The Internet: A Commodity Disguised As An Outlaw

Let me just say that I try to stay away from writing pieces that are really long, maybe because I’m a digikid, but also because I’ve always valued effective communication (hence the degree in communication studies), and I know that these days it’s especially important to get your point across quickly and concisely before losing someone’s interest.

But this one was necessary, I promise.

Not a lot of people know this, but a majority of the greatest milestones in technological innovation come from institutional goals and purposes. In other words, major governments are usually the source of our eventual every day technologies. But the internet was not, which made a lot of people believe it was going to completely change the game.

If we go back to the invention of the alphabet, we find ourselves in ancient Egypt, where hieroglyphics were first used by high priests and royal kings to mark tombs and tell religious/political stories that guided this great society. There are examples in many ancient civilizations across the globe of governments that needed to create these systems of transcription for spiritual and economic purposes. Wikipedia it.

Then we get to the printing press. From what I understand, Johannes Gutenberg didn’t create it with any particular political or religious goal in mind, but it was certainly embraced by scientific and religious leaders, and it was no coincidence that the first book ever printed by this new technology was the Bible.

The last example I’ll give before getting to the invention of the internet is the telegraph. It was pretty much created in the name of war, and there’s an interesting article here about how the telegraph helped Abraham Lincoln win the Civil War.

So if it sounds like I’m a hippy yelling “Technology is controlled by The Man!” …. yes, I am.

But that’s what makes the internet so cool, and what made people really believe it was going to be a revolutionary technology.

The dream of a free internet is long gone now though. Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, law professors at Harvard and Columbia, describe the government’s changing (and growing) role in the internet’s life in “Who Controls The Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World“.

It turns out the government was completely uninterested in the internet until the company who partially owned it started making a lot of money. It’s kind of a complicated story, but to sum it up, this company shared authority over the internet with the engineers who actually constructed it. So when this company started making millions of dollars from the dot com boom, these engineers got pretty peeved. That’s when the question of ultimate control over internet policy came up too, and let me tell you, these engineers fought hard to make the internet free from government regulation.

They pretty much failed, and there are a lot of people who still think this is an injustice and doomsday. “The internet was created in the name of freedom,” blah blah blah. But there are a few points I take issue with on this outlook, mostly because it distracts us from the bigger problem we face…

First of all, there are many places in the world that don’t have widespread, [almost] unlimited internet access, nor the need or desire for it. It’s incredibly culture-centric to assume that those without it are being deprived of some innate civil right. It kind of shows you how deep we are into the 21st century, digital state of mind (medium is the message, for you McLuhan fans).

Secondly, we are forgetting that the internet is a commodity. Yes, it’s a very different commodity that requires us to reflect on the very definition of a commodity in the new age, but it is still a commodity. Governments have every right to apply the standards and rules they see fit for a new commodity; this is what they’ve been doing for a very long time. Furthermore, the general population of any country got along fine in the days before the internet, and now each country decides for itself how it’s going to use it. It’s not the end of the world. Right and wrong are not objective realities.

So like Goldsmith and Wu point out, this can be a good thing. The government at least tries to protect us from people who want to exploit us. It’s one of the powers that keeps our products safe, cheap, etc. And as much as we’d like to think capitalism in the U.S.  today reflects a free market, it’s not true, because there are some very bad, greedy people out there ready to take everything from ignorant ones.

But I’m not here to argue economics. My point is that the real fear we should have for the internet is corporate domination. The money mongrels. Companies like Facebook and Google that are altering our search results and browsing abilities. The marketing experts that feed off of our every move to make us their puppets…

Okay that one got a little dark…

But you see my concern here right? Money has controlled this country for a long time, and I’m not ready to allow that control to spread to the one medium where the people have a chance. I’m not a leftist or a rightist, I’m not sure if the government intervening more or less is really going to solve anything. But I do know we have to keep an eye on these big businesses, especially since a huge benefit of the internet has been its ability to create massive amounts of transparency for the public.

It’s these big, multinational companies (usually American) who have to deal with the disparities between different international internet regulations, and all that boring stuff people get their panties all in a twist about; stuff that doesn’t even affect normal, everyday bloggers, vloggers, tweeters and consumers.

The digital age has fueled a surge in small business, entrepreneurship and localism because of this, but the war is not yet won. Make no mistake that these corporations have survived this long for a reason. They have a lot of smart people working for them to make sure nothing gets in their way- not even an outlaw like the internet.

 

 

 

 

 

They just don’t understand.

I’m a digikid.

Two “Twitter Bots” have a “conversation”

And of course right after my last post I find THIS:

That Time 2 Bots Were Talking, and Bank of America Butted In

Digital is changing the way we, and it, feels?

I recently came across James Bridle and his project “The New Aesthetic: Waving At The Machines.” To sum up with the best of my abilities, it’s about an increasing number of pixellated objects in the real world, and how machines “see” the real world and display it back to us.

The reason why this is an interesting phenomena is because we are creating things with an aesthetic not found in a world before the internet.

Bridle says, “Our devices are learning to see, to hear, to place themselves in the world,” to which he is talking about things like Google Street View and iPhone location data.

The point is, it got me thinking. And then I noticed this:

As someone without an iPhone, I had no idea what this specific Emoji was beyond this person’s description (I guess that’s the one thing that doesn’t make me a digikid). But to my surprise, hundreds of others understood exactly what this person was talking about.

We are expressing ourselves with the language of machines.

So being the media ecology nerd that I am, I emailed Bridle about it. He of course had already given this thought, and pointed out another example of this fascinating behavior: gifs.

Then I came across Hello Lamp Post, interactive furniture placed in public spaces around Bristol that would talk to you via text message about the space around you. Pretty cool stuff.

But I wonder, what must these machines do with all this information? Surely this interactive technology can recognize patterns, so what could it draw? What do these machines see amidst our sentimental texts? What could it show us, tell us through its eyes and voice?

This interactive nature to technology is becoming more and more evident, and I’m not sure how to feel about it. Like Siri, for example. Or smart homes. Everything is becoming increasingly integrated and autonomous.

I have a hard time believing our machines won’t ever “wave back” some day, or aren’t already. I guess that’s Bridle’s point. Furthermore, the daily happenings and thoughts of people during their every day lives are recorded in digital history now. This information reminds me of mediums such as Twitter, where actions and thoughts not previously traceable are now being voluntarily told, recorded and publicized. (Information that corporations, with the help of marketing experts, love to get their hands on to essentially manipulate the real world we live in.)

It seems to me we’re so caught up telling the story, adding details, and being “present” that we’ve lost sight, or interest, in its actual meaning… and implications.

-Digikid

When a revoluti…

When a revolutionary technology first enters the public realm, it emboldens outlaws and seems immune from government control. During this period, “it’s not that governments lack the interest or the wherewithal to govern new areas of technology; rather, it’s just that old laws are unlikely to cover emerging technologies and new ones take time to create- time, that, initially seems to favor the pirates and pioneers.” But eventually, the commercialization of the new technology needed to make it available to the masses fuels demands for property rights and government-enforced rules. After an initial period of uncertainty, the government responds to business and consumer demand to assert the control over the new technology needed to make it widely available.

Ruling the Waves by Debora Spar, 2001, quoted in Who Controls The Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World by Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu.

“Time Banking” Education – Exciting or Scary?

“Exciting or scary?” is a fun game I like to play a lot when researching the latest technology trends and developments. Usually I end up voting “exciting AND scary.”

So the idea behind time banking in terms of education is similar to alternative currencies popping up across the U.S. and the world. Spending an hour of your time gains you an “hour” of currency that you can use wherever else it is accepted.

Here’s the example Katie Lepi gives:

With a time banking system, Student A can search for an expert in the arena of social media trends and contact a mentor, with whom the student contracts for a specific amount of time (an hour, for example). Student A transfers one hour of time into the mentor’s account. That mentor, in turn, can use that time to learn another skill or gain information from a different mentor in a different subject area, depending on what the mentor’s needs are.

This is a really cool, innovative idea, but why is it scary you might ask?

Because it’s becoming increasingly more literal that time is money. In “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now” by Douglas Rushkoff, he explained:

Back in the mid-1990s, Wired magazine announced to the world that although digital real estate was infinite, human attention was finite; there are only so many “eyeball hours” in a day per human. This meant that the new market- the new scarcity- would be over human attention itself.

So is this a more logical, beneficial way to do things like education? If we’re in an age where time is quite literally a resource, doesn’t it make sense to adjust our education systems, since they don’t seem to be working (in many ways) anyway? Or is this way of thinking an alarming result of a new era?

-Digikid

I Am A Digikid.

I was born into the digital age. Close to a year ago I discovered the world of media ecology. This is my story. This is my journey.

I haven’t given much thought to whether or not I should have even made this blog. I’m hesitant because I don’t want to become obsessed with maintaining it. Although I figure, what better way to discover and document the draw of digital media than to let myself fall into it a little, step away, and reflect? Maybe I’ll find something worth sharing with academia.

I also feel as though I need an outlet to share my thoughts and findings because I have no mentor for my studies. I wonder if there are other kids out there as fascinated by media as I am. So far I haven’t found a lot of youth in the field (no offense), and I think we need more of a youth perspective. After all, we are the ones most uniquely engaged with media.

But then again, what if I just think I need a blog because I’m a digikid?

When I call myself a digikid, I’m referring to the youth born in the digital age, obsessed with social media profiles and documenting their every breath, bite, and beat. I’m talking about the generation that is aware of so much and seems to care about so little. The ones who are constantly digesting new information but lack the tools to extract anything meaningful or important from it.

That is one of my greatest interests in this field- media literacy, for youth especially. But don’t get me started on the education system. Not just yet, anyway.

In other words, I fear I can’t study something as accurately while being immersed in it. I mean, that’s media ecology 101. But then again we’re all immersed in it technically (no pun intended). And like I said before, I think we need a digikid perspective.

I do believe I am neither a Luddite nor a “technology-will-save-us-all” protagonist. My biggest blessing and curse has always been my ability to understand and weigh the differences and validity of any idea or issue.

So I’ve made this blog. And I just made a Twitter account, which you can follow here. I’m not new to Twitter though. Social media has been a part of my life for a few years now because I used to be an on-air radio jock. But now I’m exploring how to use social media for my own interests, as opposed to selling a personality, and I’ve got to say there is definitely something positive to be said about the amount of readily available information on the internet.

I just finished a book called “Present Shock” by Douglas Rushkoff, and at one point he outlined some very real and inarguable points about misinformation on the web. But he, as well as a few other authors, have also pointed out how great internet education can be. I mean, I’m coming across so many organizations and individuals I’m not sure I would have found before, at least not as easily or quickly. It’s just such a shame in a time of global connectedness, awareness and creativity that our governments, institutions, and businesses are failing.

So yes, by all means call me an optimist, I absolutely am one in all aspects of my life, which is partially what has kept me so happy in a generation of attention deficit and depression. But I understand we have some serious work to do.

Then again, I’m just a digikid.