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WEEK 10 BLOG: Big Data and My Issue with Entertainment

Week 9 was on the topic of Big Data. A concept, which to be honest I do not like. Big Data is comprised of every electronic move you make whether that is clicking on a website, online shopping, watching videos, enabling GPS in your phone etc. All of these actions create data that is recorded via the cloud - data which is sent to oversize computers whose sole purpose is to collect and store this information. What businesses and governments do with this data not legislated - they can do whatever they wish - and i think this is what scares me. 

While many different positive outcomes are likely to arrise from the use of big data - examples can be seen here or here. One of these examples was spoken about in Jenna’s 5 minute review at the beginning of the week - The Gates Foundation and the Polio Program (here is a link to her blog post this week) 

I am nervous about the ways in which Big Data could be abused by those in power - both in government and in business. Google is currently the main collector of Big Data with Google Ads displaying items that you may have searched for or added to an online shopping cart.  To me it seems like an breach of trust and privacy - it seems eerie and off-putting to see an item in my shopping cart advertised to me while i am searching for information to compete uni assignments (not to mention distracting).  

What negative impacts could come from big data?

Unstable governments could use big data as a way to track and target individual citizens who do not agree with their regime. It could be used to enforce a totalitarian state. We have already seen examples of this sort of story - and i will keep my eye on the recent news story about Iranian Women Ditching Head Scarfs and the display of this on Facebook. It would not surprise me if Government Intervened. 

Finally, while others have spoken about the positives of Big Data in the Heath Industry I have concerns in regards to these comments:

While being able to decode human DNA at an affordable price would bring around cures to certain diseases and illnesses, this ability could enable a Gattaca-esque society to form, with DNA decoded at birth to find illness leading to discrimination. If you haven't seen the movie Gattaca from 1997, i recommend you do, as it is one of my favourites and has a strong storyline that revolves around Decoding DNA and the discrimination that would ensue. A trailer is included below.

Overall throughout the semester we have covered many different topics within the new media environment. I have learnt a lot about each topic - including that i consume far too much futuristic, dystopian entertainment. I have also discovered that if i want to have a positive opinion on the topics discussed, i should probably step away from both Orwell and my favourite movies. What has everyone else thought about entertainment and the topics, have books or movies given you a strong opinion on the topics? Or have you been able to separate Fiction from the future of New Media?

References:

Woodford, Darryl. 2014. “New Media, Big Data and Telemetrics.” QUT Lecture , echo file posted May 1. Accessed May 10, 2014. https://lecturecapture.qut.edu.au/ess/echo/presentation/11dcf106-e7c9-44eb-a753-74dfff689043?ec=true

Youtube. “What is Big Data.” 2012. Accessed May 10, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahZGEusG13A

Youtube. “What Big Data Says About You.” 2013. Accessed May 10, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc1zBNC9wNY

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WEEK 7 BLOG: CMC and Netspeak

 Week 6 explored Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). CMC is the use of technology to communicate and record information - the complete opposite to direct, face-to-face communication. 

It was the reading by Crystal (2001; 2006) that i found to be of most interest this week. It originally caught my attention in the lecture where Theresa spoke of Netspeak. Netspeak is a term used in Crystal's reading used to describe the language used in CMC. 

While I have a rather cynical outlook on a few of the topics discussed in previous lectures, and have even compared some aspects to an Orwellian dystopia. I am not sure I agree with Theresa's reference when comparing Netspeak (the language of the Internet) to New Speak (a dystopian language from George Orwell's 1984, a language which limits freedom of speech and self expression).

Crystal discusses the language of the Internet, noting that the online world has a specific jargon - originating from the "language of geeks" (Crystal, 2006). This language is appealing to the young, computer-literate population of first world countries. He goes on to question what will happen to Netspeak as the user-base expands and the demographics and geographics of users broaden. 

Demographics are already expanding in first world countries, with people from a much older age group  becoming users of the Internet. While much of this demographic ignores the specifics of Netspeak, there are also a number who try to adopt the language as their own - some not so successfully. 

The language of Netspeak is considered confusing for this demographic as meanings of acronyms have changed with the decades.  LOL, Which once meant "lots of love" now means "laugh out loud". A mix up that would cause lots of confusion and for an awkward situation. 

Not only is Netspeak made up of acronyms such as LOL, OMG, ROFL, YOLO etc,  it is also made up of memes, images and GIFs (just to make things more confusing). Over the years these new acronyms have been added to the Oxford Dictionary, other internet jargon, such as derp has also become a ‘proper’ words - meaning we can now use it in a game of scrabble. That will certainly give you a heads up when competing against your grandparents!

David Crystal originally  explored the idea that CMC is “written speech… the way people talk” and “writing that very often reads as if it were being spoken… writing talking” (Crystal 2006). While writing the way people talk is a good idea in theory, it comes into question when we ask “which people?” Crystal 2006).

Whole websites have been created to help those over 50 to use the internet… An example of one is below: it explains everything from how to say names of websites (not “the Facebook” or “the Twitter”),  acronyms and even  memes.

http://cykod.com/blog/post/2012-01-how-to-speak-internet

References:

Crystal, David. (2006). Chapter 2 : The Medium of Netspeak. In Crystal, David, Language and the internet, (pp.26 - 65). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Cykod.com. n.d. How to speak Internet.. [online] Available at: http://cykod.com/blog/post/2012-01-how-to-speak-internet [Accessed: 10 Apr 2014].

Sauter, Theresa. (2014). “New Media Communication”. Powerpoint Presentation. Accessed April 10, 2014.

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WEEK 6 BLOG: Fandom on Tumblr

This week I presented my five minute recap of the lecture. I focused on the concepts of convergence, participatory fandom along with audience alliances that have an inclusionary vibe. 

Rather than just repeating myself in blog format, I am going to focus on the ideas surrounding Tumblr and how this platform encourages fandom, more specifically a participatory one. 

Tumblr is different to the usual microblogging and social networking platforms due to the community feel. Tumblr is deeply woven into fandoms with the platform all “about sharing and adding your own spin onto whatever it is that you are sharing” (Participatory Fandom, 2011)

Jenkins describes participatory culture as “a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created)” (Jenkins et al, 2007). This definition leads to the conclusion that Tumblr is an effective, multimedia friendly, platform for participatory fandom.

Below I have listed three ways in which Tumblr users engage within fandoms:

Artwork:

Fanfiction:

This is when a writer takes characters and/or storylines from a piece of media that is not their own and creates their own story around it. Fanfiction has been given a bad name by poorly written and explicit stories (ahem… 50 Shades of Grey, which was originally a Twilight fanfic). However their are exceptions, such as ‘Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality’ by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Vidding:

Vidding is one of the more popular forms of fandom interaction. With the improvement of technology, fan vids become more professional and have become in a large number of cases better ‘trailers’ for television and movies than the originals released by the production companies/studios. Vids are created and uploaded to YouTube and then shared via the Tumblr community.

These are two of my current favourites. This first one is from the TV program Teen Wolf.

This second video is much older and is a ‘Chair’ video. ‘Chair’ is the couple name for Chuck and Blair from Gossip Girl. If you search for this tag on tumblr, there is a whole community based around this couple. 

Overall, I highly recommending looking up the name of your favourite TV show/movie/book/video game etc. on tumblr and having a look at communities that surround them. You may be surprised as to what you find! I would love to hear your opinions of Tumblr. Do you have a personal account? I do.

References: Jenkins, H. et al (2007). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. [online] Retrieved from: http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF [Accessed: 1 Apr 2014].

Participatoryfandom.tumblr.com. (2011). Participatory Fandom on Tumblr. [online] Retrieved from: http://participatoryfandom.tumblr.com [Accessed: 3 Apr 2014].

Sauter, Theresa. 2014. “New Media: The Entertainment Industry. Week 5 Lecture”. PowerPoint Presentation. Accessed March 31, 2014.

Shefrin, Elana. 2004. “Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and participatory fandom: mapping new congruencies between the internet and media entertainment culture” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21:3, 261-28

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WEEK 5 BLOG: Crowd Labour

Week 4 looked at the idea of new media enterprises and in particular participatory systems, such as crowd sourcing. 

Before I begin, an explanation of crowdsourcing can be viewed below, it is a much simpler explanation than I could give you:

The video recording of Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s, Minds for Sale lecture, was of particular interest to me this week. Due to this, my blog post will be on the topic of Cloud Labour for which I have strong feelings.

Professor Zittrain focused on the topic of crowdsourcing and crowd labour along with the variety of online platforms that enable this. Implications of these platforms were discussed, with both the positives and negatives explored.

One of these platforms that he discusses is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. This platform uses crowd labour to enable participation in anonymous HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). These tasks can be submitted by anyone, with the majority of HITs being paid between one to fifteen cents for completion (Amazon Mechanical Turk, 2014).

In Zittrain’s lecture he brings up some of the negative ethical implications surrounding the platform. An example of this is when a HIT was listed offering the opportunity to write a positive 5/5 review for a product on a website. Hundreds of workers (called turkers) accepted the HIT and completed for the action for a less than 15 cents a time. This raised many ethical issues, in regards to the content of the HITs (Zittrain, 2009). 

Another ethical issue that was raised was to do with the hourly wage one can earn by completing HITs. According to research, 80% of HITs are performed by the 20% most active Turkers, these are those who spend more than 15 hours per week completing HITs on the Mechanical Turk system. The average wage earnt by these Turkers is less than US $2 per hour, a wage which would be considered unacceptable in developed countries. Unions, sick leave and vacation leave are also denied to workers, cutting costs for Amazon, but leaving Turkers to struggle (Fort, Adda, Cohen, 2011). 

So whats my view on crowd labour?

After viewing Zittrain’s lecture, I completed a considerable amount of research on crowd labour and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. I came to the conclusion that due to the unethical HITs, low wages and the lack of health and holiday leave. The idea of a faceless crowd completing tasks for such little in return concerned me. 

It’s like a modern day virtual sweatshop, an example of a dystopian nightmare. I read one quote by Marcus Courtney of WashTech, that stuck with me, and I could not agree more with him.

“What Amazon is trying to do is create the virtual day labourer hiring hall on the global scale to bid down wage rates to the advantage of the employer… Here you have a major global corporation, based in the United States, that’s showing the dark side of globalization. If this is Jeff Bezos’ vision of the future of work, I think that’s a pretty scary vision, and we should be paying attention to that.” (Marcus Courtney via Katharine Mieszkowski, 2006)

If you would like to read more on the topic I highly recommend reading this article.

References:

Amazon Inc, n.d."Amazon Mechanical Turk." Amazon Mechanical Turk. Web. 26 Mar. 2014. Available at: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

Fort, Karen, Gilles Adda, and K. Bretonnel Cohen. "Amazon Mechanical Turk: Gold Mine or Coal Mine?" MIT Press Journal, 2011. Web. 26 Mar. 2014. <http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/COLI_a_00057>.

Mieszkowski, Katharine. "“I Make $1.45 a Week and I Love It”." Salon.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2014. <http://www.salon.com/2006/07/24/turks_3/>.

Zittrain, Jonathan. 2009. Minds for Sale (video, 1hr 16mins). Accessed 27 March 2014. Available at: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2009/11/berkwest

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WEEK 4 BLOG: User Generated Content

Week 3 moved on seamlessly from the topic of privacy and the introduction of Social Networking Sites and Web 2.0. The lecture and reading topics that I found to be of most interest this week, was that of user generated content and spreadability.  

According to Tim Berners-Lee, one of the inventors of the internet, the original purpose of the Web was to enable flow of information in more than one way - “we ought to be able not only to find any kind of document on the Web, but also to create any kind of document, easily.’’ (Berners-Lee, 1999, p. 182). This media, that is created outside of traditional routes is called user-created content (David Brake, 2013). 

Web 2.0 has a key role in enabling user-created content and in building communities around this shared information. One website that has been built around this model is YouTube, and “no site - ever - has more quickly become central to popular culture” (Lawrence Lessig, 2008).

YouTube’s pop culture significance came from “the community… the people’s relationship. Their tie to, user-generated content” (Lawrence Lessig, 2008). This producer/consumer community relationship, is beneficial as the consumer becomes an active participant, “appraising, distributing, advertising, contextualizing, packaging, and critiquing content for others within their networks… They do not simply pass along static content; they transform or recontextualize the content so that it better serves their own social and expressive needs” (Lawrence Lessig, 2008).

An example of this community relationship between producers and consumers can be seen through Becoming YouTube, the 12 part “weekly” documentary that aired from December 2012 to Febuary 2014. 

Becoming Youtube was written, directed and edited by Benjamin Cook. It is a series of satirical, comedic and pop-culture referencing documentary style videos about the YouTube platform and how an individual can become “crazy internet famous” (Benjamin Cook, 2012). The series brought up discussion amongst online communities on the effect of YouTube on the entertainment industry. It also opened up the topic of what YouTube is and more importantly what it isn’t, Television. 

The most discussed video of the series was Girls on YouTube. One vlogger (video blogger) Rosianna Halse Rojas has even been published in a book called “Lean In: Graduate Edition” with her comment about women in YouTube and the Ladies Survey, an initiative to promote women on YouTube.

On another note - As far as spreadability is concerned, until recently there has been an unspoken rule that YouTube videos should be less than four minutes long (think buzzfeed). This ‘rule’ was created due to the short attention span of the viewer. For content creators who do this for a living, putting a time frame on a video limits creativity. It is for these content creators that the “controversial Kony 2012 film, which has drawn 97m viewers to a 30-minute documentary” means more than “Gangnam Style becoming the first video to pass a billion views” (Tim Lewis, 2013). The statistics that prove that audiences are enjoying thought provoking, long form content have facilitated creators such as Benjamin Cook to produce projects such as Becoming Youtube. The combined number of views of the documentary series totals almost 3 million views.

References:

Becoming YouTube. Dir. Benjamin Cook. YouTube. YouTube, 9 Dec. 2012. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.

Berners-Lee, T. (1999). Weaving the World Wide Web. London: Orion Business Books.

Brake, David. R (2013). Are we all online content creators now ? Web 2.0 and digital divides., Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication pp.1-19.

Green, Joshua and Jenkins, Henry, (2011). Chapter 5 : Spreadable Media : How Audiences Create Value and Meaning in a Networked Economy. In Nightingale, Virginia, The handbook of media audiences, (pp.109 - 127). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 

Lessig, Lawrence, (2008). Chapter 7: Hybrid Economies. In Lessig, Lawrence, Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy, (pp.177 - 224). New York: Penguin. 

Lewis, Tim. "YouTube Superstars: The Generation Taking on TV – and Winning." The Observer. Guardian News and Media, 07 Apr. 2013. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.

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WEEK 3 BLOG: Your Personal Information – A Matter of Privacy, Sociality and Publicity

I found the topic of Privacy, Sociality and Publicity which was discussed in week two to be particularly interesting. Due to this I am going to base this weeks blog post around this topic.  

When social networking sites first crept into the public consciousness they were praised as a new frontier but feared as the final word in modern narcissism. Either way, it has become almost impossible for a citizen of a first world country to not have a virtual identity. Social media accounts such as: Twitter to feed us bite-sized profundity, a Facebook full of sort-of friends, that long forgotten MySpace peppered with mid-2000s trends and an oh so safe for work LinkedIn. Each of these sites right through to retail rewards programs and even government documents can be used to create online information hubs on each individual. 

Online privacy and the leakage of personal information has dominated headlines from the very beginning of Web 2.0 (Flew 2014), with one detail-spilling scandal after another. Meanwhile, the number of people using social media websites creeps steadily upward and the wave of loyalty programs and groups one can sign up to (for any number of reasons) grows by the day. To gain entry to these ‘all important’ programmes, however, one must enter some personal information. This willingness to relinquish information in exchange for digital conveniences has become almost entirely naturalised, refusing to partake in this currency of content is an almost outrageous act of modern rebellion. 

One particular comment by Papacharissiand and Gibson (2011) intrigued me “The sharing of private information online frequently carries consequences for privacy offline, in a manner that negates the online/offline dichotomy”. This statement reminded me of the 2009 documentary “Erasing David” (the trailer is below).

David Bond turned to film making when “[he] started wondering just how much information there was about [him] out there. [He] quickly found out that the average UK citizen is on approximately 700 computer databases." Shocked that so much of his personal details were recorded, David tried to disappear. Failing in the end, David was tracked down after just eighteen days on the run. Most of the information used to apprehend this liberty-seeking citizen was found via social media sites and personal information that was either lost or sold by companies that he willingly signed up for. (Erasing David, 2009)

In the wake of the documentary’s release, media outlets picked up on the story saying that perhaps we should be more careful with our personal information while online. While geotagging the picture of your morning walk after using instagram to simultaneously tweet, tumble and facebook may seem like a harmless exercise in digital camaraderie, it is essentially one of many steps we willingly take toward our own intricate web of self-surveillance where privacy will no longer exist.   

Warnings aside, we’ve micro-managed our public profile so effectively, entered into this apparently money-free economy so enthusiastically, extended our once-prophesied fifteen minutes so indefinitely, that we have condemned ourselves to life pleasantly imprisoned in our own digital spotlight.

References:

Bond, David. 2009. Erasing David. Directed by David Bond and Melinda McDougall. United Kingdom. Green Lions Production. DVD.

Flew, Terry, (2014). Chapter 1 : Introduction to New Media. In Flew, Terry, New media, (pp.1 - 17). South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Papacharissi, Zizi and Gibson, Paige L, (2011). Chapter 7 : Fifteen Minutes of Privacy : Privacy, Sociality, and Publicity on Social Network Sites. In Trepte, Sabine and Reinecke, Leonard, Privacy online : perspectives on privacy and self-disclosure in the social web, (pp.75 - 89). Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.