Keith Demele's Blog

Not really. It’s there, although many a folk would argue that the internet does little for democracy….

So, in the most irresponsible act I have made this year, (should tell you how fun I am), I fell asleep after an all night-er working, and missed my classes on Thursday, missing what I think was or would have been the most interesting, engaging class discussion yet this year in my emac 2321 class.

But anyway, we are supposed to find an interesting article that discusses democracy and the internet, and write about it, we are also supposed to write about how it related to the reading and discussion from last class, but that would be a little impossible since I did not attend. I am, however, told the class discussion was about democracy on the internet; the class had a spirited discussion on weather (weither?)  or not the internet was encouraging, or asphyxiating democracy. Hmm, fascinating…I would have bitten my tongue all class again. Well, I better stop procrastinating, in the time honored tradition of writing half legible, sporadic, little-effort, and discombobulated posts, lets begin shall we?

An interesting article that discusses democracy and the internet. could you be any more vague? Oh well.

Lets start off by asking what a Democracy is…

Well scratch that, there will be plenty of time for me to set up that argument in the future net neutrality stuff, here is an interesting article that covers democracy and the internet:The Internet: Foe of Democracy? by Jonathan Shaw…It’s from harvardmagazine.com, sounds smart, it must be good.

Shaw basically talks about Cass Sunstein’s position, stating the internet hurts Democracy by allowing like minded folks to get together and cohort, Sunstein says that the internet is destroying the balance of different minded people by allowing like-minded people to come together, discuss issues, and become more extreme about the issue. Its an interesting point.

Beyond the article I wish to speak a little further how I feel about the internet and democracy, First of all, the content is mostly governed by the people, however the main gatekeepers govern how people use the internet, we will get into that discussion later this semester but I felt like I should make the point. Its an illusion of Democracy. Or as the thought poped into my head earlier….Anyway, I will leave the rest for another post.

Edit:

Finally, watch this, it was just tweeted, relates to the topic I feel.

Fin.

Another EMAC 2321 Assignment…Our professor asked us too read an article by Telegraph.co.uk, entitled “50 things that are being killed by the internet“, he wants us to list 3 things we believe the internet has killed…An interesting question…

The internet has brought on fundamental change in almost every area of our lives, what can we says has been changed, and at what point do we say something has been killed? Here are 3 things which I think have been thoroughly axed by the internet:

1. Physical public forum:

The internet is thoroughly destroying peoples ability to get together, from all walks of life, and talk about important topics. This is destroying the United States political landscape. I once saw a documentary titled Split: A Divided America, and it explained this topic well. Watch it below:

2. The music store experience:

I was developing my love for music right around when Napster was live, I remember my friends brother downloading bands like Pantera and Metallica (Ironic), anyway, although I was never around to really spent time wondering the isles of music stores, I do remember it faintly, where did that go? Now we can sample music online, a bad thing? Nah, however a large part of the experience has been lost from the whole music discovery process, no longer do we have to stand around looking through millions of CD’s and taking a stack of CD’s or cassets over to the demo stand, most websites can recommend great music. Oh, yeah, what happened to the audio CD/physical audio medium? Weird!

3. Down time…

I believe the Telegraph.co.uk article mentions this, however, so true, when is the last time you went and just, “chilled out”…I can pinpoint it, I chilled out for 30 min last august when my truck broke down in canton,TX I went and got an ice cream cone from the Dairy Palace, sat outside in a rocking chair, closed my eyes and just let my mind wonder. It’s been a year, crazy. With the internet at our fingertips constantly nowadays, we are always occupied with something.

For our assignment this week we are to find three links that relate the the class and write a breif description of them, so here we go:

David Harsanyi of Reason Magazine wrote an article entitled “The Amateurs’ Hour“, in the article Mr. Harsanyi pretty much calls Andrew Keen a slob and points out where is logic is flawed.

A. Wilson of dailymail.co.uk wrote an article named “The internet is destroying the world as we know it” This doom and gloom is right there with Andrew Keens views on the new internet. Wilson actuall talks about keens book, however goes into deeper thoughts on why he agrees…Fairly interesting article.

Jeffrey J. Hardy Tells us about Cloud computing in “Cloud Computing – Challenges, Benefits, and the Future“. In this article Hardy tells us that the cloud as a non-physical identity is a mis-conception, he also tells us some of the benifits of the cloud.

EMAC 2321 assignment…When I get some time I really need to create a separate blog, and some tags for this class, sorry for those who are looking for my updates, they are around…

Preface:  To be perfectly honest, I have attempted to write this homework assignment several times now, I have so many arguments to be made against Keen and his point of view, I honestly don’t know where to begin. From comments he has made outside of his book, to comments he has made inside of his book… but I suppose that is the assignment isn’t it? Narrowing it down to just one….Yesterday my instructor covered what I had decided on doing in his sample post, so its back to square one…And I need to post the assignment now so I can get to my rigging class…

In his book, The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen outlines how the internet and the web 2.0 phenomena is destroying the quality of content delivered to the masses by making the readers/viewers the artists instead of just viewers.  He is saying everyone can now contribute and it makes it hard to sift through the bad stuff on the web, to get to the good stuff. He himself says it in his book,  “The blurring of lines Between the audience and the author, between fact and fiction, between invention and reality further obscures objectivity. The cult of the amateur has made it increasingly difficult to determine the difference between reader and writer, between artist and spin doctor, between art and advertisement, between amateur and expert. The result? The decline of the quality and reliability of the information we receive, thereby distorting, if not outright corrupting our national civic conversation.” (27)

This can be seen in the influx of blogs we see today all over the internet, yes there are a ton of blogs out there with expert writers and professional staff, for example a site like tutsplus, however, the vast majority of blogs today are written by people like me, a student with no accreditation on any topic. (AKA a degree) Just have a look through any of my posts, there is not a lot of quality information being posted here. Although this does make Keen’s argument in one since, we must ask if this example truly causes a decline of the quality and reliability of the information we receive.

This example of Keen’s claim tells us so little, but so much about what keens concern about the internet actually is. On one hand, we can see that Keen is explicitly concerned about not only what kind of content is put out on the internet, but who puts it out, and how much of it is put out. He clearly sees a line between amateur and expert, and believes only experts, or at least people qualified to speak on the subject, should be publishing data on the web. One could argue that he is correct, its kind of annoying to read peoples personal blogs (although no one forces you too).

On the other hand, we can see that Keen’s concerns are rather dated. Keen does not see the communities (AKA the clouds) ability to filter such frivolous data. While, admittedly, a lot of the content put out on the web today does not hold a lot of pertinent data, they certainly do not degrade the quality  of the information we receive. Keen argues the reliability of our data is degraded by all of the information, I would not argue with that statement. Unlike print, data on the internet is not subject to as much scrutiny and criticism, leaving the author open to spread almost any information relatively freely. Now its up to the user to filter data, which brings us to a greater issue all together.

Moderation. What keeps the internet in check, how can we guarantee the content on the web will be kept honest, who keeps in check…That is a much larger question I believe keen is looking for an answer to this questionaswell. His editor keeps him in check, who keeps the web in check? Moreover, who keeps the amateurs who are making all of this money of advertisers in check? This tells us me must start thinking of the web in a whole new way. What way? I don’t think any of us know yet. However we can see with the issues poised today, keen’s train of thought does not work on the internet.

EMAC 2321 Assignment…

Today my world stood still, and I made it happen. Something I could not do yesterday. What an odd and uncomfortable experience, I must admit. They say the Earth rotates at 1000 miles per hour, it’s my firm belief that in today’s day and age we, as students plugged into the grid, should be going just as fast if not faster. For our EMAC 2321 Assignment due today, I am a great procrastinator by the way (no doubt a skill fine tuned by the likes of social networking), we are to write a blog chronicling our experience unplugging and attempting to deep read an except from Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur.  Nicholas Carr tells us we have lost the ability to do deep read in “is Google making us stupid?” Is this true?

To be quite honest, I could not bring myself to unplug until I was going to sleep at 5AM this morning, after a long day of work I figured I would do the reading and go to bed…I got a few pages in, and next thing I know I was waking up in a pile of papers strewn all over my bed. Ok, time for a regroup, that last strategy failed. I knew that I woke up and stepped off of my bed it would be impossible for me to do. So, I gathered all the papers and started reading again. I must say, Carr makes a good argument…I have not tried to read like that since maybe my freshman year in high school…I would not get into the groove of deep reading, I couldn’t find a comfortable position to be in and the young kids at the end of the street were screaming at the top of their lungs…A few pages in I found myself reading it, but thinking about something else. Regroup again, I was finally able to read the whole thing, and a little of it over again, with NO distractions. Quite amazing really. Have I lost the ability to deep reed as Carr suggests all together? No, however its definitely not an on-demand service anymore.

I think what has happened, is that the internet has taught us to communicate in a different way, a way in which we skim over information and grab what we deem is relivant, I think that is what Carr is saying, in fact, in his article “The amorality of Web 2.0″ , he reinforces that statement by saying the quality of reading we are doing has decreased greatly. He talks about, Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur As he states that web 2.0 could be bad for us, once more.

I have gone way over my allotted blogging and reading time allocations today. Off to class.

EMAC 2321 Assignment…

In the Feburary 2009 issue of Discover Magazine, Carl Zimmer tells us our minds are not under attack by the internet, but they are evolving to adapt to the mass of information to which the internet grants us access too. Zimmer argues for the extended mind concept, where using the computer to find information is equal to and equally efficient to physically remembering the information. In the article, Zimmer asks how the internet changes the way we think about the human mind, as well as how we judge what is good and bad about the emerging technologies on the internet. Zimmer argues that not only is the internet a wonderful tool to aid us in finding information, but its doing so in a natural way in which our brains naturally process information. He says that the internet is causing changes which are forcing our brains to process information in new ways, and those changes are in no way negative. Alternatively, Nicholas Carr argues in his Atlantic Monthly article, Is Google Making us Stupid?:

“And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

The contrast between Zimmer and Carr’s views on the internet influence on humans is very fascinating. On one hand, Zimmer completely embraces the new technology as a way for humans to evolve and gain information on a level never seen before, he claims we are Natural-born cyborgs, able to interface and adapt to new technology on the fly. Carr clearly does not believe this is the case. Carr believes that the internet takes away from his abilities to concentrate and contemplate, he goes on to make several other claims about skills he has lost, or believes we are loosing due to this new technology. He claims this new media will turn us all into brain dead zombies.