I really hope Andrew Keen chokes on his own ignorance. I remember seeing him on the Colbert Report and I couldn't tell if he was serious because I honestly couldn't believe than anyone not being paid by Big Media, let alone an independent minded author would actually think this way.
Keen's argument is flawed from the word go. He compares user-generated content to the T.H. Huxley's idea of unlimited monkeys at unlimited typewriters, but that's not quite applicable. Huxley's monkeys are all equally incompetent on their own, while our human internet is filled with god damned geniuses. The primates are capable (theoretically) of producing a quality work on with all of them working together at once. The interwebz show that people are quite capable of doing it on their own with sometimes alarming frequency.
So immediately Keen has shown himself as an ignorant, elitist snob, sneering down at the lowly likes of us who dare post something of ours that we think is cool online. It's not that he's wrong about how much crap there is out there, but he seems incapable of comprehending that, just like with any other form of media, you can ignore it. Just because a blog is out there doesn't mean you have to read it. And just because Fox News is out there doesn't mean I have to watch it. I don't think it's even necessary to mention that I've seen plenty of blogs with a quality of reporting that Fox News could never even hope to emulate.
His argument against Wikipedia assumes that no one posting edits to an article knows anything about the topic or that people are actually trying to put misinformation up there. I've yet to actually get incorrect information my use of Wikipedia (that I know of), and perusing pages on topics that I happen to know quite a bit about doesn't yield the inaccuracy that he would have us think is so prevalent throughout the site. Most of the people that post edits actually are knowledgeable about what they're posting about, and the ones that aren't get corrected by the ones that are. In fact, the most common occurrence of what Keen is trying to blow the whistle on is actually the example he provides: large corporations, the kind that he wants everyone to trust for their media, editing articles about them in their own favor. Hmm.
His attack on Google's "collective intelligence" makes me wonder if he's ever actually used Google. He seems to be under the impression that people go to Google to ask it deep, meaningful questions and seek insight, not find a store's webpage to look at it's hours of operation. Those types of people use AOL. If I type in "Parkway Music Clifton Park" in Google, I should goddamn hope that the website of Parkway Music in Clifton Park is first hit, I imagine that if it weren't, enough people would be clicking it to correct that.
I honestly wanted to break something when he accused internet news of not focusing on important events. Does he really think that nothing was going on in any of those war zones while every major news venue was devoting all of it's coverage to the imprisonment and/or "liberation" of Paris Hilton? Come on! Yes, Reddit and Digg will frequently focus on interesting, but ultimately trivial things on their main pages, but you can also narrow the scope of stories to things like politics or even the war in Iraq. Regardless, though, if you're the kind of person who uses Reddit or Digg as their only news source, you probably aren't very concerned with what's going on in the Gaza Strip anyway.
I'm not touching his ideas on social networking with a 10 foot pole.
Finally, oh noes! The interwebz are killing the economy! Run for the hills! Really? Are we seriously to believe that Web 2.0 managed to only take away jobs, with creating any in the process? How many people does it take to keep YouTube running? Reddit? MySpace? Get with the program, you Luddite, tahms ah changin'! Frankly, I imagine all those people who lost their jobs at time just went and got similar jobs at internet publications. Unless you've actually got numbers to back up that the total number of jobs has gone down because of this stuff, I'm not buying it. This wouldn't be the first time that people had to learn a new trade to keep up with technology. It's called "progress".
God, this guy makes me so mad I want to punch babies.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
My Thoughts Exactly
From my brains to Joe's blog.
As far as I can tell, all the technology that was being discussed already exists and has existed for years, and these ideas have already been implemented elsewhere. We wouldn't be doing anything new or exciting... we'd be free labor to set up and layout a blog. You guys were joking, right?
I also have a bone to pick with this residency business. I think it's great that the arts department is bringing in artists and allowing students to work with them. I don't think it's great that they're making students work with them. While I wouldn't mind attending a lecture by the Shoot An Iraqi/Waterboarding guy, and certainly wouldn't try to stop him from doing anything he wants to do, I have absolutely zero interest in assisting or participating in his work or the general liberal activist agenda that this whole "collaborative project" seems to be pushing. This type of thing should be completely opt in (undergrad research project, maybe?). I just want to keep doing participatory culture exploration and media creation, so that whole first hour of class yesterday was a major turn off because I got the feeling that my time in this class was going to be used to work on someone else's project that I have no interest in. I'd really like to get a clear description of what the plan for our involvement in this project is soon, because if this is going the way that it seems to me it's going, I need to either pass/fail or drop this course, since I don't want my GPA to depend on this. And that would be a real shame because everything else that we've been doing in the class so far has been pretty cool.
As far as I can tell, all the technology that was being discussed already exists and has existed for years, and these ideas have already been implemented elsewhere. We wouldn't be doing anything new or exciting... we'd be free labor to set up and layout a blog. You guys were joking, right?
I also have a bone to pick with this residency business. I think it's great that the arts department is bringing in artists and allowing students to work with them. I don't think it's great that they're making students work with them. While I wouldn't mind attending a lecture by the Shoot An Iraqi/Waterboarding guy, and certainly wouldn't try to stop him from doing anything he wants to do, I have absolutely zero interest in assisting or participating in his work or the general liberal activist agenda that this whole "collaborative project" seems to be pushing. This type of thing should be completely opt in (undergrad research project, maybe?). I just want to keep doing participatory culture exploration and media creation, so that whole first hour of class yesterday was a major turn off because I got the feeling that my time in this class was going to be used to work on someone else's project that I have no interest in. I'd really like to get a clear description of what the plan for our involvement in this project is soon, because if this is going the way that it seems to me it's going, I need to either pass/fail or drop this course, since I don't want my GPA to depend on this. And that would be a real shame because everything else that we've been doing in the class so far has been pretty cool.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
ZOMGINTERWEBZ
It's hard to write a "response" to a document that's entirely historical in nature, especially if you are previously familiar with said history. "Yes. This happened."
I did like the description of the internet as anarchy, though. While that's exactly how I think of the internet, I never actually though to ascribe that word to it. But it perfectly describes what makes the internet so great: that you can do whatever the hell you want.
Again, the datedness of the article is amusing, since this blog is clear evidence of using the internet for something past e-mail, discussion groups, long distance computing, and file transfer. Reading this kinda feels like watching one of those 50s film strips designed to introduce you to some new fangled technology. "Why yes, Billy, the internet is quite fascinating," the narrator comments in a pleasing baritone, "But be careful! The communists have the internet too, and they might try to infect your computer with a virus, like gonorrhea!" It's unfortunate that the author didn't really speculate on future uses of the net, just on the growth of technology. I imagine hearing (again) what people in 1996 thought the internet would eventually be used for would probably be hilarious.
I did like the description of the internet as anarchy, though. While that's exactly how I think of the internet, I never actually though to ascribe that word to it. But it perfectly describes what makes the internet so great: that you can do whatever the hell you want.
Again, the datedness of the article is amusing, since this blog is clear evidence of using the internet for something past e-mail, discussion groups, long distance computing, and file transfer. Reading this kinda feels like watching one of those 50s film strips designed to introduce you to some new fangled technology. "Why yes, Billy, the internet is quite fascinating," the narrator comments in a pleasing baritone, "But be careful! The communists have the internet too, and they might try to infect your computer with a virus, like gonorrhea!" It's unfortunate that the author didn't really speculate on future uses of the net, just on the growth of technology. I imagine hearing (again) what people in 1996 thought the internet would eventually be used for would probably be hilarious.
Monday, January 21, 2008
ZOMGDEL.ICIO.US
Booyahkashaw.
For some reason, one of my links in there isn't showing up, so pretend this comes up in there.
Soooooo, here are the methods behind the madness:
The Bench - Ok, so this one's kinda weird, and the link doesn't actually go to The Bench project itself, because that site doesn't seem to be up anyway. The Bench was an experiment held by the guys who create the webcomic Penny Arcade in which they provided their readers with a bunch of pre-drawn materials, specifically images of a guy, a squirrel, speech bubbles, and a park bench setting, and told them to create their own comics with them. All of the submissions were posted on the project's website and a few of the better comics were presented as Penny Arcade strips. This is one of the oldest examples of participatory culture that I can think of and one that I got alot of enjoyment out of. I don't remember if the comic in this link was made by a fan or by the Penny Arcade guys, but it exemplifies the type of stuff that could be found there.
Overheard in New York - This site has provided some of the most quotable material ever because you literally can't make this shit up. People submit funny, interesting, horrifying, disgusting, all of the above, and more quips that they overhear in New York and the site editors post their favorites with snarky and often hilarious comments in the form of titles. This has spawned Overheard at the Beach, Overheard in the Office, and Overheard Everywhere spinoffs, not to mentions countless Overheard at X Facebook groups. I'm not sure how old this is, but definitely one of the older PC things out there. For some reason though, I always seem to find the original funnier than the others.
Wikipedia: Participatory Culture - Ooooh, this is soooo meta. I absolutely adore wikipedia as a resource. It's so damn fast and almost always has exactly what I'm looking for. It's probably responsible for most of my music trivia knowledge. While its merits and pitfalls can be argued all day, I definitely the that the whole wiki concept is fascinating and definitely here to stay. It's speed and ease of use are astounding, and unless Stephen Colbert is involved, it's usually pretty reliable (though I do recall reading that, apparently, Killswitch Engage is a "Gaycore" band from "Gayville, USA").
Flickr - Yay, easy photo sharing! This photo and flickr set were posted on Boing Boing, and I just find it really cool that somebody's (great) vacation photos can get attention like this. That photo is a complete marvel, but not too long ago, it would've been doomed to obscurity in someone's physical photo album.
Ze Frank - The man who pretty much defines both Videoblogging and Participatory Culture for me. Every weekday for a year, Ze posted a video he made of himself offering biting and hilarious political commentary, silly skits making fun of himself, poignant thoughts and philosophies on life, and scientific debasings of stupid things. Better yet, he got the audience involved, from challenging them to make an Earth Sandwich (placing a piece of bread on exact opposite sides of the earth), to playing a game of chess against them as a collective, to letting them collectively write an episode of the show. I might have a slight man-crush on him.
LonelyGirl15 - I never actually watched LonelyGirl15, even after the cat got out of the bag that it wasn't a real girl, but I thought it was a really incredible idea. Then I stumbled upon this video while looking for something else and just kinda had my mind blown about where the whole thing had gone. It began as what appeared to be a cute, kinda nerdy girl posting videos of herself talking about her life and whatever was on her mind. She became something of a YouTube celebrity for her frequently amusing videos and witty insight. People began writing to her because they totally identified with her and the things she said. Then, after some creative use of Google caching, a MySpace featuring photos of said girl with a different name was unearthed. As it turned out, the whole thing was staged, and was in fact a media experiment. LonelyGirl15 was an actress reading lines, and someone else had been writing all those blog posts and responding to those e-mails. But the show didn't end. And apparently went into some serious high drama shit, told entirely through YouTube videos. What this could possibly say for entertainment in the future is pretty heavy.
SongFight! - Another of my old stomping grounds. It's changed a little since I was on it (less titles, more time to make the final product) but it's still at least doing its thing. The site editors post a song title or tiles and you have a week to write, record, and submit a song based on that title. The submissions get posted on the front page and anyone who visits can vote on their favorite. Alot of the submissions are unpolished, weird, or just downright bad, but I've found some absolutely phenomenal music here.
XKCD - Not inherently participatory (though it is one of my favorite webcomics ever), XKCD did something really interesting in this strip. The coordinates in the comic turned out to be a field outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fans of the comic gathered there on the date in the comic for a giant XKCD party, where the fans modified the entire surrounding area to be XKCD themed, changing street signs and erecting references to the comic. XKCD has also done a couple of PC projects since then, like WetRiffs.com, meant to be a play on niche genre porn, and an IRC-bot that only allows original conversation, punishing people for making statements that they've made before.
For some reason, one of my links in there isn't showing up, so pretend this comes up in there.
Soooooo, here are the methods behind the madness:
The Bench - Ok, so this one's kinda weird, and the link doesn't actually go to The Bench project itself, because that site doesn't seem to be up anyway. The Bench was an experiment held by the guys who create the webcomic Penny Arcade in which they provided their readers with a bunch of pre-drawn materials, specifically images of a guy, a squirrel, speech bubbles, and a park bench setting, and told them to create their own comics with them. All of the submissions were posted on the project's website and a few of the better comics were presented as Penny Arcade strips. This is one of the oldest examples of participatory culture that I can think of and one that I got alot of enjoyment out of. I don't remember if the comic in this link was made by a fan or by the Penny Arcade guys, but it exemplifies the type of stuff that could be found there.
Overheard in New York - This site has provided some of the most quotable material ever because you literally can't make this shit up. People submit funny, interesting, horrifying, disgusting, all of the above, and more quips that they overhear in New York and the site editors post their favorites with snarky and often hilarious comments in the form of titles. This has spawned Overheard at the Beach, Overheard in the Office, and Overheard Everywhere spinoffs, not to mentions countless Overheard at X Facebook groups. I'm not sure how old this is, but definitely one of the older PC things out there. For some reason though, I always seem to find the original funnier than the others.
Wikipedia: Participatory Culture - Ooooh, this is soooo meta. I absolutely adore wikipedia as a resource. It's so damn fast and almost always has exactly what I'm looking for. It's probably responsible for most of my music trivia knowledge. While its merits and pitfalls can be argued all day, I definitely the that the whole wiki concept is fascinating and definitely here to stay. It's speed and ease of use are astounding, and unless Stephen Colbert is involved, it's usually pretty reliable (though I do recall reading that, apparently, Killswitch Engage is a "Gaycore" band from "Gayville, USA").
Flickr - Yay, easy photo sharing! This photo and flickr set were posted on Boing Boing, and I just find it really cool that somebody's (great) vacation photos can get attention like this. That photo is a complete marvel, but not too long ago, it would've been doomed to obscurity in someone's physical photo album.
Ze Frank - The man who pretty much defines both Videoblogging and Participatory Culture for me. Every weekday for a year, Ze posted a video he made of himself offering biting and hilarious political commentary, silly skits making fun of himself, poignant thoughts and philosophies on life, and scientific debasings of stupid things. Better yet, he got the audience involved, from challenging them to make an Earth Sandwich (placing a piece of bread on exact opposite sides of the earth), to playing a game of chess against them as a collective, to letting them collectively write an episode of the show. I might have a slight man-crush on him.
LonelyGirl15 - I never actually watched LonelyGirl15, even after the cat got out of the bag that it wasn't a real girl, but I thought it was a really incredible idea. Then I stumbled upon this video while looking for something else and just kinda had my mind blown about where the whole thing had gone. It began as what appeared to be a cute, kinda nerdy girl posting videos of herself talking about her life and whatever was on her mind. She became something of a YouTube celebrity for her frequently amusing videos and witty insight. People began writing to her because they totally identified with her and the things she said. Then, after some creative use of Google caching, a MySpace featuring photos of said girl with a different name was unearthed. As it turned out, the whole thing was staged, and was in fact a media experiment. LonelyGirl15 was an actress reading lines, and someone else had been writing all those blog posts and responding to those e-mails. But the show didn't end. And apparently went into some serious high drama shit, told entirely through YouTube videos. What this could possibly say for entertainment in the future is pretty heavy.
SongFight! - Another of my old stomping grounds. It's changed a little since I was on it (less titles, more time to make the final product) but it's still at least doing its thing. The site editors post a song title or tiles and you have a week to write, record, and submit a song based on that title. The submissions get posted on the front page and anyone who visits can vote on their favorite. Alot of the submissions are unpolished, weird, or just downright bad, but I've found some absolutely phenomenal music here.
XKCD - Not inherently participatory (though it is one of my favorite webcomics ever), XKCD did something really interesting in this strip. The coordinates in the comic turned out to be a field outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fans of the comic gathered there on the date in the comic for a giant XKCD party, where the fans modified the entire surrounding area to be XKCD themed, changing street signs and erecting references to the comic. XKCD has also done a couple of PC projects since then, like WetRiffs.com, meant to be a play on niche genre porn, and an IRC-bot that only allows original conversation, punishing people for making statements that they've made before.
ZOMGSTARWARZ
Here's a "response" for you: GIVE US SHORTER ARTICLES! Good lord, I could feel my youth slipping away reading that.
As far as the actual content of the essay? Snore. Alright, I guess that's a little mean, but this is all stuff that I've already experienced, thought about, or read before. I wrote fan fiction as a kid and posted on Star Wars RPG forums. In high school, my friends built their own Mystery Science Theater 3000 robots and we taped a homebrew episode of the show with our own skits and commentary on a episode of the 60s Batman TV show. Freshman year of college, for a film project, I re-shot the opening scene of Pulp Fiction with all the dialog presented as an AIM conversation. Basically... this essay was about me.
Unfortunately, while all of the stuff in the article is accurate and still rather poignant, it feels dated, being decidedly pre-YouTubevolution. Yes, I definitely just made that term up. Regardless, Jenkins seems to limit his definition of "Participatory Culture" to non-canonical uses of popular universes and pop-culture cross references. These days, it's not so much about parodying or homaging stuff you like, it's about making your own. It's not about Thumb Wars anymore (which was lame anyway, Bat Thumb and Frankenthumb were way funnier), it's about LonelyGirl15, which in turn, makes this a really long winded essay about things that used to be interesting. Alright, that's mean too, but I find myself at a lack of anything to really say about this except, "Yep. That's right. Let's move on."
It's not that the things in this essay are no longer relevant, it's just that they seems to be somewhat old hat because basically nothing new has happened on that front since the article's writing. People will continue to create fan films/fics/games/whatevers for things they like, the media corporations that own the IP will continue to send cease and desists if any one of those gets too popular, and people will continue to find new methods and technologies to take their own little media-related amusements and bring them to the big time. The breakthroughs of Photoshop and Premier are long since past now, and it seems like everyone and their grandmother is "rolling their own". And for whatever own you might be rolling, there's a dot-com 2.0 ready and waiting to present it to the rest of the interwebs.
This is a good essay. Actually, it's a great essay. It just stresses things that are now of historical importance rather than current events.
As far as the actual content of the essay? Snore. Alright, I guess that's a little mean, but this is all stuff that I've already experienced, thought about, or read before. I wrote fan fiction as a kid and posted on Star Wars RPG forums. In high school, my friends built their own Mystery Science Theater 3000 robots and we taped a homebrew episode of the show with our own skits and commentary on a episode of the 60s Batman TV show. Freshman year of college, for a film project, I re-shot the opening scene of Pulp Fiction with all the dialog presented as an AIM conversation. Basically... this essay was about me.
Unfortunately, while all of the stuff in the article is accurate and still rather poignant, it feels dated, being decidedly pre-YouTubevolution. Yes, I definitely just made that term up. Regardless, Jenkins seems to limit his definition of "Participatory Culture" to non-canonical uses of popular universes and pop-culture cross references. These days, it's not so much about parodying or homaging stuff you like, it's about making your own. It's not about Thumb Wars anymore (which was lame anyway, Bat Thumb and Frankenthumb were way funnier), it's about LonelyGirl15, which in turn, makes this a really long winded essay about things that used to be interesting. Alright, that's mean too, but I find myself at a lack of anything to really say about this except, "Yep. That's right. Let's move on."
It's not that the things in this essay are no longer relevant, it's just that they seems to be somewhat old hat because basically nothing new has happened on that front since the article's writing. People will continue to create fan films/fics/games/whatevers for things they like, the media corporations that own the IP will continue to send cease and desists if any one of those gets too popular, and people will continue to find new methods and technologies to take their own little media-related amusements and bring them to the big time. The breakthroughs of Photoshop and Premier are long since past now, and it seems like everyone and their grandmother is "rolling their own". And for whatever own you might be rolling, there's a dot-com 2.0 ready and waiting to present it to the rest of the interwebs.
This is a good essay. Actually, it's a great essay. It just stresses things that are now of historical importance rather than current events.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
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