Jesus

Paul Starr got it right by naming his article ‘The Seductions of Sim.’ The game is a dream for any Mayor want-to-be, or even for a kid looking for a fun way to waste some time. Starr refers to SimCity as step toward “edutainment” – or the long talked about application of computers and technology in the world of education. Starr writes that SimCity is educational: it exposes users to consequences of important decisions; it makes information gathering an important part of creating and executing city plans; it also makes children creative leaders as they attempt to build a city from a plot of land. These are some of the lessons that are difficult (if not impossible) to teach in a textbook or in a classroom. Plus, children want to play this game because, now get ready for the shock, they find it fun. Learning is fun for children when it is interactive and not boring.
Like Starr, I am not promoting Sim City and other simulation games as the key to education – these simulations do have their flaws. Wright, the creator of SimCity, fashioned the game on very basic principles. Wright did not have an extensive background in urban planning when he created SimCity – which is one reason that the simulation is a very simplistic model. Another reason, and most likely the more relevant of the two, is that simulation games in general are imperfect models. They operate on assumptions: what “should” happen in a given scenario. The reality of, well, reality is the lack of any absolute knowledge of any outcome, even if a particular result can be guessed with some accuracy.
The draw of simulation games like SimCity is not one stemming from the pursuit of education. They are played because they serve as an extremely powerful mode of communication. Paul Starr credits the allure of simulation games to their increasing complexity and resulting faster pace of play. SimCity offers virtually unlimited possibilities of choices and therefore virtually unlimited possibilities of how a city develops and thrives. This open-endedness along with other intricacy of the game attracts players and keeps them playing.
Wright does not seem to take his own creation as viable means to educate children. He says his decisions are based on “Game play,” or whichever possibility is more fun. When I was younger I loved to play SimCity at my cousins’ house. We would fight over who got to use the computer, opting to spend all day seated at a computer during the middle of summer, grinding our little fingers into the grey keyboard and calculating the effects of a 7% tax increase on commercial retailers instead of playing basketball or swimming at the pool. Starr is correct in his explanation of the games appeal, but I do not agree with SimCity as a game rich with educational opportunities. Reflecting now on those times with Starr’s article fresh in my mind, I believe the game promoted more greed than good, although it did not take long to figure out that giving your Sims what they wanted would eventually put more money in your virtual pockets. I found ways to manipulate the game to get money – raising takes to an ungodly 20% for 2 months or speeding up the time clock on the game – so I could “beat” my cousin and his city. I did not learn from SimCity in a conventional way. All I learned was that personal gain was easy when exploiting fake people and eating 2 of every 3 meals at a computer leaded to all sorts of missed social interactions. Learn from family, learn from teachers and classmates, learn from friends and yourself – but do not rely on a simulation game to provide any education worth merit.

“What great fortune for those in powers that people do not think” –A. Hitler

“Thinking is the hardest thing you can do – and that’s why so few engage in it” –H. Ford

Being left alone with your own thoughts is a unique assignment for a class concerned with internet and society. I often think and write my thoughts in a journal on a variety of topics, spanning anything and everything from why I think some people will never be happy to wondering if the world recorded for peacock juggling will ever be broken. So when this assignment was given, I figured that it would just be like journaling — but me just wondering and not so much me writing.
But, after the email specifying how we should come about complete silence in attempt to clear our minds, I found it much more difficult than I anticipated. After setting my alarm clock to beep after 5 minutes, I sat down at the foot of my bed with my back leaning slightly against it and took a deep breath.
What followed was not a relaxing, meditative few minutes that calmed my mind, nor was it a small amount of time that I tried count as procrastination from working on my term paper. I realized, as did the leaders with which I quoted at the beginning of this blog, discovered in their respective endeavors: people really have no idea what the hell they are thinking. Our minds are consistently lost somewhere in moments of the past or between anticipations of the future. It took most of the five minutes, even though I was trying to keep my mind clear and focused on my breathing, to realize I have almost no concept of ‘now.’ This is not a new philosophical thought – many great writers, most notable Henry David Thoreau as well as Ralph waldo Emerson preached of ‘now’ as an enlightening yet complicated way to understanding the world and how people are in relation to it.
Blocking out society in all forms just feels, for lack of a more appropriate word, weird. It was like trying to write your own name with your non-dominant hand: we become so accustomed to preoccupying our minds with societal traffic that, when a simple task comes along that is slightly altered from a normal action, we have no idea how to react.
Communication, media outlets, games, friends, the internet – it seems that everything we have are ways for our brain to forget about now and focus on much more simple tasks: gossiping with a friend, looking up football scores on the internet, watching The OC. To put it simply, thinking about nothing is difficult.
This was an exercise worth the attempt to develop into habit. People who learn to meditate talk about the wonders of a clear mind and a comfortable conscience — which some claim to be an incredible sources of strength and stress deduction when dealing with the ups and downs of life. Maybe we could all use a little 5 minute exercise to see what it is that we really think. If I am like most people, society would be in force quite a shock.

Renegade of Funk

Jason Gallo seems to be a man of great informational potential and academic pursuit. I searched his name first on google.com and many results came up with his name. I clicked the first one, www.ecommons.net/laoir/aoir2003/index.php?n=125. His blog came up, reveling that he is a doctoral student at Northwestern University’s School of Communication. His most recent blog entry discussed culture as an identity of the public sphere and how it relates to the online world.
I went to http://blog.lib.nmu.edu/blogosphere/contributors.htm and hit the “Jason Gallo Jackpot.” The website said his “academic interests include surveillance, subcultures, the history of technology, and the increasing role of computer-mediated communication in the political process.” Damn, that’s a lot of academic interests.
He is currently researching for his dissertation on the U.S. government role in promoting nanotechnology, biotechnology, and information technology as well as cognitive science. He is from Washington D.C. originally and received his B.A. from Colorado College and earned his M.A. from Georgetown University. He apparently likes mail, as he has been employed by both the U.S. and the German Postal Services. He is also one of many authors who contributed to Into the Blogosphere, which appears to be an online journal or blog of some sort. To find his name among many on the contributor list, I used the “Ctrl+F” function to search for his name – a search technique that I learned from a great Internet and Society Class somewhere.
I then journeyed to www.webuse.northwestern.edu which was the forth result on my search list. He has worked under Professor Eszter Haragittai’s Web Use Project, apparently aiding in the area of the structure of political blogspheres with a colleague named Sean Zehnder.

His academic pursuits and obvious interest (as is apparent in his blog) is undeniable. I think his presentation tomorrow morning should be a fantastic and exciting change of pace for the class. I am anxious to here what his presentation will cover and how it will fit in with our Professor’s course structure and what we have been learning about this quarter about the internet and its relationship to the society in which we live.

“The times they are a’chang’in” B. Dylan

The digitalization of American politics is a new direction in culture via a new medium. Howard argues that a new political culture is on the rise and it is best seen by viewing political stages through 3 distinct lenses: Pre-modern politics, modern politics, and post-modern politics. He explains of our political arrival in the Post-modern era, a time he defines as “hypermedia campaigns.”
He recognizes campaigns not through the expensive television ads that have marked political campaign methods of the recent decades, but rather through much less costly internet advertisements. There are significantly fewer barriers to enter the internet and to use it can literally reach millions of potential voters each day. Television has long been a tool of those who have political control, and as Howard points out, negatively impacted otherwise democratically efficient public debate. “Television communication [is] largely managed by political and media elites…[it] has served to constrain healthy political discourse.” This is the truth of all electronic media, including the internet. Voters are treated like consumers, with the politicians seeking election the product being pushed. This turn to unhealthy discourse in our political institution is the fault of a mass electronic media that has been created and accepted by us as voters. Why do politicians need to have substantive, eloquent, or precise policy when all of the attention will go to the candidate who is best at grabbing attention? We have transitioned from an era of politicians who engaged in live debates for hours to a society that now sees most of the information we received about candidates in 30 second clips on the 11 o’clock news; we have transitions from an era where politics was a form of entertainment.
Perhaps the best result of an electronic political movement, according to Howard, lies in the vast amounts of information that is stored. This allows voters to “see” a candidate’s past – from his previous congressional acts to discrepancies in policy to lies and mistakes. Along with the rise of politics as a function of the internet is the creation of virtual communities. Howard notes the new possibility of exchanging new ideas, mobilizing the public, and building social capital as only the internet can. These communities now cross socioeconomic boundaries that politicians at one time had trouble with. The advent of online politics may also draw in new voters through more direct and interactive activities.
There are also downfalls to this movement: it is easy to mislead and misquote politicians on key points. Using a medium where literally anyone can be herd, there are some sites that encourage unproductive deliberations and slanderous propaganda, and unfortunately there will be some internet users who fall victim to these sites. The biggest negative impact of politics on the internet is the resulting social implication that more and more people will become less engaged in politics, opting to let other people think for them.

“When the internet provides widespread access to informational resources, political life will become a clash of the most opinionated, not a dialogue of the self-taught and inquisitive.”

As we have discussed in class, the internet can cause polarization of opinions, leading to increasing extreme thought.

“Always have to steal my kisses from you” B. Harper

“forget tattoos, never mind body piercing – our kids are becoming thieves!” Is this an appropriate way to begin an article addressing privacy, copyright, and the internet? Lessig lends a simplified legal description to an ever increasingly dense topic. Am I a thief for taking music from online file sharing software sites — -definitely. Do I care? Absolutely not. I do not care about the copyright laws; nor do I have concern that I will ever be caught when considering the thousands of college students across this country of ours that are illegally downloading 50 cent songs right now. This trend is shaping the way the internet works and how copyrighting is changing.
With the advent of Peer-to-perr (P2P) file sharing capabilities, industries are scrambling for protection – and the government grants it by adapting laws. The internet has changed law: now it is moving to protect certain industries against this illegal competition and moving away from the reason for a copyright – to foster and support creativity. This is a shift from earlier times when the biggest media source was printed material. Authors were granted copyrights to prevent others from profiting off of their work. Now, with the availability of the internet, these original copyright justifications are outdated.
The government knows that creative work has value. So, Lessig argues, if a person takes something of value from another person, he becomes an agent of thievery. So in this rearguard, a person who takes something of creative value (in the most common cases, music) is also a thief who needs to be reprimanded. I agree: put the cuffs on my mouse finger and close my laptop. But that will not stop this trend, nor will it even slow it.

“Things Change, but Basically they stay the same” David J. Matthews

Exploring trust and reputation on the internet via economic transaction sites like Ebay opens interesting concepts of how people act in a world where, after a single transaction, the two strangers involved may never be in contact with each other again. Reputation on the internet is different than in the physical marketplace in this regard. Traditionally, people in a community who frequent a marketplace unconscientiously include two factors in their decisions: How frequently (if at all) will there be another interaction between the seller and the buyer and when (if at all) will they “run into each other at some point in the future.
These two factors are not relevant on sites like Ebay where a transaction is initiated, carried out, and finished with the intimacy of a one night stand: During the interaction, both parties care about what is happening and both want to be satisfied. Come the next morning, they part ways, and in Ebay’s case often without an awkward “I’ll call you sometime” lie. And with Ebay, there isn’t the slightest trace of a hangover.
Zeckhauser & Resnick explore the fundamental difference of trust between online interactions and the physical interactions that people of the world are accustomed to. “…Risks [of false reputations on the internet] are small so small not much trust is required.” Trust is what makes the world work – from the paperboy delivering the news on time to the process of democracy that illuminates the cultures of the west – and then the internet comes along and we do not need it to interact anymore? That would be the case if not for the reputable aspect of buyer and seller interactions.
Reputations online are the remainder left after the issue of trust has been belittled. In the case Ebay, as defined by Zeckhauser & Resnick, a reputation grading system must sustain three characteristics in order to be most efficient for users:

(1) Provide information that allows buyers to distinguish between trustworthy and non-trustworthy sellers
(2) Encourage sellers to be trustworthy
(3) Discourage participation from those who aren’t

They found that over 50% of buyers responded to the optional reputation grading system. But does it work? I do not think so. I am an Ebay users and find that almost all of the time I look at the feedback rating of a potential seller it registers at a consistent 99.6% rating. So how does that help me determine if a seller is well-intentioned and trustworthy? I do not think it does a very accurate job.

As an example, I was looking at a product that was being offered by a seller with a user rating of 99.6%. I was looking at the picture and it all seemed fine. Just before I clicked the “buy it now” price, I read the fine print: The product was an imitation packaged as the real thing. Basically, had I clicked the button, I would have been duped out of $79.99 +shipping and handling and there wouldn’t have been a damned thing I could have done to change that. But the seller reputation was almost at 100%. This tells me that the reputation system is flawed as it does not follow Zeckhauser & Resnick’s third rule, “…[D]iscourage participation from those who aren’t [trustworthy]. They do mention that a fault of past online interactions as a source of determining reputation is “limited and potentially unreliable,” but what else do we have as a tool of measure? The system is still more systematic than conventional gossip in physical marketplaces, but which do you, as a consumer in the year 2005, trust more?

“A Friend of the Devil is a Friend of Mine” Jerry Garcia

Boyd’s analysis of Friendster and its relation to a new age of social networking is a new-aged spin on an old question: How do we initiate, maintain, and foster friendships and how does trust play a role? A related question is one of a subjunctive nature for people on Friendster – How does a person determine who is (and who is not) a friend? Some choose to accept almost any one as a friend on Friendster, often with the implication of gaining access to a larger share of the profile pool. Others choose their online friends with a strategic mindset, opting for a herestetical approach to accepting friends. Still others opt to just “keep it in the family” and limit their friend base to just those people that they may know physically and trust emotionally.
So when someone is looking at your profile and sees that you are “friends” with someone that has sparked their attention, how does that person determine if the relationship is real? It is all relative because there is does not exist one universal definition for defining friendship. This is not necessarily a flaw, but more of an impediment for people trying to connect to others through their supposed “trustworthy” connections.
Milgram’s phrase “familiar strangers” is one that many college students have experienced. I know I have met two people online (through a friend) that I talk to regularly using AIM and Facebook.com yet I have never seen nor have I talked to either of them over the phone. I like these ‘familiar strangers’ and in an odd way, the separation is a little bit comforting. Perhaps this safety of separation is what draws people to sites such as Friendster and other online social networks.
“Fakesters,” or people who post false profiles on social networking sites, are a part of these communities. Some do it for fun as a prank; others may do it to test the reaction of people viewing them. As is the case on Facebook.com, there are many Faksters that students come upon everyday. I have “friended” The Northwestern Rock, Northwestern University President Bienen, The Grim Reaper, and Michael Jackson. These people (and rocks) did not make profiles themselves, but are rather victims of fakesters who exploited their names. The interesting part of these faksters is that many people respond to them; hundreds of students have friended Bienen (hopefully) knowing that the president is not really registered. The Rock has just as many friends.

Firefox is an internet browser that is fast becoming a well-used service. It is a server that is fast and reliable and has many “extensions” that allow for users to personalize a lot of different aspects of their inline activities. We talked in class about how Web Portals are becoming increasingly easy to personalize – sites like Google.com and yahoo offer more than just a list of search results. Many features, such as email capabilities and online messangers are free of charge and easy to use, two very influential points for any online consumer.
Firefox is like this but on a much grander scale. According to Professor H., Firefox is run by people who are in favor of progressing internet capabilities out of a driven interest and not by the pursuit of profit. Some Firefox extensions are practical; others are more for fun or entertainment. People download these free extensions because as the internet becomes ever increasingly relied upon for day to day activities, the quest for convince and choice rise to the top of consumers’ decision making criteria. Why pay for email or AOL when you can achieve the same internet capabilities for free from a provider like FireFox? Firefox is a way for people who are looking for a wide range of applications to create a unique online experience for themselves every time they access the web.
Personally I have found these extensions make a big difference in the way I use the web. Some of the extensions make the simplest internet activities – like just browsing the web or online shopping – a more entertaining experience. I downloaded Foxytunes and have used that extension probably 10 times in the last two days. I have used Firefox as my web browser for about two years and just came into the know about these extensions from our Internet & Society Class and have already turned on some of my friends to the options that it offers. The trend of personalization will continue to grow, and will inspire new and innovative options will become available.

THE POLITICS OF SEARCH ENGINES

Introna & Nissenbaum’s the Politics of Search Engines is an enlightening article exploring the web as an institution corrupted by commercialization and competition. Early in the article, Introna & Nissenbaum express their fear of the mass commercialization of media with specific attention to the internet. They say that “the American media system is spinning out of control in a hyper-commercialized frenzy” (169). This is a statement that needs little statistical reasoning. Every time you turn a TV channel or call up a search engine like google.com or ask.com, somewhere on the screen there is at least one commercial add vying for your attention. Every time a new screen appears there is another camping hoping that it will get you to visit their site or buy their product.
I agree with the authors that most of the blame falls on the shoulders of the giant conglomerates that literally own the media. Introna & Nissenbaum make note that less than 10 giant corporations own a majority of our media. This alarming trend is one that is easily overlooked by most American consumers. As the media ownership continues to dwindle as more and more conglomerates join as one in the pursuit of profit, the problem will become more visible and more problematic. They cite Robert Machesney’s The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism:

…[W]ith every aspect of our media culture now fair game for commercial exploitation, we can look forward to the full scare commercialization of sports, arts, and education, the disappearance of notions of public service from public discourse, and the degeneration of journalism, [and] political coverage…(1).

Most of his notions have already come to the fore: Most baseball stadium bears the name of a company, and many educational programs are endorsed by similar companies, as is the case in Northwestern University’s new Ford Motor Company School of Engineering. Or Introna & Nissebuam’s example of Amazon.com giving “friendly recommendations” to its customers – only to find out later that these “recommendations” were paying companies.

But the most startling development in commercialization is the resulting competition that arises on search engines. Search engines are a consumer’s dream come true: you want to find information on something, weather it be a product or service, you type in two words and BAM! Your screen is instantly filled with thousands of relevant topics organized in a ranked order. But it is this ranking system that so many web companies compete to dominate. There is intense battling to be in the top 10 spots of a search result – and this is big news for sites trying to attract hits. Personally speaking, when I receive my search engine results, I rarely (if ever) even look at any of the sites below the top ten (or beyond the first page). This consumer trend is what drives companies to get these top spots and, in the process, push the commercialization of the internet. Introna & Nissenbaum report that this intense sparing for top search engine results spots has made most search engine operators very protective of their ranking algorithms so sites cannot manipulate their system.

CODE AND OTHER LAWS FROM CYBERSPACE

Cyberspace, as contended by Lawerance Lessig in his book Code and Other Laws from Cyberspace, is a new medium that most people want to see as an unregulated resource but unfortunately most people do not see that the very idea of cyberspace stems from a means of control:

Cyberspace…could only be free. Freedom was its nature. But why was never made clear. That cyberspace was a place that governments could not control as an idea that I never quiet got. The word itself speaks not of freedom but of control….its very motivation was finding a better way to direct. Thus, it was doubly odd to see this celebration of non-control over architectures born from the very ideal of control (5).

Lessig argues to prevent governmental control we need to devise a societal constitution – a new document that serves similar grounds to the one our country was founded upon, but with new rules that apply to a new technology. He exemplifies his thoughts using the trials of America’s founding fathers, who “learned from the anarchy that followed the revolution” as a sort of call to arms for our generation. Only we are not defending against the British, but rather against the monopolization of a power that has yet to have defined limits.

I found an interesting comparison of the argument progression between Lessig’s book and Introna & Nissenbaum’s article in relation to the internet and ownership. “If the code of cyberspace is owned,” Lessig argues, “…it can be controlled; if it is not owned, control is much more difficult” (7). Introna & Nissenbaum’s article takes a different approach, portraying the detrimental effects of internet ownership in relation to commercial exploitation. So which is more severe – Ownership as a form of control or as a commercialized sequence? Both authors portray their views in different lights, and I believe the answer will surface as both of these ideas begin to merge, forming an even larger complication for American consumers.

Communication: History and usage

Professor Hargittai’s article Radio’s Lessons for the Internet points out really fascinating similarities between the beginning and progression of radio with that of the birth of the internet. Both were incredible advancements in technological communication for their times and both define an era of how information is broadcasted. The interesting contrast between the internet and all other forms of communication, as Hargittai references, the internet “includes the use of just about every other existing communication medium.” The Radio fails in broadcasting capabilities in comprising with the approximately 200 million internet users (as reported in 1999).
I never though of comparing the radio to the internet, and decided to see how a person raised in the ‘radio generation’ felt about the comparison. My grandfather, George H. Ehemann, was born in August 24, 1927 and my grandmother, Helen L. Ehemann, was born in June of 1929. I asked them about the radio and how important it was as an entertaining and informational piece of technology. “Growing up…we had no fancy television. We would sit and listen to the radio programs at night,” my grandfather said. “Programs like Jack Armstrong, Little Orphan Annie, and The Lone Ranger were all we had for fun.”
My grandmother chimed in when I asked how crucial the radio was for information. “[In rural Tennessee] when we did get the newspaper, it was two or three days after its printing. We relied on an old battery powered Sears-Roe Buck & Co. Radio for quicker information.” She remembers one story about the radio very accurately: Her brother Carl had been deployed to Pearl Harbor In early December, just days before Imperial Japan attacked on December 7, 1941. “My dad sat with his ear glued to the radio, trying to convince himself that Carl could not be there yet.”
I cannot imagine listening to a radio program and just staring at a wall or waiting days for old information. I have the internet, a digital playground of visual to dazzle my mind and numb my intellect. As my fingers dance across the keyboard anytime I am searching for information, and must believe that people of their generation could never even imagine that the wonders of the interned started with the radios of their generation. Even primitive spam, then called commercials, interrupted their shows and flow of information much like today on the internet. “The trend toward cheap PCs and heavy online advertising seems to be mirroring events early in the century with respect to radio (Hargittai).
The most stirring piece of the article discusses the internet as ripe and waiting for an accident to happen, and Professor Hargittai’s reference to the amateur radio users and their unintentional interference with the Titanic’s distress signals is fearfully relevant today. “As the Titanic disaster proved for radio, once a tragedy happens, the people and the government are both more likely to introduce serious limitations.” I do believe we are waiting for our internet accident to happen – unlike the Titainc, I believe the next internet disaster will not be unintentional.
So in the end, my grandparents and I share a different technology for information and entertainment with similar reliability. In their time, they could not live without their radio; I cannot live without the internet.

Works Cited
George H. Ehemann & Helen L. Ehemann. Phone Interview. October 06, 2005.

Paul Starr’s The Political Origin of Modern Communications brings a institutional perspective on control over technological communications. Early in the article, Starr explains why different countries that have access to the same communicational technology are not all at the same congruent level of advancement. “At times of decision…ideas and culture come into play…choices bias later ones and may lead institution along a distinctive path of development, affecting a society’s role and position in the world.” I find a noteworthy comparison as to the development of the radio as communicational technology in Professor Hargittai’s article Radio’s Lessons for the Internet. Radio was initially developed by private entrepreneurs. After World War I, when people were still fearful of international threats taking over American radio, the government stepped in to regulate and thus changed the course of radio, say, in comparison to other countries which continued to allow private use of the radio. This changed the way America developed in terms of technology.
Governmental regulation of some aspects of public information broadcasting can prove more efficient. Starr talks of earlier days when the U.S. government decided to regulate the Post Office, which “was used to subsides the press.” This was coordinated with the press as a source of information, and synergistically to broaden earlier boundaries of communication (Starr 3). I feel that any sort of government regulation, no matter what entity of public opinion, would never be allowed by U.S. citizens. Today any threat of regulation by the government instantly hails cries of “Big Brother,” whether or not the object of consideration would be more efficient or beneficial to those who use it.
From a state standpoint, Starr illustrates how some authoritarian leaders have attempted to exploit Francis Bacon’s ‘Knowledge is Power’ (Starr equation. The attempt to monopolize knowledge as a means to keep those in power status is not a new approach to maintaining political authority. It is, however, a time-tested failure, a disastrous logic most colorfully exemplified by the second fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Star 8-9). His point is that communication will spread, and with it knowledge, to people who have the technology. In Gladys D. Ganley’s article, titled Power to the People via Personal Electronic Media, the point is explained concisely: “The personal electronic media…empower individuals and small groups by allowing them to collect, store, reformulate, create, duplicate, and communicate information…on a vast scale, instantaneously and globally” (Ganley 57-58). Hoarding information in order to preserve power only serves to defeat it, and as personal media grows, inversely the number of authoritarian leaders who successfully attempt this method falls.
Communication, in both a historical sense as well as a pragmatic one, is about knowledge. The only difference between my grandparent’s generation and ours is the technology available to broadcast knowledge. People want to know, and they want to know things now – that is the reason IT communications have developed and will continue to develop as new mediums are explored in order to quicken the dissemination of information

“Life is short, but sweet for certain” D. Matthews (is it too clique to quote him still?)

The weekend starts for me on Thursday afternoons; no class Friday means I have some extra time to relax. But this weekend is going to be busy: It’s parents weekend here at Northwestern, we have a home football game against Big Ten rival Wisconsin, its MLB playoff season, I have a friend that will be here shortly from Florida State, and, to top it off, we have a big nine team home water polo tournement at SPAC. The parents and the tourney take priority, but still, this weekend will have a lot of action. I have planned accordingly and have been a homework nazi for almost 18 hours (keep in mind, this post is being written at 7:14am on a day I DO NOT HAVE CLASS!)
The breath of fall is in the air, and although I love summer with all the madness of life, it is a refreshing break from the recent hot spell. So enough it will be 10 degrees out and everyone will be complaining, but that’s how it goes sometimes. I fall victim to it just like everybody else.

BLOGGING ON KATRINA articale

I thought the most interesting of the three articles was the Katrina victims blogging about their first hand experiences. I never really thought about blogging as a news source, but it seems like it is becoming more common. As cited in the article, hug news media sources like CNN, USA Today, and NBC maintained blogs about the event and they received attention. I checked out one of the hurricane blogger’s site, http://hurricantupdate.blogspot.com. The writer, Kaye, updated what he felt, saw, and did as the hurricane hit, grabbing international attention. I feel like we’re almost getting “too modern” for our time. We are checking blog posts for information that, during the hurricane, that was widely covered on radio and tv. I understand the “first hand” aspect, but still, can people really find reliable information from people just writing on a blog? We have access to so much with IT communications that it’s almost scary. In the article, one hurricane blogger continued to post when his internet was down (through a local college campus) and even charged his Blackberry with a car battery! I have to ask, would McGuiver even know how to do that? Probably not.

TROLLING articale

Susan Herring’s report and case study really portrays the danger of the internet. You do not know who you are talking to or what a person’s true motivations are for speaking or posting. I do not believe cases such as Kent’s postings on a feminist site are really an issue of free speech. The community is a private gathering of people who want to speak of and promote feminism as a way of life. Kent should have been banned from the site at the first sign that he did not want to debate, but rather insult and disrupt the group.

People like Kent seem all to common in internet chat rooms. There is somebody who, for whatever reason, desperately begs for attention, and they get it through rude and obnoxious comments. But it works — as in Herring’s article, it takes a lot of self control to outright ignore provocative comments aimed at something you support. Personally, I enjoyed Donald’s method of dealing with Kent. His ambiguous and indirect sarcasm really did point out Kent’s insecurities and paranoia that he was being attacked.

The group is not at fault for a Troller’s posting, but they are at fault for not taking collective and uniform action against the intruder. Everybody responded differently to Kent’s comments, some opting to ignore them, others attacking him personally with vulgar language. An administrative ban should have been placed on him so he would have no choice but to stop posting. I am interested to know if the group has since had any other trouble with Trollers since Kent after they amended the “3 strikes your out” rule.

INTERNET SURFERS AREN’T ALONE articale

Communities on the Internet are unreal; I mean I do not feel that people talking on the internet as a group can be called a “community.” I agree mostly with the Lost in Cyberspace part early in the reading: Internet communities are less meaningful than person-to-person contact. I believe that the internet is part of our community and obviously an important part of life, but it is ont the “real world.” In comparison to the telephone, which was unimaginable before its invention, the internet does serve as a “global village” as the authors point out.

As for the specialized relationships, I think it is great when groups are formed to support each other with questions or problems that they would like help with. But in a real life community, when somebody isn’t seen for a while or doesn’t speak, a person can see if there is something wrong through voice tone, body language, and other traits that humans use in face to face contact that words cannot portray.

The authors claim that internet communities are legit because of the constant emotional support that is available. But Part of community is trust; trust comes from knowing someone and understanding their intentions, experiences, and emotions. How do so many people trust complete strangers, some of whom the article says use identity hiding email services? Earning trust takes time and emotion, two things that I do not want to just give away to strangers over the internet.