IT 695 - Week 3

Reading: The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen.

Here's my initial impression of Keen's book: He loved the internet in the beginning. He was a pioneer in the internet music industry and made some money. As long as the internet followed the path of traditional media (one-to-many), it was fantastic. Enter Web 2.0, and suddenly the average person has the ability to not only receive information, but to interact with it and create it. The internet is thus transformed into the herald of our social and cultural doom. In short, he seems to believe the human race is incapable of adapting to this degree of freedom without someone smart to tell us what to think.

I found his "the sky is falling" attitude in the first few chapters of the book to be just annoying. I rarely like to listen to someone tell me repeatedly that things are awful. I'd rather entertain ways to fix problems and, until chapter 8, there was little of that. Keen seemed determine to map our path along the road to ruin, when what I wanted to say to him was, "This is bad, here's my suggestion to make things better." And really, his opinion of web 2.0 - anyone's opinion, really - cannot change what's already happened. The genie is out of the bottle, and instead of crying that we can't stuff it back in, the naysayers should start planning effective wishes.

Most of Keen's major premise just made me shake my head. He spends an incredible amount of time bewailing the average consumer's inability to separate information and entertainment from advertising and propaganda. This kind of made me giggle when you consider that the definition of propaganda, according to the evil Wikipedia, is "the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist." I don't know about Keen's average monkey behind the keyboard, but I can clearly recognize his book as propaganda.

One example of this is his anguish over the closing of Tower Records. Don't get me wrong, I loved Tower Records. But I'm willing to bet that any time a new Tower store opened, there were smaller stores owned by individuals (not huge companies) that went out of business nearby. We used to hear those stories all the time, the small mom-and-pop store falls to the power of the big box seller. So what he viewed as something fantastic, had profound economic effects on some people. The current changes occurring our culture and economy will do the same thing. As it states in the Karl Fisch video, Did You Know, many of my middle school students today will graduate and hold jobs that don’t exist today.

Keen's book got me thinking a lot about evolution. Not only his reference to monkeys (thanks Darwin!), but also sociocultural evolution. The one absolute in our existence is that things change, whether we want them to or not. Things change in ways both good and bad, and our history is full of examples of our ability to adapt. Keen himself identified several ways that we're already doing that with sites like Citizendium and Joost, which may not solve the problems he outlines, but they are certainly a first step.

And as educators, we're already adapting (or should be). When I started working as a media specialist, I was teaching my library classes things like the Dewey Decimal System, how to use an atlas, what to do with a periodical index. Now I don't even introduce those things; instead, I spend the bulk of my class time teaching students to be evaluators of information. Because the problem now isn't how to find information, it's how to be sure the information found is worthwhile.

IT 695 - Week 2

Reading: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky.

I really enjoyed reading Shirky. So much of what he said made perfect sense to me. The first chapters of the book dealt with online communities and their effect on both consumers and producers of media and information. Like Jenkins from last week, Shirky suggests that online communities offer people strong social bonds built on common interests and causes. Though they are often temporary bonds, Shirky seems to agree with Jenkins that they are important - Jenkins even suggested that these bonds may have become more important than bonds to community, extended, and even nuclear family. As Shirky's example of one person's crusade to get a cell phone back, what one person could not have accomplished a few years ago is now possible through the ability to engage a community of people who can work together and offer unique skills and viewpoints. It ties in again with Jenkins and his quote of Levy on collective intelligence: "no one knows everything, everyone knows something."

Shirky also introduces the idea of "everyone as a media outlet". He discusses the necessary changes in defining professions like journalist and photographer. As I was reading, a commercial for a local television news program was playing in the other room. The announcer encouraged viewers to send in photos, video, and other media because the viewer/consumer and the producer/news program "worked together" to bring the news to the public. This reinforced Shirky in a big way!

Though the amount of available information and our methods of sharing it may have changed, Shirky doesn't think that this "amateurization" of media production is necessarily a bad thing. And even if it were a bad thing, it cannot be undone; "As with the printing press, the loss of professional control will be bad for many of society's core institutions, but it's happening anyway." The consumer is savvy enough to hone in on quality information and determine between personal journals and small group communications and what is truly content for wider public consumption. Add to that the sheer volume of information. The consumer must develop some kind of personal filtering system that is not necessarily based on technological constraints, but social ones. Information comes from trusted sources and communities of practice. Internet territory is establed (according to Hine from the Leander readings) by linking pages of similar information to each other and maintaining a flow of information along channels that agree and support each other.

IT 695 - Week 1

One of the class readings for this week was a 2004 article by Henry Jenkins from the International Journal of Cultural Studies. This article suggested that media is currently on a path of convergence, where media that is so prevalent in our society can now be accessed, viewed, interacted with, and even altered by the "collective intelligence" of the global community. This convergence will require creative industries to rethink their definition of consumer from passive to active and unpredictable.

Jenkins suggested 9 areas where the "negotiations between producers and consumers" were likely to focus. One of these areas struck me in particular, the idea of redifining intellectual property rights and media ownership. I read earlier this week that YouTube has begun to confront the issue of copyrights and digital rights by muting the sound on videos where the soundtrack is copyrighted material. This move was hardly unexpected, but will certainly cause a huge reaction in the YouTube audience.

A second assigned reading was Kevin Leander's review of several ethnographic studies considering social spaces, both on and off the Internet. One finding that seemed consistent across several studies is that today's youth does not really see their online social activity as being different from "real life." The Internet is a "cultural artifact." It has always been part of their cultural and social experience and, while it carries different importance in various cultures, it is considered part of the whole and not seperate.

I read an article in T.H.E. Journal that detailed the extreme lack of computers available for use in education in Latin American countries. Can these students share that same inclusive attitude toward the Internet as a social space? The article, "A World of Hurt" by Rama Ramaswami, focuses on Internet availability in schools, but in a country where the ratio in an elite school is 40 computers for 1000 students, can technology be widely available outside school? The article really caught my attention because of the Leander readings and raised many questions that went beyond the scope of Ramaswami's study. His article details the state of computer availability, but cautions that just getting machines into the buildings won't be enough to create instant change.