I wonder if we are living through the utopian days of peer production (or user-generated content, as most CHI folks call it). I certainly see the utopian view floating around here. However, the other day I heard some (certainly non-definitive) statistics on the usage of Flickr. The stats said that less than half a percent of the Flickr users actually upload content. The rest only view photos. That aligns with my hunches about peer production. Yes, we have lowered the bar, making it easier for more people to create content and things of value on the web. However, I fear that we just have just created a new cultural elite: the people who are brave and educated enough to post their creations on the web.
]]>In this assignment, you will understand peer production by participating in it. Almost certainly, you have encountered Wikipedia as a consumer of information, maybe while you were doing research for this class. In this assignment, you will produce information for Wikipedia and study what happens to it. Please note that you cannot wait until the last minute to complete this assignment. You need to allow at least 2 days between when you first write your content and when you go back to Wikipedia to study what happened to it.
1. Sign up for a Wikipedia account.
Go to the main English Wikipedia page, click on the "Sign in/create account" link in the top right corner and complete the process for signing up for a new account.
2. Find a stub on Wikipedia and help complete it.
Wikipedia has a number of articles that are only basic outlines of a topic. Wikipedia calls these articles "stubs." Perhaps you have had the experience of searching for something on Wikipedia only to find an article that said little more than you already knew. That was a stub. Wikipedia lists all of the stubs on the site, and you can browse it by category. For example, you can find the stub on "Joliet Catholic Academy" (an Illinois high school) by clicking first on "I" for all stub categories starting with "I", then clicking "Illinois school stubs" and then on "Joliet Catholic Academy."
Your job is to find a stub and help complete it. You do not need to finish the article. The point of peer production is for individuals to put small pieces together to make something useful. Your contribution should be between 500 and 1000 words. Before you start writing on a topic that interests you, please understand Wikipedia's guide on neutral point of view and verifiability. Try to conform to these guidelines; conforming to the guidelines will make your information more valuable and stick around longer. Log in before changing the article.
3. Pick a random article and delete a section from it.
Traditionally, Wikipedia has been very resilient to vandalism. You will perform a small experiment in vandalism. Find an established article on Wikipedia (more or less at random), not a stub, pick a section (more or less at random) and delete it. Save the page.
WHAT TO TURN IN
While my opinion diverges from Howard, I should point out that he believes that new media fundamentally allows campaign managers to target individually-tailored political messages. Further, he concludes that new media helps degrade the public sphere by creating a personal information tunnel between a citizen and a campaign. In Howard's view, new media serves to create an echo chamber where you are rarely, if ever, exposed to challenging ideas.
]]>"Epistemic heterarchy," as opposed to administrative hierarchy, is the decentralized organizational structure adopted by new media campaigns. Howard identifies the key characteristics as "lateral systems of accountability; epistemic and symbolic power basis of credibility; loyalties are project-based and given to membership or program..." (159). Howard uses the concept to contrast the organization of new media campaigns with mass media campaigns. He claims that mass media campaigns deliver projects sequentially, manage only a handful of messages throughout the campaign, stay on message and require strong candidate loyalty from members.
I am worried that Howard did not discuss the originality of "epistemic heterarchy" given that these companies arose in a (post-)dot-com world. For example, Voter.com sounds so dot-com to me. I worry that its organization has very little to do with politics, and a lot to do with dot-com culture. As another example, consider GrassrootsActivist.org. Its members met bouncing around in Silicon Valley in the early- and mid-nineties. How much of "epistemic heterarchy" has to do with political campaigns, and how much has to do with broader organizational trends?
]]>2. How long did each game take?
I played once and it took about 30 minutes from install to the game's conclusion.
3. Did you win? What was your final culture score and game score?
I lost. I did not note the final game score, but I was in second place, about 50 points from the top Civ.
4. Please note particularly difficult features of the interface that could be explained before students begin playing in order to save them some confusion.
I think you should highly stress that cultural victories are the way to win. Also, having played the game before, I found it strange that scientific research did not matter. I recommend stressing that as well.
In the start of the game, I thought that it might be hard for a student to decide which difficulty level to pick. You might want to provide some guidance on that choice.
5. Notable features of game experience / your reactions to the game
I found the game fun and fast-paced. Will students understand the mapping from cultural score to overall score (what is that, btw)? Will they understand how to improve their cultural scores, or even where to find them in the interface?
I chose to go to war because I thought that some students will inevitably do that no matter what you tell them to do. I lost with 33 turns left. I had concentrated up to that point on culture, but then when I saw Gandhi enter the game, he was so close that I nuked him. Yes, I nuked Gandhi. I wanted to drop his score in a short amount of time, and immobilize his army. I didn't have enough army to back it up and he got me in the end. Why are ICBMs allowed? Will this just distract students?
6. Elements of the game that are related to comm tech that we didn't mention in the assignment prompt (when it is written) that we could add
I am interested in why you disabled scientific research. Without it, the game becomes a free-for-all on who can the build the most cultural stuff in the most amount of time. If this is what you're going for, I think students need to know exactly what each improvement means for them in terms of points (does Civ provide this...I can't remember).
7. Is there any interface text (almost all text is editable by us) that can be changed to make things clearer.
Can you provide a banner when the game starts to encourage students to play a particular strategy?
8. Need to modify / write instructions for downloading / installing STEAM and/or InnisMod
I found a bug after I declared war on Gandhi. His angry face became the backdrop for the map. It was weird. I will attach the game file so you can inspect.
"In the Reformation print was used to overwhelm sculpture and architecture as interpreters of the scriptures." (128)
Particular forms built up around print: magazines, epics, treatises, essays, novels, pamphlets, comics. Looking at this quote, I think Innis would say that the Internet's unique forms are still beginning. We see blogs, podcasts, video sharing, but I think the defining character of the Internet will come later. I have a hard time backing it up, but I think Innis would agree.
"The capacity to concentrate on intense cultural activity during a short period of time and to mobilize intellectual resources over a vast territory assumes to a large extent the development of armed force to a high state of efficiency." (133)
"Under the influence of the state, communication among themselves has become more difficult for scientists with the same political background and practically impossible for those with a difficult political background, because of the importance attached to war." (193)
The "over a vast territory" caught my eye. Has the Internet changed this? Do you still need a strong, efficient army to mobilize intellectual resources? As he points out many times, Innis could not help the strong effect WWII had on his views of science. I think this sentence comes from that experience. In the next major war, the Internet may make military control of information much more difficult than in 1943.
"The post office became an object of intense political interest and after 1825 a federal postal department was separated from the revenue system and made independent." (162)
The battle over net neutrality rings out in this comment.
"Western newspapers were at a disadvantage in time since news tended to spread from east to west" (175)
Information flow in time was a distinct characteristic of all pre-electronic media. The Internet has all but dissolved that relationship. Innis would say that we are the bottleneck in the flow now; our human information processing abilities are the slow point in the chain. (Or, maybe that's just me channeling Innis to say what I want.)
(I had to comment on the essay's tangent into academic culture. Those few pages had the hallmarks of a discussion over beers that might go something like, "No one appreciates me and it's hard to get funding. Those social scientists have sold their souls." Innis seems to lament the academic's former role as the guardian of knowledge.)
]]>I see the difference in conclusions as a result of methodology, mostly. Williams, however flawed, looked back on television after 20 years of its use in America. M&S, on the other hand, took an ethnographic approach set in the early days of the web. I think they would come to different conclusions now. I hear the same ecommerce themes expressed in M&S that I heard expressed in America around the same time: How will businesses make money using the Internet? Is it worth the cost? What will distribution look like? (Remember the days when many people questioned whether Amazon.com would ever get into the black?) I suspect that the same changes we see today in the US with regard to ecommerce, we would observe in Trinidad. And, in that case, the Internet may have actually enabled the free-market ideals that Trinis aspired to.
]]>The Dynamic of Objectification has been useful to other researchers analyzing how people represent themselves online. For example, researchers have analyzed how people project identities in MUDs (when they were still in widespread use). More recently, researchers have looked at identity in Second Life. While I am no expert in massive online games like SL, this book made me wonder whether games like SL are inherently local. Would the approach used in this book apply there? Would the techniques and framework (the four dynamics, for example) still be useful there?
]]>Mengxiao Zhu's argument that Depression made farmers choose among competing technologies is compelling. I recently read the book Consumers In The Country. It argued that rural consumers (specifically) re-appropriated the telephone, automobile, electricity and housecleaning appliances in new ways. While I believed in most of Fischer's analysis, I was surprised that he did not talk about re-appropriation. Rural consumers could tinker with the car much more easily than the phone, finding new uses for it. The phone was largely a black box to a rural consumer, with the exception of the farmer running the coop. Rural consumers could and did find new uses for the automobile, like hooking a washing machine to the car's axle. So, I would speculate that since farmers had to choose between technologies, the car looked more attractive since it could be taken apart and put to new uses.
]]>Yet, radio clearly could have developed differently. For example, if the press had blamed Marconi instead of radio amateurs after the Titanic disaster, amateurs may have fared better in the first Radio Act. Consequently, their numbers may have grown before the war. If the war had not intervened, perhaps De Forest would have created an alternate system to cater to amateurs on the West Coast. A system designed around amateurs could have been interactive, with listeners transmitting feedback to the local broadcaster in near real-time.
What if amateurs had never discovered that crystals could detect radio waves? Individual amateurs could never have afforded to build their own sets, forcing them to work together. Perhaps towns would have constructed sets, like a barn raising. Imagine leaving your home to listen to a radio program with your neighbors.
]]>Neumann attacks the lack of focus in Television and he's right. I found myself looking for a real, hard-hitting thesis early in the book. However, I found sections that do not connect to one another. In fact, I think the Preface does the best job of telling the reader what the book is about. In the last chapter, Alternative Technology, Alternative Uses?, Williams finally lets us in on his real motivations for writing Television: "there has never been, and is unlikely to be in the future, a more suitable time for a general reconstruction of communications policies" (p. 153). In the end, Television is a work of media activism, not science.
Williams should have put the last section first, couching his analysis in activist terms. Instead, he drops hints and values commentary on us. For example, talking about a television show he deems an important piece of art, he says, "this new television drama stimulated similar work elsewhere, though in the United States, because of sponsorship difficulties, it was shamefully cut short" (sorry, lost the page). Where does he get off telling us it was "shamefully cut short?" Along those lines, I think Williams clearly wants us to know that he thinks the BBC produces more valuable programming than American television, and that corporate interests have hijacked American TV. He just doesn't want to tell us in one sentence; he would rather take four chapters to do it.
Conservatives and libertarians feel largely unrepresented in academia (and for good reason). Unfortunately, Television just confirms that view.