S03. Internet Memes

Reading Jenkins' treatise on Convergence, I became stuck upon the idea of "consumption... [as] a collective process," and its relation to my favorite part of the internet, the internet meme. According to wikipedia, a meme can be defined as "a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena."

Watching the spread of certain videos ("David after the dentist", "Charlie the Unicorn", etc) and images (Lolcats) without any real explanation invokes in me a certain belief in a collective unconscious, or at least in the concept of ideas that spread rapidly like plague. Perhaps this has more to do with Keenan's assertion of the self-other construct being just that (constructed), in the way that peer pressure is actually an internal influence, but it strikes me as odd that many people become aware of the same material at the same time.

With the rise of KnowYourMeme.com and Digg.com, these objects themselves are being spread wider and faster than ever before, drawing further parallels in the way that the spread of the internet represents the spread of a single, universal culture that is a convergence of all the others that went into its creation.

S.03 Freedom of ...

We continually redefine the idea of freedom. What is it? How related to control is it? It seems that this we we again redefined freedom with passion as a basis for the argument. Basically what I concluded from the lecture on wednesday that passion is the freedom to explore what you want to explore. This concept further the idea mentioned earlier in the class that control is freedom and visa versa. If that statement is true, control is freedom than essentially what is being said is you have the ability to develop you own passion; you have the freedom to pursue learning and other adventures. What I think the real questions is does this conception of control and freedom have a positive reflection or negative? At what point is it bad and what point is it good?

Free Labor = Crowd Sourcing, Friday 11am Section

The article “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy” by Tiziana Terranova made me think hard about current internet trends. I find it interesting that this was written in 2000, well before Youtube , Facebook, and Wikipedia. The “free labor” that she discusses is called “crowd-sourcing” and is a key factor controlling affecting the success of social media companies. The arguments being presented here are stronger than ever and I would not be surprised if others felt this paper was ahead of its time. I find it hard to understand what it was that she had in mind when writing this and don’t think I would have believed her if I read it in 2000.

My favorite part of the reading can be found on page 37 where she writes:

“Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited.”

This, in a nut shell, summarizes the rest of the paper and perfectly encapsulates emerging internet trends. Fan fiction, as was described in class on Wednesday, is a perfect example of this. Fans love reading the new material, but the original writers themselves can take advantage of it without any compensation to the fans. Facebook’s user-agreement stipulates that any original material on the social networking site is property of Facebook. In other words, crowd-sourcing is the name of the game on the internet these days because of all the useful material that free labor produces. Terranova calls these new workers “digital artisans.” I also find it particularly interesting that the younger generations seem to be adopting these new trends quicker. Although I consider myself a heavy internet user, I have never contributed to Wikipedia, been an active member of an online community, and have never uploaded a video to Youtube. On the other hand, there is no limit to how many 13-year olds upload video after video of them ranting nonsense. I think modern crowd-sourcing sites are the beginning of this trend toward harnessing the power of crowds online and am excited/scared to see what comes next.

Friday 11 am Session Blog Post

The formation of free labor, according to Tiziana Terranova, is the result of the digital economy in a macroeconomic sense. For individuals, their laboring is sometimes voluntary, but not willing. They understand that “the free stuff offered around the net” is “either a product that gets you hooked on to another one or makes you just consume more time on the net. After all, the goal of the access people and telecoms is to have users spend as much time on thoe net as possible, regardless of what they are doing” (50). A lot of my friends who claim to be “addicted” to Facebook, among whom a lot are aware of the commercial mechanism of the website and of the nature of their addiction, somehow can’t help spending hours on their addiction, or labor, of roaming on Facebook everyday. When we think about what happens when people do that, Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of flow seems to fit into the picture. In the users’ long-time vision, they don’t want to spend that much of time on Facebook; but they cannot not want, because they are subject to be immersed in the flow of exploring the random stuff online. Their situation of “escaping, but never leaving” is due to the capturing nature of the labor, which utilizes their addiction, more than self-fulfillment. This form of voluntary but unwilling labor exemplifies the convergence of leisure and labor in new media economy in a different aspect, with the individuals being the subject of this convergence, rather than active practitioners.

Open Source Software

I have been using Open Office for quite a while and I never really asked myself what is the ideology behind creating Open Source software. I started using it not because I knew how to modify the source code, but because it was free and I wanted to try it. I never thought Word was any better than Open Office though. However, using Open Office did change the way I perceived buying computer software. In particular, it did not seem very reasonable to me to pay for something that I can get for free and that is not really significantly different.
Yet, I still don't think I completely understand the difference between “free beer” and “free speech” in terms of computer software. Even after reading Open Source Initiative, I still did not think programmers were awarded enough for the work they did. On the other hand, when I thought about it in more general terms, I realized that people from many professions do not get sufficient awards for the work they do. In fact, the income one receives does not (and often is not) proportional to the amount of effort one invests or the talent one possesses. That is why, in my opinion, free labor is so important.
Free labor is what makes functioning of the capitalist society possible. Free labor enhances the flow of information greatly, enabling more people to participate actively in the functioning of that same capitalist society. Without free labor, information would circulate much slower which would, in return, cause not the development of the capitalist society, but rather its stagnation.
Taken in that context, the ideology behind Open Source software makes much more sense. Ultimately, Open Source is not something that would destroy programming profession, but rather help it develop to a more advanced level. True, in the very beginning, programmers would most likely experience financial difficulties, but, Open Source software could lead to higher demand of programmers due to the fact that it stimulates individualization of software for specific needs of the users and due to the availability and possibility to modify the source code.
No one could stop the programmers from selling copies of modified Open Source software that would satisfy needs of particular users. In that way, not only would programmers still have their jobs, but the users would have software that would be more appropriate to their needs.
However, the complete transition between standard commercial and Open Source software would be certainly very hard, if not impossible. For that, we have to start perceiving computer software as a tool of our electronic “speech”. Because of that, we should have the right to use it just like we use other people's written or spoken thoughts.

S03 Collective Intelligence

"Consumption has become a collective process" (Jenkins 4).

There are times when I get on Facebook that several people have posted the same video. Where is this information coming from? It is as if there is a collective source of knowledge. This is what the internet does. It provides for a collective space for knowledge to be shared in. When there is a scandal, almost everyone has the same information. It creates a collective memory and essentially connects an imagined community not only on the source (Facebook) but also information.

How does this information even come about? Sites like Google cater to larger companies who purchase ad space and it caters to the consumers who choose the popular websites. The consumer chooses a lot of what appears when they enter a website because it is based on what the consumer has a tendency of checking online. (All my Facebook adds mention Jason Mraz and fraternities) "The Internet is the material evidence of the existence of the self-organizing, infinitely productive activities of con- nected human minds." (11) All this work by the consumer is creating free labor. We create the content that appears on websites and at the same time consume it.

Friday 11am

I was a little confused by Jenkin’s Convergence book. He says, “I will argue here against the issue that convergence should be understood primarily as a technological process bringing together multiple media functions within the same devices” (Jenkins 3). Alright fine that’s all well and good, but then for the next couple pages the only references to convergence he makes exemplify the contrary. He goes into detail about how the cell phone represents a convergence (that he believes to be unnecessary) of phone, web, video, picture, music storage, and navigation. The cell phone is the perfect example that refutes his argument. He brings it up, and then does not explain why it is not an example of convergence. Later he mentions Microsoft and Sony and how they planned on disguising convergence within their game consoles. Indeed these consoles do represent a form of convergence; they can be used for enjoying games, movies, or music. I think convergence is better represented in the examples Jenkins uses in order to try to change how people think about convergence.

-Ben Trotter

S03 - Hackers

When I pulled a new issue of Wired from my mailbox today, I was unsurprised to notice that the cover article, "Geek Power: How Hacker Culture Conquered the World," was quite relevant to this week's readings. In the article, author Steven Levy follows up on the hackers he chronicled twenty-five years ago for his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. These included Bill Gates, Richard Greenblatt, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak. In a look towards the future, Levy also turns his focus on "the next generation" of hackers, namely Facebook's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. While Stallman remains faithful to the ideals of the Free Software Foundation and his GNU project, he admits, "I have certainly wished I had killed myself when I was born." Perhaps this is due to the next generation's view of hacking as a "humming economic engine." The Internet guru Paul Graham and Mark Zuckerberg believe that they have managed to retain some of the hacker ideals even as they combine hacking with "entrepreneurial effectiveness." What we should challenge however, is this new generation's assertion that big business as a means to find the broadest audience possible fulfills the ideals of broad, unrestricted distribution or that Facebook's "hackathons" are the same as releasing early, often, and having the kind of beta-tester and co-developer base achieved through what Ryamond calls the bazaar model.

Digital Media- Spark of International Controversy

11 AM Section

Convergence- new media is convergence. Think of the ipad, the ipod, the iphone... basically any Apple product, or as Jenkins puts it, "The other week I wanted to buy a cell phone- you know, to make phone calls. I didn't want a video camera, a still camera, a Web access device, an mp3 player, or a game system." The phone of today has become a one stop shop, where you can make calls (which of course is becoming rarer and rarer due to the features of internet/IMing and/or texting), surf the internet, watch tv, listen to music, take pictures, preview music, play games, and about a thousand other things; convergence has become the future. Why have a laptop, mp3 player, tv, or landline telephone when you can just get a nifty little blackberry or iphone, perks of the others wrapped in one? Yet the funny thing is, even though there is this convergence all these other forms of technology still run rampant, and are promoted as necessary for one to be a citizen or rather a "new cultured" human being- and even here convergence is the perk, convergence is the answer, convergence is supposed to make lives easier not more anxious. Oh well. That- anxiety- is what people are left with, a device that makes them neurotic on what is constantly happening, whether thats finding out from friends via text, facebook, AIM, checking the New York Times or Perez Hilton. The problem with convergence is that it complicates everything, it sets out doing what is was meant not to do.

Section 3: Big Picture Communication

Sometime after the human race harnessed fire, in what we call the twentieth century, humans started doing some relatively awesome stuff. We figured out flight (...to the moon), started to more fully understand how to treat ill members of our species (...or clone them), and conceptually began to grasp our global situation (...we don't get along, but when we do we prosper). We learned so much from each other that some guy who helped a bunch of other people destroy and larger bunch of other people in a globalizing war decided we may need a machine to facilitate in our information retention and organizational system. Shortly after that desire we arrive at now, here, on the internet.

The massive archive of collective human knowledge and information we hold on our computer hard drives, in our libraries, and in our minds cannot be organized by a single human, but must be organized with the facilitation of communication. Some argue that verbal communication is partially based on the fact that since our eyes are both on the front of our face we have to turn more to see our surroundings. We teamed up and the ones who had better warning systems for predators propagated the survival of their genes by not being killed. Eventually those warning sounds became language, both verbal and written. We express our selves with our body through 'body language' and signs, or by using our body to push sound waves to other bodies' ears, or by leaving symbols of thoughts to be read by others (perhaps in a letter–if it looks like you're writing one to the Paperclip in word–or on a blog). We began to develop ways to extend the range of these visuals and sounds of communication. Now we can leave visual and audio recordings of ourselves or our symbols all over the internet and beam them all around the world almost instantly.

If the goal of human existence is to preserve our personal physical body as much as possible, and to appease it with direct benefit for its actions in a small picture way, then things like Facebook and open source are a threat, because they reject the priority of the body for the sake of the mind. For Facebook, the body is the profile and our physical bodies are simply a part of the equation (as much as a computer is; a middleman), which may at least seemingly undermine society's current opinion of corporeal existence (that it is super important; that can never be ignored, as it is our first mediator to existence, but other mediators like Facebook profiles or our art may be just as influential if not more). For open source, personal credit and monetary benefit may be sacrificed, which also threatens a society of competing individuals. It seems unfair to give away knowledge we individually obtained over time for free, but we may not be giving it for free; in return we expect human betterment which we may personally benefit from.

If the goal of human existence is for the betterment of our entire race (which in turn benefits the selfish being we all fundamentally are), things such as Facebook (with the decorprealizing/globalizing effect of internet profile communication) and open source (super globalized cooperative progress) certainly provide better access to more of the collective human knowledge. Now we must decide: once we break the world down into the big picture mosaic of physics and atoms that it is, do we want to keep knowledge as a luxury and limit access to our individual discoveries or act with our species as one single being? Our 'body' would be the collection of all our bodies, just like our bodies are collections of cells that communicate for a common goal of mutualistic existence; our minds would be all one mind facilitated by communication (like a computer with more than six million hard drives, many of whom have hard drives themselves). It works on an atomic level, and a cellular level, but atoms and cells don't whine as much as humans do. We've made it pretty far as a race that hates itself, imagine what we could do mutualistically.

Jordan - Matt's 11 Friday Section

This is a response aimed at Jenkins' essay "Worship at the Altar of Convergence". Jenkins' writes that, "a medium establishes itself as satisfying some core human demand," and I am interested in what the contemporary pervasive mediums are, what core human demands they do satisfy, and how does the development of technology itself develop these core human demands. In western culture, if you were to ask any individual what they consider a type of media or medium they would probably say television, radio, and art; however, it seems that many people do not recognize the internet as media for some reason. (I just asked two of my roommates, they both said television, radio, and art.) I believe the core human demand that the internet is attempting to fulfill is establishing a space for information that situates the individual in the post-modernist society. Space is definitely a form of media that has been evolving as the internet evolves.

I disagree with Jenkins' claim that the black box will never exist as evidenced by the divergence of technologies. He immediately points out how annoying it is to have so many different devices and technologies. Ultimately, there will not be one black box; however, think of the black box as an essential system of situated mobility. It will be a system that utilizes mobile devices networked over a broad public national network to any other device anywhere on the system. Additionally, you will have a point of situation, whether it is a web page or a networked hard drive, that contains your relevant information that you want to have with you as you move. This way your iphone can act as a remote control for your television. That's what I think will happen and I disagree with Jenkins.

Jenkins, convergence S 03

What interests me most about convergence is the way that it redefines the term consumer. When we are surfing the internet or even watching a television show via the web we are interacting with that television show in a way that makes us not only a consumer but also a producer. We are encouraged to contribute to comment pages or blogs about the shows we are watching. We are encourages to rate them, star them etc. We are even encountered with instances where our television characters themselves become consumers and producers at once, as in, when a television character (as many do from the Office or Barney from How I Met Your Bother) has a blog that exists within the same webpage that you are using to view the television show, regardless of who is actually the writer of that blog, they have had to use, or consume, a program created by somebody else in order to create that blog. Therefore, they have too become consumers. We are encountered with instances where we assume to be producers, where we are creating something like fan art but instead we act as free advertising for the very same thing we are assuming to produce. Then comes such problems as copy right laws and how they aid and harm certain industries. I recall reading that the show South Park when it started had very lenient copyright laws to enable consumers to duplicate parody and recreate the show. This gave the consumers a sense of control and they felt as if they were part of that show they were watching. This boosted rating and when the show boomed they were forced to enforce harsher laws to protect the show, and enable it to bring in more revenue. In this way, the sense of control that was created for the consumer was in a way a ploy to get to get them to tune in more, and therefore it was not control at all, and they were not producers at all. Rather, they were reproducers and everything they produced was somehow owned by, or lead back to the original conglomerate that created that which they are consuming. This also makes me think of such sharing sites as Youtube, where if a video has enough hits or if a character is popular enough, it brings the attention of the larger media owners to it, and eventually and for enough money, they can own that idea that at first was in the name of an individual consumer/producer.
Jenkins talks a lot about what it means to converge. He seems to say that convergence is a state of mind. That convergence occurs in our mind as much as it does in our appliances.Convergence, to him seems to be a positive movement forward. It is a way for old media to meet new media and for old media to find a new meaning to new audiences. Like the theater that becomes elitist or the comics that become specific to certian audiences. He says that the difference between old media and new media is that new media is interactive. It gives us the chance to create a collective memory and it deceneralizes media. but i wonder if this is actually a good thing because this means that we start to hold the position of consumer/producer. We are using programs in order to produce material that is then put into another program through which the owners generate revenue through advertising; therefore we as producers are free labor ( even if it is a labor of love). Or we create content, whilst watching a video that tells us how to produce content. Or we begin to expect to be able to produce and consume at the same time, or to consume different things all at once. We begin to expect to be able to have our music on our computer, ipod and phone. We begin to expect to be able to take a picture with our phone and send it to a friend. The incident that he first mentions about the “Bert is Evil” problem that Sesame Street had just seems absurd and yet so normal. We are faced with these kinds of things everyday now with our convergence culture.
This kind of humor is normal, if not hilarious. When a show like Family Guy parodies a song or a clip from a film, are they in danger of being sued? What about a person who parodies a clip and posts it on Youtube? If anything they are generating more buzz for whatever it is they are parodying. It is free labor. The other thing that has come out of convergence that I am fascinated with is Viral Advertising it is by far the best thing that advertisers have ever done. Viral advertising is produced by a “producer” but is read like it is produced by a producer/consumer. It is everywhere and it is created in a way that it converges with our culture, our habits, our needs, our wants and goes unnoticed as advertising, but is rather enjoyed as a form of entertainment.

Friday 11am Section

“It only does everything.” That is what Sony marketing executives have to say about their Playstation 3. And while many people, Communications Professor Henry Jenkins included, would argue that such a claim is not only false but entirely impossible, the numerous functions of the system are impressive to say the least. Sony's machine “only” reads the newest and most popular movie discs (Blu-Ray), plays the newest and most visually astounding video games (PS3 games), allows users to watch youtube, check their facebook, and browse the internet, among other functions. Prior to the Playstation 3, Sony's line of game consoles had been just that—a line of game consoles. Their functionality had been limited almost exclusively to playing video games. But their newest product illustrates the growing trend of convergence in media.
Certainly, the Playstation 3 is not the only example of media convergence, nor is it the ultimate example. Everywhere people go, media is becoming relevant and significant across multiple platforms. The term convergence itself, in Henry Jenkins' mind, refers to “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences” (Jenkins 2). Jenkins' three part definition can be easily illustrated by the recent efforts made by godaddy.com. The company, which earns money by selling domain names, airs brief, misleadingly risque ads that end with a message: go to godaddy.com to see the rest of the ad. This method is occasionally successful, and results in the viewers seeing the coordinated effort between two platforms to communicate the company's message.
Convergence, though, does not end at just a definition. As content flows across various media, “consumers are encouraged to make connections” (Jenkins 3). Obviously it is impossible for one person to know everything or make every connection. However, everybody knows something. As a result of this incomplete personal knowledge, a collective intelligence is formed. That means that the bits and pieces of information possessed by multitudes of people are pooled to add up to a more complete whole. The richness of information in media helps to stimulate a desire for discussion, which in turn generates a buzz surrounding the content. Therefore, collective intelligence serves as an alternative form of media power (Jenkins 7). This leads to an important point of convergence—it takes place in brains, not appliances. As the crossover takes place in people's minds while discussing information, they piece things together and begin to contribute in there own way.

Wii and Convergence

I think the Nintendo Wii is the perfect example of convergence culture. Jenkins defines convergence as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries” (2). The Wii is at its core a video game console, but it is really so much more than that. On the menu page, there is an option for uploading your photos from an SD card and it has the current weather and news stories. You can connect to the Internet over the Wii Wi-Fi Network to interact with other people and go shopping. The different applications you can do with the Wii each have their own “channel” (eg. Internet channel), which is interesting because it is juxtaposing the idea of TV channels, video games, and the Internet all into one. You are looking at the TV screen and “flipping through the channels,” essentially changing programs, but it from a video game console, not the actual TV.

When the Wii first came out, it cost $5 to be able to use the channel to browse the Internet. After two years it was made free and everyone who had previously purchased it could get a refund. Making the channel free showed how deeply integrated the Internet had become to the media of video games- they have converged. Also, it means the TV basically becomes a computer. The Wii brings together all the media forms to create ultimate convergence.

The Wii actually facilitates convergence within its own genre. Using the online store, you can buy “classic console” games, which go all the way back to the first ever Nintendo console. No other system can boast having such backwards compatibility. Past and present media are both available in the Wii and coexist side by side.

Lastly, the Wii can now be used to watch TV and movies. Netflix recently introduced a disk that Netflix members can request for free, and it allows you to watch your TV shows and movies from Netflix on the Wii. The Wii is literally a combination of a DVD/VHS player, a TV, a camera, a computer, and a game console. The Wii 100% accomplished the challenge of “expand[ing] the potential uses of this cheap and readily accessible technology so that it…smuggled convergence culture right into people’s living rooms” (8). The appeal of this broad range of media cultures is apparent in the Wii’s success- it leads the market in sales over its competitors Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, which have Internet capabilities but nothing like the multi-media approach of the Wii.

Friday 11AM Section

"Free like speech"

The idea of "Free like speech" as opposed to "Free like beer" references Agre's theories of Grammars of Action in two ways. First, open source software, and for that matter all software and all code-based material exist within protocol: users can customize, manipulate, optimize, and utilize software programs, but only to a certain extent - only as much as the code will allow. Second, though the original intent of "free like speech" probably wasn't to directly reference Agre, this phrase brings to mind the freedom of speech that exists within a grammatical system. We are able to express thought, emotion, create near infinite combinations of articulation - but only within a grammatic protocol. Some structuralists may say that a thought does not exist until it can be articulated: we are therefore imprisoned in the system of grammar (and language) - we are unable even to think without the lens of protocol.

Emily for Matt's section

Blog #10 - S03

In “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Tiziana Terranova discusses postindustrial societies’ emphasis on knowledge as a new commodity for consumption. While I had never directly considered knowledge in this way, as an entity as commodified as anything material, what struck me more about Terranova’s article was not the idea of free labor and its fueling of Internet capitalism (though it is simultaneously exhausted and largely unrewarded), but rather the extents to which this free labor stretches – just how many free laborers the Internet is contingent upon, individuals who make possible some of its largest capitalist enterprises yet are not acknowledged or reimbursed for their efforts. Moreover, they are often not even aware of their own labors. When you consider a site like eBay, mentioned in a post below, it is quite amazing how holistically the entire system depends on free labor. Users must photograph, describe, and post their products to be sold; sellers must browse seemingly endless pages and bid constantly to secure their win. Negotiations between the winning bidder and the seller are common, and occur directly through email: what, then, does eBay really do to sustain itself, besides providing the domain and interface through which buyers and sellers may find one another? For, once they do find each other, the labor rests almost entirely on them. Of course, eBay, like all other large commercial websites (e.g. Amazon) has adopted customization features, telling users what products they might be interested in based on past purchases, but even still, the site itself, i.e. its paid and acknowledged employees, are not particularly responsible for the site’s capital revenue. The users’ labors, the posting and bidding and emailing and shipping, fuel the site through its commission and seller fees.

Even a site like Facebook, where no direct transactions involving the users are executed, still depends on the free labor of those who join it. The more Facebook users, the more wall postings and uploaded pictures and general time spent on the site – all a sort of labor in itself – and thusly the more site traffic, which attracts the advertisers that clog the margins of our screens and create large amounts of revenue for Mark Zuckerberg et al. To go a step farther, even news websites like The New York Times Online or CNN online – which certainly do create much of their own revenue through their journalists – still depend partially on the free labor of others. News coverage of the riots in Iran last year, for example, was deeply rooted in the cell phone videos and pictures submitted to the NYT, CNN and others by people far removed from the organizations – people present at the event itself. It was their labor, their strife and the effort of capturing it, which allowed online news publications to break the news with on-the-scene video and photographs.

And yet, as Terranova very astutely says, free laborers are not entirely exploited: they have a “desire for affective and cultural production that is nonetheless real just because it is socially shaped,” which creates an interesting distinction between the free-labor-dependent capitalist structures of the contemporary Internet and, perhaps, a stricter Marxist view of capitalism (Terranova, 36-37). There is a sense of “fulfillment through work” that drives the voluntary labor of so many web users (37). We enjoy viewing and consuming Facebook pictures, and thus post them to create/produce our own fulfilling experiences. With eBay, there is a monetary/material gain (whether you buy or sell) but fulfillment plays its part too. And of course, in the example of online news sources, one might contribute to worldwide awareness of a cause or event; the free laborer’s contribution and production has undeniably beneficial ramifications in the news world, thusly supporting Terranova’s claims of “fulfillment through work,” even when it is free, uncompensated, under-appreciated work.

The little black box of dreams

I want to talk about the black box (issues of myth that surround convergence) in Jenkins' article and relate it to Terranova's theories about freedom and control.

The image of a "black box of convergence" that Jenkins discusses posits resided in my mind. I couldnt help but see similarities between it and the sleek black, rectangular iphone and now iPad. The black box is an ideal goal for convergence that has real wold corollaries (ipod, kindle, blackberries, xbox etc) but at the same time is imaginary, something to strive towards, inovation, simplicity. The ideal black box wouldnt be a fixed object but rather durable hardware that can adapted to the flexible and always updated world of software, allowing for the new inovations to work on the device. There are always new apps coming out, that make the iphone not just a point of convergence for media but a toolbox, a means of currency and transaction (imagine a not to far off world where creditcards will be embedded into phones). Inherent in this image is a not so far off world where not just media converges but all technology may converge.

This idea attracts our society because of its implicit promises of freedom, mobility etc. Indeed today many people aspire to have location free jobs, or ones in which mobility becomes possible. In our postfordist society this is increasingly more possible (appaderai points to this in his idea of Ethnoscapes). The imaginary associated with this is a CEO doing work from the a beach in Fiji, sipping a momosa. Such freedom is an ideal: to travel the world, to follow a loved one, to shake up the stagnation of daily rhythms, and live life to the fullest (sorry gettting a bit carried away here) but that is the point.

Essentially convergence becomes synonymous with ease, and freedom, and convienence. Authorship of the little black box means early retirement, fame, accomplishment, buisness. Both the consumers and the producers participate in this goal. Consumers want it and will pay for it, while producers want to create it. This creates a situation in which the quest for utopian convergence fuels productivity, research, innovation. This work essential is unpaid because profits are hypothetical based on meeting a future goal. But those who enter the race, enter willingly and most importantly freely

The myth then that surrounds convergence is responsible for late hours, for technological juicing of human productive power, and de-emphasis on the individual in favor of the synergistic energy of collaboration.

Perhaps convergence is an interesting way to think about Appaderai's theory of consumption fetish where there is both a fetishism of the producer and a fetishism of the consumer.

Now i turn to the appaderi's social imaginaire. Appauderies idea of nostalgia and the social imaginare- which he says: "Social imaginare is built around re-runs". We are stuck in the the media of other temporalities the past yes via the re-run culture, but also the future, imaginary culture (of convergence) which we strive towards.

Fuller's article about Microsoft discusses our hope for more autonomous workers, and also that work gets absorbed into the technology via the convergence of skill and capabilities into one interface. But at what point does this hope become oversaturated? is it only imaginary? Has it yet been realized in society?

Are we simply taking the neoliberalism promise too seriously and becoming addicted?

It seems that capitalism is trying to manage our desire for change/progression (is there a difference?). but equally it could be that we we project onto capitalism our disires and ideals. and that capitalism can regulate our actions without itself having agency other than simply being a promise or a set of rules.

So then my questions break down here . i want to know how capitalism regulates social desires. And what does marx have to do with it?

Word -- changing the face of programs

While we did not talk about this article much in class, I was really interested in Matthew Fuller’s “It looks like you’re writing a letter.” To me, this article not only illustrates what we’ve been studying regarding control society, the user vs. the creator and the things that the user can do in the world that the creator has given him.
Like Fuller, I am typing this article on word, and I can agree with him that since lot of the space “is taken up with grey toolbars pocked with icons.” This gives the user so much to do. From personalizing the toolbars to deciding which tools we want to use, we feel like we have a lot of freedom. This multiplicity of offerings is also available on the other applications in Microsoft Office.
While it seems like there is much freedom given to us as the user, we must remember that, like when using one of Google’s many websites, we are still in a system, and cannot go outside the boundaries, unless we are the ones programming a new version of Office. This brings us back to the control society and the idea of “always escaping, never leaving.”
It also is illustrating it’s control over us by “shifting things about in the workplace…And what it changes into at work effects how it is used, what it allows to be done, outside of work.” Word is also changing standards by changing what we think is normal for a program to give us, as “the volume of features…is often represented as a disastrous excess, but…[is] fitted up as standard” now.
I think that what word and programs in general have been doing are very interesting and definitely pertinent to the changing face of programming, and I hope that we can talk about what Fuller wrote about in section tomorrow.

BLog10--Matt's Section Fri 11am

Because I brought up the Terranova piece in an earlier blog post, I want to address that reading this week. To me, it is one of the most applicable readings that we cover in the class. It is also, just as Qian mentioned a few posts down from me, a terrifying notion. Within the notions of freedom and control, Terranova’s ideas truly shed a new light on the twisted control that is present on the web. I definitely feel freer on the web than I do in the real world: I can say whatever I want behind a veil of anonymity via sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. I can peruse through peoples’ belongings in unprecedented ways via sites such as eBay and Craigslist. However, my participation in these sites leads to my overall control under the auspices of the web, according to Terranova. All of these sites clearly fit into her idea of free labor—none of them could work if people were not constantly updating and adding digital material to the sites.
I want to take eBay as a perfect example of Terranova’s ideas. eBay is quite possibly one of the largest market sites on the web. Its big rival is most likely Amazon, but their difference is remarkable. Amazon is a company: it runs by selling books from its own warehouses, but eBay runs person-to-person, with people selling their belongings to one another. This website would be completely defunct if it did not have the many users it has today. It is as if we are all working for the website. How paradoxical is this though? Because this website is used as a convenience, something that people can easily get rid of old things with and make a few dollars on the side with, eBay is not thought of as controlling. Thus, the freedom and control that the web gives us is interestingly intertwined. In section this week I think it would be interesting to think about this intertwinement. Most of all, does the web give us more freedom or more control?

Reading over the Fuller link this week, I found myself continually disagreeing with the analysis of Microsoft Word as an application. On paper, sure, the number of permutations of preferences and selections is downright ridiculous. In practice, I know what I'm doing and I rarely if ever feel overwhelmed by the formatting options. It is when I use more basic, traditional text editors, like TextEdit, that I find myself really confused. At some level, that's just the nature of becoming accustomed to an application - you know how it works insofar as you need to use it, and anything else becomes uncomfortable.

At some other level, though, my perspective is fundamentally different from Fuller's. Word was released years before I was born - my generation pretty much grew up on it. Beyond that, I think people who were born into the world of affordable personal computers as lifestyle necessities have a totally different perspective on them. We know how to cut down immense amounts of information into just the relevant and how to ignore the constant interruptions to the flow of computer use - as we discussed in class, virtually nobody reads over the terms of use documentation anymore. I see my friends dodging software updates (for better or for worse...) and circumventing registration for websites like it's second nature. The image of a toddler using an iPhone is the perfect illustration of this idea - bafflingly complex interactions with technology take on a disarming quality of fluency among those who grow up in an environment where that technology is commonplace.

This is why the tone of Fuller's piece didn't resonate strongly with me - the ideas are compelling and accurate. It's the presupposition that I've been extensively frustrated by the Word software that misses its mark. It's not that I don't think the program has design flaws that could have been thought through more thoroughly from the start - I just think those flaws have a rapidly decreasing salience to the experience of the average user.