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Summaries galore!
First up, Dana Boyd‘s piece on SNSes (Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?). I will somehow relate this to SNL’s Weekend Update with Seth Myers, more specifically his piece about Michael Phelps, in class.
Boyd tries to bridge the generational gap between youth who are growing up with the Internet entrenched in their lives, and older people/educators. She doesn’t want conservative educators to think of “social technologies as a product of the devil.”
Back in the day, kids hung out at the park/mall/cafe – all unmediated publics. Now, more hanging out occurs on SNSes, aka mediated publics, which are set apart by 4 things:
- Persistence. Unless deleted, online data sticks around for decades.
- Searchability. A few keywords later, your mom knows where you are and what you’re doing.
- Replicability. Copy + paste is crazy effective. Content is easily doctored.
- Invisible audiences. Who is really looking at the information?
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If you guys can go back to the days of middle or maybe high school when our lovely history teachers taught us all about the elastic clause I would bet that most classes considered how this addendum to the Constitution would be applied to the proliferating power of the Internet.
Most members of our American society have come to be fairly familiar with the Internet, yet the only “rules” we have to govern our cyber behavior come in the form of an intangible social contract. The Elastic Clause states that Congress should have the power to to make all laws which shall be neccessary and and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers of the Constitution — yet this power has yet to be exercised.
As discussed in class I am a proponent of maintaining the status quo, and keeping the cyber world free from regulation. I believe in the power of an organic, self-selecting process. In other words I believe that it’s almost possible to apply Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest to the Internet. Those arguments, opinions, movements, and artistic expressions that are powerful enough to receive attention and recognition deserve the forum to be heard if they are strong enough to be found amongst the plethora of information that floats in cyberspace.
Here’s the video I told you guys about in class — definitely let me know what you think of this lil troublemaker:
