Category Archives: r6

r6: Love in the Time of the Internet

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I guess love really does come in all shapes, sizes, and ages. Reading Henry Johnson’s “Love Online” I was not as surprised that love could sprout between two teenagers online. I’ve never seen teenagers fall in love online so the story was quite amusing and even, dare I say it, cute! Instead, I was more surprised that their families supported their virtual relationship. I could imagine trying to tell my mom that I had a crush on a boy I was talking to in chat rooms. My mother would go off, demand that I stop talking to this boy immediately, and take away all my technology for around a month…Actually, maybe more.

I guess this article surprises me so much because I can’t even imagine a world where this would be possible. For myself and many of my friends, our parents are weary of us even casually communicating with people we don’t know online. Honestly, I have never even talked to a stranger online unless they were part of a website’s support team. Thus a relationship was completely out of the question. When I first think of online relationships begun in chat rooms, I think of those Lifetime movies where young girls get abducted. I know…not the best frame of reference. Perhaps it’s because I am a female, but honestly I could never imagine having the courage to start a relationship from a conversation in an online chat room.

I enjoyed reading Johnson’s anecdote. His perspective on online teen dating seemed as if it was just another development in dating relationships. What do you think? I’m all for love but when it comes to young teens chat rooms with strangers I think I draw the line. It’s great that Johnson’s son told his parents who his love interest. However, lots of teenagers aren’t as frank with their parents. I know – much of the dating that begins in online chat rooms is harmless. However, the risk factor that something might happen to a young, unsuspecting teenager has completely turned me, my family, and many of my friends off from online dating. I do not however, have any qualms about adults dating online. Adults have more life experience, wisdom, and can protect themselves a bit more. Additionally, adults often use trusted matchmaker sites to find love interests. I think that’s a way more credible. Though, I probably wouldn’t begin an online relationship, I’m much more supportive of adult relationships than young teenage ones.

 

r6: “New” Problem or “Volume” Problem?

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In the article “Activism,” the authors make a few key points regarding the internet today and its impact on politics.  Digital media allows anybody to advertise whatever it is that they want people to read or hear, whether it be fact or fiction.  This can lead to uneducated people telling other uneducated people unsubstantiated “facts” about something that they know absolutely nothing about.  Or, to the contrary, this can provide an open forum for people to discuss and communicate ideas about government and political agendas.  It’s all about sifting through the crap until you find something credible.

As for the notion that this is increasing the amount of mudslinging in campaigns… it’s debatable.  Politicians have always had to deal with slander and frivolous accusations during campaigns; after all, I’m sure you’ve all seen political cartoons before.

So maybe the volume of propaganda and misleading information is increasing.  But this is nothing new to the world of politics.  This is something that politicians have dealt with for a long time, and they’re going to have to continue to deal with it for the rest of time.  Being in the spotlight is tough, especially when digital media allows for everyone’s eyes—and ears and mouths and rapidly typing fingers—to be on you.

r6: the critical generation

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The most interesting idea that came from reading part 2 of Digital Divide was the idea that “NetGen” kids are more critical, that they scrutinize more. In “The Eight Net Gen Norms,” Don Tapscott talks about the eight identifying features of the NetGen generation, one of which is scrutiny. His argument for this particular conjecture (not that I disagree) is that we have to learn to be critical online because there is so much information. He has a point; there is a lot of information to drudge through on the internet.

His test for this idea he had that we were more scrutinous was ridiculous though; is there any reason this guy would know Angelina Jolie? And does this prove that we’re more scrutinous, because the younger generation didn’t believe such nonsense.

I was however impressed by Tapscott. Given how much he talked about his children, I expected him to be clueless about the NetGen’s grasp on the world, but for the most part he’s right. He’s much more in tune than much of this book is anyway.

My questions are whether or not we see ourselves as increasingly scrutinizing? Do professors (Professor Harris?) see us this way? If yes, then why? What is it about the world that makes us such doubters? Is it just photoshop and all the lies people can easily spread on the internet? Or is there more to this idea?

r6: The People’s Net

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While reading Douglas Rushkoff’s “The People’s Net,” I found myself disagreeing considerably with several points that the author brought up. Throughout his article, Rushkoff continually portrays the Internet as an idealistic world where evil corporations could not profit and every citizen is a do-gooder that simply wants to improve mankind. This just isn’t the case.

First of all, the reason why most corporations weren’t successful during the initial Internet craze was because they hadn’t discovered where and how to make money. Back then, it was all about shifting goods and services to the Internet and trying to grow by reaching untapped markets. However, the Internet wasn’t saturated enough with the population and the demand for products really wasn’t there. But nowadays, the next wave of Internet companies has learned where all the money is at: information. Companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google are sitting on a treasure trove of user data, and that sort of information is invaluable to commercial companies that are trying to reach the right group of consumers. Furthermore, the more and more functions like television and books move towards electronic or Internet related sources, the more market power tech companies are able to command.

And to Rushkoff’s second point, it seems that there are just as many people pursuing hurtful and unproductive motives on the Internet. There are 262 billion spam emails sent every day and a number of different viruses are trojans have wreaked billions of dollars of damages. Sure, “the experienced user is delighted in setting up a newbie’s connection,” but only because he can steal network information and later infiltrate the newbie’s computer and take whatever important information he wants. Maybe at one point in time, everyone enjoyed bettering the Internet for the sake of everyone else. But in this day and age, most people are only concerned finding ways to help themselves, directly or indirectly. Any benefit to the popular masses seems to be coincidental.

r6 All This Hot and Cold…Can I Get Room Temp?

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After reading Cathy Davidson’s article, I’m struck by the extremes with which these essays present technology and its educational capacity. Much like discussion during our last session, the essays either adamantly defend the efficacy of technology or declare that technology is the product of witchcraft. For Davidson’s article she seems to beatify technology, especially Wikipedia, without considering how it is used every day. Davidson emphasizes the power of a community of learners and the potential such online social academic environments hold for creating lifelong learners. The following was my initial response to Davidson’s claim:

Wikipedia? An community of lifelong learners? You mean the same Wikipedia in which Stephen Colbert asked his audience to change the pages of presidents, celebrities, and words? The same Wikipedia that, for almost a year, gave me the wrong Santorum (teehee)?

Admittedly, I love the idea of using Wikipedia in the classroom, and I plan on doing so; however, I find the lack of qualifying arguments—not even a hint at acknowledging the nay-sayer—within this book prevents it from providing a more productive look at the role of technology in our lives.

r6: The Eight Net-Gen Norms

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Since I found myself scrutinizing the majority of this book and feel as though the majority of it is out of date, I think it’s appropriate that I give a brief discussion on the article which specifically mentions “scrutiny” as a norm ingrained into my generation. I actually enjoyed the majority of this article and found Tapscott’s eight norms – freedom, customization, scrutiny, integrity, collaboration, entertainment, speed, and innovation – to be fairly, well, normal. Initially, I wasn’t sure that these terms were all direct outcomes of being a part of the so-called “net gen” with our constant internet access, but as I thought about it more, it seemed that even if the internet itself didn’t propel us towards valuing these ideas, it definitely helped.

There were a couple of these norms that really stuck out to me as worth being discussed further. Freedom, to me, is the most obvious example of a norm of our generation that’s well supported by the boom of the internet. As a young person with access to the internet, in the United States you can find basically anything you want. You could learn about things your parents or teachers might not tell you about (for better or for worse), you could chat with your friends, and so much more. This idea goes hand in hand with scrutiny – many times the information you’re seeking is to confirm whether or not your parents or teacher are really telling you the whole truth about a certain topic.

Another two of the terms which I automatically coupled in my head were integrity and collaboration. Tapscott tries to make the more noble point that our generation is setting higher standards of integrity for the people and companies we interact with, but I worry that our generation is taking advantage of the pure magnitude of information that’s on the internet – it’s easy to steal someone else’s idea without crediting them for an assignment with a good chance that nobody will ever know. This could further extend to the idea of collaboration. The internet is doing incredible things for collaborative efforts – take, for example, the googledoc. You could update a doc in real-time with people who you aren’t with. It’s a great way to get something done if you don’t feel like leaving the comforts of your apartment (which I rarely feel like doing.) On the other hand, because of the inherently collaborative nature of the internet, you could very easily end up in a gray area when it comes to intellectual property and things like that.

I believe Don Tapscott’s essay does a nice job of honing in on how the internet has influenced the way the “net gen” thinks about and faces the world.

r6 The world of online love

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In Henry Jenkins article “Love Online,” he describes his fifteen-year-old son’s online relationship with his girlfriend, Sarah. Jenkins claims his article is not a story about virtual relationships, but I found this hard to believe. He opens his article by telling readers he accompanied his son from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Omaha, Nebraska so his son, also named Henry, could meet his girlfriend face-to-face for the first time.

Jenkins has a positive portrayal of the online world of love. He points out that while there were “slim pickings” at Henry’s school, the world of cyberspace provided his son with a larger pool of possibilities. The digital world also allowed his son to record the beginning of his relationship as he backlogged chat discussions he had with Sarah.

Henry and Sarah first met in an online discussion group and had to practice good communication skills to maintain a long distance relationship. Such long-distance communications were also necessary for Henry’s great grandparents when they were forced to send letters to each other during the First World War. This comparison seems a little far-fetched, however. Henry’s great grandparents were forced to communicate long-distance after they had already met each other and fallen in love. Henry and Sarah’s relationship began as a form of long-distance communication as they had never even seen each other in person.

This form of “online love” immediately made me think of dating sites like eharmony and match.com. I have always been skeptical of these websites and find myself bothered by the handful of commercials that advertise these dating websites. Am I the only one who doesn’t believe those happy couples who claim they finally found love through the Internet? It’s not that I don’t believe the Internet doesn’t produce lasting and serious relationships. In fact, one of my friends from high school met his current girlfriend through Facebook. She lived in Sweden and messaged my friend after she saw him on the MTV show “Made.” At the same time, I feel like the Internet is an unreliable and unnatural source for relationships. I would never be able to get over the potential risk the Internet poses. How do the people using these websites know for certainty whether their date on the other end of the computer is in fact who they say they are? Call me old-fashioned, but I could never imagine flying my child half way across the country so he or she could meet their online crush.

Putting my skepticism about “online love” to the side, maybe it’s time I realize that the Internet has become a very plausible and acceptable for way for people to form relationships. Or perhaps, there are others like me, who still find this process very strange.

R6: Who wants to be president in a digital age?

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I found John Palfrey and Urs Gassner’s article “Activists” on civic engagement and political participation on the internet to be one of the most relevant for the year of 2012. It was thought-provoking, in that it showed how digital media has changed prior elections, and left me wondering how the internet will affect the political future. Their point that “internet engagement sites are usually only facilitators, rather than places of action” (199) rang particularly true, as I find myself as a user ignoring most issues online until I find one that I already had a vested interest in. Elections however, are an issue in which everyone has a vested interest, whether they engage or not.

Of course, the article missed a few key points while exalting alternative news sources like the Huffington Post. Candidates don’t need an online presence solely for campaign websites, fundraising, and social networking with voters; they need them to combat the inevitable mudslinging and thousands of online sources discrediting the candidates. In fact, the explosion of the internet has taken control away from campaign managers in elections. Those average citizens with the most fervent opinions on either side have the power to dig up dirt, make accusations, and divulge them throughout the internet. I’ve always found televised campaign commercials to be nasty and detrimental towards the democratic process, but with the internet, similar messages can be conveyed without a candidate having to announce their sponsorship of the commercial. I consider myself a moderate on the political spectrum, but have a hard time finding moderate news sources in an age where the extremes on both ends get the most attention.

Additionally, a lot of the articles in this section of Digital Divide mentioned that people of my generation are unaware that what we are putting on Facebook is available for people to see and track. A few years after these articles were published, this is no longer the case. Many of us now have privacy protections on our social media (although most of us also feel certain that there are ways for companies can get around this). I’d be curious to see how this changes elections 10-15 years down the road, when people of my generation find that they have digital histories that cannot be erased. Sure, George W. Bush and Barack Obama admitted to trying cocaine, and Bill Clinton smoked but “didn’t inhale” marijuana, but there is a huge difference between hearing these facts in speeches or reading them in biographies, and seeing messages, wall posts, and pictures of the young candidates in action. Will future candidates have to have a cleaner record? Will people intelligent enough to be president still be stupid enough to run?

In terms of the process of voting itself, I wonder whether the US will ever move to more advanced technological systems of voting that don’t require physical voting sites. As a Minnesotan, my absentee ballot still has to be sent my snail mail and requested months in advance. Despite advancements in registration and voting technology, the whole process of going to the polls and waiting in line seems strangely outdated in the digital age. I’m not arguing against the traditional, as online voting could potentially pose a huge security and falsification threat to our country, but I find it interesting that everything else regarding campaigns has changed so drastically, while voting itself has not.

R6: Internet-Industrial Complex

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Dichotomous thinking is the phenomenon where individuals abide by a black and white, either/or perception of the world. They seem to think that life consists of permanent, irrevocable tradeoffs that require the sacrifice of something for the attainment of another. Douglas Rushkoff in his essays “They call me cyberboy” and “The people’s net,” are two examples of an intelligent individual who constructs an argument based on the false notion that the internet can either be a tool for the common person, void of any commercialism, or a venue for industrial transactions and agenda. As with most things in life, I think the two can work hand in hand to maximize on the opportunities and resources the internet, and exclusively the internet, has to offer to create a more efficient and productive interface for the entire population, not just a subset.

“Every day more people conduct their daily business online. The Internet makes their lives more convenient. I can’t bring myself to see mere convenience as a victory. Sadly, cyberspace has become just another place to do business,” Rushkoff laments. Yes, he is right. The internet has opened its virtual doors to the long fingered reaches of industrial heavyweights. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He discusses in depth the benefit of the internet as a forum for the people and points to common functions such as messaging and picture sharing as the most important services the internet has to offer. I do not understand, however, how he thought philanthropy and altruistic techies alone would be able to provide such high-end services like Facebook or Gmail without some form of incoming revenue. As we have seen with industrial history, most businesses start with a brainchild that an individual sees come to fruition in a few well-created prototypes of his idea until he garners enough support that he can ask for financial donations. Only then, however, with some sort of monetary activation energy can an entrepreneur improve his product and provide it to the masses.

I think that by joining corporations with intellectual innovators, the internet has become a place where the next generation can take an idea that benefits the public, offer it to them in the most equalizing platform the world has to offer today—the internet—and have the incentive to do so because he or she will be able to make money off of it. Thus, innovation becomes a profession. Passion can only go so far—that is why the government and private corporations fund scientific research. The scientist loves his work, surely, and indeed the doctor does want to help humanity, but they have three meals a day and a mortgage to think about as well. With some semblance of a salary, the great thinkers of the upcoming generation will educate themselves further on the internet and use it to full capacity to provide even more services without having it seem like an irresponsible professional decision like majoring in art history and wanting to be a writer. (Don’t get me wrong; I want to be a writer. But try convincing a parent that their money is being well spent on a college education if that’s the end goal you have in mind.)

Finally,  my final qualm about Rushkoff’s essays are his assertions that the internet is becoming a corporate playing field and that the real important aspects of the internet such as conversation generation do not create the revenue these corporations seek. This seems incorrect and while I am no economics major, I do not think Facebook would have become the multibillion-dollar corporation it is if conversation did not generate revenue. Social networking as revolutionized human interaction and Facebook has pioneered a way to empirically embody the notion of “six degrees of separation” by allowing people to connect to friends and friends of friends based on social groups or shared interests. It is an autobiography that is constantly being rewritten and continued. It is something anyone from my little brother to my grandparents in India can use. It diminishes the importance of time difference, distance, socioeconomic status, education, race, religion, political affiliation or other such divisive factors. And it’s free. How many things in life that are free accomplish such ubiquitous change? Facebook is funded by advertisement revenue, primarily. Where do these dollar bills come from? Industries that want to get their name out. This is the perfect example of the symbiotic relationship between entrepreneurs aiming to tough the lives of the average global citizen and corporations out there looking to make a buck. Together, they form a internet-industrial complex that’s finest work is most likely yet to come.

R6: Digitally Engaged

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As we all know, part of the allure of the internet is that it allows for engagement with, rather than pure consumption of, information. In the final article of Section Two, entitled “Activists,” John Palfrey and Urs Gasser argue that despite this, we can’t count on it to solve the long-standing issue of civic disengagement (e.g., not voting in presidential elections) among young people in America. They claim, however, that the internet can “become an extraordinarily powerful tool of organization, recruitment, and participation.”

Palfrey and Gasser’s article got me thinking about Punk Voter, a (since discontinued) website that was popular prior around 2003 and aimed to “unite the youth vote and bring real activism back into our society.” The website encouraged ongoing communication between musicians – including some pretty popular ones like Green Day, Sum 41, and Rise Against – and their devoted listeners, who opposed the election of George W. Bush to office. The Punk Voter campaign took a pro-peace stand coming into the 2004 election and was committed to supporting voter registration drives, such that everyone who was eligible would, ideally, go out and vote against Bush.

At least, that was the goal. Of course, George Dubya ultimately won the presidential race, so the campaign wasn’t 100% successful. However, it did encourage young people – especially those involved in punk culture who were likely to view the government as oppressive and purposefully disengage themselves – to become more involved in civic matters. In that respect, I think Punk Voter was, indeed, an “extraordinarily powerful tool”: I myself remember wishing I were old enough to vote so that I could make some sort of contribution (the closest I got was buying their CD).

But this was eight years ago, and the internet has become much more detail oriented since: there are YouTube videos and Twitter accounts highlighting every move of those in the political sphere. Now, I feel, young people use the internet to find out every last detail about a given candidate before they commit to a vote, rather than looking to a general campaign to give them a thumbs up or down. Do widespread campaigns like Punk Voter even exist for the 2012 election? And if so, would voters be as willing to rally together as they were in 2004? Or is this mode of campaigning overshadowed by more specific information, like videos of Rick Perry proclaiming the teachings of the church?