Fin

it's the end of the semester already. part of me is completely surprised and the other (sleep-deprived) part of me has been counting down the minutes to this day. all parts of me, however, have been taking stock of the classes i've had this semester, weighing the good against the bad and wondering what i would do better/again. 

of the three classes i had in the last 5 months, i definitely wished they had all been like this one. a necessary evil of the last semester has been finishing up the required classes and, while i've learned a lot in each of them, i feel like i never got to escape that dreaded banking method. learn this resource, the fields in this standard, etc. etc... you know, i pretty much blame this for my lack of sleep (what can i say? dewey keeps me up at night.) thankfully, 680 did not fit that structure. there was so much room for exploration, both in reading contemporary and classic texts and duking it out with their authors in class (i will continue to hold a grudge against postman). and, unlike most of my other classes to date, there was such a process of colaborative learning here! i tease out an idea, jessica rephrases because i just spoke gibberish in class, a classmate responds with an anecdote that really illustrates the point i was trying to make...*sigh * what a great learning experience.

speaking of anecdotes, here's one that illustrates exactly the opposite of the 680 educational lovefest.

prof.: can anyone name anything that seems like it should be included in this list? i will take any answer. just volunteer something aloud.

me: how about [answer]?

prof.: no. that's not right.

always a definitive idea of right and a wrong! no shades of grey. just memorize and spit out answers. those answers, that banked info, only sticks in my brain for so long. to the contrary, i can remember exactly who i stood between when we arranged ourselves in the "agree/disagree" exercise re: postman's statements.

so, thanks instructional technologies for moving me out of my comfort zone and teaching me that old dogs can have fun with new tricks. thanks classmates for remembering my blog posts and mentioning them in class, making me feel like i actually contributed something of value. and thanks jessica for being so attentive and willing to depart from the norm. that has made you a truly great professor (and will make you a great mom, too!)

see you guys, to borrow a phrase from emily, IRL (in real life).

wrong side of the virtual tracks

Social networking sites are a lot like your neighborhood bars. They’ve each got their own atmosphere, crowds, and you choose which one you'd like to be at based on your preference for either of those qualities. This is a great way of assessing the types of (potentially like-minded) people you may meet on these sites; however, this site selection usually gives way to an "us vs. them" mentality. in Boyd’s article, "Viewing American Class Divisions through MySpace and Facebook" the "us" and the "them" become the "hegemonic" and "subaltern" teens - or what the rest of the America would call the "good" and "bad".

 Boyd’s discussion of social networking sites reveals a very scary comparison that is leveled against today's teens. The idea that those who conform to societies rules are good and those that do not are bad can't be good for teenagers as they develop their sense of self and, furthermore, isn't a maxim that is completely true. The fact that this "good vs. bad" dialog has been translated to teen’s online socializing behaviors is even more startling.

 And yet, as arbitrary as this internet-age social code seems, I have witnessed it exactly as Boyd portrays it. I came of age around the same time that Friendster, the first social networking site of its kind, hit its peak. At the time, the novelty of connecting with friends over the internet far outweighed the hipness of its aesthetics or exclusivity. Actually, that’s not entirely true. At the time, Friendster had little to no competition so there were no hipper/better sites to flock to. But, in the years that followed the competition appeared and Friendster was left in the dust. Facebook emerged as the go to place with those for a .edu email account and MySpace was the catch all for everyone else who wanted profiles but lacked credentials. In Boyd’s article she points to a number of reasons for the social divide between Facebook and MySpace (aesthetics, interest in bands, etc.) but I think these elements are all symptomatic of their beginnings. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard student replicating the university’s internal website for profit. The fact that it persisted as a site for “.edu-havers only” for years after its inception is key to understanding its ivory tower outlook today.

 Even now that Facebook has opened its gates and allowed entrance to high school students and the middle aged alike, the elitist current has not flagged. I could write a dissertation on the disadvantages of being Facebook friends with my mother. I could also note the fact that online communication between me and my hometown friends (who still reside in the lower middle class enclave famous for Pat Benetar and the number of pubs per capita we grew up in) is limited to MySpace messages and infrequently checked emails, all for lack of computer access. It may seem like a lot of work must be done in order to change people’s opinions about these sites and the people who use them, but I wonder if that is all that important. In as much as self-imposed caste systems are limiting, they are still self-imposed.

Podcast promo, etc.

i consider myself someone who's familiar with a lot of the new technologies out on the market today, so it was surprising when i realized i had no idea how to work GarageBand on my computer. the scary thing about new programs like this is it seems like you are venturing into a foreign world: new language, customs, etc. the upside in this case is that there are plenty of people who have gone before you, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in the form of youtube videos, webpages, and podcasts (interesting that people use the medium to describe the in's and out's of said medium).

so, now that i've taken in what these resources have to offer me, i've created my very first audio recording. i'm glad i've had this experience to force me to deal with this technological obstacle. for someone who has easy access to these programs it seems a real shame that it's taken me this long to use them. regardless, i really appreciated the fact that after a few tutorials i was able to grasp the major concepts/functions and craft exactly the audio piece i wanted.

the practice of recording my audio and uploading it to my itunes, really made me realize how democratizing technology can be. if i can learn how to do this, with the right tools, anyone else can.

fingers crossed. let's see if this works.

from blog to pod

podcasting is one of those inventions that makes me thankful for technology. this is exactly what technology is supposed to do for us: bring together people from all over to share their views on just about everything with no mediating forces to stop them from doing so. the fact that so much of what is on our airwaves is brought to us by the good people at Clear Channel Communications means that most everything we hear on the radio is profit related. Curtis Fox, in his review of podcasting, mentions the real world constraints of being a cog in the corporate radio machine: padding a show to fill the prescribed segment of time, breaking for messages from your sponsors, affording the massively expensive airtime, etc. podcasting makes these concerns obsolete and, best of all, anyone can do it. i don't know what the average hourly rate is for time on an FM frequency is, but i can't imagine it's something a housewife or college student could afford.

what may be even more significant than the democratization of the medium is the fact that, in podcast form, amateur broadcasters don't have big brother breathing down their neck. the FCC does not police the podosphere...and thank god for that. it's enough that corporations decide what messages i should be bombarded with, having the federal government decide what isn't appropriate for me to hear is beyond frustrating.

popular commercial radio may remind me that its got "more music, less commercials, every hour" than its competitors, but i still feel like i'm being sold something every minute. and public radio may have the content i like (relatively free from corporate brainwashing), but it's not radical by any stretch of the imagination. i just can't win here.

but i believe podcasting can be a real success through its free and diverse content. my only concern is, as podcasting's popularity increases will there be better way to promote and organize all of the offerings out there? efforts like story corp's are a good framework for cataloging personal oral histories, but will places like the paley center for media (which is the brains behind nyc's museum of television and radio) organize large scale efforts for recording our oral history on the web?

google busts

big brother (in this case, google) is watching. some other famous moments caught by the google street view cameras.

• guy passed out drunk
• guy falls off bike
• guy sells drugs

for more, see my new favorite blog: Street View Stuff

[too lazy to give this a title]

from the comics i read to the movies i watch, it seems everyone is talking about universal knowledge and the collective unconscious. the idea that great progress is made in silent and sudden bursts is circulating. turns out the answers to all our problems are simply in the ether...or on google.

of course, not everyone falls into the pro-google category i would claim i belong to. those more "old school" than carr would say that answers not hard-won by tireless research are not truly earned or deserved. that google makes nearly unlimited amounts of data (it's safe to say call any database with one trillion items "nearly unlimited") available to us in a few key strokes has certainly changed our culture. it has changed the path of human intelligence and i don't think this is a bad thing.

carr cites a number of examples where technology threatened a way of life and those that witnessed the change cursed it. you'd probably have a hard time finding a group of people today who think guttenberg was a jerk, but the whole movable type thing didn't go over so well with those that had a vested interest in the hand-printed word. sure, hindsight is 20-20 and we know now that the democratization of information revolutionized the world, but let's learn from history a bit before we go repeating it.

google, yes, makes us lazy. i think that's a fair (ish) statement. with the internet on my phone, and my phone with me wherever i go, i never hesitate to consult the internet when my brain refuses to supply an answer to the question at hand. maybe that's not the best behavior. but what about the positive changes the internet/google brings? carr talks about the plastic brain and i think i've got it because i know my neurons are moving! my hard drive reformatting! i may be easily distracted as of late, but i am able to make faster connections to a wider array of material than ever before. i may forgo a deep reading of article, but when i recall several pieces together i am making quick, sharp choices. i am storing more information and learning how to synthesize more complex ideas at a greater speed and that is a very good thing in my book. the content of these ideas doesn't matter as much as my increased comprehension skills.

carr talks about the threat of people becoming machines too, but i feel this is just a sensationalist way for others to try to scare change off. there will always be the human element, the part of this technological evolution that introduces chance into the equation, and i don't believe that can ever truly be overcome by algorithms. mankind will continue to build smart machines and tell them what they must know, but i have no fear that the reverse will happen.

ps. for someone who claims his attention span is spread thin, he wrote a pretty lengthy article. i wonder if it took him multiple sittings to finish the re-read.

that's so last month. or the problem of obsolete sns's.

last week my friends and i got in to a debate about the "eminent" demise of facebook. they insisted that the sudden emergence and success of twitter was proof that people no longer considered facebook as the source for internet communication and recent (failed) redesigns of facebook were the death throes of the once all powerful site. i disagreed. for several reasons.

to begin with, i don't believe facebook and twitter are meant to do the same things. i would even go so far as to say that twitter is a "social networking site" in the strictest sense of the word. i say this knowing full well that i am not the model user/appreciator of twitter, but i do listen to those that love the site and what sticks out most to me is how unidirectional the messages of twitter seem to be. transactions on twitter seem to clearly fall into two categories, input and output, with little overlap. some people use twitter to glean bits of news from sources important to them (input) but, at the heart, twitter is geared toward the individual who wants to broadcast status messages to an audience (output). sure, followers can reply, but conversation is limited to 140 character snippets and a scrolling home page where new posts replace the oldest. in this way, it's hard for me to think of twitter as a community building site (community implies the exchange of significant content. and, yes, that was a value judgement.) and, as the "networking" part of social networking implies some sort of exchange, i really wonder how this is achieved under such time/space constraints. and, you know, telling 200 followers you had cream of wheat for breakfast hardly seems like a way to build or maintain relationships.

facebook is a horse of a different color. with a number of functions (contact information, messages on the public wall and the private inbox, picture albums, etc.) i don't understand how it is perceived as being in direct competition with twitter. if anything, twitter is simply one element, the status message, extracted from the entirety of the facebook world. now, i should disclose the fact that i think both sites are superfluous. facebook is just as guilty of encouraging the me-centered approach to 2.0 (i tag myself in a friend's picture, i list movies/tv/books that demonstrate my pop cultural savvy, etc. etc. ad nauseum) and i am just as guilty as the next in participating. that said, it fulfills my definition of social networking in that users exchange information. and, successful or not, the redesigns are always crafted with that input-output exchange in mind (you can digg a comment now, see new photos as soon as they are posted, read friends' status messages on your home page the moment they are posted...).

so will twitter kill facebook? not exactly. i think it's important to note how the twitter is keeping facebook on its toes, but i don't take it as a real threat. and while we may be too lazy to read an entire article in the paper (140 character summaries, please!), i don't think were willing to live by status messages alone. twitter's numbers may be rapidly increasing, but facebook has the edge in that this generation (see pew study) love uploading content (pictures, videos, audio...).

but i suppose the golden rule here is that nothing lasts forever. does any body even remember friendster? have all those myspace users run to facebook and never looked back? twitter may have its moment and facebook's popularity may lag (though numbers say membership is still growing) but one day the only places you'll find both sites will be on the wayback machine.