Rethinking Privacy Part 2

In part 1 I talked about how people should focus more on how people are using their data rather than just obsessing over the invasion of privacy. Not many people actually stalk you with that information, it's used for marketing purposes and statistical data or even to ensure safety such as in places like the airport.

Leading off of the idea of the importance on how "invasion of privacy" is used, the concept of parents being able to track their children should be of more concern. Unlike companies and the government who track you as simply a number in a system, parents are interested in exactly what their children are doing and why.

When is it appropriate to stalk your child? "Stalking" is a strong word, but by definition it is pursuing someone with "unwanted or obsessive attention" (dictionary.com). Most teenagers would describe getting tagged with a GPS tracker as falling under that category. How about for young children who don't know any better than to trust strangers or wander off? I personally think GPS trackers, particularly in a theme park where there are so many distractions and so many people that it's easy to lose your child, where is that line when the child becomes too old to be constantly followed?

By insisting on tracking your teenager, it can create problems where the teenager thinks you don't trust them enough to make the right decisions. Shouldn't there be a moment when you have to be satisfied that you raised your child to make good decisions? If not, trying to control them into their teenage years or young adulthood isn't going to have any impact on them except make them resent you more for your lack of trust.

I think parents need to make their own distinction based on their child's personality and maturity when to let go of the tracker, although if they continue using it into their child's teenage years that would be cause for concern. We need to worry about defining that line between using tracking devices for safety or for stalking.

Responsibility

In a world where the internet is an open and free marketplace of ideas, one must realize that this "free" and open marketplace is not truly free. As I've said before, the internet levels the playing field, giving power to the humble masses of the untelevised and the uncontracted. This is a source, a wonderful outlet, to exercise 1st Amendment rights and let your voice be heard in an open venue.

However, this marketplace of ideas isn't exactly free. It comes with certain responsibilities tied to posting your opinion online for all the world to partake of.

With great power comes great responsibility....

Yes I just made that reference.

It's like Dr. Mike said the other day in other day in class, "Is everyone entitled to their opinion?" And of course, as he iterated, NO. They're entitled to have their informed opinion. Those two syllables make all the difference in the kind of opinion that should be allowed to be expressed online, via these 1st Amendment rights. To have an opinion is one thing. Exhibit A: The frivolous hypothetical example....Say your friend is wearing a new yellow dress. It compliments her figure, and the color brings out her eyes brilliantly. The stitching is just gorgeous and the material is to die for. You compliment her on it, saying that that particular designer is a genius, and she thanks you with a smile. This is the opinion of someone who is seeing a solution from one side of the glass. This could be an example of an uninformed opinion. But say you were to find out that the Chinese orphans that sewed that dress together in a sweatshop were paid only four cents an hour and were forced to stretch themselves beyond the means of most child labor laws. Suddenly, that dress doesn't look quite as fabulous. Now, you are able to have an informed opinion about that particular designer and how their business is run.

Now of course, that's a ridiculous example, but I didn't want to use a real-life example. The main point being that rather than shutting oneself off from all sides of an issue, you should expose yourself fully to all points of view before forming an original thought to post for all the world to see. Know that it is your responsibility to your first amendment rights. You can have any opinion you like, that is, any informed opinion.

Insights and More Tie-Ins

I think the ideas we've been discussing in class recently are really interesting. It's helping me understand how we use technology in all new ways, which I suppose is the point.  It's likely that most people our age, because we grew up with all this rapidly developing technology, have gone through our lives as passive receivers of technological information, without really taking the time to figure out hows and whys of it.  How it works and why it works and how and why we should or shouldn't use it.  The idea is to be informed, and this point is often missed on people our age--or maybe even people in general.

Another tie-in with one of my other classes is that we recently read a short story that takes place in a futuristic virtual world.  This world is much like the "real" world, but things like graphic violence and sex are not possible...yet.  As the story unfolds, the main character and others discover that new developments are being made, and that these things are increasingly more possible.  Someone stabs the main character, and he actually begins to virtually die--all the progress he's made in this virtual world will be erased if he dies completely.  The persons stabbing him thinks it's funny. Then he learns that his virtual girlfriend is actually a man in real life, and has a wife and kids. When the main character learns this, he goes from wanting to find some way to stay alive in this world, to telling his attacker to stab him more.

I believe the point the author is trying to make with this story is that technology can often cause us to detach from things emotionally, and to adopt the mindset that because something his happening in virtual space, it is irrelevant to or cannot affect people in the "real" world. But if one thinks about it, things that occur through technology are as real as anything else, but in a different way.  The things one does on the internet can affect real people in the physical world. I thought all that was relevant to this class.

YouTube Comments Glitch to 200 Character Limit: Causes Discussion on Discourse

Don't get me wrong. I've never perceived YouTube comment sections as the best place to have discussion on a topic, but given the right group of people, discussion could be useful.

However, YouTube (or should I say Google?) briefly had a glitch in which the character limit on comments changed from 500 to 200. Google employees cleared up this issue on the forums saying the 200 character limit was not intentional, but this news didn't even reach well-known celebrities on YouTube.

The popular video blogger and best selling author John Green had this to say on his twitter:

Of course, one can not avoid the irony that this was posted to Twitter, which has an infamous 140 character limit to text, the equivalent to soundbites on television. Despite this, Twitter is meant to be a place to see snippits of information, sometimes followed by a link to more information.

YouTube comments on the other hand don't have a specific goal in mind. Sure, it's meant to be used to give the creator of the video feedback, but it sometimes becomes a discussion. In the best (a.k.a. rarest) cases, there will be meaningful discourse about the subject of the video. In the worst cases, there will be religious or political discussion on a cat video.

Dan Brown made this video in response to John Green's tweet, outlining how 200 characters can actually be a good thing.



Dan Brown seems to be saying that limiting comments to 200 characters prevents users from being intimidated by the "immense wall of text" and forces commenters to "get to the point." Are we really at that point where 500 characters is considered too much for people to handle? I'm also very concerned about Dan's opinion that users should "embrace any and all experimentation on YouTube's part to try to make the comment section [better.]"

Dan Brown did bring up the interesting point that limiting the character limit on typed comments would encourage people to make more video responses. While I support this new form of internet discourse, it poses a problem for me for two reasons. (1) Not everyone on the Internet or YouTube has a camera, though it seems like a great majority do. Even though this is not a huge problem, it still leaves out a portion of the Internet population. (2) If all the text comments were changed to video responses, YouTube servers would have trouble handling the increased data flow. I think it's pretty common knowledge that videos take up more space on servers than text.

Of course, a lot of this discussion on whether YouTube should have a 200 character limit or not is moot, since it was not a legitimate change in the system, but rather a glitch. It did spawn a rather interesting debate on how discourse on YouTube should take place.

Rethinking Privacy Part 1

Morville's chapter five made me a bit more aware--and thus more paranoid about what the future holds for privacy.

To be honest, I've never understood why so many people are paranoid about their privacy. For example one of my teachers is angry that Ball State tracks when you are in the gym. At a glance that looks like an invasion of privacy, but what does privacy even mean?

As a society we like our privacy, but years ago before cars puttered around and expanded our living radius to more than 20 miles, communities were just as intimate. They knew who you were, where you were and what you did.

I think the issue here is what people do with your information. When my professor said he was enraged about Ball State's tracking system, I didn't see it from the same point of view. Despite our best efforts, we are going to become more "findable." I think the important thing is what is done with the information. Honestly, I doubt Ball State actually cares about you. They don't care whether you are in the gym or not. They don't use it to track you as a person, just to see how many people are in the gym.

Another example of privacy invasion is airport security with the new x-ray system. People feel like that is an invasion of privacy, but if the trade off of that is to stop terrorists, I'm okay with that. I can suffer having strangers who will never see me again be able to see the outline of my body.

Again, I think an important matter is to determine what the government/businesses are using your information for. People don't like security cameras, but it helps deter crime. If someone kidnaps me, I'll be thankful that they will be able to find the last place I was seen. These are rare circumstances, but they happen. Overall, the government/businesses don't care about YOU, they care about information to make their business run better and more efficiently. They aren't stalking you.

We need to rethink privacy because unless you plan on living like a hermit, our idea of "privacy" is going to be invaded on a daily basis.

With that being said, there is another type of privacy invasion that is different from observation by strangers: Invasion of privacy by parents/family/friends. While the government doesn't care about you, being tracked by family members has a whole new meaning. They DO care about where you are and what you do. For me personally, that's the real "invasion of privacy," not Ball State tracking my location every time I swipe my ID card.

Because this is such a big issue, I'm going to split it in to two blogs and post the second part next week. In Part 2 I will talk about the other type of privacy invasion by family and friends, specifically concerning tracking children/teens with a GPS tracker.

The Machine is using us...

My dad always told me don't believe everything you hear and don't believe everything you read. Don't believe everything that's on TV, and don't believe everyone that has power. Don't even believe everything that he says. He thinks that it is so important for young people to form their own opinions about what happens in the world, provided that they are well-informed. And most people with internet access cannot help but be "well-informed."

We talked today about why it's important that we know who the major players are in digital literacy. Government and business all concerned with how people are consuming and processing information they receive. Sarah posted a blog last week about how the internet offers equal opportunities in posting information and opinions online. Even in Wikipedia, anybody with an internet connection can go onto the website and edit articles to their heart's content, with or without citation. While this level playing field can be a good example of the First Amendment, that doesn't mean that information-devouring web surfers should be swallowing everything they read.

It's hard to think of our society as a series of robots, who are being fed information and processing it as truth, just like computers when they are built. Because we are human beings, and therefore are able to think, process, and form our own opinions, some may not want to accept that out of mental sloth, we are willing to accept opinions as FACT. There are man people who subscribe to a specific political party or title, who are listening to the words of their leaders and decided that because that is the opinion of their party, that is also their personal opinion. It scares me how easily some Americans can be so easily swayed by the power of oratory in this country. The automation of the internet and its vast cesspool of opinion and here-say is having a similar effect.

Now, the end of the Web 2.0 makes me think on a whole new level, especially near the end, where it makes the statement that we are going to have to do a lot of rethinking, especially ourselves. And that means, I think, the reexamination of how we process information, not only by receiving it, but decided what it means to us and whether or not we agree.

1984 Findability?

This new book we're reading is really making me think, which I guess is the point. It was written seven years ago and I've still never heard of this technology.  It interests and disturbs me at the same time.  But is it really all that different from tracking what we do online? Not really, since people do almost everything online nowadays.  It can be good in some ways and bad in others, just like any technology...but the fact that we don't have a say, that it's happening to us automatically, is scary to me.  It's coming to the point where almost anyone can find out anything about you with a few clicks of a mouse.  It's like something from 1984. And if you haven't read that, you definitely should!  It seems to get more and more relevant as technology is developed. Just a few thoughts that surfaced while reading Ambient Findability.

Unanswered Questions

The other day I made the comment that the Internet is much unlike other media in the way that it is accessible to more people than ever and that you can publish text, images, and video much easier than the past. In the past, you had to get accepted by publishers for text and studios for video. Now, everyone is able to publish and get their voice heard.

And then Dr. Mike asked, "Do they really?"

At first, I thought, "Well, of course! What kind of argument is 'Do they really?' anyway?" But it wasn't really an argument, it was rhetorical question that my confirmation bias kept me from finding the truth of the matter. No one else in class seemed to care, and we passed by it pretty quickly.

But now that question is gnawing at me. "Do they really?" It's like a Zen riddle.

I guess what we need to take into account is that with a million voices making up the static of discourse in the internet, is your voice really heard? Who outside of the class is reading this blog? Probably no one. We still have a gap between the static of information on the internet and the websites and users that get the most views.

YouTube is a great demonstration of this fact. There's no filter (other than the guidelines against violence, sex, and other inappropriate things), and there's a lot of low quality videos on the video portal. However, only a select few probably get more than 100,000 views on each of their videos, and even less get paid to do so.

Does that make my point invalid though? Although only a few select people get views and get paid for it, it's ultimately the collective of the internet that decided that these channels are worth watching and viewing. Sadly, this means the lowest common denominator determines a great deal of what is given the most attention.

What does this mean for the future of our society as we have more generations born into the internet? It's too late to tell right now of course, but in order to keep from falling into the pit of intellectual despair, we need to keep our minds open. We need to explore our resources. We need to stop paying attention to the content that gives us no meaning and become perpetual students, never satisfied with unanswered questions.

Does the Internet Provide for Equal Opportunity?

In some of the articles we read earlier this semester, they talked about how the printing press made more people into publishers. Things that had been accessible by only a small population is now open to more people.

Did it really?

In Clay Shirky's second book, "Cognitive Surplus" (we are reading the first book in this class later this semester) he talks about how publishing, which had at one point been accessible only to a small population of people, has now turned everybody into publishers. Blogs have turned everybody into writers.

Does it really?

Instead of just simply being "published" there are now tiers of publishers, writers, actors and anything else that can be accessed by the general public. What's the fun of turning everyone into a publisher/writer/actor? With every step of technology, the stakes of becoming a publisher/writer/actor also increases. Sure, you can self-publish now, but most people still won't consider you to be a writer until you have a publisher backing you up. With the rise of small, independent companies, even that is not as credible as the huge corporate companies.

We still consider "movie stars" as people who are endorsed and paid millions of dollars and show up on the movie theater screens across the world. This is how we wade through the millions of amateur videos on the internet. Anyone can be a musician now, but we have the highest respect for the ones we hear on the radio.

With the accessibility the internet gives us, this does not make us equal. To be honest, not everybody would make a good writer, or a good actor or a good musician. Now that anyone who wants to be any of these professions can, we have a flood of less than desirable information on the web. How are we supposed to sort it all out?

In my opinion, no matter how much power the internet gives us, there is always going to be a higher elite above that. While there is still some bad (in my opinion) music/movies/books in that "elite" industry, I don't think it's such a bad thing to have requirements in order to be considered professional. I don't think this will ever change anyway.

Intellectually Unpacking

Today, I liked Dr. Mike's comment about "intellectually unpacking" certain types of content. In terms of information access, technology, specifically the internet, has been a floodgate for those thirsty for knowledge. Wikipedia, for the most part, is a vast wealth of knowledge for the common man. The power not only to attain information via the internet, but also have the freedoms to go in and add information of one's own gives a supreme freedom to the common man with internet access. This creates an open marketplace of ideas. With information at your fingertips via technology, the Digital Divide is growing shorter and shorter every day. There are so many countries where there are whole populations without access to information technology. What would life be like if you couldn't remember the specific year a major war began? Today in class, no one could tell Dr. Mike what year the Civil War began until someone opened a web browser on their laptop and used technology to answer a question. Now, while this information technology opens many doors for people seeking valuable information, there is also the concern that the evolution of education may lead to the discontinued use of printed sources and a lack of ability to seek out information in an "analog" fashion (i.e. using a library to find information in printed sources). But even in that light, I think it's almost impossible to place a price on the value of technology's freedom of "intellectually unpacking."

More Opinions About Selfe's Book

There isn't really that much for me to discuss this week...I've been reading more of Selfe's book, obviously.  It's a bit of a dry read; to me it kind of drags on.  Of course, it continues to encourage parents to discourage their children from using computers for anything other than academics, which is irritating.  The people quoted in this book tend to act like education and mindlessness are binary opposites that have no gray area, that these are the only things computers can be used for.

To me, even watching people vlogging on YouTube can be "educational"; sometimes you go onto someone's channel and, by watching them talk about their thoughts on various things, you learn about them as if in a documentary...it can be really cool.  If you want to know about something, you can look it up on YouTube, usually. Tumblr can be educational, if you follow art or science blogs, or blogs that cover things like current events and politics.  Even Facebook can be more than just a "mindless" way to waste time; as someone in our class pointed out, riots and protests have been organized on Facebook. Once again, the lesson seems to come down to, "It's all in how you use it".

I also think it's kind of irritating how the politicians and people quoted in this book are pushing the "American way" of life on everyone, and how that's their definition of progress.  I mean, maybe things other than Capitalism haven't worked for other countries in the past, but why should we push our way of doing things on everyone? It has its flaws too!  Sometimes I feel like America is the arrogant douchebag of the world, trying to bully everyone into doing things the way it does.  Sorry if that was offensive, but I feel it's true sometimes.  I actually came across a meme (on Tumblr) that suggested something similar and found it pretty funny.  Just a few more of my opinions on the book.

Amazon to Test Brick and Motar Store in Seattle

It may sound like Amazon is going to start selling books at physical stores, but in reality, the company is actually testing out new ways to sell their tablets. Probably competing with Apple's stores, Reuters is reporting that the online behemoth is planning "to showcase and sell its growing line of gadgets, including the Kindle Fire tablet." So far there has been no reports on whether or not they are thinking of expanding to sell books at the store. There was speculation in Daily Finance that "it's quite possible that an Amazon Store could eventually carry a wide range of products." I do believe selling books in an Amazon store would fill the great vacuum in the physical book store market that Amazon helped create in the first place.

Do you think this is a good move on Amazon's part? Will customers go to a physical store to try out the new Kindle, or will they trust online reviews and buy it like online as usual?

Comfort Zone

Humans don't like change, and when we are shoved out of our comfort zones we act like it's the end of the world. Let me give an example: Facebook. How many times has Facebook changed their layout? Each and every time, without fail, there is a massive uproar. I've never heard anyone in the first week say: "Oh, I like the new design." We hate change. Within a week or two (for the more resistant Facebookers) people settle down and soon that layout becomes the norm until they do another layout change.

This isn't just portrayed in social media, either. As we read in Pencils to Pixels, people have always resisted change in technology. Pencils... typewriter... telegraph... Even Socrates was opposed to then notion of moving speech to paper because he thought it would make us dumber. Sound familiar?

This does, however bring up an interest question. Do we become accustomed to change because we have no other choice? We accept Facebook's newest layout because we have no other choice. We can't stop the universal shift toward the internet.

What do you think, if we had a choice to leave things the same, would we? Or would we realize that change might not be so bad once we get the hang of how to navigate and use it properly?

Illumination via Mapping Project

*I attempted to post this on Monday, but apparently it didn't go through. Thanks to Michael for letting me know.

Today when we had an opportunity to revise our maps, not only did it give me a chance to better understand this assignment, but once I got my ideas down on paper, I really got the true meat of this assignment. I'd never acknowledged how completely integrated my life was in technology. I rely on it for everything. My news, my social interactions, even my television. I have no idea when the last time was that I actually sat down in front of a television and watched a television program. I view all my favorite programs through the internet. There are people in my life whom I would never talk to if I didn't interact with them via Facebook or Twitter. Technology in itself is so important to my education. Were it not for the internet, I wouldn't have access to essential student resources such as Blackboard or Gradebook. I use my laptop to download textbooks from the Internet at a reduced price. In comparison to a print textbook, an electronic textbook allows me to find information easily and quickly just by entering my desired topic into the search bar. Overall, without it, I don't know how I would be able to function without the internet. The mapping project has allowed me to see that.

Born Into Technology

I haven't been in class recently (so sorry about that!), so I don't really know much about what's been discussed, but I have been reading Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century by Cynthia L. Selfe on my own time, and I just sort of find it funny that we're reading a book on modern technology that was written in 1999...over 13 years ago. At first I thought it couldn't really be all that relevant, with the way technology develops so quickly, but at that point most of us in the class were really too young to know the issues and debates that were going on about technology in that time period.  We were sort of born into this rise of the Internet and computers and it has developed and matured with us, so many of us probably wonder why it's even being debated. We (or at least I) didn't or still don't understand how much societal change has occurred in our lifetime because of the rise of the computer and Internet age.

I didn't realize that all these debates were going on at all. Some of the arguments the book tries to make seem so backward to me now that we're 13 years in the future and now some of their fears have been disproved. I don't really like how, in the second chapter of the book, someone suggests that using computers or the Internet for anything other than schoolwork or research or very official, dryly academic objectives is some kind of moral faux pas.  Using something for entertainment isn't some kind of misuse, the way whoever said this is implying. That just sort of rubbed me the wrong way, I guess. And, oftentimes, entertainment and education overlap--which I think is usually the case with modern technology. And what about art? That definitely can take the form of what many people consider useless entertainment. There is a fine line here.

Just my two cents about the book so far...

Why the Internet isn't Reaching its Full Potential

Last week, I discussed how the Internet is a global village we all contribute to. Today, I'll attempt to explain why this hasn't quite caught on and why the majority of the Internet's population isn't using the Internet to its full potential.

In years before the Internet, we were always limited by our medium. Books could only hold so many words, cassette tapes could only have a few hours of audio if we were lucky, and VHS's typically only had one movie on them with little or no bonus features. (In the cases of large movies like Titanic, you had two tapes.)

This is becoming less and less so with the fantastic electronic media that we have today. Sure we're still limited to our hard drives and servers as far as our movie and music collection, but as far as text is involved, we have virtually unlimited space to work with.

Despite this, it seems that many of the users on the Internet aren't taking advantage of the great power that we have. Of course, there are problems with the sites themselves, (YouTube and Twitter limiting the number of characters on comments and posts respectively) but the real problem seems to lie in the fact that we popularized the Internet while the television was the largest medium of mass communication at the time. Short news bits are what we are used to, and we perceive that we have little time to read.

In case you didn't know, TLDR stands for "Too Long, Didn't Read."

I feel strange talking about my generation as if I am an outsider, but in many ways I feel so different from the majority of the 18-25 demographic. I'm not hooked on reality television or pop music. I prefer my media with a little meat and substance. Of course, this doesn't mean I don't like browsing through LOLcats or memes every once in a while, but I don't spend an hour looking at them on TV or listening to remixes of "Do a Barrel Roll" like it's art.

I guess I'm just disappointed at the fact that we have so much potential to change our world with the internet, but we're still caught up in our inability to process anything longer than a full page of single-spaced text before feeling fatigued enough to say, "tl;dr."