This week’s readings focused primarily on digital media’s implications in terms of democracy and political engagement, and how it’s changing, and what it means going forward. Several of the articles also discussed the ever-increasing role of citizen journalism.

I particularly enjoyed the article that examined Facebook’s role in the 2008 presidential election. The study detailed the intensity of engagement and breadth of participation in Facebook postings on the presidential candidates’ Facebook walls that year. I’m doing a similar study for our final paper in this course, but analyzing the candidates’ use and management of social media in 2008 and today. Herbert Gans (2010) proposed that news and blogging websites helped contribute to the large number of young people who voted in the 2008 presidential election. Social networking sites are helping young people become politically engaged more than ever before, and the ways that people are spreading political information is continuing to develop and change every day.

There was a significant theme that linked several of the articles. The authors all believe that declining advertising revenue and failing traditional media organizations has fueled the growth of citizen journalism sites. Gans said, “The arrival of new and competing communication technologies, the decline of the news audience and of advertising revenue, and the resulting closure of several newspapers” is worrying traditional journalists about the future of news (p.10). He details what he a vicious cycle through which traditional outlets provide news, but lose audience and income, while news websites that are social or citizen driven are gaining larger audiences, but still not pulling in significant advertising income. Likewise, Lacy et. al. (2010) state that while readers seem to be making “the slow transition to digital newspapers, advertising lineage is not” (p.34). These changes have set the stage for others to provide community coverage in places where newspaper coverage may be lacking.

As Gans says, the Web is becoming the “main home for the consumption of news” (p.11). I agree with Gans’ assessment. Even though the newspaper business has suffered, Lacy, et. al. (2010), found that citizen news and citizen blog sites can complement newspaper websites, but are not a sufficient substitute for the news and information offered by traditional news sites.

There are reasons why citizen-based and social-oriented sites can’t meet the needs of the traditional news consumer. Those who work for newspaper-based sites and news-oriented sites are journalists who are trained to report on news events. They are experienced at detailing facts in a story as well as weaving together a mixture of facts and eyewitness reports. More often than not, citizen-based or social sites rely on third-person accounts or rumors about events, often repeating gossip instead of facts.

The biggest challenge for the newspaper industry and other news-oriented sites is finding ways to increase advertising revenues. The notion that so many things on the Internet are now free and should remain free is a key stumbling block. Some sites, including many popular sports and recruiting sites, require readers to pay a subscription fee. Some newspapers also are doing this. Readers are offered a few paragraphs of a story but must pay a fee to get the full content. The LakeCharles American Press and the Ruston Daily Leader are two such papers in Louisiana.

In order for the newspaper industry and other traditional outlets to keep up in the digital age, they will inevitably have to continue to adapt and change what they do to maintain an audience and increase revenue. Though there are certainly issues, newspapers aren’t going anywhere. Not just yet anyway.

In Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, Lessig details our ever escalating "copyright war" and how we should address copyright law going forward as new digital technologies develop.

Lessig suggests we live in a "remix culture." With the digital technologies available to combine, transform, and manipulate photos, music, stories, and other information, remixing is now easier than ever. And that’s Lessig’s primary point: People are naturally doing what new technologies encourage them to do (Nook location 12). The very nature of digital media makes it so simple to "remix" by reformulating content and presenting it as something new or different.

It’s creative and fun to take photos and video clips and re-arrange them. But Lessig poses some serious questions. What effect will our copyright war have on children? Will it change how they think about normal behavior? How will their behavior toward copyright law change as they continue to download and "remix?" How will they look at other laws in general? And are we too quick to criminalize kids from the get-go for utilizing digital technologies that are made so easily available to them?

It’s no secret that new digital technologies have changed how we think about access. Lessig agrees this is a pivotal issue. He uses Amazon as an example. Amazon gathers consumer information about what we like and are likely to buy, then tailors products to our specific preferences. This is hardly any different than what platforms such as Facebook and Google allow advertisers and third parties to do right now.

Lessig compares the passive read-only culture to the more reciprocal read/write culture we’re familiar with today when it comes to dealing with digital technology. He says as the read-only culture has "evolved in the digital world, technologies have given the copyright owner an ever-increasing opportunity to control precisely how copyrighted content is consumed" (Nook location 84). Or as he says, "Every time you use a creative work in a digital context, the technology is making a copy" (Nook location 85). In the digital world, he says, any use triggers copyright law because any ordinary use is a copy. On the other hand, the very nature of read/write culture suggests any rewriting in a digital context produces a copy and violates copyright law.

Lessig also hits on the Internet as "the age of the hybrid" (Nook Location 137), building on aspects of commercial and sharing economies. He says that "a hybrid that respects the rights of the creator -- both the original creator and the remixer -- is more likely to survive than one that doesn't" (Nook location 185). He offers as one example the Creative Commons he helped found that offers legal and technological tools for creators to effectively share their digital content and helps offer a balance between the reality of the Internet and of copyright laws.

Lessig poses the other questions, "In a world in which technology begs all of us to create and spread creative work differently from how it was created and spread before, what kind of moral platform will sustain our kids when their ordinary behavior is deemed criminal? Who will they become? What other crimes will to them seem natural?" (Nook location 11). Lessig suggests that because kids are now growing up in an age where digital literacy is the new literacy, they’ll be hard-pressed to understand why "remixing" isn’t necessarily OK.

Lessig outlines several suggestions for how to change (NOT abolish!) copyright laws in ways that will allow for more creative thought and expression on the Web, including simplifying copyright laws and regulating use of copies while not criminalizing copies themselves. Indeed digital copyright laws will inevitably have to change as the digital landscape continues to.

I believe the world of remixing and copyright provides a very slippery slope. I’ve downloaded music illegally in the past. However, I would never try to claim another author’s work as my own. I suppose the fear here is as easy as it is for people to manipulate content online and represent it as something new, where are you supposed to drawn the line? I think it’s each person’s responsibility to do that. But I also believe that just like we teach kids not to run red lights or to obey the speed limit, it’s going to become equally important to teach them about copyright issues concerning the web … what’s appropriate and what’s legal.

The right to privacy is something all of us assume we have. At least, I know I did, until I started looking closer at the digital choices we make through the context of this class. Now I wonder exactly what privacy is, especially after pondering this week’s reading assignments. danah boyd and Alice Marwick both point out that there’s no crystal clear definition of what privacy is. Does it involve more than just what people do or do not know about you and your life? That’s just one of the key questions I think we all need to consider.

In Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck, boyd (2008) discusses the launch of the news feed feature on Facebook and the concerns people had about exposure and invasion of privacy. In aggregating the information displayed for Facebook users to see on the news feed, already public information was made more visible and easily accessible. However, boyd says that, “privacy is not simply about the state of an inanimate object or set of bytes; it is about the sense of vulnerability that an individual experiences when negotiating data” (p. 14). What the news feed did was take previously obscure and discreet information online and put it at the forefront of every user’s accessibility, in a neat chronological format.

The recent introduction of Facebook’s timeline has chronologically organized all the information we’ve ever posted or disclosed as long as we’ve had an active Facebook account. It is unnerving to know that it is so fast and easy to go back and look at posts from 2005 or 2006. That was a time when my friends and I certainly understood less about the consequences of what you post online for others to see. I did think it was funny that boyd mentioned initial news feeds showing updates from all “Friends” and not just those we deem to be close to us, since we now can in fact distinguish “close friends” from “acquaintances” when trying to filter information on Facebook.

boyd and Marwick (2011) also examined how teens perceive and try to achieve social privacy. They discuss how privacy “is related more to agency and the ability to control a situation than particular properties of information” (p. 2). boyd (2008) also states that privacy is “a sense of control over information, the context where sharing takes place, and the audience who can gain access” (p. 18). More and more, teens and adults are finding out that what we thought was a controlled, private interaction may be anything but that.

We’ve already talked about how platforms like Facebook and Google package our media consumption information and browsing habits to sell to advertisers and other third parties. We’ve also discussed how the FBI is finding ways to mine our social networks for information about us. And we’ve even discovered that Facebook can in many instances access our text messages, as they’re in the process of developing their own messaging service. Just recently Google was able to bypass the privacy settings on the Safari browser to track people’s web browsing without consent. Where does it end? Will it end?

Should we blame Facebook? Or are we to blame because we exposed too much personal information? I have a friend who laughed when I told her Dan Gillmor said he believed Facebook is one of the most dangerous companies on the planet … until her account was accessed by someone else, prompting her to deactivate. Of course, we now know that deactivating doesn’t mean any of your information or content actually goes away. I think there was a time not long ago where I might have laughed at that statement too. However, I now find myself more and more wary about things like where I “check in” at and what sites and apps I link to through my Facebook page.

The premise behind Facebook and other social networking sites is to make it easy for people to “get connected” or to “re-connect.” But at what cost? Some people use social networks to make important business and personal contacts. There are also cases where employers warn employees about what they can and cannot say. And they monitor the activities of their employees. We might to be inclined toward outrage at the thought of companies asking for Facebook passwords, but we’d be silly not to recognize that employers checking social networking profiles today is nearly as standard as performing a criminal/background or credit check. Social networking sites are also linked to different kinds of stalking and identity theft.

Does the loss of privacy make the cost of social networking too steep? Or can we find ways to strike a balance? Those are just some of the questions that are ripe with research possibilities that we’ll have to try to answer. And I think we’d all be wise to think of privacy now in terms of being a privilege, rather than a right, to protect both “socially” and “structurally” as boyd (2008)
suggests.

When Evgeny Morozov writes about our “net delusion,” he’s not making a basketball reference or any notes about March Madness, though you can see where my brain has been recently. He’s talking about the cultural bias all of us have when it comes to the Internet. Whether we realize it or not, each one of us has preconceived notions about the Internet based on where we come from and what our prior knowledge and opinions are, especially when it comes to issues such as the Cold War, authoritarianism in general, and globalization.

That’s why Morozov says you have to look at the dissolution of the Soviet Union a bit more closely. Some people have a tendency to rewrite history and give more credit to things such as Radio Free Europe and Voice of America for toppling tyranny than they actually deserved. They should instead acknowledge the inherent problems the Soviet system had. But because of this, the implications for future promotion of democracy were remarkable – the prevailing thought was that “large doses of communication” and communication technologies would be “lethal to the most repressive of regimes” (Nook location 13). Of course, Kony 2012 is a perfect example of this attempt.

The problem with this thought process is something he discusses in chapter five. He says that a “mere exposure to information does not by itself decrease support for authoritarian governments; it does not guarantee an increase in media literacy or sophistication” (Nook location 123). Based on our discussions about the “digital divide” earlier this semester, I don’t believe that simply giving everyone access to the Internet and a Twitter account will automatically change the way they think. For me, this is not a “utopian” or “dystopian” viewpoint. It’s a realistic one.

Basically, Morozov wants us to grapple with the idea that dictators can benefit from the web as much as a democratic government can. He says dictators utilize the Internet in ways that are advantageous for them: boosting oppression, censorship, or on the flip side, providing a spin for propaganda. Just as sites such as Facebook and Google package our personal information and use it to target us with specific advertisements and other information, he urges us to “imagine building censorship systems” that can “learn everything about us to ban us from accessing relevant pages” (Nook location 106).

Probably the most unnerving point Morozov makes concerns Internet freedom in the United States. He says we love to promote free, unregulated Internet everywhere else but here at home. He tempers this “freedom” by pointing out attempts to introduce our own type of Internet kill switch and the FBI’s increasing surveillance abilities using our social networking sites. All of these things undermine the Internet Freedom Agenda that we push so proudly. Morozov says Western leaders still won’t admit that most threats to Internet freedom start right here. The fact of the matter is, forms of censorship happen every single day, even in America, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be implemented by the government. Take the recent Doonesbury comic strips satirizing the ongoing fight in Texas over the ultra-sound abortion law. If you read the comics section in The Advocate last week, you won’t find these strips among the ones printed, nor will you see any type of indication that the ones they actually ran were from previous weeks. Based on this decision, some readers may not know such a controversial topic was being covered at all unless you read the actual comic strips here.

I think a lot of people have a tendency to subscribe to one theory or the other, utopian or dystopian, good or evil when talking about the political and democratizing implications of the Internet. Morozov urges us to forget about both cyber-utopianism and Internet-centrism, and instead look at the Internet in the context of how it’s currently affecting our policies. We need to see what forces are reshaping the Internet, for better or for worse. Morozov says anyone who’s a “cyber-realist” understands that the Internet will produce different outcomes in different environments and political climates.

Yes, the Internet is a tool, maybe the most important one we have now. It’s certainly not going anywhere, so we have no choice but to embrace Hartley’s “digital future.” But we must learn how others have utilized it, and explore how we can best use it in the future.

In “Digital Futures for Cultural and Media Studies,” John Hartley analyzes the historical uses of media from print, through broadcasting to the internet, and attempts to make suggestions on how we should study media and journalism going forward. He gives us a look at the various uses of media by users and consumers and provides new theories of communication that account for social media today.

Hartley says that the “mid-20th century was the high water mark for totalitarianism in politics as well as capitalist monopolies in the media marketplace, so it is no wonder that cultural and media studies were founded in suspicion of those who own and control the media” (p.8) I believe there’s been a decisive and powerful shift in the media we utilize and in how we view the media. We depend far less on the NBC’s and CBS’s of the world for dissemination of news than we did just a few years ago. Now we rely much more heavily on social media like Facebook and Twitter for our news blasts. Most people get updates about our world from other people, including friends, family and acquaintances. And we participate in the process, too, by posting, sharing, and spreading information about what’s going on in the world and telling others what we should be concerned about.

With the emergence of digital, interactive, and participatory media we are more than just media consumers. We’re media users. Hartley suggests it is timely to rethink the model of communication we so commonly study because of these changes. He urges us to shift from the linear communication model that Claude Shannon popularized, and we discussed several weeks ago and take a closer look at the ‘dialogic’ model of communication. Here, he says the idea of a ’consumer’ disappears altogether. He says that ‘meaningfulness,’ ‘social networks,’ and ‘relationships’ surface as the crucial components of the communication process. He says they’ll replace ‘content,’ ‘information,’ or the ‘message’ with human interaction based on self-expression (p.9).

When discussing digital media this semester, we’ve explored the idea that everyone who utilizes digital media is a “producer” and not merely a “user.” That’s why Hartley suggests that we extend the study of media and culture to a “population-side focus on how all the ‘agents,’ individual or institutional, in a given communication, media, or cultural system act and are acted upon as they use it (i.e. the ‘people formerly known as the audience’)” (p. 9). He further discusses in chapter three the role of popular culture becoming the “subject’’ rather than “object” of journalism. Hartley describes popular culture as the “place where individually and collectively, ordinary people get to speak for themselves” (p.90). He summarizes things succinctly by stating that journalism takes on different forms depending on whether you look at popular culture as
the “they” or the “we” in the process of production.

Hartley suggests that journalism studies would benefit from a different approach -- taking a page from cultural studies by considering both the subjective and objective viewpoints equally. That would mean equally weighing the impact of YouTube with the “newspapers of record" today. As
he says, the emergence of digital online self-made media requires it. And I tend to agree. But…

All this discussion about popular culture and journalism makes me further question what exactly is journalism once again? Who is a journalist? Is it the reporter at the newspaper? The blogger? Is it both?

Clay Shirky says that ‘publishing’ by users, online, ‘has become the new literacy,’ and Hartley agrees. Hartley also notes that the internet marks the most important evolution in the growth of knowledge technologies since the Gutenberg press. He says we don’t yet know how to harness all the new ‘public thought’ that’s already out there. He says we know even less about how to stimulate, improve, or propagate its ‘quality.’ (p.52). Isn’t this the next big challenge in communication that we’re facing? While figuring out how to harness this power and ability we have to be our own content producers for better or for worse.

Everyone is in love with the newest methods of distribution, and that’s really what the internet and social media are, the newest delivery system for information. The focus now is to get what we want to say out on a splashy web page faster than the other guy. We’re less concerned about whether what’s being put out there is accurate. And for this reason, when we rethink the digital future, I agree that we must study it from both the objective and subjective viewpoints and find ways to embrace emerging technology as Hartley suggests.

Does all of this mean digital will necessarily be better? I’m not sure about that. But what I am sure of is the way we receive and distribute news and facts seems to be changing almost daily. And that is a trend I expect will continue for quite some time.

I have to say I was pretty excited to jump into this book. I come from a group of friends whose primary hobbies include being wired into games like Call of Duty and Skyrim. Personally I’ve always been more of a Mario or Pac Man kind of girl, but I did own my very own Super Nintendo at one point, and I’ve been known to tear up Guitar Hero from time to time. And, I will say...I absolutely LOVE Halo. So, I guess as far as most girls go, I’m as close to a “gamer” as it gets.

In his book “How to do Things with Videogames,” Ian Bogost explores the different ways computer and video games are used today, and he argues that the diverse applications today’s games have make gaming as a medium “broader, richer, and more relevant.” The book looks at how gaming has explored everything from music, art, and travel to branding, politics, and promotions. The aim is to show us how videogames change and influence our daily lives in really profound ways. We all play games, whether we recognize them as forms of leisure or entertainment or they’re used for work or political purposes.

Bogost initially discusses videogames’ ability to “create worlds in which players take on roles constrained by rules” and how it “offers excellent opportunities for new kinds of learning” (p.5). Video and computer games have created an infinite number of possibilities by creating their own simulated realities. I couldn’t help thinking about the movie “Gamer” starring Gerard Butler as a convict who’s controlled in a real life video game of sorts by a teenage gamer. His freedom depends on the kid’s ability to win “battles” in combat. How crazy is it that the character played by Michael C. Hall could develop a technology that actually replaced brain cells and allowed another person to control your actions online? Or is it really that crazy? This movie gave me such an eerie feeling. Could this really be what video games could turn into in the next 30 or 40 years?

Or what about the movie “Surrogates?” Before long, will we just be operating humanoid robots from the safety and comfort of our own homes? It really doesn’t seem that inconceivable. With the rate at which processing speeds on computers increase, before long you may be able to create real 3D environments for long periods of time. But when we get to the point where our technology can recreate or simulate ANYTHING we can dream of and can do anything for us, what happens next? I know Bogost's goal was to show us the variety of things that video games can currently do, but the implications for the future are what I find most fascinating, and I wish he could have spent more time delving into.

Gaming, in its own way, serves as a mirror to show where we stand culturally at a particular moment in time. As Bogost touches on in the introduction, I also don’t believe that technology necessarily saves or condemns us. As he says, it influences us, “changing how we perceive, conceive of, and interact with our world” (p. 2). He references McLuhan’s “medium as the message” approach saying the medium is an extension of people because it helps structure and inform, altering our understanding and behavior. What he thought McLuhan was getting at is totally right: seeing items like video games as a medium, you learn that what they can do to and for a culture are often going to be more important than the content they convey. I believe that technology and gaming will continue to develop and change in ways we can hardly imagine now. As gaming technology changes ,the way we perceive and interact with our world will also continue to develop and change as well.

I think it will be interesting to see where computer and video games take us in the future. As the idea of being a “gamer” becomes outdated, and as games become more ordinary and familiar, will we all essentially be gaming, as Bogost suggests? Will we exist in a Sims like universe? Could we live like Bruce Willis in “Surrogates?” Or will we be controlled like Gerard Butler was in “Gamer”? It’s honestly a little terrifying and also a little exciting to imagine. I believe video games have a wide range of applications and that it’s admirable that there are a number of games created for the purpose of helping us get in a better workout (like Zumba for the Wii). Others make us look at social and political issues (like Darfur is Dying). But only time will tell where we, and our video games, go from here.

Something I’ve recently beeninterested in is whether or not social media and social networking sites can actually enable or influence real political action. Political engagement has been my main research focus in another class I’m taking this semester. I thought it was interesting that Danah Boyd (2008) said that when mostpoliticians and activists talk about using social networking sites, they’rereally talking about using it as a “spamming device,” or what Crawford (2009)calls the “broadcast-only” model. She says that just because someone wants to reach millions of people, it doesn’t mean they will do so effectively because if nobody is interested in hearing what they have to say it doesn’t matter that the information is out there for millions of people. As I’ve discussed before,if someone is not motivated to learn or seek out well- informed information, they just won’t. It won’t matter how much information is widely and readily available on the Internet.

Additionally important here is the idea of being tuned in. Often as Crawford (2009) notes with Twitter, we utilize a type of “background listening” with the updates and messages we choose to receive and follow. Having Facebook and Twitter and other applications readily available and accessible on our phones and other mobile devices often means being tuned in 24 hours a day. But just because we’re “tuned in” doesn’t mean we’re processing everything that we’re fed, and more often than not, as Crawford notes, we end up scanning and discarding, or tuning out lots of material. And while some of us are active media consumers, who look to switch up and maintain a healthy media diet, most will just search through the tidbits that momentarily hold their interest or mirror ideas and thoughts they already have. That brings me to the next somewhat obvious, yet still unsettling issue raised in these readings.

Just as marketers use platforms like Facebook and Google to track our media consumption habits and target us with ads and information tailored specifically to what they think we want to see, we also tend to seek out opinions of others just like ours. Boyd notes that politically engaged people tend to know and converse with other politically engaged people like themselves. Likewise, uninterested, disengaged people typically associate with people just like themselves. As Boyd puts it, “social network sites create cavernous echo chambers as people reiterate what their friends posted” (243). I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve watched “Friends” on Facebook mindlessly repost statuses ranting about this political debate or that politician without any sort of insight or rational basis of opinion.

I don’t know that I’d call Boyd’s view a dystopian one, so much as a “cyber-realist” one on the effects social network sites can have on political engagement. I do, however, have to remain optimistic about the effects that social media has and could potentially have in mobilizing citizens to real political action. Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election is the best example of social media at work and being used in the right ways to mobilize groups who had otherwise been politically disengaged. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote, the tools of social network sites have reinvented social activism. I would also argue that it’s changed how people can come together and collaborate to campaign for issues or candidates that are important to them, and have also offered politicians and other leaders the access to connect with a global community.

But again, the most disturbing topic I feel like we’re continually faced with each week as we read is the issue of privacy (or lack thereof) on the Internet. As Boyd (2008) tells us, public and private are merely guidelines on the Internet because “there are no digital walls that truly keep what is desired in, and what is not, out” (243). Boyd & Ellison (2008) ask whether or not law enforcement has the right to access information posted on social media sites without warrants. As the article I linked here last week mentioned, the FBI is already well on its way there.

There is still plenty of room for growth and change in terms of how social media can influence political engagement. I believe the key to using social media to influence future political views will depend on how the message is crafted. It can’t be simply thrown together and put out there like a spam message. The messages must be powerful and have purpose. Without that power and purpose there will be no memorable change, making social media little more than an afterthought in the political process.