Archive for March, 2008
wikipedia; digital values for dynamic platforms.
After reading the responses to Digital Maoism, I have a few conflicting feelings.
On one hand I feel that the argument concerning the “medium” of the internet should be retired. I feel like some of these projects (open source as well as larger social media projects) while each have shortcommings of a traditionally kept media product, have inherient tendancies tied to the structure of the platform. This structure is independent of say, another system of a simmilar product, and by this, has slightly different tendancies and results. So the struce of the media-wiki script (the underlying software behind wikipedia that manages the process for pages and edits) gives wikipedia certain characteristics that many people associate with the hivemind, rather than the structure of wikipedia as a platform.
ok, a less wordy example. For example, personally I have noticed with Facebook, through structuring the interaction, through semantics, placeement, ect, some parts of the site carry more “weight” socaily, which I would argue is structed within the platform. So for example “friending someone is unacceptable unless you have a good reason and regualar of significant contact with that person. However, Facebook has not focused on upping the ante on “invitations” which are largely meaningless, people people missreporting their RSVP information or inviting less familar people. It is a platform which has construted its own social norms, and the platform of creating articles.
So while the argument of can a group of people create great cultural products I think is somewhat pointless. Something such as Mac OS X proves that sometimes it is better for a product to be a fully realized experience, but that does not discredit the purpose of Linux exsisting. While it may seem they are in competeing spaces, they both have completely different purposes in the world, and we need to accept that there are inherint structual differences in creating each which effect how each is fully realized.
With this being said, there can always be improvements within Wikipedia to build imporatance to different features. The platform was built with “anyone can edit” as the number one priority; they chose this to be more importantly displayed than the discussion around each article, the debate that takes place behind the scenes.
There is a correct balence, but as media scholars, we need to work out what things need to be impressed on a platform, and decide what is important to us in a media platform
Kevin Kelly and THE Wikipedia
Kevin Kelly’s response is saying the hive mentality may seem pretty narrow and seem like groupspeak, but “its brute dumbness produces the raw material that design smarts can work on.” Just trusting the hive would be stupid he believes, but disregarding the hive would be even worse. He believes there needs to be involvement from the bottom-up and the top-down in order for something like Wiki to actual be some sort of resource. He also believes that the Wikipedia model would probably not be good for anything other than writing universal encyclopedia (for now at least).
I would have to agree with Kevin about involvement from the bottom-up and the top-down, but I think this type of involvement is used in any successful… anything and so I would have to disagree with his belief that the Wikipedia model would probably not be good for anything else. I think he might be thinking about this too narrowly. In a sense, I feel like this is how elections work in our political system. Top-down telling us what they’ll do, bottom-up responding, top-down altering their campaign or continuing what they are doing.
Exploring Douglass Rushkoff’s Response to Wikipedia
“…we can’t go on pretending that even our favorite disintermediation efforts are revolutions in any real sense of the word. Projects like Wikipedia do not overthrow any elite at all, but merely replace one elite — in this case an academic one — with another: the interactive media elite. Just because the latter might include a 14-year-old with an Internet connection in no way changes the fact that he’s educated, techno-savvy, and enjoying enough free time to research and post to an encyclopedia for no pay. Although he is not on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia Britannica, he’s certainly in as good a position as anyone to get there.”
I think Rushkoff has made some great arguments for the ability of the internet to connect people not in content but rather just contact. In my opinion, sites like Wikipedia serve as general information but are no means an outlet for primary research. The internet, in allowing users to insert their own knowledge and opinions have accumulated a reputation for both having a vast amount of available information but also a lot of false information. Therefore, when doing research for academic work, the internet becomes a touchy subject yet most of us do not go to sites like Wikipedia (or user content sites) to get information for papers.
Therefore, Rushkoff tells us to focus less on the content of user generated sites and more on the connection it provides for users alike. What sites like Wikipedia offer for us as a whole is a push on individualism while connection strangers together. This ultimately serves as a sign of intelligent life- people coming together to share common knowledge that is accepted by each others’ checks and balances.
“In any case, the true value of the collective is not its ability to go “meta” or to generate averages but rather, quite the opposite, to connect strangers. Already, new sub-classifications of diseases have been identified when enough people with seemingly unique symptoms find one another online. Craigslist’s founder is a hero online not because he has gone “meta” but because of the very real and practical connections he has fostered between people looking for jobs, homes, or families to adopt their pets. And it wasn’t Craig’s intellectual framing that won him this reputation, but the time and energy he put into maintaining the social cohesion of his online space.”
I think Rushkoff has some great arguments for what Wikipedia has done to the internet and its users. I agree that some people may take information available on the internet too seriously- but finding facts versus general information is something we all have to learn to sort through.
A picture says a thousand words… How about a youtube clip? (please help)
They say a picture (or a still virtual image in this case) says a thousand words. So how many words would a video say? I’m going to argue that oftentimes a picture can potentially speak more words (more ideas) than a video because a video gives more context; provides more answers about who the people are, what they are doing, what the setting is, etc. Pictures only show us one frame of a frozen moment in time, and hence they are much more ambiguous.
In that same way, a shorter video says a lot more than a longer one. To be more specific, a scene from a film can potentially contain more open-ended ideas than the entire film itself. Related to my topic on video being posted on youtube of the candidates for the 2008 presidential election, a clip of that candidate taken out of context from the entire debate/event can make the candidates words/actions be potentially perceived much differently than if we watched the entire debate/event. However, we are a culture that doesn’t values time; we usually don’t have too much of it to spend. Therefore, we appreciate the short juicy clips; even if they’re less juicy when viewed in their entire context.
Doctorow and “Digital Maoism”
I chose to read Cory Doctorow’s response to Digital Maoism. He presents a number of interesting ideas in this response, and in some ways takes a refreshing step back from the conflicts surrounding Wikipedia, and looks at the conflicts themselves as opposed to involving himself in them. One of the best lines in this response concerns his evaluation of how Wikipedia can be superior to a traditionally more respected medium like Encyclopedia Britannica:
“The Britannica tells you what dead white men agreed upon, Wikipedia tells you what live Internet users are fighting over.
 The Britannica truth is an illusion, anyway. There’s more than one approach to any issue, and being able to see multiple versions of them, organized with argument and counter-argument, will do a better job of equipping you to figure out which truth suits you best. True, reading Wikipedia is a media literacy exercise. You need to acquire new skill-sets to parse out the palimpsest. That’s what makes is genuinely novel. Reading Wikipedia like Britannica stinks. Reading Wikipedia like Wikipedia is mind-opening.”
This is probably the best point he makes in the piece: In chastising Wikipedia for its ever-changing nature, we’re reading it like an old-style encyclopedia. Knowledge isn’t fixed, as it would appear to be in a volume of static text; however, on Wikipedia, the body of knowledge is given a more fluid form. Additionally, Doctorow brings up the importance of examining the “history” and “discuss” sections of Wikipedia articles, which can give users an even better understanding of the issues surrounding a topic, and an insight into multiple sides of an argument. These points help address some of the criticisms brought up in Digital Maoism, and provide somewhat of a solution to examining Wikipedia.
My Response to Cory Doctorow’s response to Lanier’s response to wikipedia
Response to response to..
In his response, Doctorow said:
“We’re bad futurists, we humans. We’re bad at predicting what will be important and useful tomorrow. We think the telephone will be best used to bring opera to America’s living rooms. We set out nobly to make TV into an educational medium.“
He brings up a good point. The internet was created for military purposes and look what it has become today. In the same way, wikipedia was created to be a continuously updated, free, user updated encyclopedia (according to wiki) yet it is being thought of as a hive mind or the next step for collective knowledge. I think that Lanier is looking at wikipedia a little bit too much on the surface when he thinks that the individual mind will be lost in a collective, hive mind (the zerg from starcraft comes to mind..im a nerd). Clay Shirky points out, in his response, that beneath the surface, wikipedia is still run and managed by administrators; that is not just anyone can go in and change an entry, it has to be approved and etc first. Doctorow also mentions this when he talks about the gatekeepers to different mediums. These people keep things on track and keep wikipedia from running rampant with rediculous facts. Otherwise, wikipedia could turn into something like the urban dictionary which is basically a big crack at ebonics. Another way Doctorow claims that wikipedia moves away from a true hive mind is that there are “those “history” and “discuss” pages hanging off of every entry” where people challenge and discuss the entries. Even the Borg from star trek had individual minds within the collective. I’m not too worried about wikipedia stealing my individuality.
Software? Check. Synth Pack? Check. Talent? Uhh…
Well, over break I attempted to journey into the world of chiptune creation. YouTube was my primary source of information in getting the proper programs to make a quick song, but the process is fairly complicated. Here’s the video I looked at:
As you can probably tell from the somewhat complex appearance of the program, it’s taking me a while to get used to the way things work. Shaping the actual sound wave of the note is a new concept to me, and although the video makes it look easy, I’m having trouble piecing together anything that really sounds like music. To make matters worse, I’m getting all kinds of conflicting results on what the best software to work with is. Itt looks like I could possibly be able to play some chiptunes on my Nintendo DS, with the proper emulators and ROMs, but it could get complicated. As of right now I’m still trying to balance an authentic experience with the amount of talent it’s going to take to put something together.
This is no Traditional Board Game!
 
So its been almost 3 weeks now since I began this new travelogue and it seems that with each passing week I am drawn deeper into the scrabulous hole. There are many interesting scenarios in scrabulous that can all be developed further, however, this week I will focus on just one, and that is scrabulous as a community.
The photograph above shows two individuals playing in a scrabble tournament, I chose to display this photo in order to reaffirm how different the dynamics of scrabulous is from traditional scrabble. The birth of digitlism paved the way for re appropriation like never before, scrabulous is just another example of that. Scrabulous as a community on facebook:
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For today’s class: Wikiality
It was mentioned before, but should be discussed in class today:
flash mobs
For my next log, I decided to pull back a little and look at different kinds of flash mobs, rather than just ImprovEverywhere. I found a variety of different kinds that range from strange to very serious. One site, flashmob.com is an open forum where anyone can post a flash mob event that people can attend. However, judging from the types of events that are posted, I cannot imagine that the turn out to the events posted here is very high. However, I am going to investigate further and see if this is actually an effective way to get a mob going. It seems that flash mobs are more successful when they are organized in a way that people feel that they are part of a community. Flashmob.com features an anonymous, unstructured way of mobbing. ImprovEverywhere provides a community and a certain degree of fame (they list the “agents” used in each event).
Another group, critical mass seems to be a mix of flashmob.com and ImprovEverywhere. Critical Mass meets on the last Friday of every month to promote bicycle riding and to protest the huge amount of cars that people drive in urban areas. There is a specific goal and purpose yet there are no specific people mentioned. ImprovEverywhere is much more open about publicizing the people involved. If I find the time, maybe I will participate in critical mass or post an event on flashmob.com and see what the turn out is..
Another way flash mobs are used are for purely pranking purposes as featured below on a silly japanese tv show
