were living in China, we could be investigated or jailed for some of the political commentary we’ve been putting in our blogs. (Drezner’s Web of Influence). Crazy…
For us as NU students, it’s almost like asking what it would be like to live without electricity.
Next year, I’ll be teaching for the Teach For America program, where I won’t be able to take things like this for granted. My students probably won’t be checking e-mail regularly. I’m sure some of them will be lucky to have a in-home computer they’re allowed to use.

Greenstein’s article on spreading influential ideas quickly and effectively over the internet made me think immediately of the eVite service.
A couple years ago, when I got my first official Evite, I thought the idea was sort of stupid. I thought to myself, why would I need an online invitation for a party that I’ve already heard about? As more and more people sent them out, though, I started getting Evites for parties that I hadn’t already heard about. Also, invitees started posting funny responses on the actual eVite website. Each time an invitee did this, it served as a site based viral marketing scheme. I could see exactly who said yes to coming to the party, which subconsciously functioned as a personal affirmation that the Evite service was fun and easy to use.
When it came time to plan a friend’s 21st birthday, I realized there was really no quicker, simpler way to reach out to each and every person that she would want to be there. Not only was it incredibly easy to set up, it was efficient, effective and entertaining. As Greenstein remarks in his article, “the product depends on having the right combination of imagination and luck,” which the Evite service definitely did. Its popularity grew exponentially at a time when there were so many parties on campus (i.e. new student week and early fall) that the only really easy way to keep track of them all was electronically. It also was directed at an audience of college students that are more than happy to plan their schedules through email. (It would be interesting to know what other age groups use Evites as frequently.)

Another interesting part of the service is that it doesn’t seem commercially driven. I’m sure that behind the scenes there are mailing lists being sold or user fees about to be installed, but for now the site appears fairly pure. “User cooperation comes more readily when commercial motives are less explicit…Hence Evite explicitly downplays its commercial motives.”
I think that in a very subtle way, this has contributed to the sites popularity. If there was a charge for it, I doubt people would use it nearly as often. But, now that it has become an almost expected notifier of parties, established users probably wouldn’t mind seeing a few ads on the site or making a small payment to send out an invitation.

I see Sunstein’s point. I see that the ease of customization of the internet, may in some cases, lead people to follow narrower paths of information exposure. But I see this as what I would call a ’so what?’ problem. Yes, it might be true, and yes, it might limit certain people from getting a complete view of information, but so what? (I view the claim that Sim City is bad because it’s biased as sort of a so what problem, too?)
So people don’t get a full range of opinions injected into their minds by the internet. So what? People don’t get a full range of opinion exposure due to plenty of other things. TV, newspaper, the friends the choose, the stores they go to, the neighborhoods they drive through.
Suggesting that one of the internet’s downfalls is it’s liklihood to limit people’s opinions seems as legitimate to me as wondering whether cars are bad because it allows to surpass the crappy neighborhoods between your house and your school. Maybe before cars you had to walk through them and be exposed to a wider range of lifestyles, but that doesn’t mean cars are bad does it?
To be honest, I’m not even sure I agree that the internet doesn’t expose people to a wider range of views. Personally, I think I may be exposed to more views, because I have time to look at more sites than I would have time, money or patience to look at various newspapers. It seems to me that narrow people will choose to stay narrow, while curious open-minded people will choose to expose themselves to many different ideas, just as they would do with or without the internet. To me this problem isn’t one that belongs to the web or to the blogosphere. It’s one that belongs to the field of human psychology.

This class has made me question so many things. First of all, it’s made me question my general awareness of world happenings. It’s made me question my education. It’s made me question my anonymity as a writer. It’s made me question what my attitude toward the internet would be if I had never taken this class. As I mentioned in previous posts, I’m completely addicted to eBay. I try to imagine what my shopping life (I know that sounds terribly shallow, but I’m not just talking clothes, shoes and whatever else is stereotypically associated with female shopping. I’m talking books, DVDs, photo equipment, iPod accessories, etc.) would be like without eBay. It terrifies me. I try to imagine what my general awareness would be like if I knew nothing about blogs. That terrifies me equally. Blogs are getting so huge, so fast, that I wonder how the hell I considered myself an educated college student before I took this class. I seriously knew nothing about them, and I knew nothing about how much influence they have over politics, over mass communication, over entertainment.
I even took a class last spring called Theories of Mass Communication, and (not to point fingers at anyone’s curriculum) we didn’t even talk about blogs! Maybe I am dramatizing things a bit, but I just feel like a communication medium that grows from 50 users to 2.4 million users in a matter of 5 years is going to cause amaxingly huge gigantic changes. “The top five political blogs together attract over half a million visitors per day” !!! And to top it all off, people are blogging without earning any money! When was the last time 2.4 million capitalists participated in an activity that earned them nothing?!?! It earns nothing, it produces no tangible or consumable goods, and it costs us time and energy. It adds a new element to communication, psychology, philosophy, technology, politics, economics, the list goes on…
I know whoever reads this will think I am crazy, but the only comparable activity I can think of is going to church. That’s big. That’s really really big, and I’m embarassed that I’m just now realizing it.

Call me paranoid, but I personally believe the government has it’s hands in far more places than any of us know about. I think subsidy and federal regulation on usage are two of the obvious ways they control the internet, but it seems those are just the tip of the iceburg. When Jason Gallo came to speak, we talked about the Homeland Security Act and its effects on our every day lives. Apparently, it has given the government the right to listen in on phone coversations, video tape people in public places without them knowing it, and access the personal information of citizens all over the country. If they have this power over land lines and cell phones, then they undoubtedly have it over the internet as well. I would guess there are hundreds of government employees, working specifically to monitor material on the web. After problems like the Washingtonienne incident, as well as the one that sent bush.gov searchers to a democratic website, I doubt government officials are willing to withstand much more embarassment. I would put money on the fact that there will be a landmark Supreme Court case dealing with this in the near future (4…5 years?).
I’m sure government officials are already monitoring and censoring material on the web, so my guess is a public court case will merely make what they are already doing, official.
“A central feature of the Internet is the power it gives individual users in free-for-all communication. Can it maintain this vital attribute as its use spreads to an increasing portion
of the U.S. population and beyond?” My reaction to this question makes me realize how cynical I really am! But to answer this question I would say the internet is probably already losing this quality. I think we are living in an ‘internet golden age’ that is too fantastic to be permanent. I think the same thing about Facebook and eBay. I think, as the article suggests, we are merely “waiting for a net Titanic”. The day someone sells Al Q’aida manuscripts in an online auction, releases highly classified information on a well-known blog, or stalks a college age student on Facebook, the rules will change…just like what happened with anything from free music downloading. Not to be melodramatic, but it seems that lawyers get their hands on pretty much everything in America. I doubt the internet will be any different.

The beginning of this article was very strange to me. The fact that it seemed so strange, taught made me realize something about myself…
I’m not really all that into computers and the only computer games I’ve played are Tetris (wayyy back in the day) and Minesweeper. I’m not surrounded by very many people who play video games, either. So, sometimes I forget that there are huge groups of people who play games either on their own computers or in cyberspace. To me, this idea is a distant, unfamiliar concept that my brain relates to pieces of the Matrix and my freshman year rescon. So, the story about Martha and Dank, was interesting but foreign. I guess that was sort of the point as Lessig says, “proof…will come in a string of stories, which aim to introduce and disorient….Out of confusion, something useful will emerge.”
After the Martha and Dank story, I was definitely a bit confused, much in the same way I’m confused when I’m IMing someone I just met. I see their words and understand the sentences, but because I don’t fully understand their sense of humor yet, it’s difficult to read between the lines. But Lessig was right, from this confusion came an appreciation for the fact that I know very little about cyberspace. I have little knowledge of where it’s been, where it’s going, or what is going to happen in it next. I think it is one of those things that I enjoy not worrying about. I love using AIM and e-mail, blogs and eBay, but I don’t much enjoy pondering how it’s all powered or ‘where it all IS”. I also don’t like thinking of the space from which it functions as a playground. I would rather think about cyberspace (if I’m thinking about it at all) as an extension of reality. It is an aid that allows us to streamline the world that IS real. Maybe after playing Sim City or another fantasty cyberspace type game, I’d change my mind. For now, though, I like reality. I don’t think I’d much enjoy leaving it to play with poisonous flowers or imaginary cities.
This makes me wonder how many people there are here at NU that feel the opposite, i.e. ones who would much rather spend time in cyberspace than time in the real world…

Also, as a legal studies major I highly enjoyed the Judge Posner reference : )

“In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome.”
“We know that power law distributions tend to arise in social systems where many people express their preferences among many options.”

It seems that Shirky’s article points to a widespread truth that applies both to the internet and to regular everyday life: The early bird sets the norm (or gets the proverbial worm, whichever you like). People who do things first, and who do them satifactorily, are given the first bit of attention for their action. Then as the pool of actors increases, an imbalance develops which shows that attention is more likely to be given to early actors.
This rule applies to so many areas related to our class. The first and most obvious example is with our blogs. I’m sure some of them were read more frequently than others. I think it would be fascinating to know whether the power laws in this article governed this imbalance. What I mean is, were the first few people to blog, or the first few people to receive comments, steadily receiving more attention for their blogs than those who did not have early commentors?
I am trying to think back to the comments I left on blogs, and I admit that when I saw comments left by other students, I was slightly more interested in the original post. Something was subconsciously triggered that suggested I would find a blog more interesting if someone before me had also found it interesting.
Obviously, this is not to say that particular blog was the best, just the most attention catching. I think that for a blog to follow this pattern it must achieve some level of quality. If it is mind numbingly boring, I don’t care who already commented. I’ll surpass it. It’s hard to say where that quality threshold lies, but I think it’s safe to say it is far lower than the level we would use to judge the ‘best blog’.
This power law is obvious in so many other situations. On eBay, we’re much more likely to buy from someone who has lots of feedback. In classes, we’re much more likely to contribute in class on subjects that students before us have already talked about. This is why some people buy what celebrities buy, or read whatever book is currently on the best seller list. It’s why, for what seemed to be no reason at all, mothers all over America went temporarily crazy for beanie babies and Tickle Me Elmo dolls. I bet in retrospect, owners of these astronomically priced toys wonder why they threw their money away on cheaply made stuffed animals. It sounds like they were just succumbing to commercial power laws (aka searching for their own opinion by referencing others’).
To get back to the point about power laws and our blogs, I think it would have been really interesting if they had had hit counters on them. I think that could have seriously altered how much each blog was read. I’m guessing it would have drastically polarized the number of hits the most and least read blogs were looked at. I wonder if it would have aligned with the 80/20 rule? hmm…

“Can people find community online in the Internet? Can relationships between people who never see, hear or smell each other be supportive and intimate?”
I think the answer to this question, posed by the Wellman & Gulia article is yes, definitely!
“Critics worry (mostly in print, of course) that life on the net can never be meaningful or complete because it will lead people away from the full range of in person contact.”

In response to these questions I want to analyze my own usage of eBay. (which I most definitely consider an online community.)

I started using eBay as a freshman in college. I started with things like North Face gloves closing at 12.99 and posters going to well over 50% off retail. I gradually perfected both my buying and selling habits, to the point where I now search for everything online before going to the store. I buy anything from snow shoes, to digital cameras, to mascara to the perfume my Aunt wants for Christmas. To be completely honest, I am addicted. I am exactly the type of person that cyber critics refer to when they talk about those who are “[led] away from the full range of in person contact.”
It’s true that I use eBay to avoid the mall. It’s true that because I use it, I rarely have to deal with salespeople, or waiting in lines, or mall traffic. It’s also true that sometimes I get so caught up in it that I sit on eBay for hours on end, then come out of my room feeling a little bit like I’ve been hibernating. I won’t deny these things. However, I will argue that this dedication or obsession or whatever it should be called, does make me feel like I’m part of a community, because the interaction that happens within it, is extremely more personal than people imagine. Also, I argue that the interactions I’m missing out on are not necessarily better than the interactions I’m gaining.

At the mall, people don’t get personal, because they are taught by their employers to wear a pleasing smile and be sickeningly sweet. They won’t volunteer information about their families, their financial status, or their hometown. Instead the information salespeople give you is what they look like (i.e. age, attractivness, race) and what they’re wearing. Overall, in person interaction at the mall is very impersonal and often extremely superficial.
On eBay, things are different. Anonymity works in opposing yet complementary ways (makes identity anonymous, but allows people to give out more personal information). I think the lack of face to face interaction is specifically what eliminates much of the insincerity and superficiality you get with in person sales.
On eBay people use user names, rather than their personal names. When you complete transactions, you don’t ever them or hear their voice. However, you do know where they are from (the ships from feature tells you that much), you know how many transactions they’ve completed (i.e. whether or not they are a personal seller or a commercial seller), you know how technologically savvy they are (by the complexity of their website) and often you even know personal things like why they’re selling the item (examples I’ve come across: my daughter got these gloves from her grandmother for Christmas, but they never did fit her, I bought this dress last minute for a wedding but I am too conservative to wear it out anywhere, I’m cleaning out my closet to prepare for a move to Japan, etc.). The anonymity of the system, what some would call impersonality, is what allows people to reveal information like this, just like with our class blogs. (If our blogs had our names on them, I don’t think we’d say half the stuff we do.)
After an item closes, you get even more personal information from a person. You learn about their punctuality (how quickly they send the invoice), their patience (how long they give you to pay for it), their writing style (the tone of the e-mails they send you saying thanks for buying the item), and their personality (how nicely they deal with making returns, if necessary). But most of all you learn that you share a common interest: matching supply with demand in the most efficient and mutually profitable way possible.

Another one of Wellman & Gulia’s questions that I found really interesting was “Why do net participants help those they hardly know?” In the case of buying and selling goods on eBay I think the answer is obvious.
Selling online is purely voluntary and self-motivated. You are your own boss when you sell on eBay, thus you are wholly responsible for your sales actions. When someone works at the mall, they don’t want to help customers, because the help they get is not directly related to their personal paycheck. On eBay, because everyone is in charge of their own commercial success, each individual seller knows that his or her niceness, understanding, and reliability is going to affect both their published reputation and their future sale prices.
Wellman & Gulia note that members’ attachment to a given organization affects how willing they are to offer help to strangers. Personally, I love eBay. I love knowing that people are happy with things that I’ve sold them, and I actually like going out of my way to make sure both I and the person I sell to are happy.
I could really talk about this for days…but I won’t. The main point I want to get across are that online communities, although they may can away from person to person interaction sometimes, the interactions they do provide may be of less superficial more efficient quality.

“Unless it’s entertaining, the educational value is irrelevant.” This quote is taken from Starr’s article on the Seduction of Sim.
I think the point is very powerful and relates to many of the different thoughts I have on games like Sim City. Most importantly, I think it says a great deal about our desires for and requirements on the content we absorb as stimuli. We like to be excited about the things we let into our brains. We like to be entertained. By nature, we are entertained by reflections of ourselves. The most simplistic applicable analogy is gazing in the mirror. We enjoy it or are curious about it because we are naturally interested in who we are, and it is innately human to desire studying oneself. When I say oneself I mean it on a macro level, not just that people want to know their own individual personality, but also the greater group of people that make up their community or their society. Because of this fact, people are interested in things like Sim City. It provides insight on the player, because he or she is part of a community that somehow relates to or models the material in the game. Thus, playing it is a form of macro level self-study which serves to entertain our natural need for introspection.
The entertainment value of Sim City was not really questioned in Starr’s article, but the effects of it were. A couple that piqued my interest were the debates on how real the program is, how real it should be, and (this ties directly in to Sandvig’s article on inner-city kids’ exposure to online information) the relationship between the realness and the educational value games like Sim City have.

I think people are attracted to Sim City in ways similar to those that attract us to reality TV. We know it isn’t really real because the people in it are aware that they’re on TV.
They’re aware that cameras are in their faces. They know the show will be changed around and edited. That changes our view of friendship, love, adventure and social interaction in general, based on a model. That model is the one the editors choose to create when they decide where to put the jokes, which character to subtly incriminate for the most recent social wrongdoing, which sexual innuendos they choose to display and which they choose to hide. Their model is based on entertainment value, as I’m guessing the Sim City model is.
If reality TV was really real, it would not be nearly as exciting. We would be watching people who aren’t necessarily intelligent or witty or attractive doing things that we don’t think are that much fun to watch, like reading a book, or sleeping, mopping, chewing gum and staring at the wall, anything less active.
Interviews with people on reality TV shows always bring up the same thing. The characters say “It wasn’t really how it looked. They only showed the exciting parts, all the drama.” We see the fights and the crying sessions and the drama, but we miss the down time that makes up our real day to day lives.

So, is Sim City the same way? I’ve never played it, but after reading this article, I would love to. I’m wondering if it shares the same “flaw” as reality TV does: marketing itself as real, when in fact it really is based on a “hidden curriculum” that makes it unreal and specific to one organizations wants, biases, opinions. Are the events in the game overly dramatized? Are they prioritizing their want to mock reality or their want to entertain the user? Basically, the concern that Starr brings up, is that the program oversimplifies, that is not really real. An inherent question also raised is, if it’s not what we call really real, is it flawed?
I think it’s great that people are getting into this game and wanting to study themselves and their communities. It is making people more aware of human emotion, social interaction, urban planning, and a bunch of other tangential things. I am all about the marketplace of ideas, sharing the maximum number of points of view in order to make the most educated decision on your own opinion. So, I love that this game and others like it spread awareness. I love that, whether or not it is called a real or unbiased view, it’s better than no view at all. It’s getting the ball rolling for people to think about issues that without something original and entertaining and maybe slightly controversial, nobody would be paying attention to.

Thus, I think Sim City is fantastic, in spite of it’s supposed surrealness. I think we have to get over the idea that anything can be truly unbiased. Every word out of every mouth in every corner of the world, is biased somehow.
So, all we can do is accept this fact, stop worrying about cleansing things to the point of perfect realness, because after all, whether or not we as a society label it as ‘real’ it is still real in the sense that it is not imaginary. It is real because it has been contracted by real biases and real people and real technology. Maybe it doesn’t perfectly represent every piece of every day in our society, but honestly, isn’t simulating that impossible anyhow? Religion is a very tangential issue here, but I still can’t help asking, where does anyone get the idea that if could be possible? Our world and our lives are full of such intricate interdependencies that creating a perfect mock of it would be like trying to create a perfect mock of the human brain. People can try. People are trying and they will keep trying, but it will never happen. In my opinion, we might as a society, fool ourselves into thinking it’s possible, because in terms of science and discovery we like to think ‘anything is possible’. I like to think anything is possible, but I still think it’s slightly ridiculous to presume anything as complex as the human mind could be duplicated. To magnify that thought, I find it even more absurd that people presume a city, full of hundreds of thousands of human minds and interdependent thoughts/actions could be perfectly simulated.
So after all that banter, I guess my point is that Sim City is great. It may present problems in terms of bias or a hidden curriculum, but if we look at things realistically, nothing will ever qualify as wholly unbiased. I think Sim City is biased, just as I think everything ever written or programmed or verbalized by man is biased. So, I say people stop worrying about the ‘realness’ of it, take it for what it’s worth, and continue exposing themselves to as many new ideas, biases, opinions as possible! This means continuing to use it as an educational tool, one that opens people’s minds to new things.
This ties in closely with a comparison that Sandvig’s article inspired. The article is concerned with the internet access inner-city students have. The article is based on many assumptions. Two central assumptions are 1. Internet access is beneficial 2. It is beneficial because it allows for exposure to more ideas.
Nowadays I think those on the privileged side of the digital divide think of those without the internet as deprived, isolated, the “information poor” (Graham and Marvin). If we look at the internet as an information source, an interesting point comes up that relates directly back to all the aforementioned issues with Sim City.
The internet broadcasts ideas in every conceptual shape and size. It includes access to professional and personal sites, accurate and inaccurate sites, democratic and republican, American and European (and obviously many others). Thus, by nature, the internet IS BIASED. Every website is biased. Every blog is biased. Every everything is biased. So, why are we not concerned for our kids being biased by it the way we are concerned about our kids being internalizing the biases of Sim City. Is the internet not just a more informal mock of real life than Sim City? Granted, it is not interactive and does not present itself as a direct reflection or model of reality, but when it comes down to it, that’s exactly what it is. It’s a reflection of reality that, as we have learned from past articles in this class, is influenced and molded by social and financial powers that are not equal, fair or real (in the sense that they perfectly reflect reality). So, really, I’m curious why it seems that we as a society would question the educational value of something like Sim City yet immediately assume that the internet (which is equally if not more biased) is an unquestionable educational necessity?

This is a semi-scary New York Magazine article about interviewers checking up on us through Facebook.