My Response: Not to go for the easy, and perhaps obvious choice because of my paper topic, but I thought it would be interesting to compare the perspectives on internet technologies of Howard and Benkler. On a superficial level Howard and Benkler seem to have opposite perspectives of the potential of the internet. But on some level it is just a matter of which type of evidence each is looking at. Both authors value the interactivity and collaboration possibilities of the internet. Benkler sees many examples of what he refers to as “non-market” interactions dominating the scene. While Howard does not examine traditional market activity he does examine a much more structured organization. Howard is not looking for examples of the ways that peer production has been able to overcome adversity, but instead almost looking for the ways in which political organizations fall short of their own proposed ideology. In some ways the story Howard tells is one of how those with power are able to harness networked technology to their advantage, while Benkler sees the rise of the more powerless to gain more autonomy. What seems most likely is that these two phenomenons are not directly in conflict with each other but are occurring simultaneously. After all it is through additional activity on the internet on issue related sites and through your credit card purchases that Howard’s consultants are able to construct more sophisticated profiles of their members and constituents. I suppose that is price of transparency (which Benkler prizes), that to truly have a transparent network then you are not only transparent to those who share your values, but also to those who do not, or even those who oppose your values, and what they do with your information can sometimes be out of your hands.
The class will be broken up into an even number of groups of about 5-6 students. Each group will be given a prompt aimed at provoking utopian or dystopian sentiments about various communication technologies.
Please create a list of reasons why Facebook could be considered a helpful communication technology. Remember to keep in mind ways the ways in which it effects individuals, communities (both local and non-local), and society as a whole.
Please create a list of reasons why Facebook could be considered a damaging communication technology. Remember to keep in mind the ways in which it effects individuals, communities (both local and non-local), and society as a whole.
Technologies should be those which are familiar to undergraduates other ideas include cell phones, blogs, pod casts, etc., for as many separate questions as needed for the size of the class.
Students will have approximately 10-15 minutes to brainstorm and develop a list. Then each group will be asked to present their list. This list will be compiled on the board, with the utopian orientations on one side, and dystopian on the other.
The students will then be asked as a whole to examine each list and observe the themes within each orientation across technologies.
*****UPDATE*****
I did want to add to this by saying that this activity would be most appropriately used to completment readings about technologies. Selections from either Susan Douglass' Inventing American Broadcasting or Claude Fischer's America Calling. The goal would be to draw connections between these more historical works with contemporary communication technologies, to draw attention to the reoccuring themes about how we and others think about technology in our lives.
My Response: After reading this weeks question I though a lot about our conversation during last weeks class session. Many voiced dismay and concern over the activities described by Howard, isn’t that I don’t share some of their concerns, but political campaigns have never had the best reputation for ethical behavior. What is it then that makes these newest developments so different? Part of the answer to this question may have more to do with how unfamiliar many are with the full capabilities of the technology. While they may be familiar with the user side of these technologies how they actually work and what is being done behind the scenes is quite a mystery to most people. As Howard describes early in the book, the leaders of hypermedia consulting firms have established an elaborate justification for the work that they do. The work is justified as an aid to democracy to allow voters to have greater access to political leaders. The problem develops when the activities seem to work against the ideals, which is clearly the case in this situation. Further more as Professor Howard pointed out in our discussion last week there is no system for accountability in hypermedia campaigns. They aren’t subject to the same regulations and laws as other campaign activities. That is not to say people would be more careful of what they are hearing if there were a more solid system in place, but it seems logical the more unfamiliar one is with a technology the more you want someone else looking out on your behalf. Perhaps it is just part of the fall out for allowing individuals at least the appearance of access to higher authorities. It may seem like a more direct line than the political activist who lived down the street, but then you also knew where that person lived, perhaps about their background, and whether they could be trusted. By loosing this more distant but familiar connection to the political process the result may be the need for more checks on the methods used in campaigning.
My Response: In Phillip N. Howard’s book New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen he outlines the transition from mass media campaigns to hypermedia campaigns. One of the concepts he uses to illustrate this transition is “political redlining.” Howard defines this as “the process of restricting our future supply of political information with assumptions about our demographics and present or past opinions. Overall he observes a trend away from the organizations themselves doing the majority of the redlining to a more citizen powered redlining where your self identifying hypermedia networks determine what kind of information you received. It becomes in some senses a self selecting and empowering version of political redlining. Hypermedia professionals seem to be of the mindset that whatever they can do to make government more responsive to the people will make government better. This seems to be a good idea on the surface. But not everyone agrees that government officials should be 100% responsive to their constituencies. Many reason that they should be following a trustee model. Where officials do what is better for the people, even if that disagrees with what the people want. Furthermore this self selecting system also has many potential consequences. There are undesired implications for individuals becoming too specialized in political issues. Single issue voters are often viewed as being narrow minded and short sighted. While I won’t go into these issues too much more, I think they are important debates which should be discussed in reference to hypermedia campaigns. After all, making the assumption that our goal should be to get as close to direct democracy as possible, may not be the safest assumption.
Playtester Questions: (Blog entries with your results are great.)
1. How experienced with the game are you already?
I had "played" or watched others play a previous version of the game when I was babysitting all summer. Lots of long hours in front of the computer trying to convince the kids it would be a better idea to go outside.
2. How long did each game take?
Never longer that 30 minutes. Most right in that range.
3. Did you win? What was your final culture score and game score?
2 out of 5 games. Any game where I did not get invaded I won culturally. It was actually the first and last games I played. The first time it was fairly quick I just built as many culture pieces as I could and turnned the % to culture up to around 50% it probably took about 25 minutes to win and my score was 2803 (I didn't write down the culture score since it was over so quickly) The second victory had a score oof 2868 and 13415 culture points and took about the same time with similar settings. The only games I did not win were when I got invaded since I didn't have much defense at all.
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 was a bit confused about the people in the city and how those features worked. You were able to select areas and use + and - to do something with different types of people in different areas but I really didn't understand what I was doing with that.
5. Notable features of game experience / your reactions to the game
I thought it was interesting but a bit mundane perhaps because I didn't know exactly what all the options were I found myself just building thing after thing and pretty much just hitting "enter" a lot to move to the next turn.
7. Is there any interface text (almost all text is editable by us) that can be changed to make things clearer.
Nothing that I saw...although there could be a bit more clarification about what exactly a great person is...and the different options with those.
8. Need to modify / write instructions for downloading / installing STEAM and/or InnisMod
The only problems I had with loading InnisMod had to do with the directories. When the game got downloaded from STEAM it made two similar directories. One was in "My Games" and another was in C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\sid meier's civilization iv and the files had to be in this one to work they did not load properly from the directory in My Games. I would be happy to detail more of the steps for using STEAM if you need that but I wasn't sure if students are using that route as an option.
ALSO---The changes suggested are all good. I especially like the suggestion for things being more expensive I think having to choose more strategically about which culture items you pick would add a lot.
My Response: In his book Media and Sovereignty Monroe E. Price lays out a complex web of interlocking actors and agents that influence the way in which our media systems operate. Behind this whole discussion seems to lay this need for political and/or ideological dominance over a given area. Many of the actions seem to be driven by the idea that media access in a market can be an instrumental step toward transferring ideology, while other actors seem motivated to keep media out as a way of insulating their nation or entity from undesirable ideologies. What is perhaps most interesting is that political units are by no means the only or even in some cases the most powerful actors pushing this agenda. Multinational corporations are also interested and in many cases seem to see the spread of free market ideology as desirable and use the media to reach those ends. And yet at some point the reality of the complexities of the world come into play. In some senses what causes the consequences is when nations attempt to navigate between the ideology and the practicality. All of these interactions are limited in some way by belief of nations and/or political units that they have the right or in some cases the duty to protect or promote their own needs or demands. The V-chip example is an excellent example to examine with regard to this issue (p. 125-132). The initial premise that allows for the V-chip is that in some way restraints on content must be put on the media. Since what exactly those restraints may be differs from culture to culture the easiest and clearest unit on which to delegate this task to are the established political units. While new media forms may be breaking down national borders it seems as though it still falls on the shoulders of those nations to solve the problems that seem to threaten its people.
Also for clarification in the instructions you may want to specify that students should be accessing an existing account, as opposed to creating a new account. I figured it out but it wasn't clear on the first read.
]]>What would Innis make of the Internet? Write a brief analytical comment about the relation of the Internet to society that you can defend as consistent with Innis's ideas in some way. For example, you might employ one of his concepts (information monopoly, time-biased, space-biased) or borrow one of his analyses from an earlier technology (cuneiform's effects on the invention of abstraction in math) and apply it to the Internet.
My Response:
Initially, I found myself wanting to respond to this question by analyzing the internet based on Innis' concept of the time/space bias, however, the more I thought about it the more it might be more interesting to discuss the internet in terms of "information monopolies." My first instinct would be to say that the internet is a communication technology that transcends this constraint. In the age of web 2.0 it's hard to think of information being held by a small minority. The internet seems to be less monopolistic than previous forms. And yet it is perhaps too idealistic to believe that a great deal of the internet is not maintained by an unrepresentative section of the public. It's significant to note that especially when discussing the printing business, Innis is careful to explain that it was not that smaller presses could not produce material; however, they were never capable of maintaining the sales numbers as the major producers. This discussion reminded me of some statistics that are often related in political communication classes (I don't have the exact numbers here but I'll give you the trends...someone feel free to correct any inaccuracies). There has been a great deal of discussion as of late about how people are turning to online sources for news. There has been special attention drawn to alternative news sources like blogs. While more and more people are turning to these sources the overwhelming majority of individuals who use the internet as a news source turn to online versions of print or broadcast outlets. In a sense they go to the same establishment resources for information. In some sense, as long as people are still turning to the same outlets in a technology, has the information monopoly of the old technology really been broken?
The Bias of Communication is known as a "classic" in the study of communication technology, but it is also described as "difficult," "nonlineal," "puzzling," and "a struggle" -- probably chiefly because the book does not build to a sustained or coherent argument. Choose one of the three essays assigned for today and read them in the manner suggested by the introduction -- as an "idea file." Identify some important concept, theory, or insight in the essay you chose and describe its importance. Please describe the idea critically as appropriate -- list drawbacks as well as praise. It may be helpful to reference earlier class readings as a point of comparison to show what is different about Innis' ideas or his disciplinary approach (economic history).
My Response:
One of the things that became abundantly clear while nearing the end of Innis’ first chapter “Minerva’s Owl” is his disciplinary orientation to the topic of communication. What initially may come across as a somewhat haphazard historical narrative linking events and changes with the evolution of communication technology is viewed through a very specific lens, which is quite different from what we have been exposed to in our previous readings. Innis’ background in economics allows him to view knowledge as a commodity which can be possessed and withheld from the masses. This commodification seems to aide in his attempt to explain how such an abstract concept like knowledge could be contingent on the available communication technologies. If we accept Innis’ conception of knowledge as a commodity, it becomes essential to understand how technology increases or decreases the amount of this commodity which is available. While this may seem to be a somewhat cynical view of knowledge it does provide us with an interesting frame work. Instead of thinking about the vast potential of what information is available in the universe, we are instead asked to think about not only how the spectrum of available knowledge may have been limited in the past, but, how we may currently be limited because of the limitations of the mediums we are able to utilize.
For this answer, try to highlight a conclusion that Miller & Slater make that differs from what we know about an older technology. That is, Miller & Slater cover themes that are very familiar from our earlier readings -- such as businesspeople and consumers trying to come to terms with a new communication technology -- but they occasionally come to strikingly different conclusions. Consider Chapter 6, "Doing Business Online," which chronicles several instances where Trinis try to employ new communication technologies (Web site design businesses, textiles catalogs, Miss Universe, etc.). Compare one of these instances and any conclusions that Miller & Slater draw from this material (e.g., about decommodification, virtual vs. real, the dynamics from ch. 1) to an analogous instance with an older technology covered by another author in this course (Douglas, Marvin, Fischer, Williams). How do you explain this difference in conclusions? e.g., Is the difference the result of technology (the Internet?), the method, the theoretical approach, assumptions, Trini culture, etc.?
My Response:
When discussing internet consumers Miller and Slater come to the conclusion that consumer desires for free items and objects newly available on the internet is leading toward a sense of decommodification. I found this discussion very interesting given the more recent debate in the US regarding pirated music, and video through the internet. They are clear to state that this tendency could have something to do with an innate Trinniness towards acquiring free or low price merchandise. However this trend is not necessarily something that has occurred with other technologies. If for example we examine Douglas’ analysis of the radio we do not see the same trend occurring. Perhaps there are some similarities between the information exchange and radio amateurs (but that would be quite a stretch) There may be another way to think about the decommodification trend which Miller and Slater seem to see happening. In some sense this process is one of the “great possibilities” not yet fully realized. The free exchange of materials and ideas without the constraints of previous technologies is a theme we have seen before. The internet just may have allowed this to occur in a more practical and tangible way, perhaps this trend is not as different as it may seem. However, this is a phase that Douglas and others found to be short-lived. In the tale of the radio we know that government legislation and corporations came in and limited the possibilities of free radio access and ideas. Why is this something that Miller and Slater don’t find? There could be any number of factors that prevent this from coming about? On some level there could be a unique nature to the internet that prevents free materials from ever going away? Or perhaps the technology at the point where it is being studied is too new to settle into the more conventional structure that other communication technologies have acquired? In the case of this trend I honestly believe it may be too soon to tell, and in order to make a case for an innately difference because of the technology of the internet I think a little more distance is defiantly required.
Miller & Slater have elaborated four cross-cutting, non-exhaustive "dimensions" or "dynamics" that mark the Trinidadian Internet, and perhaps the Internet everywhere. Choose one of the four dynamics introduced in chapter 1 (Objectification, Mediation, Normative Freedom, Positioning) or a sub-concept within one of the dynamics (expansive realization, expansive potential). Analyze how the dynamic manifests in the ethnographic material presented in chapter 3 (Relationships) or chapter 4 (Being Trini). You might consider: What does the dynamic mean? How is the dynamic analytically useful? How is it applied? How is its use related to the method employed here, or the assumptions?
My Response:
In Chapter 1 of Miller & Slater’s book I was captured by the principle of “expansive realization.” The idea being that the internet is best understood as “helping people to deliver on pledges that they have already made to themselves about themselves” (11). The most straightforward example which is mentioned both in Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 is the way in which Trini’s use the internet to maintain familial contact. There seems to be the sense that previous options for communicating with overseas family were unable to capture the essential family conversation which is “mundane, everyday, intimate in a household way, in both style and content” (57). This statement makes a number of major assumptions. First, that there is a normative type of family conversation that is in some way central to maintaining a true connection with family members. Also, that this type of conversation is more desirable than other kinds of conversations. As a more empirical quantitative person my initial urge when hearing this claim is to want to get to the bottom of things. Are these logical assumptions? But instead Miller and Slater ask us to consider the way in which Trini’s perceive and understand how the internet influences their lives. In some ways the idea of “expansive realization” is a very relative and personal concept. It requires an individual or group to have a sense of what should be and examine technologies as a way of helping make this come about. What I find particularly interesting is that this lens tends to overlook the technologies or constraints that bring about this disjuncture in the first place. The focus is on overcoming obstacles rather than eliminating them. In some senses this pairs a very utopian view of technology with a more cynical view of an individual or groups present circumstances.
When scholars write about communication technologies, they often focus on successful technologies. Successful technologies, in turn, are usually described as ever-expanding or "diffusing" throughout society until they are widespread. In this context, Fischer's analysis of the decline in rural telephony in Chapter 4 is remarkable and unusual. Please evaluate this argument in chapter 4. You might comment on his evidence for the decline, his analysis, or his explanation of it. Is the explanation convincing? You might compare it to discussions of other technologies we have read. Does this analysis demonstrate a strength or weakness in his method? (Or, Why did he find this decline when other scholars rarely if ever highlight any declines?)
Response:
Instead of focusing on the merits of the argument which Fischer makes (which I agree with many of my classmates contains a number of flaws), I have chosen today to focus on Fischer’s choice to focus on this issue. It seems almost odd to have such a significant chunk of this book focused on a decline in use of a specific technology. It seems even odder for the author to go searching for an alternative explanation of this decline beyond a major economic downturn in the country. Yet this passage seems to accentuate strength in Fischer’s method.
Fischer is quite clear early on that the book is to be “concerned with the manner in which turn-of-the-century technologies made a difference to North American’s way of life, in particular to community and personal relations,” (5). This focus requires him to go beyond what the technology was capable of doing, or how the businesses attempted to sell the technology, but instead to examine the ways in which people actually interacted and utilized the technology. With that in mind it is extremely important to be able to track the ways in which different social groups such as rural and urban populations handled the technology. It is then also significant to acknowledge the pervasiveness of the technology at any given time in order to establish how universal these changes were. While this decline was only temporary and would be easy to gloss over if the focus were on the actors and forces that guided the technology to its height (as seems to be the case in Douglass’ work), Fischer’s focus on community and personal impacts requires us to examine the ways in which use or lack of use altered the pace or impacts of the technology itself, and as a result, requires a better understanding of the reasons the decline may have occurred. By focusing on both rises and declines in the utilization of the technology it enables us to have a more accurate view of the process that the telephone went through as a consumer product, and as a result make it easier to provide a context for how many consumers lives it altered at a particular historical moment.
Douglas has written an explanation of the social construction of radio in order to avoid technological determinism. The "constructors" proposed in this book are inventors, the press, amateur operators, the military, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and others. One sure way to avoid "determinism" is to advance a narrative that contains more than one possible outcome. Can you use the materials in this book to propose a plausible alternative way that radio might have developed in the U.S.? If yes, explain the alternative. If not, discuss what information you would need in order to propose an alternative (that is, information that you don't have in this book).
Response:
In her book “Inventing American Broadcasting” Susan Douglas relates a narrative story of the development of the radio in the United States. While Douglas, herself, never explicitly offers an alternative route for radio to have been developed her emphasis on individual personalities, business interests, and social forces offer the reader a lot of “what ifs” that keep one wondering if this was the only way things could have turned out.
While these “what ifs” work skillfully to keep “determinism” at bay, Douglas does not supply her readers with all the information possible to truly develop a “plausible alternative” to the way that radio was developed. I think that the main barrier for a more tangible alternative is actually one of the features that made the book most enjoyable to read, the focus on telling a historical narrative. This narrative has a tendency to place a heavier emphasis on the paths that were taken as opposed to the paths that were abandoned. There are however many moments, where we are able to individually postulate on how things could be different. What if Marconi had been successful at his first attempt to sell the entire wireless system to shipping companies? Would he have been as concerned about advancing a policy of “nonintercommunication” if he were not leasing the machines? (69-71) Or later with the U.S. governments first began requiring ships to possess and utilize radio technology? (220) What if they had simultaneously enacted laws that would organize the use of certain frequencies for certain activities? This system could have been very different than the one enacted as a reaction to the Titanic disaster. Any of these changes could have had long lasting implications for the way radio works in the U.S. today, but ultimately these were not the strategies employed and as a result we are only left to wonder about the possibility that things could have been different. Douglass’ method of casting doubt is limited mostly by the historical record itself, with its bias toward what was as opposed to what could have been.