Who's running online life?

It occurred to me the other day that there's an unresolvable tension embedded in online culture: that is, that the leaders online -- the developers, the coders, the engineers -- are not known for their social skills offline so much. Yes, it's a stereotype, but for a reason. Coding is accomplished through a computer interface, requires mastery of reams of arcade symbols and logic systems; for those of us whose tastes lean more on the literate side of things, anything written in syntax makes our collective eyes glaze over.

Everyone discusses who goes online and what they do online, but who's building the fundamental architecture of the place? Who can master the code and rule online life? Not the poets, that's for sure. All that fun stuff -- Flickr, Facebook, Webkinz, etc. -- has been built by someone (or someone(s), a team of coders). It can all be leveled by a sharp hacker. In the offline world, virtually anyone can stroll through a garden. To master doing it in Second Life is a colossal pain in the ass. So why invest the time learning? Who has the capacities to learn this high-level coding?

We talk about participatory culture, but it's akin to being able to dial the telephone... what I'm asking is, who's building the telephone? Who decided the buttons should go where? One school of thought will counter that user feedback influences the construction of these interfaces, and that's probably true to the extent that developers want to broaden participation.

But at the end of the day, there is someone at Blogger.com who built this portal and I dutifully type in the box they've given me and use one of their generic templates. There are rules online, and I'm a mere putsch.

All this intelligence

... and what's the point? Two separate postings online have gotten me thinking...

The first, from the New York Times, discusses recent article which suggests that smarter animals die earlier and get confounded by certain tasks versus their less bright brethren. For those of us who have spent our lives going to school, working on academic projects, writing all those goddamn papers, etc., you have to wonder if we're going to keel over sooner rather than later. Or will we be confounded by something simple that all the other non-academics figured out long ago, like "never bet on the Cubs" or "stay away from pleats"?

This is balanced by a recent BoingBoing posting on media theorist Clay Shirkey, who provocatively asks if the future will involve a cognitive surplus, given all the free time we're going to have freed from drudgery?

Not that these two posts are directly contradictory. It's just the opposite: we're either going to be done in by our own intelligence, or burn it out in frustration because there's nothing to do. Note to self: learn how to repair iPhones...

Wikipedia: the Book

Am I missing something? link>:

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, will be appearing in German stores in September in an unusual format: as a book.

German publishing giant Bertelsmann AG said Wednesday it planned to publish a one-volume reference book containing the best of the Germany version of the popular online encyclopedia.

The 993-page book will contain approximately 50,000 definitions and 1,000 illustrations and will be priced at about 20 euros ($32.18 Cdn), according to the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, the group behind the ncyclopedia.

It's encyclopedia as photography: take a snapshot of a moment in time, and hope for the best.

p.s. it occurs to me that this may be nothing more than a savvy PR move, or an art installation. It's so hard to tell them apart these days.

Google Generation a Myth

I love it when I come across articles that tear down the whole notion of the "digital native":

The report, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, found users "power-browsing" or skimming material, using "horizontal" (shallow) research. Most spent only a few minutes looking at academic journal articles and few returned to them. "It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense," said the report authors.

But this behaviour was not restricted to "screenagers". "From undergraduates to professors, people exhibit a strong tendency towards shallow, horizontal, flicking behaviour in digital libraries. Factors specific to the individual, personality and background are much more significant than generation."

Let this be a lesson to those who like to think that today's youth are essentially aliens endowed with a natural facility for navigating digital information. Hurumph!

Being a media studies person and a lover of history, you learn that over time, modalities change, but human capacities rarely do. What makes the case of digital media engagement tricky is that while on the one hand it uses the same raw materials for communication we've used since the printing press -- pictures and words -- on the other hand, it promises new ways of interacting with them. In groups, rarely alone, information at your fingertips, yet often physically isolated and spiritually shallow.

I am your Grandmother

At least I feel like I could be...

In theory, at least. In fact, I don't have children and have sometimes wondered about missing out on the joys of, say, baby's first steps. But that doesn't matter now. I can enjoy those private moments in a child's life online, without the crying and the burping and the $5 in the birthday card.*



In theory, I can enjoy moments like these with all the networked children of the world. I'm not sure if this makes me a stout-hearted humanitarian, or a weird voyeur. I think the same goes for whomever posted "Standup"'s video online. Is a moment intimate if it's filmed and shared with an anonymous audience?





*yes, I'm a cheap virtual grandma.

What does participation mean?

While I'm a great fan of participatory culture -- defined as web 2.0, bottom-up connection, etc. -- I've started wondering how this practice is going to ultimately affect the distribution of power. I'm not talking about "Heroes"-type power, but the kind that can effect substantive structural changes in how business is conducted and government is run.

A friend recently told me that ethics were the quaint province of the middle to lower classes, and given the behavior of men (yes, mostly men) in power, it really does make one wonder if there's something to the idea that power corrupts. Absolutely. Or maybe power is more attainable by the corrupt -- the classic chicken/egg dialectic.

In any case, while I see participatory culture having the potential to afford great opportunities for learning, networking and creativity to everyone, I also see the following:

* those with more money and opportunity have more gadgets and more free time to play with them
* those with more money can buy the leisure time to participate in cultural pursuits

But even the lucky who aren't working eighteen hour days at several low paying jobs aren't off the hook, as corporations are more than happy to:

* make what was once (or should've been) paying work a 'game' and entice those free timers to do their work for free
* encourage fan-driven culture in order to exploit it for feedback
* appropriate ideas and talent without paying the creator a penny

So I ask those fans of participatory culture: how does the practice translate into a shifting of the corporate paradigm? Or is it its snuggle bunny? Because in any pursuit in this capitalist system, follow the money.

Discuss.

Digital life spans

Check out this story on Boston.com about the ephemerality of digital media:

Digital files, like any other media, decay over time. A typical low-cost hard drive lasts five years. While CD's and DVD's haven't been around long enough to know whether they will in fact last a century, some studies indicate they may last only 20 years.

"Who knows how long they're going to last - how much time before the information on a zip disk just goes into heaven, cyberspace heaven," said Paladino, who recently was shipping out a box of Betamax tapes of the television show "Adam Smith's Money World," to be converted into a more usable format.

A confession: I still have a shopping bag full of eight track cassettes in my basement. For my birthday one year, a friend bought me a vintage eight track player that I rigged up to my (also very antiquated) stereo system. But after years of enjoying CD fidelity, the screeches and pop of the typical eight track were like fingers down a chalkboard. I still have them all if anyone's interested, including the Broadway soundtracks for Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar.

Decaying media is nothing new; as they mention in the article, paper turns to dust, tablets break, scrolls are misplaced during a Mongol raid. What might in fact be new is the extent to which we rely on these objects to extend our human capacities. Why should schoolchildren remember dates, learn how to multiply, etc. when Google can do it for you for free, online, 24/7? The thinking is that these appliances free up our time to think Big Thoughts. Though I'm not sure how readily these Big Thoughts will come without having gone through the boot camp of multiplication tables, spelling drills and the really boring stuff that surrounds good communication.