Convergence Culture

1) What is the author's understanding of convergence culture

The author sees it as a way of explaining the communities that have sprung up on the internet as a way of communicating.  Specifically, how people react and interact with others and the source material of things they like, and how that has been opened up from a select few with access to journals or other ways of publishing opinions.  Now, in contrast, literally anyone with the passion can come together and respond to media as a group.

2) What is creative engagement?

Creative engagement, in this sense, is how people are able to interact with the media that was, until recently, very much a one way street of communication.  Now the audience is able to do something with what they have gained.  This can be communities to create videos or works of art or stories about what they love, or it can be participating in group activities, such as the Survivor fans who try and deduce the next show's location.

3) How are participator's engaging?

Essentially any one of contributing is a way of engaging.  You can be one of the people who produce these works or help do the research for these projects, or you can simply offer your own knowledge and time to help with them.  Also importantly, there are people who might not directly contribute, but who help simply by being a form of audience as well.  The people who look at the art or read the stories or talk about the research are just as much a part of the engagement as any others, because they are the ones these things are essentially produced for.

Social Media

For the industry, sharing of files has become a serious problem for profits.  Having as many possible copies as you want of the same song or movie is an side-effect of digitizing certain products.  And unfortunately for the industry, this has come with certain standards.  People want to be able to have as many versions of their own Mp3s as they want, or to be able to share these things with their friends.  And that also has a function in advertising.  Companies will want people to be able to share via word-of-mouth, and places like Youtube or file sharing sites do drive up interest.  They just also make it laughably easy to never have to pay for the music the user is interested in.  So, there comes a need for a new solution to these problems.

First solution would be to make the files computer locked.  Apple already does this through their iTunes program.  To play your songs, you have to give access via your username and password, and you can only give access to five computers/accounts.  This allows for low level sharing, and also creates a prioritizing of how it's shared - you won't send the file off without thinking, because you need to make sure you have access on all your possible platforms too.  However, this does irritate customers, and cause confusion among them.  The ability to track who is using a file is limited by how the computers are labeled (or not) when the process is set up, and so a lot of times, this way ended up choosing between random computer names or IP addresses and hoping you hadn't locked yourself out of your own files.  It also doesn't prevent Youtube uploading or the like.

Second solution would be to disable sharing all together.  This would obviously be deeply upsetting to consumers, who want to share even between their own devices, which might use different accounts for a variety of reasons, and would at least initially leave a bad impression of the company.  However, it would be one of the most effective ways at completely shutting down piracy.

The third solution would be to ad advertising onto the product.  This would also be seen negatively, but it would turn the piracy into something of a positive.  Even if the song itself is shared multiple times, the 15 second ad spot in front of the advertisement would at least allow for the company to remind consumers to buy the song themselves if they can, and to like the band or production company promote themselves.

Privacy

The basis of this article was the balance between privacy and the convince that comes from customization.  Do we care more about being treated like individuals and having our needs catered to for the best experience, or do we want to protect our privacy more.  It also takes specific looks into how companies use that information, both on the site itself, for itself, or how they give it out to other companies.  Sometimes, these privacy issues can be something as simple as cookies to help navigate or remember your settings better - and this includes something as simple as remembering what links you've already navigated, to change the colors, which is now standard fare, to remembering your password for you when you return, and all the way up to remembering your specific credit card information and address for shipping purposes.

Not only is it a problem that these companies have this information, it is compounded by the fact that they don't keep it to themselves.  Sometimes this can be like the PSN, where the information was hacked from a substandard security system, or it can be wholesale exchange of personal information for money.

In the end, it is on the consumer to decide their personal level of comfort with this system.  For some, it doesn't matter much.  Amazon and Google probably have detailed and private information on nations worth of people, but we trust them to keep it safe, while other websites, from giants like Facebook to the small, poorly designed sites that don't seem trustworthy, are far more personal decisions.

Question of the day: Have you changed your opinion on how much you protect your privacy on the internet?  Once upon a time, I didn't even want to use my real name on a website, much less enter my address and card information.  Now I don't think twice about it in a lot of cases (unless, obviously, I'm not purchasing anything.  Then it becomes suspect).  Has anyone become less cautious, like I have, or have you become more so?

Article

Read the Article Here

My article is on how emerging and new media technology affects the election cycle.  The author identifies how campaigning had adapted to meet the internet by creating 'stages' in how they are advertised and showcased.  First is the most traditional version of newspaper and print ads, and then television spots and public debates are shown.  But the last stage that has developed is in the digital sector.

The internet has changed how elections are campaigned because it has created an entirely new space to advertise in.  Campaign web banners are not only fundamentally different from print ads - and aimed at a much younger audience, for the most part - but video ads and websites must not only match the information of the candidate, but also match the expectations of the viewer.  An internet user will not trust a candidate whose website looks basic and unconvincing, and will see them as less trustworthy.

However, the internet is also critical, because it has the greatest reach in the shortest amount of time.  There are billions of internet users, and a decent majority of Americans, at least, will likely be online and be available to be targeted.

This is related to Internet Communication because it is about how candidates and their campaigns are adapting and changing to suit the internet, and then communicate their intended message - why they would supposedly be the best for office - directly to internet users, generally with a younger audience (specifically, us) in mind.

Network Laws

Network laws are not laws like those passed in congress, but more like gravity.  They try to explain how the internet works and how it is expanded so much in such a short period of time.  Because of this, the laws apply to kinds of growth in networks, specifically Local Area Networks and Wide Area Networks.

There are three main laws:

Sarnoff's Law: Value of a network increases linearly with the number of people in it

Reed's Law: Utility of a network increases exponentially

Metcalfe's Law: Value of a network increases by roughly square, or n2

Of these laws, I most agree with Reed's Law.

I don't think there is a set average rate of communication between each person on a network, but I do believe what you are capable of doing changes.  The more people, the more access to information, the more people to tell that information to, the more people for those people to spread the idea, the more people to make a joke about it and run that joke into the ground in a week...

Connectivity on the internet is a web, not a straight line.  So as you add more people, everyone has an extra line, which means an increase that is exponential, not linear.

Why We Blog

The premise of this article was exactly what it says on the tin - why do people choose to blog?  It gave a variety of reasons, from the professional, such as personal journalism or portfolios, to the personal, like confession blogs or to express interest in a subject.  Unfortunately, not only did the article not go into subjects why do other people read those blogs, but it had a very limited selection.  They only spoke to a handful of blogs, and all of them had connections to Sanford.  This was probably to weed out smaller, unread blogs, but it still narrowed the response field by quite a lot.  They might have been better served by not only expanding the number of blogs they spoke to, but by looking at different sites by the most popular blogs, rather than those Sanford endorses and those closely connected to them.

This is a test of the emergency post system

This is the greatest video of all time.

 

Watch it.  I swear you'll be mouthing along. 

I don't even remember having it memorized in the 90s.  But I sure as hell know it now.