Allegory

There is a reason why it took big business so long to figure how to use the internet in a way that does not make them look foolish  (compare the sites here with their sites now). People are afraid to take risks. If we weren't, then everyone would be an avant-garde street artist. There is a reason that peer pressure is the focus of anti-drug and underage drinking campaigns. Not only do employees of companies have to overcome their own fears of failure, but then that have to convince their higher-ups that their crackpot idea is not actually a crackpot idea. And now the higher-up has to go to his own higher-up with the exact same idea and exact same goal. 

It's really nice to point to things like the Cluetrain Manifesto and tell companies that they should implement these kind of ideas if they want to succeed on the internet, but not only do you have to convince them that it would work, but they then have to actually implement them in a way that is not only true to the Manifesto, or whatever set of ideas you have, but also makes them money.

Huge corporations make a lot of money. They will always make a lot of money, whether or not they use the internet effectively. While it is true that the internet can make these companies more money, why risk the embarrassment of failing on the public stage if you can let someone else take the risk and still make money off it (think of the iphone and all the companies that are now making iphone clones). 

Ten years in the making.

"Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K."

"The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual
Copyright © 1999, 2001 Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger.
All rights reserved. "

All of what these 95 Theses hold true for today. It's been ten years since Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger collected these here, how can these problems still exist? If companies were exhibiting a lack of willingness to communicate and cooperate together then, how entrenched must they be in their ways today? 

We really do love the Dutch

Although you can't read this, unless you're Merel, it says that the Dutch company Lego no longer has exclusive rights to lego blocks.

" "The European Department of Justice has decided that the Danish company Lego does not have exclusive rights to the lego building block anymore (sorry, it's in Dutch). Lego went to court after a Canadian firm had made blocks that were so like lego blocks that they even fit the real blocks made by Lego. The European judge decided that the design of the lego blocks is not protected by European trademarks and so anyone can make the blocks."

If true, hopefully this will open doors for people interested in inexpensive bulk purchase of bricks of specific sizes and colors. Perhaps at long last I can build a life-sized Hemos statue for my office. "

The Sims

I totally agree that Will Wright is correct in saying that The Sims is a parody of consumerism. If you have ever played the game, especially if you have played the game without cheats, it is so hard to keep your sim happy. In fact, your primary goal in the game is to keep him happy. They have a a list of primary 'needs' and each one is matched to a meter that shows how fufilled that particular need is. It is complicated to the point that it is not fun for me to try play the game with a whole family of sims because as you would imagine it is exponentially harder the more sims you need to follow.

Medias

To best conceptualize the current media setup I would say that it was a combination of industrial media with the intent of reaching out to millions, and tactical media aimed at much smaller demographics. I feel that these two names fit the best because the mainstream media, because of the internet, no longer can carefully and deliberatly reaserch a story, but must find whatever they can about it and publish that before someone on the internet or in another media firm gets the story. The tactical media is looking at stories in a much smaller scope. They do not have the resources to reaserch big stories like thier industrial counterparts, but they want their stories to still have a big impact with the demographic that they aim for.

Digital Media

Before Barack Obama gave his victory speech, there were pundits heralding his use of the internet and how it was probably the biggest reason he won the election. Now, these pundits were mostly refering to his use of online fundraising on his website, I think that it was internet media in general that helped him. He ran a extremely grass-roots campaign, but I also think that it was an extremely tube-roots campaign (if you'll allow me to invent that phrase). What I mean by that is people, not necessarily even connected with his campaign, were able to post on blogs, and forums their opinions on the candidates. If you look at the demographics (here and here) it wouldn't be unbelievable to say that Obama conected with the youth vote through the internet.

So I feel that the more time that passes, the more people will be saying that the internet is now essential to any future political campaign.

Afraid

I've been watching some of the speeches our Presidential candidates have been having today in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and I was thinking of how angry half the country is going to be come November 5th. I had read in a NY times article on Friday that half of the people who had chosen a candidate were "scared" about the other candidate being elected.

Think about it.

"The survey found that opinions of Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain had hardened considerably, as 9 out of 10 voters who said they had settled on a candidate said their minds were made up, and a growing number of them called it “extremely important” that their candidate win the election. Roughly half of each candidate’s supporters said they were “scared” of what the other candidate would do if elected. Just 4 percent of voters were undecided, and when they were pressed to say whom they leaned toward, the shape of the race remained essentially the same."

No matter who is elected thet are immediatly going to have one of the worst presidential approval ratings if you ignore current President Bush. Not only that, but either way the economy looks like its going to get worse before it gets better. Plus the aftermath of the new President's influence on the war in Iraq. 

Am I alone in this worry? Because no one I know has mentioned it to me, and I have not mentioned it to anyone else either.

I really mean think about it, I would recommend not replying immediatly after reading. Unless, of course, if I am not alone. 

Wassup 2008

We should be doing this

Read this before so you know what 'this' is.


$22 Billion? Imagine how many of these cities we could have built for the cost of the Iraq war(I did the math: 25 and counting).

"A supply shortage for classes of offshore rigs capable of drilling in up to 10,000 feet of water means that the daily rate that operators pay to rent a high-end, deep-water drilling rig is now $500,000 to $550,000. That’s up from a day rate of $450,000 to $500,000 a year ago-and more than double the price per day on the spot market just three years ago, according to ODS-Petrodata Consulting & Research."

I did the math for you and that $22 billion would be able to sustain one rented offshore drilling rig for about 120 years. However I'm sure you are all aware that this kind of drilling is directly harmful to the environment on top of the harm that the burning of fossil fuels causes.

It isn't often that you find out that a presidential candidate is personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds.

Just like the title says.

Why the hell would the Dems pull their punches like this? Why not ask him about it?

Holy shit

Palin's 'going rogue,' McCain aide says

You'd think that they would at least want to keep it in the family. Why would they let something like this leak to the press? It could torpedo any faith people have in the potential McCain/Palin administration.

Somethings to ponder

What a McCain/Palin mob looks like.

McCain gets boos at GOP rally for defending Obama.


Just for kicks.

Get This:

A secret memo controls the rules of the presidential debates - should it?

I never heard about this, did you?

Look at how advanced they are!

The section in ch18 about Stormfront.org about their forums makes them seem very dedicated to "Foster[ing] an online community." However, all of the tools that their site uses are used by close to every single online forum. If you look all the way at the bottom of the page it says "Powered by vBulletin." If you go to the vBulletin website, the first thing they say about themselves is:

"It gives you an instant community that lets your visitors interact, take part in discussions, ask questions, give answers and express opinions."

Take a peak at their Features section. It lists, very briefly, almost everything that Statzel details about the Strormfront forum.

I'm not trying to take a dig at Statzel, I have no idea what she knows about vBulletin and how prevalent it is. What I am trying to get at is how easy it is for someone with $180 and the determination to create a hugely successful online community to start attracting members.

If there was no white supremacist site on the internet I would actually be kind of shocked, because you don't need to know how to code in html, or any other programming language. With the availibility of web servers (a google search for "web server rental" yields 757,000 results) one need not even own a server to host the website. In order to start and moderate a web forum needs little more than basic computer literacy.

Vote

It's the weekend after all, too bad the debate is over

Food for Thought

Something to chew on.

Maybe it will expand your mind a little. Who knows?

Wording

It was recently explained to be by the Prof, why Andrejevic seems very calm in the book(to Prof, please correct me if I get it wrong again). Just in case you also missed it, "this one's for you".

He speaks in such a calm manner because he is trying to convince pople who don't already agree with him, and it makes sense to sounds like a reasonable human being when you're trying to convince people that your argument is valid.

However, I wish that he had actually sounded a little more confrontational, but that just might be cause I like controversy. And I would have liked a little more definition of "interactivity" as he used the term, because it took a while for me to fully figure out what he meant with the word.

Hallelujah

Salvation?

This could be it. This could be the first strike back against the grip of corporate surveilance. 

Internet Forums in Real Life

So last night some asshole puked in three of the sinks in the bathroom on my floor. Usually I would just gripe about it to my roommate, but not really go any farther. Now it seems kinda lame from your point of view but i duct taped a message in an easily readable location in my bathroom that says

"Sinks are exclusivly for bathing purposes (aka washing hands/face, brushing teeth, etc.). Toilets are convineniently located for puking in.

~Thanks

Everyone you fucked over by puking in our sinks"

I forgot to mention that there was zero vomit anywhere else in the bathroom but in the three sinks. 

Anyway, that message strikes me as sounding like it could have been posted on some kind od internet forum so I decided to share with everyone.

Cheers...

PS I have road rash on my leg and elbow and enjoy cleaning and re-bandaging my wounds in front of a sink.

PPS If you couldn't tell, I'm super pissed and if you know who puked in the sinks on deCordova(south) 4th floor let them know that they are a terrible person.

Responce to responces

Jen wrote a whole bunch of stuff here that you should read first.

People who thought it was so different to invade someone's room and catalog everything they saw are having a hard time seeing the other point of view.

The reason that invading someone's home and keeping information about them is wrong is that we, as a society, have decided that it is a morally wrong (and in most cases CRIMINALLY) wrong. The internet has become what is now in our generation.

The online world is effectively a new society, where we are now trying to hash out a new set of morals and ground rules. In order to properly understand the internet you have to completely disengage yourself from the real world and all its social mores. That is not to say that we cannot define the social mores of the internet to mirror those of the real world, but without complete control of the internet resting in the hands of one governing body, it is left to each site to decide for itself what goes.

Back to the raison d'etre of this post. Just because corps are allowed to catalog us now without our consent, and hide the information they have from us does not mean that it has to be that way forever. The argument shouldn't be about whether we feel fine with letting them own our personal information, it should be about whether we want to let it stay that way.

Why should it be up to corps to decide what the rules about internet privacy should be? When big companies try to tell our government what to do people go to prison ala Jack Abramoff.

Responce to BG

BG said on a reply to my Everything is Private? post :
"Think about the other countries in the world that are already going into this direction. For example, Tibet has a ban on youtube. Tibet is not the only one as the list is growing. For those citizens, that is what they have been used to so it is nothing new not to have direct access to youtube.

If we start heading into this direction will the government start banning too many websites? Should the government be tasked with this job or should it be some sort of third party agency?"


Why should there be any need for some organization be tasked with policing the internet? The internet is the wild west, even if people decide that they want some kind of web monitoring going on, it is not in their right to force it on the rest of us. Granted there are businesses that make tons of money by supplying handy internet censorship for almost every corporation in America, but those are fundamentally different. Or are they? Technically they work exactly the same, by blocking certain websites from a specific set of ip addresses.

The same argument that corps use to defend their web restrictions are the same as those used by whole nations.

The difference is that when you're at work you may not be allowed to see something, but you can just go home and look at any of those websites that you couldn't whilst at work. However, if you can't look at those sites at home, there is no way you can go to work and see them.

Net Neutrality again!

It's so important even google wants you to think about it.

Everything is public?

The whole god damned universe is a public space. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE WAS ONCE A TOTALLY PUBLIC REALM. But it was decided that people don't want everything to be known to everyone. Why do we have tinted windows in cars? Window shades in houses? Unlisted phone numbers? Because it was left to people to decide what of their actions that they wanted to be publicly known.

What is the internet if it is not an ONLINE UNIVERSE, the only difference is that we have yet to lay down rules as to what is OK for other people to see and know. That is why it needs to be US the people, not mega-corps, who need to decide what is fair game.

Interspantion

The question/criticism from class that struck me the most was: "The internet grew too fast; are there any limits left?"

That begs the question of whether the internet had any limits to begin with. I think the fact that the internet grew so rapidly was due to the fact that, by its very nature, it's a limitless universe. There is potentially unlimited amount of storage space on it for any and every type of medium.

Who is to say what should have been the speed at which the internet expanded, also. It seems like it expanded as fast as it should have. It was something so new, there was a California-esque gold rush, during the dot com explosion, but that was just a way of learning how much our society could handle.

So perhaps its better to say that the internet grew at the appropriate speed, and it is totally limitless and has been from the start.

Net Neutrality

An Exercise in Futility

Just by reading the first two pages of iSpy, I feel overcome with an unbeatable sense of futility. Why, you ask? Because the limited ammount of us who do not think it is worth it to access free internet in return for having all of our online intereactions categorized and then unsed to selectivly target us for adverisments. From my understanding of Google's free wireless service in San Fran, it seems as if the user has no option to disable the ads. 

Even if 10% of people feel that the price for using this free wireless is too high, companies will continue to offer it in more and more cities because 9x more people want it then don't want it. Which will push technology to require the use of these free wireless tracking services. This begs the question: where does the categorization stop?

We Are Legion

/b/ itself

The biggest /b/ controversy

I admit, I am a /b/tard. 

I hate having to use the word 'admit' because it makes it seem like I am guilty or sorry or wrong. People seem to think that all the social morals from the RL (real life for the uninitiated) carry over onto the internet. They don't, at least not a a global level. It is up to the specific website to create its own set of morals to govern their social interactions. And while it is usually the case that websites try to maintain a RL level of morals, some don't. These are the sites that tend to attract the most controversy and hatred. It's fun to be able to go somewhere and leave your morals behind. It's liberating and exciting; how could it not be? The only reason people don't treat other like shit in real life is that they can't get away with it, online you can. Especially in a place like /b/. 

Just because I am a /b/tard doesn't even mean that I am a troll in other online forums let alone pretend I am a dead teenager and call his house. I played Battlefield 2 semi-professionally for a while, and I did not troll the forums of my clan, nor did I troll the forums of any other online community I was part of. Want to know why? Becuase the social morals of those communities did not put up with that kind of BS.

People need who are /b/tards but also cruise other forums, need to be able to have different modes of thinking for every different forum, because every forum has different morals.

There are those of us who look upon the depraved members of /b/ with not contempt, but pity. Because these are people who don't know that the RL and the internet are two wholly different worlds. The depravity that is a source of humor(lulz) online is something that would only show serious moral issues in a person in the RL. 

There are people that try to combat the /b/tards, but don't realize that we are not really something that can be fought. The reason that is can best be explained in our motto thingy and by the videos on this site.

We are Anonymous. 

We are legion. 

We are one. 

We do not forgive. 

We do not forget. 

We will crush anything that stands in our way. 

But we will be hailed as saviours of the internet. 

/b/rothers, MAN THE HARPOONS!

Expect us. Anonymous is waiting.

Fingers to Fingers Again

Inconvienience's Weblog says : "Now! Finally! THE HERO HAS COME TO SAVE US!! The one professor! The revolution of education!

Oh my! Why have we been so blind? No no! It was forced onto us…it’s just the way thesystem works! It wasn’t our fault! How could we have rebelled? But now, now we are enlightened!

We can be free from the burdens of spoon-fed education!

We will now take control of our learning!

Just as long as Prof. Dean comes in and tells us what we have to have read by Tuesday.

My, my, aren’t we all little activists?"

This is exactly what the internet is a great tool for discussion. People activly want to make a controversy, it's just easier to do on the internet. 

Recent Discovery

I know I gave off the impression that all I every wanted from any other class was to be able to choose the curriculum, but it seems to me now that depending on the topic, those kinds of freedoms are a bit too much. If you were in law school or if you were a pre med student it would probably be a bad choice to always choose what you want to learn, as you would certainly fail the bar or MCAT exams.

I am a Hijacker

I love to talk. I LOVE to argue and discuss with people. I will do my absolute best to steer any discussion I am a part in towards what I think of. If you don't want to learn what I want to learn about don't let me. Say something. Anything. Inturrupt me, tell me I'm wrong, show me why you disagree with me. 

I took control of the conversation that my group was having, I made people think that all I wanted out of the class was "learning how to learn." I do want to learn about how politics and the internet interact (I'm a PolySci Major too, you know). But I feel that learning how to control our own education is far mor valuable than learning how Obama's campaign revolutionized party politics on the internet or whatever else. If you learn how to teach yourself even to a limited degree it is something that will ALWAYS be relevent no matter what it is you are trying to learn. It could be something as menial as tying a tie, or something as intense as learning how to lead a non-violent civil action group.

System Broken Parts Needed

Why are you so uncomfortable telling someone what you want to learn? It isn't your fault, that is for sure. You have been conditioned to let other people tell you what is appropriate for you to learn. You say "I am a Political Science Major" then they respond with a list of classes for you to take. 

Then tell the prof "I want to learn" then they respond with a list of information that they want you to learn and remember. If you were to tell me that this is the way things should be I will tell you right now that I am going to laugh in your face. 

While I am not saying that you should not let others teach you things, I am saying that you shouldn't let the dictate what it is you learn completly. There is a time and a place for being told what is the right thing to learn. I will freely admit that I too need that kind of instruction. How could I not? I have never really had the chance to tell a professor or a teacher what it is that I want to learn. This certainly is not the environmet for learning about bow ties and World of Warcraft, but it is the place to stear the conversation towards what YOU want to learn, at least to some limited degree.

Frag the System

I am blunt. I will say what I think when I think it. I don't intend to offend people, but I am not foolish enough to believe that people will take what I say with no offence. So if you do take offence to what I say, please be kind enough not to think that I tried to insult you.

Face to Face/Fingers to Fingers

When you talk to someone you are held accountable for what you have said. It does not matter whether you have talked to them with your fingers or with your face, you still have to back up what you said. When you communicate with someone face to face, they will know who you are, so people are less inclined to say things that will start a convtoversy. However, because the internet makes it so easy for someone to pretend to be someone else, they are less inclined to steer their communications away from causing a controversy. People who communicate on the internet, unless they do so under their real identity, have almost no accountability for what they say.

Because pre-judgments are almost solely based on appearance, communications that are face to face between people who are strangers tend to not be as useful because people will not listen to people who they would pre-judge to be less intelligent or less informed than they are. With finger based communication, there is so much less of a opportunity for someone to be prejudged because of their appearence, so people who look 'weird' will have a far better chance to get their message accross online than they ever would in a face to face situation.

It definielty matters if an interaction happens face to face. Neither form is truly better than the other, but they do both have their advantages. The internet is great for expressing ideas that are controversial while real world incounters are ideal for getting across information that you want people to see as legitimate.