Power, Corruption, and Social Media

I came across this blog post from the UK’s Guardian about astroturfing.  And no, it has nothing to do with fake lawns or stadium football. Astroturfing refers to the creation of multiple artificially generated profiles used to control public opinion often at the expense of drowning out comments from real users.  This, of course, made me think back to Michael’s presentation that posed an interesting question of “Who is really at the keyboard?”

This technique is becoming more prolific, and the software is more sophisticated. Just think about the implications. The ability to manipulate mass public opinion is the ultimate weapon. It seems that even the U.S. military has been leveraging social media, and not in a way that would seem to be consistent with a country that touts itself as the promoter for free speech.  Another article from the Guardian, Revealed: US Spy Operation Manipulates Social Media, discusses the military’s plan to use astroturfing to make fake online personas to influence internet opinion and spread pro-American propaganda, primarily in the Middle East.

There have been other known instances of tobacco companies using astroturf groups to fight regulation, and even fake grassroots campaigns that appear to have mass public support. This just validates the importance of developing a critical awareness in our students about new media. When I think of the powerful and sophisticated systems and software that large corporations and governments can employ, the potential is a little scary. One of the big draws in social media comes from the power of numbers–we’ve seen how social media can incite uprisings and revolution–but what does it mean when those voices can so easily be co-opted by powerful organizations?  As someone who regularly uses social media sites like Yelp for restaurant and business recommendations, it makes me wonder whose truth I am buying into…

NY Times Announces Pay-Per-Read Model for Online Readers

The integration of the Internet, mobile technologies, and social networking has created this expectation for on-demand news.  It’s also expanded the notion of authorship, and to some extent, conditioned us into believing that online content should be free (at least when it comes to the exchange of information).  Traditional news media has struggled to find its footing in this market of content saturated messaging.  And in its latest attempt in trying to resurrect the flagging print industry, the New York Times made an announcement that it will now start charging its online readers for reading more than 20 articles a month.

Beginning March 28, this new pricing model will let readers who wish to have access to more content purchase digital subscription packages that start at $15 for four weeks access.  Print subscribers will have full-access.  The new pricing model has already been  implemented in Canada.  The news has generated a mixed reaction–some readers are willing to pay for what they deem quality content, and a majority have threatened to boycott, not happy about having to pay for content that has always been free.

What will happen if other major publications start to follow suit?  How does this pay-per-read model affect accessibility?  And if all professional news publications start to follow this trend, will our news diet start to rely more heavily on informal news sites and blogs?  If the New York Times is successful in repositioning its online business model, this could mark a major change in how content is used and valued on the Internet.

The Tor Project: Protecting against online monitoring

Many of our class discussions have circled back to the concern over the monitoring of our online browsing habits.  Some interesting points were raised about how new media and consumer sites can be used to track our online movements, which in turn, can be leveraged by marketers to build detailed user profiles and wage targeted ad campaigns.  And while this is not a new phenomenon–advertisers have been using media like television and radio to get ads out to consumers for decades–the specificity of the information gathering and the invisibility of it is something new.  This, I think, raises some important issues about digital literacy because how many of us are guilty of skipping over the user agreement section and just clicking on the opt-in box without bothering to read or fully understand what it really means?  It doesn’t help that these user agreements, full of technical jargon and legal language, are designed to be unreadable.  And because this tracking of our movements takes place in the background, it’s rendered invisible and isn’t something we tend to think about.

The echoes of this class discussion were on my mind when I stumbled upon The Tor Project, which is free software that can be used across a Mac, PC, or Linux platform to safeguard against network security and traffic analysis tools.  Basically, it’s designed to prevent online tracking systems  from gathering information about your location and browsing habits. Military and law enforcement use this to protect their communication and online intelligence gathering efforts.  Activists, journalists, and some businesses also use Tor to anonymize their browsing habits and protect information and sources.  Tor is supported by The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco based organization concerned about defending civil rights in the digital world.  They have an interesting section about online behavioral tracking.

The Anonymity Debate: Should commenters be allowed pseudonyms?

We recently discussed the issue of trolling–the practice of posting inflammatory comments with the intent of provoking others or igniting some type of emotional response.  With the recent media attention on cyber bullying, trolling can almost be seen as a form of that, played out in the arena of public opinion.  James Rainey wrote an interesting article in the LA Times, “On the Media: Your words, your real name,” regarding this very issue.

In attempt to counteract some of the mudslinging and derogatory commenting, the media has experimented with different methods of control, trying to keep the online commenting environment from becoming “too ugly.”  Sometimes that involves tighter monitoring from the moderator, but this can be difficult given the amount of content that many media outlets put on the web, and the dwindling staffing resources that they’ve been forced to contend with.  Rainey reports that big media outlets such as the Washington Post and the New York Times have employed staff whose sole job is to moderate the comment boards. Recently, the LA Times has adopted a self-monitoring system using a red flag icon that other readers can click to “report abuse.”  But can handing over the policing of the comment boards to the public really help solve the orignal problem?

The latest solution for managing, what’s become a costly and time-intensive feature in online news articles, is requiring readers to sign-in with their Facebook accounts.  The Bay Area News Group (which includes San Jose Mercury News) and the Los Angeles News Group (which includes the San Bernardino Sun, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Pasadena Star News, Los Angeles Daily News, and The Long Beach Press Telegram) have both moved to a model requiring Facebook log-ins.  The reasoning behind the decision was that eliminating the anonymity and forcing readers to sign-in with their real identities kept commenters accountable and cutback on the trolling.  The Los Angeles News Group has created a FAQs page explaining their reasoning for the change in policy stating: “We’ve found that article commenting became more civil when a person is easily identifiable with their name and face attached to a comment.”  Still, others argue that this new sanitation effort is a subtle form of censorship and doesn’t grant equal access.

Digital Literacy and the Generational Gap

 

 

In reading the case studies from Hawisher and Selfe’s Becoming Literate in the Information Age: Cultural Ecologies and the Literacies of Technology, I became reflective of my own digital literacy practices as well as those around me.  The two research study participants, Melissa and Brittney, separated by an age gap of over 20 years, show the advantages of a “digital native” (someone who grew up surrounded by technology) over someone who had to acquire the skills later in life.  Both participants came to age in a time when the digital culture was undergoing a radical transition.

I can’t help but be reminded of the frustrating hours spent helping my mom on the computer.  My mom, who is part of the Baby Boomer Generation, sees computers as a foreign concept.  As an elementary school teacher, she wasn’t required to use computers for her day to day job beyond taking her class to the “technology lab” twice a week (where there was a dedicated librarian/lab technician to answer student questions and troubleshoot any network errors).  She has only recently discovered the virtues of email, but hasn’t quite mastered the distinction between the reply and reply all functions.  It was an inside joke between my brothers and sisters when our inboxes became flooded with chain letters and “true” stories verified by snoopes.com–uh-oh, mom has discovered the fwd button. I once received a panicked call from her because she couldn’t access her bookmarks, only to have to explain that bookmarks did not transfer from browser to browser and computer to computer (she was at a friends house trying to access her own bookmarks).

I find myself repeating the mantra of “patience” in my head when it comes to helping my mom navigate her computer troubles.  I’ve come to realize that maybe there is somewhat of a generational gap, or at least a gap in experience.  And it isn’t just my mom–frighteningly enough, many of her coworkers are the same when it comes to the uses of computer technology–and when I help them with a simple task like uploading a picture, they see me as a technology guru, though I am far from it.  I’ve noticed that the knowledge that many of us who grew up using computers would consider intuitive (links and search engine functions), aren’t so intuitive for people like my mom.  For her (sorry mom, hopefully she never reads this), technology is just a big enigma, shrouded in mysterious powers.

Circling back to Hawisher and Selfe article, it points out that “people are constrained by any number of influential factors: age, class, race, gender, handicap, experience, opportunity, and belief systems” (667).  How do these factors conflict with our notion about an open, universally accessible world wide web?

Fair Use Practices in the Remix Culture

The proliferation of technology has made it increasingly simple for everyone to write, publish, and create their own material. The cost to produce video has become relatively inexpensive when you consider the days before YouTube and mobile technology with push-button video capabilities. It used to involve expensive high-end, industry standard, camera equipment and video editing programs like Avid or Final Cut, not to mention the deep financial pockets needed for distribution. Now anyone with a decent video phone or digital camera and simple editing software can produce and upload their own video on YouTube, and it doesn’t have to be a time or resource intensive project.

Not only has the digital culture given rise to an expansion of authorship like the previous post discussed, but also this notion of what Lawrence Lessig, author, Harvard Law professor, and founding board member of the Creative Commons, describes as free information–and the ability of people to draw on elements of prior cultural production to further the creative cause. Lessig has even published a book, Free Culture, which criticizes how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity–and to prove he’s not all theory, Lessig has even made his book available for free under the a Creative Commons License.  Users are welcome to access Lessig’s Free Culture under the direction that they are allowed to redistribute, copy, or remix/reuse the content as long as it is for non-commercial purposes and proper credit is given to the author.

In Chapter one of A New Literacies Sampler, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel address different dimensions regarding opposing mindsets about digital literacy.  In the first mindset, value is seen as a scarcity, which results in efforts to control by using copyright or licensing.  To a certain extent, Lessig’s criticism about big media and corporate interest suppressing creativity is not unfounded, especially when you look at the market share for a company like Microsoft.  But as the development for open source software grows, more people are gaining confidence with the alternatives to commercial software like Open Office instead of MS Office or Gimp in place of Photoshop.  These are examples of the second mindset, which sees value as a function of dispersion with more emphasis placed on the collective.  This mindset is more fitting with the Open Source and Creative Commons mission that sees information as public and collaborative.

A small but growing belief in the collaborative, free information, school of thought gives way to the remix culture.  It’s what happens when you take bits of cultural production that is already in existence for fair use, and either alter it, or remix it with another form of media to create something completely new.   The concept that creativity and new ideas will thrive under this model as more and more people contribute to the collective seems to be the distinctive aspect of the “new” literacy of the digital culture.