Week Fourteen: Barney and Andrejevic

Justified worry or just paranoia? 

The topics of both works this week are proving themselves to be more and more relevant as we become more and more reliant on networking technology, but I'm not entirely sure I agree with some of the conclusions they reach.

Barney, I think, is on the nose about a lot of things, specifically passages like "...the response of those hoping to capitalize on the commercial potential of network technology has been to make the medium behave more like television... ."(pg. 182) There is more content than ever on the web, but in ways it seems more constricted and less free. Barney notes that everything is being divided into channels to deliver pertinent content to receptive audiences while diminishing content that may not be of interest. 

It's happening all over the web, and it's certainly a far cry from an idealistic democratic utopia of media, but perhaps the amount of content necessitates it. There's simply too much on the web for anyone to dive in unfiltered and attempt to find much of worth. The channeling of the net is probably something to remain watchful of in the future, but given the alternative of pure oversaturation and information overload, it might be favorable.

When it comes to Andrejevic, I feel like he supposes a hefty amount of motive and intent on those doing the surveillance that simply might not be there. I don't want to say that we shouldn't be concerned that everything about us is being recorded and tracked online, but it may just be pushing us out of our comfort zone and we venture into unknown territory with all the internet is capable of.

Maybe I'm too naive in not really caring so much about all the data tracking and personalization of ads that is happening. In a lots of areas, I think it's good. I like that netflix can recommend me movies I may like based what else I've watched. I like that Pandora plays songs it thinks I'll enjoy based on my listening habits. I like that amazon attempts to suggest what I might want to buy based on previous searches and purchases.

It ties in with my point about Barney. There's just too much out there to try and slog through it on my own. I don't mind sacrificing a bit of digital privacy to streamline the process (and really, digital privacy still seems a little nebulous to me). Or I could be way off base in assuming that all these monitoring agents are doing it just to make everything more targeted and efficient online, when there's really some underhanded scheme at work to track and label everything about us.

I don't see a reason to worry, but it could be the kind of thing that can't be seen until it's past the point of worry.

Week Thirteen: Kelly, Lurie, and Tripp

Where does it go from here?

A refreshing bout of optimism in this week's readings made for a nice change of pace. It hasn't all been doom-and-gloom so far, but for the most part I feel that the stuff we've read has tended towards bleak. Lurie and Tripp both presented some basic overviews on the web and its relations to politics. The whole feeling I got from them was along the lines of "here's this wonderful new tool that is hardly being utilized to its full potential. We can do wonderful things with this!" 

And we're seeing those wonderful things happen. Traditional means of media are all on the decline, either dying out or adapting themselves for integration with the internet. Not only that, but we're finding the internet to be wonderfully democratic, participatory, open, and accessible. The perfect storm of new media is upon us.

But the best thing from this week's readings was Kelly's "The Web Runs on Love, not Greed." He put it in great perspective in his discussion about the billions of pages and sites on the internet, and how its inventors would have thought those numbers quite impossible to attain in such a short time.

Yet here we are, moving closer and closer to the digital divide every day as the web becomes more and more useful and powerful. But what does it lead to?

I can't help but imagine that with anything but optimism. 5 years ago we were content to wait hours for a song to download, and now we're streaming entire films in high definition on connections that are "average." It's fascinating, and it's only going to improve. I saw a graph the other day of the projected storage capacity of SD cards over the next few years, and it was staggering. They've grown from a few megabytes to several gigabytes in a short time, but projections show that if they continue to develop at their current pace, we'll have SD card capable of holding several terrabytes.

Terrabytes, on something the size of a postage stamp. That's insane.

I believe it was Arthur C. Clarke who said something like, "Any prediction about the future that sounds reasonable in anyway is assuredly incorrect." That's the feeling I got from Kelly's piece, and it's an exciting feeling to have. Wherever media and the internet goes from here, as long as people like Kelly, Lurie, and Tripp are at the helm, it will be good.

Week Twelve

Does Media Really Die?

One problem I had with the Gilder piece, especially in the first half, was his constant insistence that TV is a doomed medium, headed for a sure death at the hands of new technology and broadcast standards. Sure, it's a little unfair to look at how the situation played out 20 years after Gilder wrote the piece, but it's a mentality I just don't understand.

Television today really only resembles television of 20 or 30 years ago in name only. Yet the medium persists. Content delivery shifted from over the air to cable, but the box still remains in every living room in the country. Computers rose, becoming more and more like the telecomputers Gilder wrote of, but the set still sits in the living room. There only functional difference between computer monitors and HDTVs is a tuner and a coax jack, but the big screens have only moved from sitting on a shelf in the living room to being mounted on the walls.

Television hasn't died, it has evolved, and this is becoming true for every form of media. We are far, far past the point of compartmentalized forms of media that become obsolete after certain advancements (although print media may be the last holdout). Rather, a breakthough in one area, such as the development of flat screen HD displays, becomes a breakthrough in every area. 

As the second half of Gilder's piece indicates, even though corporations and governments aren't quite past the idea of killing one form of media in favor of boosting their own, technology certainly is. Natural selection has worked its way into the technological sector in the form of the microchip, and it's becoming readily apparent that any media that chooses to adapt to it will survive for a long time to come.

Media will continue to blend and meld, like TVs and computers becoming nearly indistinguishable from one another, but neither is going away.