O/I

My final project for Journalism 4551: New Media Culture is a recycled item sculpture of Shiva Nataraja, the Hindu "Lord of the Dance". It's titled "O/I", both for Object/Information and binary code (0/1).

There are three main themes to the piece. The first is a recent idea, that as new media take over from old media, it changes the people and societies that interact with it. The second is as old as the worship of Shiva, that in order to create, we need to destroy. The third theme is where I see the first two colliding/conflicting, because using digital media creates objects that are endlessly costlessly replicated, and I think this is going to have a bigger impact on society that a lot of people recognize.

New Media/Old Media

I tried to show that new media engulfs and takes over old media when it arrives by making the structural elements of the piece out of artifacts of "old" media, a pile of paper for the base and coaxial (cable-TV) wire for the middle of the aureole, and separated CAT-5 Ethernet cable for Shiva and the flames around the aureole.

Changing media change people and culture, and the web does that by not only being immensely useful, but increasingly accessible. By making the body of Shiva out of a smartphone, I tried to show that because technology that puts the internet in our hands makes each of us part of the web.

Creation/Destruction

In Hindu legend, Shiva represents destruction and transformation. In the traditional Nataraja sculptures, he holds a drum in his upper right hand to signify the sound of creation, for my version I used two speakers.



Shiva's upper left hand traditionally holds fire to represent the prerequisite destruction for creating anything, but in my version he has a CD burner made out of a circuit board from a tape deck and a blank DVD. This is to represent what I see as the difference between the world of old media and the world that new media is building, with new media, copies are easy and cheap/free to make, and this lack of scarcity is a big difference from the competitive environment we evolved and grew up in.

Objects/ Information

This discussion might seem to be relegated to things most people don't consider things, movies, music and other audio/visual media, but more and more of the physical world is ending up on the web, and we need to think about the implications of this.



There are online projects that aim to link data instead of pages on the web. They're creating a web of meaning and knowledge that is going to be very powerful once their databases are more extensive and we get better at using the data. I used printouts of the data on turtles for the base from dbpedia, one such linked-data project.

Another way real world objects are being connected to the web is through things like QR codes. QR codes are small two dimensional barcodes that can contain information that people can read with their smartphones. They're usually used to link to webpages or other data. Shiva's face is a QR code for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nataraja.








Shiva's left hand is pointing to his raised left foot, showing us the way. I'm not sure which way the way is, but it sure looks like it's going to be interesting.






Me after about 2 days of nothing but winding and unwinding wire with the final product. Shiva played the final joke on me and proved that physical objects aren't really relevant anymore, he isn't exactly very stable on the one leg and can't make it to the Journalism mailroom, so this blog post is going to serve as me turning it in. I think it's pretty fitting.

Electronic Voting and Democracy

The results of the 2008 national elections seem to discredit conspiracy theories that Republicans are using electronic voting systems to fix elections, but that is no reason to stop paying attention to how these systems could be abused. A Wired article on Michigan's voting machines brought up some interesting points. The most telling part I thought was a quote from Oakland County Clerk Ruth Johnson, saying ""The same ballots, run through the same machines, yielded different results each time." Since the function of a vote counting machine is to count votes, not being able to accurately count votes makes it useless. It goes to show that human error (in the design/construction of the machines) is as big an issue as human abuse of electronic voting systems.

But the problems don't stop in Michigan. As another Wired article states, we used the same kind of electronic voting machines in Minnesota. These machines are responsible for for counting a vote that came down to 312 votes! I'm surprised that this isn't an argument that Norm Coleman has brought up in his endless barrage of appeals (it's a lot more legitimate claim than any he's made so far).

The only solution I can see is more government transparency. President Obama has vowed to make governmental processes more transparent to citizens of the US, hopefully elections will be part of that movement.

(Side note: As we complain about how electronic voting machines could hurt democracy here in the US, I think it' interesting to look at how they are helping in other parts of the world. As this FAQ from India-Elections.com explains, in India electronic voting machines are seen as advantageous in situations where armed men take over polling places to stuff ballot boxes because "The EVMs are programmed in such a way that the machines will record only five votes in a minute. As recording of votes has necessarily to be through Control Unit and Balloting Unit, whatever be the number of miscreants they can record vote only at the rate of 5 per minute. In the case of ballot papers, the miscreants can distribute all the 1000 odd ballot papers assigned to a polling station, among themselves, stamp them, stuff them into the ballot boxes and run away before the police reinforcements reach. In half- an -hour, the miscreants can record only a maximum of 150 votes by which time, chances are the police reinforcement would have arrived. ")

Whuffie: Science Fiction Fantasy or Present Day Reality?

In Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (free download at link), the post-scarcity Bitchun society delegates resources using a reputation-based exchange system based on a currency called "whuffie". Whuffie is earned by making things that others find useful and treating other people well. While literally operating under such a system is quite far off, web marketing/ community building consultant Tara Hunt advances in her new book The Whuffie Factor that Whuffie is a great metaphor for how online reputations are becoming more important to brands, and I'm inclined to agree with her.

Online, making useful products and creating great customer experiences is the most import important factor in making an idea spread. This makes sense, the most limited resource online is attention, so you have to both make a product that gets a prospective user's attention and an experience that they want to share with other people in their life. If someone has a good or bad experience IRL, they might tell a few friends about it, but online, the amount of people that hear about terrible customer service increases dramatically. (see The Consumerist)

This has given rise to a cool phenomenon. Web Marketing gurus everywhere are espousing the idea that a "brand" is more than just a logo and a letterhead, that it's every transaction with every customer, and I think that this is a great way to make businesses more responsible (which I think a lot of business owners want to do, but had no 'monetary' reason to). I think that this could be a great thing, for businesses, the web, and everyone who uses either (which is pretty much everyone).

Not Punk Enough

It is common for political or other popular movements to be labeled as "counter-cultural", and for those in the movement to then label the opposing side as "mainstream". By adopting these stances, both sides of any mainstream/counterculture argument .

Both calling a movement counter-cultural and a movement responding by decrying the mainstream reflect an Aristotelian understanding of the the goal of rhetoric, where both sides of an issue, be it "anticonsumerists" vs. "capitalists" or vegetarians vs. meat eaters or bike riders vs. hummer drivers are trying to compete in an all or nothing battle of mainstream vs. counterculture.

A Burkian understanding, that the idea of rhetoric is to find common ground with your opponent, would benefit both parties, but how would that work? As someone who identifies with the causes that many "counter-cultural" movements promote, but disagrees with the fact that those who don't agree are mindless sheep being driven to the slaughter by their fatcat corporate overlords, I think that figuring that out is one of our most pressing issues as a society.

(This all came from a discussion I had over StumbleUpon with a friend about the book Rebel Sell, so check out the link if you want to know more)

Satellites and the Digital Divide

One of the methods for increasing the number of people with web access ("bridging the digital divide" if you will) was satellite internet. The New York Times conversation with Pradman Kaul was really interesting, and it brought up some interesting points, including:

• There are "probably 15 million" households in the US without access to broadband internet services. If we can't get broadband over wires to everyone in the US, I think that the problem is going to be different around the world. It just isn't feasible to lay wires to every house in the world.
• Broadcasting high demand programming over satellites means uploading once and sending to millions at once instead of downloading it millions of times. This makes a lot of sense in terms of bandwidth usage, but I don't know how it will be worked into people's already "on-demand" attitudes about web content.
  

This all reminded me an article I read from the BBC I had heard about the launching of satellites by a group called O3B networks (named after the "Other 3 Billion" people on the planet) to provide satellite internet to underserved markets in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East. The venture is funded in part by Google, and this makes me a little uneasy for two reasons:

• Every person online is another set of eyes that can look at Google advertisements. It is in their interest to get as many people online as possible. Will they be willing to accept responsibility for the social unrest that comes with the changes in communication that take place when a society takes up a new technology en masse, or are they doing something about it?
• Do we really want the owner of a lot of online content being an Internet service provider? I don't feel like it's a good idea to have the content and the service come from the same place.
  

The Networked Society: Coworking

One of the most interesting examples of how globalization and new media are working together to fundamentally change the world is the demise of the long term, position based career and the rise of the task based career. Because I'm going to have to work in this environment, this really interests me, and there is a new trend in freelancing called "coworking" that I'd like to look at.

When most people think of a freelancer or someone with a flexible working arrangement, they usually assume this person is working from home. After all, doesn't everyone want to work in their pajamas from the couch?

What some who don't have to go to an office for their job every day have learned is that this doesn't always work. When working from home, it can be hard to make the distinction between home and work life, leading to a feeling of always being on the clock. Also, working at home is full of distractions that take away from productivity.

This lead to the invention of "coworking". In a co-working environment, "independents" as the movement calls them can rent an office in a suite with other similarly situated workers. By sharing office expenses and communal space for conferences, a more productive, professional office can be attained much more cheaply. In addition, the coworking office allows for socializing and professional networking with other independents.

Obviously one downside is that it increases the overhead for those who use it, but the increased productivity and work opportunities that come from networking should be more than enough to balance it out. Overall, I think coworking is a great idea, something we're going to hear a lot more about in the future, and something I'd like to explore for myself.

"Micro-nickeled and Nano-Dimed"

Today in class we watched a Daily Show clip where Walter Isaacson presented an argument he put forth in a Time article earlier this month. He believes that instead of "giving content away for free" newspapers and magazines should start charging very small amount to read articles online.

The fact that Isaacson is seriously pushing this course of action is hilarious. No one is going to pay to read articles online. Most of my news reading is done with a web application called Google Reader. It aggregates RSS feeds of news stories and other content from around the web, and brings it all together so I can read all my favorite sites without having to go all over the internet. Google Reader keeps track of how many stories a user reads, and over the past 30 days I have read over 12,000 stories. Obviously not each in detail, but I at least glanced at the headline and scanned the content and photos in each post. If I had to pay even $.01 for each story I read, that would add up to over $120, just this month!

Could I cut down on the amount of content I consume online? Definitely. But I feel the rich experience of hearing voices from every corner of the world and every viewpoint makes it worth devoting a few hours a day to reading what's going on around me. It would take a lot to get me to give it up, but $120 per month or more would definitely put reading the news financially off limits to me.

In addition, I'm sure people would find ways around paying to read an article. While content creators could scour the internet looking for people who pirate (should that even be the word when all you have to do is copy/paste text?) their content, it is just far too easy to share content online.

There's a great post on the Freakonomics blog today about this too. In it, Marshall van Alstyne has a great quote about how the unique nature of news as an information commodity makes it hard to charge for:

News is not like an iTunes song; it’s perishable. Today’s front page is tomorrow’s fish wrap, and we don’t need to replay it. If anything, a reader benefits more from a second source than repetition from the first. Facts are delivered; songs and movies are created. Facts also can’t be owned, so when the Internet places geographically dispersed media in direct competition, the price of facts falls to marginal cost. In digital markets, that’s zero.

He's right, we can't charge for something that loses value by the second after it is bought.

In one of the clips from Frontline we watched in class, a Yahoo! news executive was asked why Yahoo won't buy the LA Times and find a new revenue structure to preserve a good content creator. He responded with what I see as a cop out answer, that doing so sounds hard, and he doesn't want to be the one that has to figure it all out. Of course it's going to be hard, but people are smart, we can figure out how to finance good, investigative reporting, as well as other quality content without resorting to such archaic concepts as micro-payments.