Podcast 2: Copyright Laws

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Blog Post 4: Online Privacy

          Online Privacy is the single component of social networking that keeps me around. Facebook is one the biggest social networking sites currently trying to bend the rules on privacy. How so? By infiltrating us with these so called ‘Frictionless Sharing Applications’. Spotify, one of the new frictionless sharing apps, is a new experiment set up by Facebook, to try and get Facebook users comfortable with this full on media sharing. Spotify is an application, much like itunes, but it posts every song that the user listens to on his/her ‘wall’. I’m personally a fan of Spotify, but I doubt all 587 of my friends are. Every time I listen to a song, it gets sent to the news feed where my friends and family view it. Facebook is slowly constructing a social media site that bombards us with information that is not related to our interests and likes. The Guardian is another application that is currently in act along with Spotify in this early experimental stage. The Guardian is basically a news media site, created by Facebook, which automatically posts to your wall whatever stories you view. Once you accept the applications download, it starts posting information without asking your permission to. This sprouts up major issues with me. First off, I really do not care that ‘Tom Dean is reading an article on great fishing in Maine this summer’. Second of all, I like reading weird articles that have to do with alien sightings and strange pictures from the moon that NASA has decided to hide from us all along. The last thing I want is for all my friends to see that I am an enthusiast for the extra-terrestrial and bogus stories posted on aol.com.

            Facebook is trying to make it so that every action that we do on their site is recorded and posted so others can see it. Usually when I am on Facebook I am doing stuff that I would be incredibly embarrassed about if everyone somehow found out. Most of my ‘Facebook-ing’ time is spent stalking old ex-girlfriends, friends from highschool that I probably will never talk to again, and creeping on my friends pictures. If the users have no privacy to their actions then I would not be surprised to see a rise in the amount of Google + users. Facebook was originally created so that college guys could find out what girls are single. Now if we go on their profile to check, they will be notified of our actions. It is almost frightening how much personal information I have on Facebook built up over the years and with the absence of privacy this information could be handed over to someone who can use it against me.
            “We’re sort of in a position right now where people are experimenting about how comfortable they are sharing this or sharing that, and I would be really surprised if the end result is we share everything all the time,” Rebecca Jeschke, spokeswoman for the digital privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said. “Clearly that’s what marketers want, and clearly that’s what companies want, but it’s really important for consumers to think about what they want.”


-Clay


http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social-media/147638/with-frictionless-sharing-facebook-and-news-orgs-push-boundaries-of-reader-privacy/

Blog Post 2: Will the Smart Phone Help Eliminate the Digital Divide?

David Nagel’s article on the digital divide brings some good points to the table. He talks about how the smart phone is helping reduce the divide. He thinks that eventually smart phones will be the remedy for the digital divide, and completely eliminate it all together. Elliot Soloway, a professor at the University of Michigan, proclaims “Given the cost of the device, it is very conceivable that every child, rich or poor, can have one 24/7. Smart phones are the one technology that can eliminate the digital divide.”

The new generation of kids is interested in smart phones and I think we need to start teaching them more in school how to use the devices to its full potential. Since it is affordable and the phones have Wi-Fi, they can access the internet almost everywhere they go. Another positive attribute to the smart phones is that they are, for the most part, durable. If you drop it, it is most likely to be fine. You can also apply a case to the smart phone which practically makes indestructible. When you drop a laptop the outcome is far more different. Laptops also can be infected with viruses which can cause it to need repairs that cost a good amount of money. The smart phone is not capable of getting viruses.

“What the kids can do and how the kids can do it has changed,” says Elliot Soloway, “For the first time in history, there is a device at a student-affordable price point that has sufficient computing power and networking to support 90 [percent] to 95 percent of what a student does in school every day.”

If teachers are worried about kids texting in class then they need to invent a router that automatically switches all the kids’ smart phones to an airplane-like mode, in a certain area, so that all the phone can do is access internet. The next level up from a smart phone is the ipad and it is a great tool, but the costs outnumber the benefits. I do not think that it will ever eliminate the digital divide, unless they lower the costs making it more accessible.

If we are looking to get rid of the digital divide, we would also need Net Neutrality to stay in place. With the loss of Net Neutrality the poor would not be able to do anything on the internet because of the higher prices. This would in fact make the digital divide even greater. Some poor families would just scratch the idea of buying a computer or a smart phone all together because they can’t afford Internet.

-Clay

Source: http://thejournal.com/Articles/2011/02/01/Will-Smart-Phones-Eliminate-the-Digital-Divide.aspx?Page=1

Podcast 1: Net Neutrality

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Blog Post 1: The Virtual Identity of the Honey Badger

The man behind the "The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger" video finally revealed himself to the public last Wednesday…well kind of. TMZ caught the mysterious Virtual Identity walking the street of Hollywood last week, where they managed to get a quick interview of the Internet superstar. He only revealed himself under the name of “Randall”, but at least we get to see what the man behind the computer looks like. In a strange way, he almost looks like a honey badger himself. By watching the astonishing 36 million viewed YouTube video again his voice is almost exactly what I would picture him to look like. The ascribed identity is spot on with what he really looks like.

Randall’s Internet life is just about all he has. With millions of views and a whole YouTube channel dedicated to dubbing over the Animal Planet, he has landed himself in Internet stardom. But in the outside world, he is just a man with a terrible haircut and an outrageous beard. No one wants to run into this guy on the streets and have a conversation with him; but if you were to run into him online and have an instant message conversation it would be a completely different story.

The anonymity associated with the Honey Badger video is half the reason to its success. The narrator’s voice is one of a kind and what he says is just plain funny. After seeing the true identity behind "czg123" (Randall’s YouTube account) it almost dims down some of the humor from the video. Wondering who was narrating this video was half of the fun for me. Now that we see that this man is actually kind of ‘out-there’ it brings a sense of weirdness to his videos. I think it is almost best that the virtual identity should be hidden from the public.

Lately Randall has bridged out in his Internet career and has picked up the art of blogging. The reason for this: "Because in today’s society, I think a lot of people want to be able to take what they want" Randall states "inside of them, a honey badger is just waiting to get out. They don’t care, they want to take what they want and now is the time to do it". The honey badger, Randall, is tired of just conquering the viral video world and he is ready to move on and conquer one of the fastest growing outlets for media…blogging.

- Clay




Sources:http://news.yahoo.com/man-behind-honey-badger-creature-internet-174853564.html
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/voice-behind-honey-badger-video-revealed-224949372.html