BUT if you’re into south park or Celine Dion, well…

Make-up tips (impress your family for the holidays! )

Enjoy, and don’t forget your free Dr. Pepper kids.

1. YouTube
2. Dancing
3. Rick Astley
4. Style Tips
5. David Chung
6. Profane Language

then you should totally check out my blog about vlogs!

[watch and discuss]

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Meet Caroline.  Hipster extraordinaire, and one of my personal favorites on youtube.  This girl has racked up 95 vids of her thoughts, dancing, and art since she joined the site back in January.  Take a gander, I guarantee you will not regret it.

So incase you couldn’t figure it out, I’m going to explore the wonderful world of video blogging for my travelogue.  I realize this is a pretty obvious one, but like I said, my brain is no longer generating good ideas.

I truly find video blogs fascinating.  I wonder if people create them because:

1. they are bored
2. they legitimately want to share their ideas
3. think this is something people in our generation do

I think there’s alot I can explore with this travelogue.  First off, I wonder if people are being themselves on their v-blogs or if (like we learned with Jess’ second life travelogue) they present themselves in a completely different way than they are in real life.  Also, if you took the time to watch the video i posted above (which you really should, it’s nothing but comedy), like me you also wonder if these v-bloggers are serious or kidding.  Another thing I often think about when watching these videos are the people who comment on the videos.  Are they seriously giving input or are they just mocking the v-bloggers?  And are there different outlets for video blogging or is youtube pretty much it?  And as far as things like free culture are concerned, do some of these v-bloggers hope for something in return for their work (i.e. money, fame)?

I know it may seem like these questions are impossible to answer, but I figured I would not only research video blogging in the news, but also I would track specific blogs, and see how often these people post, comment, and receive comments.  Perhaps if I’m bold enough I’ll create my own video blog and see how others respond.

I’ve been researching the Freegans for a few weeks now, and this article provided the most indepth info i could find about them.  It is infinitely better than the actual website itself.  Does anyone know about howstuffworks.com?  Is it another wiki (like wikipedia)?  It has such good information that I wonder if it will one day generate as much popularity as wikipedia.  I mean this wasn’t the first time i’ve used the site, but before I would get legitimate instructions.  I didn’t realize that desribing a group of people would consitute something working. neato.

Each of these emails indicates a different list I am now part of (something that i think is going to really start to tick me off around next month).  But what is so interesting is the little motto they included on all of their letters:

In a society of massive overconsumption, enormous quantities of reusable resources go to waste.  Freegans transform waste into resources to meet real needs, allowing us to live our values of ecological sustainability, cooperation, and sharing while reducing our contribution to capitalism's abuse of humans, animals, and the earth.  

So to start of this last travelogue, I would like to address a good point some of you brought up in my last entry, and that is whether or not freegans would go against their ways to purchase medicine.  Well I initially assumed that they would do so because its not like full bottles of advil are being thrown out when the drug store closes.  But in doing some more research I found out that they will even turn to alternative medicinal practices:

Freegans usually have unconventional health care because they work
unconventional jobs -- if they work at all. Many refuse to support
large pharmaceutical companies and HMOs. As an alternative, some
freegans join health care collectives or practice holistic medicine with acupuncture, spinal adjustment, exercise and herbs.

So there you have it, I was completely wrong.  In fact while doing this travelogue, I kept having my doubts about freegans, thinking that maybe they were hypocritcal.  But Howstuffworks addresses that issue right off the bat (too bad I didn’t see this site earlier, eh?)

Because the movement is so ideologically centered, critics accuse
freegans of being hypocritical. After all, avoiding purchases in a
developed nation is essentially impossible. If you're still buying gas and electricity
to cook scavenged food, you're still very much on the grid. Freegans,
however, maintain that every little bit counts; each scavenged item
helps minimize the cycle of consumption. And with Americans wasting 96
billion pounds of food a year -- a quarter of the nation's supply
[source: EPA] -- do freegans have a point?  Is society really so wasteful that people can subsist safely and happily on trash alone?

Yes Freegans do have a point.  They believe that every little bit counts.  Some of them even resort to hitch hiking in order to avoid using more oil.  Like the article said, its impossible to avoid consumerism in such a developed society.  But cutting back can have a positive effect on the world, and that’s all the Freegans are hoping for. Additionally, this particular article also mentions that

Many freegans extend their beliefs beyond the food they eat. In
addition to Dumpster diving, some freegans squat on abandoned property
or grow gardens on empty lots. Some choose not to hold jobs and instead
volunteer or teach repair workshops for other freegans.

So when we initially went dumpster diving, one of the freegans said that he had sort of adopted this lifestyle because of monetary issues, implying his lack of capital.  But this article brings up a good point in that by adopting this lifestyle, money really is no longer an issue (even if it wasn’t one before).  (I’d like to play devil’s advocate for a second, however, and add that sure some freegans live on abandoned properties, yet they still communicate via internet…).

If you have been following this travelogue I’d like to give you my Jerry Springer final thoughts:

1. Freeganism is a physical manifestation of commons-based peer production.
2. Freegans would like to gain more followers, and change the world.
3. They really aren’t as hypocritcal as you would think.

My Last Words:  FREEGANS RULE (YEAH!)

I mean if any of you watch gossip girl, you would know that S and B tots dined with a Freegan at the Yale Dean’s reception dinner.  Boo ya.

So Shira did a great job explaining how Freeganism relates to this class, going over its connections with commons based peer-production.  For this blog I’m going to answer some of the questions Mushon had during class last week.

When we went on the trash tour we had the opportunity to talk with one of the ‘group leaders.’  In asking him questions he indicated that freeganism is a lifestyle, and the group that forages through trash together in this great city is one of the only collaborative manifestations of this anti-consumer ideology.  In thinking about this, it sort of seemed like they weren’t really trying to change the world, they were just trying to not add to the waste.  After all, their lifestyle wouldn’t really work if the rest of society didn’t throw out day old bagels.

So I’ve been researching freeganism through various news sources and have found that this is something that goes on all over the world.  I was particularly struck by one article I found from the Daily Princetonian about student Alex Barnard who did a Freegan research project in New York City during the summer.  He has since brought his dumpster diving ways back to New Jersey.

“People don’t really understand the scale at which grocery stores are wasting food and the way it’s built into their way of doing business,” Barnard explained. “Grocery stores throw out hundreds of pounds of perfectly good food every day just because slightly blemished fruit or dented cans [don't] fit into their view of perfect capitalistic abundance.”

So if you have been following our blog you probably are like me in that you think freeganism is just a response to wasting food.  But the Princeton kid brings up a good point about how this way of life will help our endangered environment in general.

“‘Changing out our light bulbs for more efficient ones is not going to solve the [environmental] problem,’ Barnard said. We have to get more radical in terms of the changes we make to our lifestyles.’”

He recommends:
“These changes, Barnard said, can include wearing old T-shirts instead of buying new ones or turning off the water tap. Any form of limiting consumption is consistent with freegan principles.

But limiting consumption is not enough, he noted, explaining that freeganism at its core is a politically motivated rejection of capitalism and the market economy.

‘Our system is broken with respect to how we treat animals, each other and the environment,’ he said.

He noted that our society eats produce ‘grown by farms that exploit workers in the third world, shipped thousands of miles using fossil fuels, put into excessive packaging and put on the shelf at a marked-up price that enriches corporate owners instead of paying workers more.’”

He has started a following among his Princeton friends, encouraging them to dumpster dive, repair old bikes, etc.

So to answer any pending questions, Freegans are trying to change the world.  They want to encourage people to live a less wasteful lifestyle.  And in response to the idea that Freegans wouldn’t survive unless society over consumerd, here’s what Barnard has to say:

“‘We as freegans choose to dumpster-dive because we try to make the best of living in a capitalist world,” Barnard said. “We want to change the world so we don’t have to dumpster-dive.’”

p.s. blockquoting wouldn’t work for me…..

Well it was a chilly October night, but Shira and I were determined to do some field work for our travelogue.  After walking a giant New York city square, we FINALLY found the Freegans outside of Le Pain Quotidien on 8th st. and 5th ave, which was also our first stop.  We didn’t go through the garbage here, we were just amazed at what was going on and needed to take a step back and absorb everything.

What was interesting was that before the trash tour began, the leader mentioned that we were going to hit up places that really are just “so incredibly wasteful.”  That was really the issue concerning the Freegans minds.  Even when we were walking, Shira and I could over hear plenty of conversations about people hating waste, over-consumption, etc.

Right before they started digging through the Le Pain left overs, the leader also mentioned a quick courtesy note, that if someone was speaking to the group please wait your turn to talk.  The Freegans were also very polite in distributing food, making sure to ask others if they wanted some of the say, oh I don’t know, buttered bread from Le Pain before they took it themselves.  This reminded us of peer-production—the self-policing and the polite manor is what made the group harmonious and functional.  It was like a physical manifestation of what we have been talking about in class this past week.

**READERS NOTE:  Mushon, we know you wanted us to include lots of fun pictures and video from our tour, but alas, it was not media night, and although we tried to take some secret cell phone pics, the lighting was not in our favor.

When we got to our next stop, the University pl. Gristedes, we had a chance to talk to another one of the Freegan leaders.  Here’s what we found out:
•    He’s been doing this for 6 months
•    He hasn’t had to buy groceries in months

•    Most of the Freegans are vegetarians, but not necessarily vegans
•    Most Freegans do their thang independently, this is one of the only organized groups
•    At one point he encouraged a tourist to secretly dumpster dive when she mentioned going through garbage on the street was illegal in her hometown.

for the rest of this THRILLING story, check out shira’s post!

The novelist brings up some very good points about Wikipedia (points that I highlighted using shift space…thanks Mushon! O:-) ).  In the Wikipedia vs. Britannica debate, any high school teacher (or college professor) will without fail tell you that “Wikipedia is not a legitimate source.”  Well what makes it so?  Because it’s created by a bunch of random Internet users?  Well Doctorow says that “the Britannica tells you what dead white men agreed upon, Wikipedia tells you what live Internet users are fighting over.”  So what makes the dead white men the ultimate source?  In an age where information is more wide spread, wouldn’t that make Internet users more knowledgable?

What I found when i google image searched

Doctorow also mentions in his post “the Britannica is great at being authoritative, edited, expensive, and monolithic. Wikipedia is great at being free, brawling, universal, and instantaneous.”  He says that Wikipedia isn’t great because it’s like Britannica, but I disagree.  I think it’s great because it is just as good as Britannica, meaning it has the same information, and it’s better.  It’s better because it’s free.  It’s better because it’s instantaneous.  It’s better because it has even more information.  I once found a list of every type of monkey in the world, both fictional and non fictional, on Wikipedia.  That’s awesome.

WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO MAKE WIKIPEDIA A LEGITIMATE SOURCE IN THE ACADEMIC WORLD??????

Letters from Ted Kaczynski

Mushon posted the above video on my last blog regarding Ted Kacynski, who was infamous for his lethal approach to change society, rejecting industry, technology, consumerism, etc.  Right off the bat I saw some similarties:  the unabomber lived for 25 years in a house in the middle of nowhere, Montana (surrounded by trees) that he built himself—similar to the freegans rejecting traditional consumerism.  The difference is that he built his station whereas freegans are still mooching off of someone elses hard work (he may have paid for the materials, but they don’t pay for the food).
The video shows protestors inside of the Gap, a commercial clothing chain found all over the world, shouting “shut it down” and then cuts to Kaczynski’s manifesto “The Industrial Society and its Future.”  This is an instance of a group of people sharing a common dislike for consumerism (only way more extreme).  He believed that the industrial society has been a disaster to the human race.  While I was about to attack him for his hypocrisy (as he stated that his pseudo-cult needed to utilize all forms of media to spread their message—I mean come on Ted, go big or go home.  If you’re going to reject technology, then don’t use it to communicate your hippie ideas).  Luckily he caught himself by saying that in order to destroy the system you have to use its technology.  So  again, the freegans reject in their own right traditional consumerism system, but if the system didn’t exist, than they would starve (these are some contradictions I want to investigate when Shira and I get to go to a meeting!).
This idea of rejecting consumerism, which in a broader sense is industrial society, relates back to this weeks reading.  Obviously the radical Kaczynski harps on the evil nature of technology, which is the opposite sentiment of the progressive ideals of the open source/peer-production innovators.  But overall what Kaczynski, the Freegans, and the aforementioned producers have in common is a rejection of the standards society lives by and, in a way, enforces.
But getting back to my Freeganism research, it seems as though there is obvious resistance to the cause.  Well, not so much resistance as people not really taking the Freegans seriously.  In an article from US News, the author believes that most people aren’t going to alter their lifestyles and start picking through a dumpster as their only means for food, even if it really is sanitary.  In thinking about this, I also wonder if the Freegans get everyone to follow their footsteps, wouldn’t there would be less goods produced and less food for sharing?  But I think the overall goal of the freegans is to get society to really consider their consumption habits and see if they can cut out any unnecessary purchases.  Still, the author makes a very compelling point that “there’s no such thing as afree lunch—except to freegans.”
But I need to look at how freegans reject (as Mushon put it) networked culture by way of rejecting standard means of food consumption.  Another article I found stated  “freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.”  So this is what I understand so far into this travelogue:  Freegans are trying to return back to a more natural way of like (similar to Kaczynski’s beliefs), they have created a community for themselves arranging meetings and gatherings, yet they utilize the tools of the modern non-natural society to communicate (like Kaczyunski).  Does this mean that what the Unabomber said was true—you need to use the system to destroy it?

Okay so here are my other developing questions:
1.    What are the hypocrisies within the freegan way of life?
2.    Does this realistically have the potential to take off?

Hopefully I’ll find out those answers and more at the big dumpster dive tomorrow night!

COMMONS-BASED PEER PRODUCTION AND VIRUTE—HELEN NISSENBAUM AND YOCHAI BENKLER

The essay written by Yochai Benkler and Helen Nissenbaum provides thorough investigation that commons-based peer production is inherently virtuous.  They believe that socio-technical systems of commons-based peer production offer both a medium of production for a variety of information goods and also serve as a context for positive character formation.

The authors stated, “the phenomenon is a product of the emergence of digital networks and the rising importance of information and cultural production.  They include numerous examples of commons-based peer production such as free or open source software (like Wikipedia), which is essentially a collective effort of indivuals (volunteers) who spend their free time contributing towards a common goal in an informal and loosely structured way.  In this system there is no formal manager delegating tasks, and no one is excluded from using the product even if they haven’t contributed to it.  The effort, they say, is sustained by volunteerisn, good will, technology, self-serving participation, and GNU General Public License that governs free software development (aka very little law involvement).

Here are some characteristics of peer production:
•    Decentralized motivation
•    Potential objects must be modular, meaning the components can be produced independently of the others (allows for diversity)
•    Importance of granularity (meaning size)—they must be small in order to motivate volunteers to only have to contribute a little amount of time and effort.
•    Must have low cost integration:  it needs to be able to defend itself against destructive contribution and needs to have a mechanism to create the finished product

Successful peer production enterprises have an advantage in that traditional firms and markets simplify decision making which ultimately cuts outs info.  Peer production enterprises contain more updated information, and the variability of volunteers within the projects and existing information resources is so great that it allows for more and diverse information.  What makes this whole concept work is the fact that it engages many people with different ideas and reasons to get involved to work towards a common goal.  You might be thinking, but how are volunteers motivated to do this work?  The answer is simply that “peer production enterprises thrive on, and give opportunity for, relatively large scale and effective scope for volunteerism, or behavior motivated by, and oriented towards positive social relations.  Essentially the rest of the article explains the authors argument that commons-based peer production is virtuous in every aspect.  Without having to go into too many boring details, essentially they argue “that the remarkable social and technical phenomenon of commons-based peer production fosters virtue by creating a context or setting that is conducive to virtuous engagement and practice, thereby offering a medium for inducing virtue itself in its participants.

Some may wonder if the software is better or worse.  The authors provide an example about how in the NASA Click Project, the volunteers were able to develop the same map of mars that a PhD NASA employee created as well, only they did it much more efficiently and for free.  The point here is that peer production can accomplish the same work as capital production, only quicker and cheaper.  Boo yah.

One also may wonder how some commons-based sites are regulated since a characteristic of this phenomenon is that there is no one person delegating rules.  The authors say there is moderation between online peers.  For example Slashdot, a website that is a compilation of stories and posts by users of interesting things they found on the web.  The users moderate by grading comments, marking its relevance; in turn those user comments are then moderated as well in order to determine the legitimacy of the original post.  This site is created by the people, for the people, and policed by the people.  As the authors say, “the software builds in limits on use that are designed to constrain anti-social behavior.  For those of you who were keeping up with Shira’s travelogue, it sounds like Oh No They Didn’t runs on a very similar method.

THE WEALTH OF NETWORKS—WITH YOCHAI BENKLER

This film was actually a lecture with the author of the above summary.  He basically covered the same information, so I’ll bullet point here important things he discussed:

•    Decentralized capitalization:  People have the physical capital necessary to make and communicate information knowledge and culture
•    What this has done it has taken preexisting human behaviors: friendships, meeting people and giving them directions, moving them from the peripheries of the economy into the core as an alternative source of production
•    Commons based production without exclusion (inputs, outputs, individual, collaborative, commercial non commercial)
•        -Decentralized capacity to act, locates authority to act where capacity resides
•        -peer production, large scaled input without tradition clearance, instead it uses     social relations
•    Peer production:
•    What’s developed is a solution space rather than a particular phenomenon.  We used to think there were two basic solutions to the problem of production but now the 3rd is that people are motivated to do something else, people have time to volunteer, etc.
•    Large population of differently motivated people.
•    What we now see is a decentralized authority and practical capacity allowing people to self select tapping diverse capabilities and interests
•    What is the motivation for people to contribute even five minutes for this??
•        More design leaders, task construction, needs to be built in with self selection, communication, humanization, trust construction, transparency, monitoring, peer review, discipline
•    Fairness is key
•    Money has the potential to cause disorder, makes it harder to sustain these open source/free software communities
•    This Is an alternative parallel form of production
•    Web 2. 0 The way in which business adapts itself to this decentralized production as an opportunity instead of a challenge
•    BBC asks for volunteers for material:
•    Basically he wants to see if social production is sustainable because something like capital injected into this free market may ruin the atmosphere and ultimately the motivation of volunteers to work on any of these potential projects.
•    The idea is that people can now do more for and by themselves, and in loose association with others.
•    The internet democratizes
•    Power law distribution of links
•    Sites cluster; when you get down to small enough clusters, the distribution is not power law
•    You end up flipping and intensely linked communities of interest become bigger than singular sites originally thought to get a lot of hits
•    We also see the emergence of a critical culture
•    The way in which we measure human development is dependent on info, goods, and tools (innovation is the key to growth)
•    How we produce info and how we make it available is critically important—free open source material will help foster growth
•    There is a battle between incumbents trying to make production harder, more costly vs. the desire to be free and productive
•    Trust is key: law is what is holding this process of free production back

THE SUCCESS OF OPEN SOURCE—STEVEN WEBER
This talks about property in the digital age, specifically around open source software, which the author believes is an experiment in social organization involving a unique, specific idea of property.  It’s distinctive because rather than having the right to exclude users from property, open source property does not really allow exclusion, just distribution.  Open source property, as Steven Weber states, “is a governance system that holds together a community of producers around this counterintuitive notion of property rights as distribution [and] is…a political economy that taps into a broad range of human motivations and relies on a creative and evolving set of organizational structures to coordinate behavior” (1).   What Weber asks in his book, and what Benkler and Nissenbaum work to answer in their above mentioned work, is how a diverse, international group of producers could successfully work together a create a structure of any kind without monetary compensation and how is this phenomenon of any real importance.  He adds that essentially the problem behind creating intellectual property is that innovators need incentives to do so.  Enter copy-right laws, licensing, patents, etc that ensure the protection of said property and a sort of monetary assurance.
Weber clarifies, however, that the ‘free’ aspect of open-source software always necessarily means that it costs nothing, but rather sometimes you may buy the software and are giving the source code (err ingredients?) of the product (I would like to add though that projects like Wikipedia provide an example of software that is free and gives users access to the source code).  He defines open source as such:
•    Source code must be distributed with the software or otherwise made available for no more than the cost of distribution.
•    Anyone may redistribute the software for free, without royalties or licensing fees to the author.
•    Anyone may modify the software or derive other software from it, and then distribute the modified software under the same terms.
Unlike the previous two authors, however, Weber does point out that this is not always harmonious venture, and discusses some of the flaws within the system.  He pretty much states, in fact, that the point of his book is to elaborate on the problems of how open source came to be and its restrictions in addition to how it functions as a social and economic system and how it is inherently progressive.  Despite these issues that exist in this phenomenon (and also that exist within traditional capital ventures), open-source action is still very successful.  I’ll bullet some of the problems he brings up:
In talking about the nature of its political economy:
•    “Intuition tells us that thousands of volunteers are unlikely to come together to collaborate on a complex economic project, sustain that collaboration over time, and build something that can beat some of the largest and richest business enterprises in the world at their own game” (9).
•    “Every individual can see that not only her own incentives but the incentives of other individuals are thus aligned, the system ought to unravel backward so no one makes substantial contributions, and the good never comes to be in the first place” (9).
•    Questions are raised about coordination of a division of labor. (He later points out, however, that the community of innovators within a project creates for itself organizing principals such as criteria for entering/leaving the project, leadership roles, power regulations, distributional issues, education and socialization paths, etc…)
•    The open source process disrupts our notions of the standard hierarchical model in the traditional work/production scene.
Other issues/questions:
•    “The open source story opens up a significant set of questions about the economics and sociology of network organization, not just network economics.  And it demonstrates the viability of a massively distributed innovation system that stretches the boundaries of conventional notions about limits to the division of labor” (14).
•    The problem in thinking about property (as open source is essentially about property) is that it is often narrow-mindedly only considered in terms of who owns what.  This is the general ideology of society, and open source defies that ideology as “property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude” (16).
•    “Is it possible to build a working economic system around the core notion of property rights as distribution?  What kinds of characteristics would that system take on?” (17).
•    (A very broad question) He asks how big of a phenomenon this is and how it will affect the progression of the world (which is an interesting question for social scientists to chew on).
•    “If we take the structure of the knowledge domain and the nature of demand that people have to solve particular kinds of problems in that domain as independent variables, then allow organization in the broadest sense (how people organize themselves to solve the problem) to be the dependent variable, can we sketch out some of the boundaries within which an open source-type process might work?” (18).
What I really got out of this reading was the open source really screws with our previous notions of work ethic and production, and it’s a controversial topic because it throws off our means for earning capital.  He makes a very good point, however, that this kind of production would never be able to exist were it not for the great Godly existence of the Internet as it makes it much easier for this diverse socialization to occur.  He also remarks that the open source process is not only important for its source code but also for how the source code is created.

I personally find this whole open source software/peer-production rage to be really very interesting.  In this day in age, for the most part it is really expected that in order for one (and society, really) to progress, they must obtain a degree and specialize in their field of interest, find some sort of occupation that suits them and work to make money to survive.  Not everyone, but a lot of people will work for big companies or corporations chuck full of rules and regulations and try to impress their bosses to they can keep moving up in the work place.  But open source software and peer-production efforts can acheieve the same, if not better, goals that many ‘professionals’ get paid to do.  And these producers do it for free.  It sort of seems as though if people adapted to this alternative (and very literal) form of a free market, economic issues would really become irrelevant (readers should note that I am by no means an economist and I still don’t really understand how all of this stuff works, but from the readings I have kind of taken a moral message that life would be easier if we were motivated to work for free).  I just think that there is something to be said about this system of progression, success, and motivation that society really enforces that seems to be more problematic than peer-production.  Its clear after reading these articles and watching the presentation that capital involvement really makes things much more difficult than they have to be.  As the great Roger Waters once said, “Money, so they say, is the root of all evil today.”

We LOVE dumpsters!!!

As we all know, the Internet has come to provide a new form of public space that allows people to connect and communicate on a local, national and international level.   It is a platform that makes change more accessible and realistic to those who wish to accomplish somthing.

Enter the world of dumpster diving.  The Freegans of the world at one time attempted to live a lifestyle completely dependant of business corporations, but realized that no matter how hard they tried or how creative they were, any product they used still had corporate ties to it.  The Freegans (meaning free vegans) now spend their time foraging through food venue dumpsters after hours in search for edible vegan left overs that were thrown out after businesses close shop.  No I don’t mean they straight up eat the rest of someone’s baked potato, but they may go to a bakery dumpster and eat some unsold bread that got tossed at the end of the work day.  They do this in protest of over consumption and animal rights.

delish.

Shira and I will blog with these people on both a national and international level.  We will also go on some dumpster rounds with them.  We wan to see if this is just a hobby or if this ‘movement’ can cause any change at all.

Initially, Joost seems like a reject child from facebook and youtube.  It offers way less video content than youtube, and the social networking aspect of the website is a poor imitation of mark zuckerberg’s brainchild.

www.sfgate.com

As I stated earlier in this travelogue, Joost runs on a Peer-2-Peer system meaning you don’t pull the video content you are going to watch from one source, but rather from other joost members watching the same content. This is different than how other sites run:  sites like hulu (owned by NBC), abc.com, and nbc.com all show video straight from one source.  Sketchier sites, such as surfthechannel.com provide links to third party sites (so if you missed the hills tonight, you can bet STC will be able to show it to you within 24 hours, commercial free).

So here is where it stands among its competitors:

1) Joost offers 100% legal content (*ahem STC*)

2)Joost offers shows that aren’t offered on any of the ‘legit’ television sites (my inside source informed me that they were/are scrambling to get any and all content they can get their hands on).

3)Like hulu, abc, nbc, etc (and unlike STC), Joost offers a clear picture (and the sound even matches up with the picture)

4)Unlike the other television sites, Joost goes above and beyond traditional comments and allows you to make friends with other users watching the same shows, and join groups based on your television interests

5)Runs on a P2P system, unlike the others.  This may present a problem, however.  According to the mute magazine article, “Capitalism [the foundation of our consumer culture]…is incompatible with free P2P networks, and thus, so long as the financing of internet development comes from private shareholders looking to capture value by owning internet resources, the network will only become more restricted and centralised.”  So basically what I got out of this article was that money circulates in the Internet through a web 2.0 system–not compatible with p2p networks.  So what i’m predicting is that Joost, financially, just won’t make it.  To answer lynn’s question, I think that the ‘improvements’ of the site won’t speed up the process of its demise, but rather is way of working (and lack of advertisement) will lead to its ultimate downfall.

Viva Joost?  RIP?

In venturing out of the television category, I decided to see what the music section of the site had to offer.  Here’s what I watched:

Joost.com

Yes that is the Boss.  And Yes, it is a live version of him singing born to run.  Want to know what I think?  I could find this video and about 100 more just like it on youtube.  So why bother watching it this way?  Well you can read other comments that other viewers have said (no one did though, also this is a feature that youtube offers), you can ‘friend’ other viewers (assuming people have commented, which they haven’t, so I remain friendless), and like many blogs, you can tag the videos you are watching!  Here’s what happened when I tried to tag:

Joost.com

I’m still new to this whole tagging thing, but someone please explain this to me:  whats the point of having a ‘tag’ application if you they reject your tag?

Upon Mike’s suggestion, I decided to explore the ‘shout’ application.  Basically the shout tab, conveniently located underneith the video you are watching (in the ‘remote’ space) allows you to express your emotions through five different choices:  “hot,” “lol,” “puke,” “wow,” and “wtf.”  Then your actions get compiled on your profile’s “joostfeed,” and your suggestion gets sent to the genius’ at joost.

Joost.com

I then went back into the shows category and watched a Howcast!  While a majority of the howcasts were about poker, I induldged in “How Not To Get Mugged.”  I initially thought that I would be taught a very important life lesson in a comedic way, but this howcast was just plain stupid–there goes two minutes of my life that i’m not getting back.

Joost.com

After spending my free time exploring the depths of Joost.com, i’ve realized one thing:  its a knock off.  First of all, the “howcasts” are lame, and I’m pretty sure i’ve been subscribing to podcasts for a few years now, and those are infinitely better (anyone ever check out the vintage toon cast?).  Second, like I said earlier,  the music channel is totally pointless, and I know I can find way better options on youtube.  Lastly, and I think this is my most important discovery, Joost is a creepy version of facebook.  As a member, you have the opportunity to friend people, invite your friends to join, leave comments on videos, and join groups (or create your own).  Sound famililar?  Come on Joost, every single aspect of your website has been done.  Your Social Networking/limited television site isn’t impressive.

Am I being too harsh?

At least that’s what he’s telling people.  Last Friday morning he woke up a few hours before he was supposed to go to work for Joost, and found an apologetic email from his boss saying that they were so very sorry, but there wasn’t much for him to do there anymore.  Good thing he kept his day job, err, other job?

So about a month ago when I found out Joost was going to relaunch as a non-downloadable application, I assumed its popluarity would take off.  It seems as though, however, that not only are they not the hot internet app but that they are probably facing some economic/sponsor issues as well.  I think also with this months return of popular television shows, audiences are focusing their attention on abc.com, nbc.com the CW’s website for reruns of current episodes–after all Joost seems to just focus on the past.  In addition to that theory, I also noticed that within this past week, IMDB.com has been offering a free tv/movie service via Hulu.com, which probably has cast a shadow over Joost as well.

Ren and Stimpy

The Joost I fell in love with was originally an application you downloaded directly onto your desk top.  You could, just like real televisioin, navigate through different channels to find a show appealing to you.  While watching the episode, you are interrupted only a few times with very brief commercials from sponsors such as Honda.  What I found to be very unique about the site is that it offers up the option of sharing the episode you are watching with friends.  Interesting:  a tv website and an SNS?

Now the environment has completely changed.  Rather than downloading an application, all a viewer needs to do is download a plug-in and they are good to go. After doing some research, I also found that Joost will be releasing a flash-based version in mid October.  Why not do that to begin with?

One other aspect of Joost is that it relies on a peer-to-peer network, similar to napster and kazaa.  Their explanation is rather complex, so I’ll insert it directly onto this post:

What I want to know from you is this: does knowing that you are more connected to other audiences make you want to watch these classic shows from this site?  Or do you not care about what kind of communication you are interacting in, just as long as you don’t miss out on Macguyver?

Joost came into my life about a month ago when the newborn company hired my roommate as an intern for the year.  As of now, this is an application you can download onto your computer (although my inside source has revealed to me that the company plans to relaunch sometime this fall and will no longer be in a form you have to download) that is kind of like selective netflix of television shows.  They offer up full episodes from series like “Square Pegs” and “Ren and Stimpy” that you can watch with lmited (and brief) commercial interruption.

Beverly Hills, 90210

Since downloading the application, I can officially (though absolutely not proudly) say that I have watched every episode of “Beverly Hills, 90210” that Joost has to offer (disclaimer:  readers should note that I did not spend countless hours watching this mind numbing series in preparation for the new “90210”—that show is miserable.  I used to be a fanatic of the West Beverly High kids when they showed all of the reruns on FX because, let’s be honest, as much as I wish I could claim I grew up in the 90210 generation, I was still watching “Salute Your Shorts” when the former was in its prime).

Considering this application is pretty new, relatively unknown, and about to go through some series changes, I decided that it would be a great destination for my second travelogue.  Also now that I have run out of episodes about my favorite Cali kids, it’ll be interesting to explore my other options.  Donna Martin Graduates.

After reading the “Scroogled” article, I started to think about what kinds of ads would show up on my firefox.  The fact of the matter is that I really don’t pay attention to advertisements at all.  Not only do I have the adblock application for my Internet, but also I think over time I have managed to train myself to not notice advertisements on the side of webpages.  So when I read the story and the DHS was interrogating the man about why rocket ads would show up because of his searches, I could only think that I probably have really really ridiculous ads.  But you know what I just don’t notice them—which is funny because I’ve been told numerous times that websites make their money from advertisements (which I never see).  But this medium is constantly changing, and maybe one day I’ll come across an ad for an 80’s techno/comedic/goth music store that I just won’t be able to avoid.

from

As we discussed in class, the Internet has made life livable without having to leave your reclining computer chair.  Thousands of developers have created ways that allows us to indulge in our own desires by giving us the opportunity to have whatever we want at the click of a button, and in a matter of days our purchases will show up at our door step (on a side note it would be interesting to research consumption patterns in our economy as we have gained more buying power).  The World Wide Web is like the BFF you’ve always wanted: something someone who is always looking out for your self-interests, always giving you what you want when you want it.

Adam Curtis’ “The Trap” discussed the mental traps of game theory, psychosis, etc, but what is important to note is the issue that something we think gives us freedom may ultimately trap us.  The internet gives us the freedom to say whatever we want, to buy whatever we want, to research whatever we want, and so on.  But there is definitely something to be said (err, its already been said) about relying too much on technology, which may ultimately trap us in the future.
This sort of fear has been explored numerous times in pop culture.  I’m sure well all can recall back to “2001: A Space Odyssey” when the ship computer system HAL (exhibiting explicit human emotions) began to really develop a mind of its own and tried to control the mission (I mean hello, he wouldn’t let Dave back in the space craft after attempting to fix the exterior of the ship because he was afraid Dave was going to disconnect him.

from

This issue is seen again in the more light-heartened Disney-Pixar flick “Wall-e.”  In this film when we are transported to the future, we see that society has gone beyond the point of over-relying on computer technology, but is actually being controlled by it.  People are depicted as being obese beings that are permanently strapped to their chairs and are moved around and aided by robots.  Once again, we have an issue of human intelligence vs. the greedy computer personality that is trying to keep society as is.

from

Not only is this a fear examined in Hollywood, but also there have been legitimate reports on the future of the Internet and how we may or may not be trapped by it.  In a survey taken by leaders of the internet/technology community, the consensus was that by 2020, “Humans will remain in charge of technology, even as more activity is automated and “smart agents” proliferate. However, a significant 42% of survey respondents were pessimistic about humans’ ability to control the technology in the future. This significant majority agreed that dangers and dependencies will grow beyond our ability to stay in charge of technology.” If we are all afraid of the future, is there any way we can avoid being controlled by the technology we create?
The survey also found that “Virtual reality will be compelling enough to enhance worker productivity and also spawn new addiction problems.”  While the survey doesn’t specify the kind of addiction problems that may occur, I think any kind of addiction relating to the Internet will ultimately result in the physical demise of the human race.  When researching the future of the internet and reading about potential addiction problems, one image, and one image only comes to mind:

from

In the “World of Warcraft” episode of “South Park,” audiences got a glimpse of the physical stature of Kenny, Kyle, Stan, and Cartman’s bodies deteriorating away as they spent endless hours battling an equally pathetic character in on online computer game. While this was a video game and not just Internet addiction, its clear that allowing the Internet (or technology) to consume your life will have harmful physical effects (not to mention it will completely alter social relationship practices as well).
Perhaps it seems like I’m trying really hard to make a creative connection between these films, shows and the Internet, but I swear I have a point.  If people are predicting that the Internet will harm us, and they even fear we are becoming too reliant on it, then how can we prevent this from happening?  Should we ban or limit Internet use?  Or should we just let this artificial nature run its course?

I feel that this idea can be applied to the studies of this class.  The new media we will be exploring is still relatively new and unknown.  Earlier forms of popular media, such as television and radio, seem to have some sort of authority or gatekeeper controlling communication (not to mention the lack of feedback feasible with such technology).  The internet is so unusual and fascinating because it lacks the authority that other mediums have and can be accessed by anyone.  This gives us complete communication freedom to say and do whatever we want knowing that anyone with internet access may come across whatever it is we are sharing.  After watching The Trap, I can only wonder how will this communication freedom further trap us, and what  will the consequences be?
Freedom

This topic of the documentary is what struck me as being the most interesting and at the same time the most infuriating.  To me, the idea of people being as simple as a math equation is absurd and offensive.  In order to paint a better picture of what I mean, I have chosen to compare this human mathematical theory to the ever-popular (well at least in the 50’s…) activity “Paint by Numbers.”

from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History

This consumer past-time included a board with an outlined drawing of a work of art.  Rather than having the work be painted already, the sections were each left blank except for a number that corresponded to a paint color (that was also included in the kit—clever).  The tag-line of the product was “Every man a Rembrandt,” and made particularly untalented consumers believe that impeccably recreating Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” was as simple as matching numbers.

Now I am not, by any means, an artist or have any artistic inclinations.  I personally find this whole concept offensive to artists and the techniques they applied in their paintings.  This practice broke down the shading and brush strokes of a classic painting into a series of numbers that allowed consumers to recreate a picture which, in some cases, was created upon a spur-of-the-moment instinct.

So how exactly does this relate to Adam Curtis’ documentary?

Well to begin with, just as the P-B-N creators thought painting could be simplified through numbers, theorists believed that humans could too be simplified to a series of numbers, and that behaviors could be determined through matching up numbers and equations (just as one would match up colors to numbers).  Great works of art are much more complicated than a blocking of colors and numeric formulas.  People are much more complicated than mathematical equations.

The documentary explored different ways society has tried to achieve freedom.  By thinking you can predict human behavior seems to not only underestimate the complexity of individuals, but it counter-acts the idea of freedom by sort of reinforcing conformity.  If theorists think a human can be defined by an equation, than that is conforming people to fit molds of math and numbers (just like the paint by numbers conforms a work of art to fit the mold of numbers).

There is something to be said about psychiatric practices as well.  The anti-psychiatry movement featured in the documentary showed how doctors eliminated old practices and utilized elaborate lists to diagnose people with different disorders.  I just don’t think a list of questions should be used to determine if a person should begin taking medications to help fix any imbalance of their mental math.  The documentary showed a couple having a discussion with a talk show host about the use of such medications; the wife (who was taken these prescriptions) thought her life was in order now, but according to who?  The doctors who told her that her math equation was off and needed some tweaking?  Even her husband thought she had changed, for the worse.

Maybe my comparison between the paint-by-numbers set and the human behavior model is completely ridiculous.  I am curious, however, to see if anyone else is as offended as I am that theorists and government officials truly believe that humans can be predicted by numbers.  I just think people are more complicated than that.