Theme 6: Analyzing the wiki-concept

The beauty of sites like Twitter and Facebook being invented is that they give us a chance to expand upon our social networking skills by allowing the technology to do most of the work and us to just decipher it. Some benefits include it allowing people to multi-task and not have to devote time to getting to know a person in a physical sense. However, the consequences include us learning the surface of what makes up a person’s personality, and not necessarily getting a deep understanding of who they are. You cannot see their facial expressions through an IM, and all you’re doing through out your cyber contacting is making an educated guess as to who you think they are. Social networking sites and the Internet overall, since their creation, have slowly began to control the thoughts of the individuals reading into them. They have made people more likely to scan blurbs, listen quickly to sound bytes, and Facebook-stalk a person in order to learn about their likes and dislikes. These advents have encouraged their audience to become lazy, because they do most of the work for us, and we don’t need to utilize those inquisitive parts of our brains anymore.

Wikipedia is another example of our now trained-to-be-impatient mindset. This website is a host of information on various topics that may or may not be accurate. Wikipedia allows users like you and I to log on and update whatever is on their site. There is minimal moderation, which means that although everyone has a chance to put their thoughts on, there’s a good chance that what you’re reading is not from an expert. What you have instead is the community’s view, and at times, the community can be warped and biased because of outside influences.

Television shows have the same community views associated with them when there is a successful series. Take for example True Blood, a show about vampires (which already had a community fan base because of Twilight). Followers of the show would update their Twitter and Facebook statuses respectively and post on forums all catering to those interested in the show. They have a chance to put their opinions on the screens of every fans’ computers. Some problems that might have stemmed from that is with instant posts popping up, the readers don’t really give the show a chance to grow on them. If someone gives away an upcoming scene and speaks about it negatively, the other viewers might not want to give it the time of day. It’s like reading reviews that pre-judged all of the time.

Other issues with this kind of crowd-sourcing is that it has pitfalls such as there being difficulty with coming up with a general conclusion that everyone agrees upon, as well as there being written contracts and disclosure agreements. This community of informants make their lives and thoughts less private and more publicly exposed – and from this, they can be accepted or ignored. These specialized online groups have a chance to exchange thoughts in a safe forum, and spread their knowledge to others. There is a sense of an online family or community built because of what they all have in common.

Theme 4: MacLuhan and changing thought processes

Marshall MacLuhan had many theories – some that seemed more plausible than others – and one in particular spoke about how media can take on the qualities of “intellectual technologies,” and that these media shape our thought processes. It appears that, for the most part, the mediums of information that we use do the bulk of thinking for us. The message that the medium might appear to give off isn’t what is truly the message. The medium itself is the message, and what this means is that social networks such a Twitter and Facebook can give you information about people without you even looking for it. You don’t have to do the work of getting to know a person by actually speaking to them and hoping for good, productive conversations. Instead, Facebook will do the work for you by combining status updates that might be mundane and repetitive on their own, but together can provide more insight into a person. These technologies are socializing for you.

This is also the case when it comes to search engines and smart phones that house search engine apps. Personally, I know that I don’t make the effort of trying to remember my own mother’s cell phone number by heart because I know it’s saved in my cell phone. My iPhone is becoming more than just an extension of my memory – it is my memory. Smart phones know all of your contacts’ information and usually have GPS systems already built-in so getting lost and having to find your way back using brain power is no longer an issue.

Google further perpetuates this change in thought processes. In Is Google Making Us Stupid the author speaks more about how people are being “dumbed down” because they have so much assistance from new technologies. The Internet does not only supply us with information, but it also shapes our thoughts. Whatever was planted to come up first in a search engine is what we feed off of and take in as legit information. Research that would have equated to hours in some library can now be done in a matter of minutes. Our minds are use to what is convenient, rather than what is substantial. Because of this, we are “loosing our capacity to concentrate,” and essentially loosing that which would make some of us intellectually elevated.

The new generation of tech-savvy people growing up now heavily rely on what technology provides. Children ages 10 and younger are taught that swiping their finger across a screen can get them an answer, and that typing in a key word will reveal the truth about something. What they are actually getting is a condensed opinion that they will unfortunately adopt as their own because their minds have not been trained to question ideas. They are taking on an old person’s way of thinking at an early age because of their limited exposure. This will also make them (and others living in this digital age) less inclined to read books. This fast-paced generation of people want instantaneous results to cater to their diminishing patience. This is a generation of multi-taskers, and so, spending time reading a book is less likely to happen now. What most people will do is skim over something and look for the highlights instead of fully absorbing something new. Why do the work when a podcast summary can do it for you?

Theme 3: Digitizing of old media

With each passing year, technology advances more and more. Media that some thought would never change are becoming digitalized and transformed to be more accessible for the users/audience. For example: people now have the option of reading a book on their iPad or Kindle, or even listening to a podcast of someone else reading it for them instead of having to carry around a book. Things in paper form are becoming obsolete, and the more electronically-ready something is, the more likely it is to survive. In a piece entitled “For the love of reading,” the author experimented with different mediums to use in order to read, and found that she loved having the actual book and experience of reading overall. For many others, things like reading a book or reading a newspaper are the same for them - even if they are reading on a screen because we live in a fast-paced world where convenience often wins over quality.

Newspapers are facing the same problem as books, but on a grander level. Newspaper revenue relies heavily on ads, and so, with newspapers moving online, the ads now must also move online. The subscriptions that papers get are now also jeopardized because people can get their news for free after just logging onto their computers. The industry itself has had to adapt to the digitizing of society, and now the “old” newspaper has no choice but to move online. If certain newspapers can not adapt, they’ll basically be extinct.

The next type of changing media is the well-known song decoder, Pandora. Pandora has brought something new to personalized radio. By choosing only one song, “musicologists” are able to match your song preference to songs that are similar in genre and style. The result is a fascinating smorgasbord of music you might not have ever heard, or might have forgotten about. I believe that radio’s future looks promising in the form of Pandora because it will give new artists a chance to be listened to by a wide audience, and it will seem almost accidental when a new fan is created. DJ’s and radio stations are told to play certain types of music as priority because of how much they’re paid, and I’d like to believe that Pandora has allowed for it to be fairer for new artists.

Theme 2: Meyrowitz and the evolution of technology

Joshua Meyrowitz discusses the separation of social space from physical place with some of his theories about electronic media’s influence on society. What this means is that before electronic media, there existed a time when a physical place was what you needed in order to socialize. There was no Internet or cyber, instantaneous communication, and even once there was, it was never to the overly specific degree that it is now. To communicate, you did so through actual physical channels such as roads and railroads. Things then moved onto telegraphs, telephones, and radios. Now communication is simply a click or a touch away. There has been a creation of something known as “social space,” where interaction is no longer physical. For a person to experience an event, it does not need to be “live” anymore.

The same can be said for getting to know a person. There are now non-visible networks online that can essentially choose your friends for you based on common interests, and even allow you to stay in close contact with them electronically. New kinds of relationships are built that way. When unifying technology first emerged like with the creation of the radio, the listener was an active participant and though miles apart from the others listening, they still had a common bond. Mary Dyck, as described in “The Radio Diary of Mary Dyck” grew attached to her radio and it began to function as both a companion and connector to the outside world.

As time went on, this interconnectivity with the radio flourished even more for the general public with emerging new media and different
types of social networks. This is when para-social relationships were formed, meaning, relationships that are mediated but still resemble face-to-face interaction because of the medium through which they travel. The viewers begin to believe that they “know” the other people on the end of the information spectrum, similar to the way an audience might feel they know the character of a movie so well.

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To thank for this, we have examples of ambient awareness such as Twitter and Facebook, where your friends and followers are your personal audience. Because of Twitter’s streaming of meaningless updates and Facebook’s perfectly engineered stalking mechanisms, they are able to pick up on the feelings, habits, and mood changes of all of their friends without exerting the physical energy. This makes it easier for them to develop relationships with the person because, in a sense, Facebook is doing it for them. The same can be applied to instant messaging – it’s automatic responses, which can further relationships and paint a picture of the person you’re speaking to on the other end. Now that Facebook has found a way to combine IMing with their site, the para-social interactions are enhanced and showing how much socializing is evolving.