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.
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