Ghost Dad

I’m really glad I read Paul Starr’s article on SimCity and similar “real” simulators entitled “Seductions of Sim.” I had never thought about the political implications of a game like SimCity. By simply deciding how townspeople will react to raised taxes, mixed-use development spaces, pollution, etc., the creators of SimCity are making political decisions. And many of the players of SimCity are young children who have not yet been introduced to the world of politics, so this is their first experience with raising taxes and many other aspects of social policy. So many children may be led to believe this is the way the world has to work. It’s kind of a chilling thought that SimCity can set a political agenda for children.

But, of course, SimCity does have to make decisions of how townspeople will communicate so that gameplay is most fun. If every aspect of SimCity did have so many variables that you never knew what was going to happen when you raised taxes, no one would play SimCity. That’s a fact.

But it’s good to know that SimCity really does lie outside the boundaries of a real universe. Especially when using historical instances in these games–like Charleston or Flint–it’s most important to know that SimCity is based on an imperfect model.

Even after learning about all this–and having my attention drawn for the first time to the politics of a Sim game–I’m glad such games are in existence because, as Starr says, SimCity “has probably introduced more people to urban planning than any book ever has.” And that’s amazing when you think about it.

I chose to turn off all forms of communication this Friday afternoon from 4:20pm to 4:26pm. I shut my computer, my record player, the door and the window. I threw my cell phone into the living room and put in earplugs and laid in the corner of my room on a bunch of blankets (I don’t have a mattress in my room right now… long story involving tacos).

The earplugs helped immensely because I couldn’t hear anything besides my own insides. It also helped to hear if I closed my eyes (which I did for the extent of the exercise). During my six minutes of loss of communication, I tried to communicate with my blood, so to speak. I strained to really hear it moving throughout my head and being pumped. For about a twenty-second period (or so I estimate) I could actually feel a slight tickling all over my skull which I assume to be my blood flowing. The noise inside my ears started to resemble a tinny rushing sound.

Then it stopped as my brain all of a sudden decided to concentrate on what it would be like to float at that instant. I imagined my room inside my mind—my room is only slightly larger than two king-sized mattresses side by side—and first imagined the colors floating off everything in my room. The colors separated from the objects they were attached to and they started floating up with the sound of a slowed-down slide whistle (there was no more blood noises at this point although my heartbeat still thudded inside my head).

All of a sudden my bookshelf, record player, computer, desk, laundry basket and bass amp were all floating in the air along with me. Then my alarm went off. The exercise was over.

I have to admit, while this exercise was cool, and it was really fun to have these things happen inside my head that are so much more interesting than reading a music web site discussion board, it wasn’t really that “eye-opening” to me because I do stuff like that all the time. I tend to wake up and lay in bed for ten minutes just pretending things or trying to really hear or feel things. And I do that at various points of my day too. I’ll turn off my cell phone for ten minutes just to sit down and look at my hand on a bench sometimes. I dunno, I hope that doesn’t make me too weird. But this was a fun exercise in using imagination. I found myself very easily able to disconnect myself from my problems and the responsibilities I have even though during my normal day it feels like these problems will never go away. Well, the hardest responsibility to “let go” during the exercise was my responsibility of writing this post. But once my blood started making noise, everything melted away.

I wish people did stuff like this more often because I really think it’s easier to laugh and smile when you know you how amazing your brain can be. I really believe imagination is the most powerful tool in the universe, and this is a great exercise at re-discovering and playing with imagination.

I shamefully but not shamefully admit that the first thing I did after I turned my alarm clock off was turn on my record player and listen to Ariel Pink. So I did miss my record player during those six minutes.

I have to admit, I think this class is making me a cyber-pessimist. For example, Pippa Norris (the cyber-optimist who LOVES the Internet so much she thinks it can save nations from illiteracy single-handedly) has done it again in her chapter about “Virtual Parties.” In it she describes how political party web sites will change the political landscape by making it like now, only better: “digital technologies can only be expected to supplement rather than replace these functions [of political parties, including coordination and organization of the electoral body] rather than replace these functions.” I think she’s kind of nuts. The Internet is taking over these functions. Many of the most popular political action movements are based almost exclusively through the Internet [the success of moveon.org, for instance].

What she’s missing is what Professor Philip Howard details so clearly in his article entitled, “Digitalizing the Social Contract.” He notes that the citizen is becoming a “thin citizen,” a citizen he defines as someone who “responds quickly to political urges, but does not spend significant amounts of time contemplating politics.” They need no political memory because they can find one on the Internet. It sounds very much like a move toward market-based focus groups to me, something Norris notes in her article as what cyber-pessismists call “corporate wallpaper.” But I think this idea is important because now that we’re getting all our information from the Internet and nobody is sharing similar experiences in experiencing politics, we’re becoming diffused as a nation in our political beliefs. The more people “talk” about politics, the less we’re talking about it with each other.

Howard sometimes smells like a cyber-optimist himself, writing that “participants can hide cues about race, gender and other forms of social inequality that are known to affect face-to-face communication” and “political elites have less control of spin and impact because the medium relies on citizenry for message turnover.” But I think he’s wrong there too because now we just have different people with control over the spin. Howard even admits this later in his article. He says the people who control these cyber politics are “technocrats, whose choices about technology design affect the distribution of political power, or nontraditional actors, who—equipped with political hypermedia—exercise the same marketing capacity as traditional political actors.” So if they have the power, don’t they create the spin? And if, as Howard says, “an effective political campaign is about defining and acknowledging the stakeholders, framing arguments, and creating icons, and all three of these kinds of political objects are much easier to manage using the new communications tools developed over the last decade,” then isn’t the “thin citizen” more susceptible to a flimsy candidate? Aren’t we more susceptible, through “hypermedia campaigns,” to a media bumrush of sorts?

I think these cyber-pessimist questions are necessary, and I feel like these scholars aren’t asking enough of them. They’re too happy political parties have web sites. But at least Howard shows that the battlefield is different on the Internet now. Except he sees the battlefield as changed too, while I just see different people with the missiles.

We’ve spent a lot of time lately–all quarter, actually–talking about how media replaces media. For example, “The Long Tail” is showing how new media, such as digital files, are now sharing a market with actual physical CD products in the music world. But what about new physical products?

The Sun, an Ohio rock band signed to major-label Warner Bros. records, have just released the world’s first DVD-only album. It is not a CD. It will not play in your car; it will not play in your stereo; it will play in your computer. They’ve made music videos for each song and you can rip the .WAV files off the DVD-ROM onto your computer for burning to play in your car… but an audio disc this is not. The press, one can imagine, has been skepitcal and lukewarm.

It did get them on the cover of CMJ Magazine–”Revolution Time: The Sun” was the cover line–but really the DVD packaging isn’t revolutionary. Wire, Super Furry Animals and other artists have released DVD releases of albums (with music videos for each song), but the difference is that these artists all released their albums also in audio CD format.

The Sun figured this would be too costly and decided instead to simply leak the album onto peer-to-peer networks five months in advance of release. If this translates into widespread success–so far it has not–we may see more of this in the future. Personally though, I don’t see this to be the future of music product. The digital world is definitely the future. Physical product be damned to the sun.

Danah Michele Boyd’s article–”Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networking”–perfectly encapsulates the problems of Friendster as a friendship network. This idea, I feel, can also be extrapolated to show the dichotomy between the Internet and the real world. Boyd brought up the good point that in the Friendster universe trust is not really an issue. You don’t need to trust someone to be their friend in the Friendster universe (unlike, I would very much argue, in the real world). This correlates with almost every other part of the Internet. Chat rooms, AIM, blogs, discussion boards… the trust is much less than necessary for a face-to-face relationship.

Another interesting argument–another one that could be extrapolating into the real world again–is that the Friendster universe is a static universe. You’ll always stay friends with someone… why actively de-friend someone?? We’ve talked about the Internet being a static place–the Wayback Machine, anyone?–in so many ways. But the world is not. The dichotomy of the Internet, once again shown through Friendster.

The Anderson article also looks at the dichotomy between the Internet and our physical world. And it’s interesting that on Friendster, the deterioration of the physical universe hurts the system. But in the entertainment world–amazon.com–the lack of a physical space is what expands the universe. The expanded universe is because there is no local audience. But on Friendster, a local audience is needed. A common geographic location is important for friends, but entertainment needs no common location. There’s nothing “common” about liking something, but there is something “common” about liking someone.

My computer, on Wednesday, stopped working. I turn it on and it says there is no operating system in it. I don’t know what that means, but it definitely means the computer isn’t operating. And because of my busy schedule, I haven’t been able to call Dell to get it fixed yet. And now I’m really learning why I like my computer to be working.

I never really realized it, but since the advent of iTunes, I’ve put all my music I own on my computer. I don’t even have my CDs at school with me anymore. So with my computer down, I literally have no music (except for my record player). This would be tragic anyway, but it’s extra-tragic because on Tuesday night I got the new Lightning Bolt album… and now I can’t listen to it. So my computer was my main interface for my main hobby: music.

Also, the etiquette of using your roommates computer is really weird. People are protective of their computers. For instance, I’m using my best friend’s computer to type this, and he’s kind of nervous about it. I know that. I think it’s because people are personalizing their computer usage–as we’ve learned in articles, especially from the Sunstein one–to such a degree that just by logging onto his computer I’m doing something akin to going through his closet. His homepage. His login passwords that are saved on all of his favorite websites. The programs that open automatically when you use his computer. It’s all his. And it’s all personal.

It’s weird to think that this tool, the computer, is now becoming so individualized that you can really read a lot about a person just by using their own laptop. But that’s the future, I guess. And hopefully, in the future, my computer won’t blow up from the inside again.

This article, entitled, “Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines Matter,” illustrates that the web is an information medium entirely capable of being overrun by commercial interests. Other articles in this course have hinted at this idea, but this article is the first to focus the argument on a very specific part on the web: the search engine.

I agree with Nissenbaum and Introna that there are problems with Yahoo! saying “they list what users want” and that “if users were not finding relevant information they would cease using Yahoo!” The main problem with that, detailed in the article, is that people do not understand how search engines function. There is no real parallel in our society for what a search engine does and how it does it (library catalogs, the author’s note, doesn’t work at all like a search engine).

I would argue that search engines are a media in the sense that they can be overrun by commercial principles in the same way other media has become overrun. I don’t think the argument that the Internet is “post-modern” and thus able to remain democratic is plausible. But I do believe the Internet is totally new in many ways, especially in the sense of technology. This article proves that there really was nothing like the search engine in our world before the Internet, and we’re using “old world” parallels to understand it. With this type of thinking, we’ll never be able to understand that Yahoo! is working against public interests and more for corporate interests because we don’t have the tools to understand it. We’re going to keep using Yahoo! because it works in the limited way we think a search engine (like a library catalog) should work. But with more information would come more power, and possibly even the hope of forcing these search engines to work for the public good.

I found Pippa Norris’s account of Internet usage across the globe—“Wired World”—a fairly nauseating piece of academic work. I hate to put it that bluntly, but I found her findings uninspiring and uneventful. It’s common sense that less developed countries are going to have less Internet usage. I think we can count that as a “given.” And her approach of the promise of Internet usage I found implausible.

The article is most intriguing when it examines how countries differ in their use of other technologies and the Internet. Norris found that Slovenia and South Africa both way more Internet usage than any other information technology and that they’re focusing intently on the Internet. Norris is quite optimistic about this fact. I would argue Slovenia and South Africa are not bettering themselves that much if they’re pouring money into Internet technologies but do not use other information technologies such as radio and newspaper. The information presented in this class—and even in Norris’s own article!—support the idea that the Internet is not a revolutionary form of information technology. It’s a new one, but it also works under the same guiding principles as other technologies. Our own professor’s article on the Internet’s relationship to radio makes that clear.

But Norris here celebrates the fact that South Africa and Slovenia have so much Internet technology. But this seems like a false hope. If these countries are not using the information technologies they already have to their best capabilities, how are we supposed to believe the Internet is going to suddenly change this pattern? I guess I’m an Internet pessimist then, but unless Internet access is coupled with higher levels of education or a growing job market (like the situation is in Bangalore), then Internet access is just another unread newspaper.

“Democracy and Filtering,” the article by Cass R. Sunstein, raises some interesting issues about the inherent function of democracy. One quote in her article really struck me: “unanticipated encounters, involving topics and points of view we have not sought out and perhaps find irritating, are central to democracy and even to freedom itself.”

Sunstein brings up a valid point: democracy is not convenient. And the Internet is being streamlined toward convenience. In the grand scheme of things, a “public sphere” where ideas and opinions are exchanged is not as convenient as a homogeneous group. But these things make a culture wonderful and inclusive. It’s what keeps us human. Inconvenience makes us human, and the streamlining of Internet technology—coupled with the growing amount of time people spend on the web—could close that window of inconvenience that keeps us thinking with an open-mind.

In Professor Hargittai’s 2000 article, “Radio’s Lesson for the Internet,” I was struck by one of the main contrasts between the radio and the Internet. She writes: “the radio today is mainly a broadcast medium, whereas the Internet encompasses the functions of all existing media.” Whoa. That’s a pretty heavy statement, one I had never really thought of before. To think that the Internet actually could serve the purpose of all existing media is a pretty scary and mind-blowing idea.

But besides from that, I found the most interesting part of the article the factoid about both mediums beginning as one-to-one communication networks. It’s bizarre to think that the “traditional” radio network people knew in the 1910s (as a personal communications system) is totally opposite our view of the radio today. Could the Internet have the same fate? Could regulation change the face of the Internet as we know it? Stay tuned, I guess.