Today, while I was on Facebook, I came across an interesting application. Recently, Facebook has added tons of applications; things you can add to your Facebook profile. I added an application called "Scrabulous," which lets me play Scrabble through Facebook with my other friends on Facebook, and an application called "Personal DNA." Basically, the Personal DNA application is a personality test. It's a well-designed (i.e. pretty), interactive test that lets you rank personal preferences and then it gives you an outcome. The scary thing is that it's dead accurate.
My results are here:
If you click on to read them, it basically says I'm exactly like myself. It says I'm self-reliant, generous, practical and hard-working. What I'm wondering though, is did I know this before the Internet told me?
In high school career ed class, we took the Myers-Briggs type indicator. I was an INTJ. This was in 1998. I re-took it today, on the Internet, and I'm still an INTJ. I feel like this is pretty accurate as well. To further test the accuracy, I had a friend take it. I've known this person for about seven years, and he's never taken a test like this. He's also an INTJ, and that's pretty accurate as well. It's strange, though, because I recognize these traits in him and in myself, but I didn't really ever think of us as similar. I probably could have come to this conclusion without the Internet as well.
So, I did all this, and realized that it's just another way, like Facebook, or MySpace to read and write and talk about myself. Now I feel like I was swindled by the Internet. It tricks me into thinking I'm special and interesting, when really, I'm just another person taking an online personality test. While this isn't exactly Web 2.0, it's sort of a stepping stone between Web and Web 2.0. It's less committal than MySpace or Facebook, because you aren't forced to share your results, but it still engages you in a kind of self-focus that many Web 2.0 things focus on.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Keen and The Liquid Library
I think one of the reasons I’m having a hard time dissecting this Keen book is the sheer amount of information crammed into it. For example, I just read a short section (not even a chapter, like a sub-chapter) called “The Liquid Library” that was about four pages, but it gave me so much to think about and discuss.
The section is about Kevin Kelly, who Keen calls a “Silicon Valley utopian.” “Kelley wants to kill off the book entirely,” Keen writes. “As well as the intellectual property rights of writers and publishers.”
Doesn’t that sound like Keen is being a little harsh? Well, it’s pretty true. In a 2006 New York Times Magazine article, Kelly basically said he wants all of literature to be on the web and “cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled, and woven deeper into the culture than ever before.” Wow. To Kelly, it means “a web of names and a community of ideas.” To Keen, it means “the death of culture.”
Both of these arguments are hard to swallow whole because both of these guys are playing in the extremes. I think that’s where all of these arguments for and against Web 2.0 break down. When you say something as incendiary as “no more intellectual property rights,” it’s easy to attract a deluge of naysayers, and it’s equally true if you say something as incendiary as “Web 2.0 will kill culture.” Haven’t these people ever heard of balance?
I’m guessing this is where so much of the criticism and anti-Keen backlash is coming from. He’s one of those all-or-nothing kind of guys. He’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater, along with the bathtub and maybe even the whole bathroom. And even if Keen is wrong, or a blustering Goliath, he’s successfully stirring up debate and thought on what will be the long-term effects of the shift from regular old Internet to Web 2.0. That can’t be discounted.
I can’t wait to read who he attacks next.
The section is about Kevin Kelly, who Keen calls a “Silicon Valley utopian.” “Kelley wants to kill off the book entirely,” Keen writes. “As well as the intellectual property rights of writers and publishers.”
Doesn’t that sound like Keen is being a little harsh? Well, it’s pretty true. In a 2006 New York Times Magazine article, Kelly basically said he wants all of literature to be on the web and “cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled, and woven deeper into the culture than ever before.” Wow. To Kelly, it means “a web of names and a community of ideas.” To Keen, it means “the death of culture.”
Both of these arguments are hard to swallow whole because both of these guys are playing in the extremes. I think that’s where all of these arguments for and against Web 2.0 break down. When you say something as incendiary as “no more intellectual property rights,” it’s easy to attract a deluge of naysayers, and it’s equally true if you say something as incendiary as “Web 2.0 will kill culture.” Haven’t these people ever heard of balance?
I’m guessing this is where so much of the criticism and anti-Keen backlash is coming from. He’s one of those all-or-nothing kind of guys. He’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater, along with the bathtub and maybe even the whole bathroom. And even if Keen is wrong, or a blustering Goliath, he’s successfully stirring up debate and thought on what will be the long-term effects of the shift from regular old Internet to Web 2.0. That can’t be discounted.
I can’t wait to read who he attacks next.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Wikipedia + Jessica = love/hate
In Andrew Keen’s book (which I am still reading, not because I’m a slow reader, but because I’m trying to enjoy it), he talks a lot about Wikipedia. And why shouldn’t he? Everybody else is. I got an email from my eLearning professor about not using Wikipedia as a source, in her class or anyone else’s. Stephen Colbert is making up fake words about Wikipedia. Even old media are talking, like a 2006 New Yorker article. It’s almost impossible not to have an opinion of Wikipedia, no matter if you’ve never even used the Internet.
Last summer, at our family beach house, my grandmother (who has barely used a computer, let alone the Internet) wanted some information. My cousin, a web-savvy teenage boy, printed her a Wikipedia page.
“So it’s like an encyclopedia on the Internet,” she said.
He should have just nodded.
“It’s open source, anybody can edit it,” he said.
“So it’s fake?”
I tried to help.
“It’s democratized.”
I did not help. This was the beginning of my Wikipedia opinion, and at this point I was skeptical.
The arguing point here is reliability. This really is the thousand monkeys sitting at a thousand computers producing something that, while it may not be brilliant, is popular. According to Wikipedia’s Wikipedia page, the site receives between 10,000 and 30,000 page requests per second. Another Wikipedia page, titled “Reliability of Wikipedia” details tests done by third parties to assess the accuracy of Wikipedia. Newspapers and magazines have done numerous studies and assessments with various people to see really how reliable it is. Most of these tests found that it was reliable, however, it still doesn’t have much of an authority. Authority is connected to reliability, but isn’t the same. Jessica Clary saying that Wikipedia is possibly unreliable is one thing, but The New York Times saying the same thing is more significant, because The New York Times has more authority. It’s older. It’s bigger. It’s written and published more.
Then I read a lot of Wikipedia, and I started to like it. It was good for general information, and answering those tip-of-your-tongue questions. What was that TV show where Alan Ruck was a TV writer? Oh yeah, “Going Places.” What show was on before it? “Perfect Strangers.” When was it on? 9:30 p.m. on Friday night on ABC. This is information you couldn’t find in Encyclopedia Britannica.
But then I started using Wikipedia for other things. I wanted to write an essay about Cotard’s syndrome, and in class I was complaining that the Wikipedia page was lacking. I realized it wasn’t Wikipedia’s fault, but mine. I did a search of Google Scholar (Google’s search engine for scholarly papers and journal articles) and found plenty of information. This is the type of thing Wikipedia isn’t good for.
I agree with my eLearning professor that Wikipeda should not be used as source material in academic work, not because of its peer-editing system, but because it’s too generalized, just like any encyclopedia. It’s good for background information or pop-culture trivia, but not for real research. This brought me into my phase of loving Wikipedia. Because I knew what it was good for, I used it constantly to solve the pop-culture questions I got in my head. What’s that song in the new Jetta commercial? Oh it’s the Silversun Pickups song “Kissing Families.” Where are the Silversun Pickups from? Silver Lake in Los Angeles. What other bands are from there? Rilo Kiley and Elliott Smith. Who’s that guy in Rilo Kiley that was a child actor? Blake Sennett. Wikipedia reading flows like a choose-your-own-adventure book. This was the height of my love affair. Then things started to go downhill.
The New Yorker’s article on Wikipedia was published July 31, 2006 and featured a prominent Wikipedia user known as Essjay. The New Yorker article said that Essjay has a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law had contributed to sixteen thousand entries. Essjay served terms as chair of the Wikipedia mediation committee and edits articles patiently for errors and obscenities. This Essjay person sounds like your model Wikipedia contributor. Well, good for him, because he’s fake. Essjay is a persona developed by a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan. In March 2007, Essjay’s persona was revealed, and Essjay retired from the site. Keen devotes two pages in his book to Essjay. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, is okay with it. He told The New Yorker that he regards the Essjay name as “a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”
So where does that fall? In the realm of reliability, sure, Ryan Jordan’s contributions to Wikipedia were factually accurate. But what kind of authority do they have? Not much. Essjay’s degrees are made up, and have no basis, so they don’t have much authority.
The scary thing here is that we may be entering a period of time where informational authority doesn’t matter. This would be the real heartbreaker. If informational authority means nothing, then why am I working for my MFA degree? Why are people working for any sort of advanced degree? If Dr. Harvard Professor and Ryan from Kentucky are considered equally knowledgeable, what’s the point? And if that dividion is erased in fields of research and writing and journalism, what’s next? Will the guy operating on me be a real MD, or just some guy that knows a lot about surgery? Yes, it’s an extreme example, but think about it. What's information worth if authority is passé?
Last summer, at our family beach house, my grandmother (who has barely used a computer, let alone the Internet) wanted some information. My cousin, a web-savvy teenage boy, printed her a Wikipedia page.
“So it’s like an encyclopedia on the Internet,” she said.
He should have just nodded.
“It’s open source, anybody can edit it,” he said.
“So it’s fake?”
I tried to help.
“It’s democratized.”
I did not help. This was the beginning of my Wikipedia opinion, and at this point I was skeptical.
The arguing point here is reliability. This really is the thousand monkeys sitting at a thousand computers producing something that, while it may not be brilliant, is popular. According to Wikipedia’s Wikipedia page, the site receives between 10,000 and 30,000 page requests per second. Another Wikipedia page, titled “Reliability of Wikipedia” details tests done by third parties to assess the accuracy of Wikipedia. Newspapers and magazines have done numerous studies and assessments with various people to see really how reliable it is. Most of these tests found that it was reliable, however, it still doesn’t have much of an authority. Authority is connected to reliability, but isn’t the same. Jessica Clary saying that Wikipedia is possibly unreliable is one thing, but The New York Times saying the same thing is more significant, because The New York Times has more authority. It’s older. It’s bigger. It’s written and published more.
Then I read a lot of Wikipedia, and I started to like it. It was good for general information, and answering those tip-of-your-tongue questions. What was that TV show where Alan Ruck was a TV writer? Oh yeah, “Going Places.” What show was on before it? “Perfect Strangers.” When was it on? 9:30 p.m. on Friday night on ABC. This is information you couldn’t find in Encyclopedia Britannica.
But then I started using Wikipedia for other things. I wanted to write an essay about Cotard’s syndrome, and in class I was complaining that the Wikipedia page was lacking. I realized it wasn’t Wikipedia’s fault, but mine. I did a search of Google Scholar (Google’s search engine for scholarly papers and journal articles) and found plenty of information. This is the type of thing Wikipedia isn’t good for.
I agree with my eLearning professor that Wikipeda should not be used as source material in academic work, not because of its peer-editing system, but because it’s too generalized, just like any encyclopedia. It’s good for background information or pop-culture trivia, but not for real research. This brought me into my phase of loving Wikipedia. Because I knew what it was good for, I used it constantly to solve the pop-culture questions I got in my head. What’s that song in the new Jetta commercial? Oh it’s the Silversun Pickups song “Kissing Families.” Where are the Silversun Pickups from? Silver Lake in Los Angeles. What other bands are from there? Rilo Kiley and Elliott Smith. Who’s that guy in Rilo Kiley that was a child actor? Blake Sennett. Wikipedia reading flows like a choose-your-own-adventure book. This was the height of my love affair. Then things started to go downhill.
The New Yorker’s article on Wikipedia was published July 31, 2006 and featured a prominent Wikipedia user known as Essjay. The New Yorker article said that Essjay has a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law had contributed to sixteen thousand entries. Essjay served terms as chair of the Wikipedia mediation committee and edits articles patiently for errors and obscenities. This Essjay person sounds like your model Wikipedia contributor. Well, good for him, because he’s fake. Essjay is a persona developed by a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan. In March 2007, Essjay’s persona was revealed, and Essjay retired from the site. Keen devotes two pages in his book to Essjay. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, is okay with it. He told The New Yorker that he regards the Essjay name as “a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”
So where does that fall? In the realm of reliability, sure, Ryan Jordan’s contributions to Wikipedia were factually accurate. But what kind of authority do they have? Not much. Essjay’s degrees are made up, and have no basis, so they don’t have much authority.
The scary thing here is that we may be entering a period of time where informational authority doesn’t matter. This would be the real heartbreaker. If informational authority means nothing, then why am I working for my MFA degree? Why are people working for any sort of advanced degree? If Dr. Harvard Professor and Ryan from Kentucky are considered equally knowledgeable, what’s the point? And if that dividion is erased in fields of research and writing and journalism, what’s next? Will the guy operating on me be a real MD, or just some guy that knows a lot about surgery? Yes, it’s an extreme example, but think about it. What's information worth if authority is passé?
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