Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Andrew Keene

1. How does Keene define democratized media, and what are his main issues with this trend? Use examples from the web in the form of links.

He uses the word to describe the phenomenon of the amateur undermining the professional to create media himself. It means the dismissal of the middleman. His main issues with democratized media include the idea that artists will merely be exploited and not paid for their work. He believes that people will accept lies from faulty sources and no longer place value in professional content. This “democratization” is actually the opposite: rather than getting more truth and solid judgement, people will only know the internet’s superficial observations of the world. He says that “the line between fact and fiction becomes blurred.”

2. Compare and contrast Keene’s take on social media with Douglas Rushkoff’s. Which one speaks to your own experience and why?

I think Rushkoff is more concerned with people using the internet and technology too much and replacing their real lives with virtual ones. Keene is more concerned about the validity of information on the internet. I think I agree that it is more concerning that people are using technology too much rather than going out and enjoying life. I'm not someone who would really just love to sit at my house all day and only leaves because society demands that I do. I really hope I work somewhere one day where I can go to work and see real people and have meetings and share ideas in person. Andrew Keene doesn't really speak to my own experiences because I usually just use Wikipedia to get the general gist of something...I probably wouldn't remember the fine details anyway. I still do all my learning from textbooks and if I want to know the news, I turn on the TV or go to a reliable internet source such as CNN.com. I'm not really even sure that the old media Keene talks about is very reliable either. All news programs are skewed one way or another and most journalists have some agenda of their own as well. I only look at blogs that share opinions and ideas....which I do recognize as just that...or artwork and music. I just don't think the democratized media is as big of a deal as Keene makes it out to be. I'm more concerned with kids sitting in front of video games all day and not going out because they can just I.M. their friends instead. I really believe that human contact is critical to the world's growth.

Friday, October 1, 2010

The Amateur Overtaking The Professional

                Social media is rapidly changing the way people communicate and share ideas. Rather than a static book or website that people merely read and absorb, they now have the power, in multiple ways, to talk, tweet, post, blog, or do a quite a number of other things in response. These powers used to be exclusive to the professional until recent achievements in our constant expansion of communication took hold. Academic disciplines in the form of classification by means of the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress Classification System have fallen wayside to folksonomies much to the dismay of those in academia. The question remains however: Does the strengthening role of amateurs in social media have a negative impact on our community? In most ways, it does not.  The rise of the amateur in the digital media realm does lead to a necessary devaluation of the professional not unlike the ideas of Karl Marx. The hierarchy is flattening to a Grassroots driven web community where money is decreasing as a factor and bullshit is being exposed.
                The rise of the amateur is creating a grass-roots approach in which the community drives the movement of media. It is a non-traditional power structure, an upheaval against the status quo of only professional creation. Amateurs can participate immediately by merely logging into a number of social networking sites and sharing anything they would like to. Simplicity in many uploading processes has been achieved on websites like Facebook and YouTube.  Not only the data itself but the metadata (data about data) is being produced by amateurs as well in the forms of comments and reviews. Designers and manufacturers can look at the responses and cater to the requests that they see or directly enable a participatory design scheme in which all stakeholders are actively involved to ensure that the product satisfies. On websites like Alltop that gather the most popular news stories from every website and organizes them on one page it is fellow readers, not editors, that are deeming what is most important and interesting. People cycle information through the web in this way at an incredible rate of speed that professionals could never keep up with. The new internet is giving people from almost any demographic to post online, since computers with internet access are now available at almost all local libraries. We are being exposed to people who may not have had the opportunity to go to college and become a professional. Anyone has been given the capacity to change the world.
                The professionals are scared, and for good reason. Charles Murray, a seasoned and well-known author, recently complained on the American Enterprise Institute blog that his contribution to the co-op page of the New York Times only earned him $75. Media platforms are beginning to recognize that there are many people who would be happy to produce articles, movies, and photographs and post them all over the internet for free. Many productions make up in character what they lose in professional editing techniques, such as the Bed Intruder song on YouTube. Experiments such as these are less restricted because millions of dollars in production costs are not lost when there is a fluke. Millions of videos are posted and while only some catch fire, that ratio is just fine. No longer do amateurs pay for the privilege of enjoying professional content. The content is the currency. This does mean that many parties involved are losing money from these sources but there are ways to cash in. A huge part of the new social media is the tracking of what people want and selling them just that. Social networking creates friends, which in turn creates more business partners and customers for companies. Websites to aid with this are also being created, like Spreadfast.  Spreadfast is web-based software that tracks people’s views and interactions on companies pages or blog. This helps companies recognize what the most successful methods are for attracting more attention to their companies.  Professional time and commitment still makes content more valuable and there is definitely still a place for it today. I’m not going to stop attending mind-blowing action films containing Batman realistically scaling buildings to sit at home and watch YouTube videos, and I speak on behalf of many more than myself.
                The new social media is doing the reputable deed of exposing consumers to bullshit, as well as showing the truth about the way people are these days. Especially since the availability of thousands of reviews for an infinite amount of products, TV shows, movies, and music, advertising by the companies themselves isn’t the only way we can obtain information about what we are going to buy anymore, which is great. There wouldn’t be enough professional reviews to keep up with the mass amounts of products being traded and a variety of opinions from different types of people who use each product wouldn’t be available. People are helping each other out by advising them against buying say, a faulty camera or boring book. In the case of folksonomies, the original creators of the media are the categorizers too. There are user added tags and keywords that people can use to search images. The Dewey Decimal System wouldn’t categorize anything under “dubstep,” because it is a relatively new music genre, but taggers on a music sit would. New names such as this are being created every day. Therefore, tags are a true reflection of society and language. As people continue to tag media, they will become more accurate as people become familiar with the most popular tagging systems. It is argued that astroturfing is a problem with the new internet, but people have always had the ability to be dishonest about their motives. The mass amount of “real” people online are sure to outnumber the astroturfers. As with any media we have gotten in the past, people need to remember to check sources and such before seriously retaining an idea that they read or see anywhere. Transparency has increased since the introduction of social media because companies can be ousted easily by anyone on the internet. I read comments on an article just the other day that it was a scam. Had there been no comment boxes, I’d never have known. Therefore, social media actually decreases the bullshit factor in our day to day lives.
      Social Media is a revolution that has created infinite connections of people on the web. People on the opposite sides of the world can come together to make or spread an idea, which is undoubtedly awesome. However, social media can be dangerous when it comes to politics. If someone posted a YouTube video of our president making deals with terrorists, it would become very popular and cause a great deal of uproar. It is much easier to make people hate by giving them something they are ready to believe, than to make them think. When it comes to topics like politics, perhaps only professionals should have the right to talk because many political groups do have the manpower to spread faulty ideas. Besides that, I fully support social media. Even the ambiguities of tags in folksonomies that some librarians may complain about really only bring people to the unexpected. I love “stumbling” (www.stumbleupon.com) and finding something completely unrelated to what I was looking for and being pleasantly surprised. Social Media brings people back to having a part in what they see, rather than just sitting on a couch and taking it in. This new system supports Karl Marx’s ideas because it is moving from the fragments of media and information given only by professionals to the complete and real picture of how people in society are talking and operating. The hierarchy of who can say what has been flattened. Marx also believed that creating rules for a system after it has been created can cause some serious problems. Producers of technology should consider that before they keep pushing these social media boundaries.

Monday, September 27, 2010

1/2 of paper...

The Amateur Overtaking The Professional

                Social media is rapidly changing the way people communicate and share ideas. Rather than a static book or website that people merely read and absorb, they now have the power, in multiple ways, to talk, tweet, post, blog, or do a quite a number of other things in response. These powers used to be exclusive to the professional until recent achievements in our constant expansion of communication took hold. Academic disciplines in the form of classification by means of the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress Classification System have fallen wayside to folksonomies much to the dismay of those in academia. The question remains however: Does the strengthening role of amateurs in social media have a negative impact on our( community)? The answer..   The rise of the amateur in the digital media realm does lead to a necessary devaluation of the professional not unlike the ideas of Karl Marx. The hierarchy is flattening to a Grassroots driven web community where money is decreasing as a factor and bullshit is being exposed.
                The rise of the amateur is creating a grass-roots approach in which the community drives the movement of media. It is a non-traditional power structure, an upheaval against the status quo of only professional creation. Amateurs can participate immediately by merely logging into a number of social networking sites and sharing anything they would like to. Simplicity in many uploading processes has been achieved on websites like Facebook and YouTube.  Not only the data itself but the metadata (data about data) is being produced by amateurs as well in the forms of comments and reviews. Designers and manufacturers can look at the responses and cater to the requests that they see or directly enable a participatory design scheme in which all stakeholders are actively involved to ensure that the product satisfies. On websites like Alltop that gather the most popular news stories from every website and organizes them on one page it is fellow readers, not editors, that are deeming what is most important and interesting. People cycle information through the web in this way at an incredible rate of speed that professionals could never keep up with.  Anyone has been given the capacity to change the world, or to deter someone from buying a faulty camera. (mention mashups?..)
                The professionals are scared, and for good reason. Charles Murray, a seasoned and well-known author, recently complained on the American Enterprise Institute blog that his contribution to the co-op page of the New York Times only earned him $75. Media platforms are beginning to recognize that there are many people who would be happy to produce articles, movies, and photographs and post them all over the internet for free. Many productions make up in character what they lose in professional editing techniques, such as the Bed Intruder song on YouTube. Experiments such as these are less restricted because millions of dollars in production costs are not lost when there is a fluke. Millions of videos are posted and some catch fire. No longer do amateurs pay for the privilege of enjoying professional content. The content is the currency. This does mean that many parties involved are losing money from these sources but there are ways to cash in. A huge part of the new social media is the tracking of what people want and selling them just that. Social networking creates friends, which in turn creates more business partners and customers for companies. Websites to aid with this are also being created, like Spreadfast. Spreadfast is a web-based software that tracks people’s views and interactions on companies pages or blog. This helps companies recognize what the most successful methods are for attracting more attention to their companies.  Professional time and commitment still makes content more valuable and there is definitely still a place for it today. I’m not going to stop attending mind-blowing action films containing Batman realistically scaling buildings to sit at home and watch YouTube videos, and I speak on behalf of many more than myself.
                The new social media is doing the reputable deed of exposing consumers to bullshit....
SOURCES thus far:

Monday, September 20, 2010

Web 2.0

  1. Today many TV shows and advertisements try to look amateurish or "homegrown" to emulate what is often seen on the Web. Do you think professional production values will continue to drop, or do you think amateur user-generated content will get better over time? WHY??

    I think that amateur user-generated content will get better over time because information on how to improve home-produced content will become more and more available through social networking. Users could begin to create applications that assist amateurs in producing media. People still appreciate well-produced content: It is smoother and easier to look at. Amateur web-content is still in its early stages...technology will continue to improve and the technology that is only available to professionals today will become cheaper and more available to the public.



  2. What social media sites do you find yourself using the most, and why? In your opinion why is Facebook so much more successful than MySpace, and do you think Facebook is "here to stay" for the long term?

    The social media sits that I use the most are StumbleUpon and Facebook. StumbleUpon is a social media site because users can share websites that they have deemed "favorites." StumbleUpon links users automatically through facebook friends. I use StumbleUpon because it gives me websites under categories that I have listed under my Interests. It is simple and fast to flip through the different websites, and gives me a variety of topics that I want to read about. I use facebook because it is as addictive as crack, and to keep in touch with friends that are now far away after graduating high school. I like that endless database of pictures that my friends and I have accumulated over time. I also use it for event invitations and to keep track of the different clubs that I am in here at Marist.
  3. Why is transparency such an important concept in the Social Media world? Is it MORE or LESS important in the offline world? Why?

    It is an important concept because a very positive aspect of social media is that people are generally sharing authentic, unpaid opinions for the purpose of serving an enlightening their fellow people, rather than them just being fooled by corporations who are skewing information for money. If the bloggers are now being paid to support businesses or ideas, their postings may include skewed, biased opinions as well. Transparency is necessary so that the people who are reading the blogs or whatever the online media may be know what the motives behind the post were. It is less important in the offline world because it is generally assumed that all the advertisements we see are definitely for money. It is the company themselves making the advertisement, so obviously they are trying to make money.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

McLuhan Photoshop Final Post

 The television is in his studio, painting a portrait of Snooki. There are other paintings on the wall of various images from reality television. Art is something that people look up to and admire;  reality television is giving people new images to look up to, for better or for worse. The message that reality TV gives by constantly flooding the airwaves with trash is that this is what America has become and it is acceptable for people to act that way. The television producers, represented by the evil face, are acting based on the amount of money they are making. The use of the art gallery as the setting reflects the change from paper to digital media.

Medium Is The Message: Project Idea

The television is in his studio, painting a portrait of snooki. There are other paintings on the wall of various images from reality television. Art is something that people look up to and admire, the television is causing people to look up to and imitate reality TV that may not be so admirable.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Reality TV

Reality TV is a genre that has become increasingly popular over the past few years. From the endless amounts of celebrity (and non celebrity) dating shows, to MTV shows such as The Real World and Jersey Shore, in which a bunch of maximum personality strangers are tossed in the same house together to see what drama can be caused, people are being exposed to these "role models" in excessive amounts.

Saturday, September 4, 2010

New Media

 Applications on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod are one of the newest media outlets. In a matter of minutes, applications containing information regarding movie times, music, the weather, and even cocktail recipes can be downloaded on to a small device that can be brought anywhere. There are hundreds of applications available currently, and more are being made every day. They are very useful to many companies for advertising purposes and as another way to sell their product. For example, Glamour magazine is now an iPad application that readers can download and bring wherever they go. This media outlet will continue to expand as more companies create applications.


Wikipedia is another new media. Rather than go to the library and see stacks upon stacks of volumes that compose a single encyclopedia, researchers can easily find what they are looking for by typing their subject into a search box. Paper encyclopedias are only as up to date as their published date, while Wikipedia can evolve with the times. The only downside to Wikipedia is that anyone, and I mean ANYONE can update it as they please and put on false information. I couldn't tell you if people do this because they find it amusing or just downright ignorant, but either way it occurs to the extent that teachers don't accept it as a legitimate source.





Digital books are also going very mainstream. From textbooks to novels, paper books are being converted into their digital counterparts. On the iPad, there is a digital library that resembles a bookshelf. You pick what book you would like to read and flip the pages by sliding your finger across the screen. You can bookmark pages, make notes, and easily go back to the table of contents. Even the hassle of finding your page by flipping through it is eliminated. Although I hope people aren't lazy to the extent that that components of books bothered them, at least the weight of a 700 page novel is compressed. And you can carry many books around at once! The convienience of these new digital media outlets are overwhelming!