part of the problem

Today’s reading:
The Tales They Tell in Cyber-Space by John Katz

First, let me say I hate the prefix “cyber” and I hate how it got attached to everything in the 90s (cyberspace, cybernews, cybersex) like a lower-case “i” got attached to everything in the 2000s (iWork, iLife, iPod). Since, though, this was written in 1994, for The New York Times, I’ll allow it. In 1994, prefixing stuff with “cyber” was undeniably hip. Isn’t it strange how even the trendy nomenclature changes? Cyber and virtual became Web 2.0, the current trendy way to say “interactive Internet features.” I digress.

Katz’s essay is about how creativity and communication have been affected by the Web. Instead of the power-communicators (TV networks, movie companies, etc.) choosing what gets communicated, the masses can discuss things directly with the masses. And though what they’re discussing lacks the polish of an editor’s hand or a newscaster’s inflection, it has something going for it: honesty. Katz excerpts posts from bulletin boards about emergency roadside births, homophobia and AIDS. These are sad stories, and funny stories, none of which are of the magnitude required to be a Movie of the Week or a novel, but they’re still true stories of real life, without the gatekeepers.

In journalism school, back in 1999-2002, we barely used e-mail or the Internet. It’s strange, really, to think about. I’m sure other departments on campus were using e-mail (computer science, definitely, and other sciences I bet, probably the business school too). I don’t know if journalists as a whole didn’t realize the possibility that we’d be obsolete someday. So much effort is put in now for “convergence” newsgathering. It’s not enough to get an interview and write a story, you have to have photos, video, interactive graphics on the Web and a thousand other bells and whistles to make your story reach as many people as possible.

That’s harder too. Since people get their news from the Web, it’s easier to pick and choose. You can read the New York Times art pages without reading the front page. You can watch a clip on CNN.com and not have to watch the actual cable channel. You can watch clips on NBC.com and never see an entire Nightly News with Brian Williams newscast. Now, this doesn't seem so bad when you think about excising stories about celebrities or pop culture from your news diet, but what if you’re excising something “important?” What if you stopped reading any news about the war? Or any news about global warming? And is that really any worse than cutting out stories about Paris Hilton?

A well-balanced news-diet is a thing of the past. Gone are the days where people read a morning paper, an evening paper and watch the local and national news every night. The only people I know that do this anymore are over 65-years-old or journalism students. I don’t even do that anymore. I might watch an hour of CNN, read the New York Times RSS feed for the front-page headlines and read a magazine every day though. But these are choices I make, not necessarily to shield myself from certain stories, but to read what I like to read.

This is bad. I’m part of the people making myself obsolete. How terrifying.

Social Networking and class issues

So, I'm starting to research my commentary essay on social networking, and apparently, a new study released recently shows class distinctions between different types of social networking sites.
According to this article Facebook is for rich kids that are going to college and MySpace is for kids that aren't, all according to this paper.

This is huge.

She basically says there's a class war going on with these sites, and that the aesthetics (another writer compared Facebook to the look and feel of an Ikea store and MySpace to the look and feel of Las Vegas) are going to become part of it. Sure, your typical MySpace page does often look like a giant war of pixels and sound, and your typical Facebook page is cleaner, but these are reflecting class distinctions? Like Ikea and Wal-Mart?

I just started reading the actual paper, but so far, it's very interesting. This woman knows her stuff. I can tell already this article will directly influence my commentary essay!

She also cites this: The Lost Children of Rockdale County, a PBS Frontline special about a 1996 syphillis outbreak in Rockdale County, Ga. I remember seeing this on PBS about a hundred times when I was in high school (in the next county over). It shows how bored, middle-and-upper-middle-class white teenagers can really get into trouble. (Consequently, when this was on PBS for pretty much five years straight, my friends and I would joke that when you turned on PBS, you either got kids with syphillis or Wishbone, a children's television program about a dog that wore hats and was commonly mistaken for historical figures. Our joke was "Is that a kid with syphillis? Nope, just a dog in a hat.")

Course project proposals

Aside from this lovely reading response blog, I'm also writing four projects for this course. I've outlined them all here. I've also submitted them to my guiding professor, and if she has feedback on how I can change them to make them better, or different, I'll post revised proposals. You'll get to see the whole process!

Exciting!

Project 1
Commentary essay on the new media social networking phenomenon
Draft due: July 5
Notes back by: July 12
Final due: July 19
Description: 750-word personal commentary essay on the effects of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook on real social networking and personal relationships in college
Suitable for publication in: trade magazines like Wired or Rolling Stone
Target audience: 20s-30s professionals with Internet/social networking familiarity


Project 2
Interactive television article
Draft due: July 12
Notes back by: July 19
Final due: July 26
Description:
Suitable for publication in: Entertainment Weekly
Target audience: 25-45-year-olds with interest in how interactive television providers work and features of them


Project 3
Conference paper on innovation in college student media reflecting professional media practices
Draft due: August 2
Notes back by: August 9
Final due: August 16
Description: 1,250-1,500-word article on different ways student media organizations have adopted new media into their daily operations, with accompanying PowerPoint presentation
Suitable for publication in: College Media Review
Target audience: College media advisers


Project 4
WordPress Web-based self-publishing software get started guide
Draft due: August 9
Notes back by: August 16
Final due: August 23
Description: 10-step guide to get started with a WordPress content manager
Suitable for publication in: the WordPress Web site or somewhere like Wired
Target audience: Novice bloggers that want to use something a little more sophisticated than Blogger’s setup on their own domain

Heavy things on ideas and humanity

This essay (Mythinformation by Langdon Winner, in The New Media Reader) hooked me in the second paragraph. Winner calls the cover stories of Time and Newsweek that declare the computer age a “revolution” garish. Garish. In the next paragraph, he explains that marketing has forced many “revolutions” on society. Revolutions in laundry detergent or floor wax. It’s a metaphor, Winner says. He extrapolates the metaphor to examine it. Will there be a real revolution socially or politically brought on by computers? Winner says not really, and after reading his essay, I agree.

Winner explains the “utopian fantasy” initiated by computer companies and perpetuated by journalists. Computers will be the great equalizer, the fantasy declares. But Winner explains, sure, as more computers do the jobs of unskilled workers, unskilled workers will be free to pursue careers as janitors and fast-food waiters. He explains that the social power and controls and class systems won’t change as fast as the technology does. He makes a clear distinction here about what is superficially plausible and what will really happen.

Some people will find this hard to stomach. After being inundated for years about how “knowledge is power” and “computers will truly democratize society,” it’s tough to believe that yes, computers will change how we do things, but they wont change really what we do or who we are. We may monitor our banking on the computer, but we still bank. We may shop on the computer, but we still shop. Only the tools are changing. Winner postulates that since humans have known existence within spatial and temporal limits, transitioning in one generation to a virtual system of space and time is not possible. Maybe it isn’t even possible over many generations.

I find this so interesting. A few months ago, I was researching an article about eating organic food. A nutritionist I interviewed explained to me that by eating a variety of foods and even shopping for them at different places, I was nurturing my hunter-gatherer instincts. I had forgotten I even had them, but once I realized that it was really much deeper, hard-wired, human-animal behavior to shop around, I was satiated. If I have that much-unknown desire to hunt for variety in something as simple as my diet, and that that is essentially hard-wired into my basic animalistic instincts, then instincts to exist in defined space and time must be even deeper. And the consequences for ignoring them are probably even direr than just bad nutrition.

Everyone knows smart kids that can’t hold their own in a conversation. Everyone knows people with IQs off the charts that couldn’t ride a city bus. Computers and the Internet may be providing alternate social forums for these people, but they’re enabling these people to deprive themselves of something vital to the human experience: face-to-face real-time real interaction with other real human beings. I fall victim to it every day. I email or call or IM when I could just walk across campus and talk to someone in his or her office. I buy things on Amazon.com instead of driving to the mall, discussing the pros and cons of products with salespeople and physically handing them money. When I use these technological so-called “advancements,” am I really just cheating myself out of my own right to human existence?

Winner seems to think so, at least a little. He closes his essay by saying that so far, the computer “revolution,” is being guided by something all too familiar: “the absent mind.”

This is getting heavy. I think in researching theory and the deep meaning of humanity, one should take a break after doing deep thinking such as this. So, I’m going to go do that. And maybe also get a sandwich. Thinking this hard makes me hungry.

Better news: poverty and new media take 2

Finally something concrete and slightly related to poverty and new media.

Cell phones.

In developing nations, cell phones are more popular and widely used than regular land-line phones. An essay I read, in New Media, Old Media, explained this phenomenon in the Philippines. According to an article in the Washington Post, similar phenomena is happening in Vietnam, Bangladesh and other Asian and African countries. Basically, before cellular phones, most people didn’t have their own phones. A few phones were scattered for public use. (The Post article gives the figure of 1 phone for every 100 people in Vietnam in 1995.) But now, cheaper cell phones have made private phones possible in Asian and African countries. The Post article also says that in the Philippines, cell phones can be used as virtual wallets to buy things.

Novelist and de facto cultural anthropologist Douglas Coupland summed it up nicely in his 2006 book “JPOD.” A character muses: 'Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now.'

I do remember this. I was in middle school and the only people I knew with cell phones were, well, nobody. They were simply too expensive. Actually, the first cell phone I ever saw was in the 1987 movie “Wall Street.” Michael Douglas stands on a beach in a smoking jacket/bathrobe and talks to Charlie Sheen on a cell phone the size of a loaf of bread.

In high school, my parents got cell phones. My mom had a ridiculous bag phone. Later, in 1996, she got a Motorola MicroTac, with some sort of Atlanta Olympic tie-in special. In Atlanta, companies were eager to test the capabilities of wireless phones, and decided the 1996 summer Olympic influx of people provided the perfect opportunity. Mom's phone was cheaper than normal because of this, but still pretty expensive. My stepfather eventually had the very-hip-for-its-time StarTac.

I got a cell phone when I went to college in 1999. I remember it was very expensive, but my parents insisted on me having it for emergencies driving to and from college. Apparently, they forgot that in high school, when I did not have a cell phone, I drove a 35-year-old car that broke down almost every week. Being stranded on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere north Georgia was apparently not an emergency situation.

I remember getting it and how cool I felt whenever it rang. It was like a little announcement that pointed to me and said “This person is very important!” I hardly feel that way anymore. Now, my cell phone is pretty much my only phone. I have a home landline for telemarketing (and so I have a local number), and an office land-line, but my cell phone is always with me in my purse or pocket.

But back to the developing nations. These people are experiencing the freedom of personal telecommunication that Americans had post WWII. The economic upsides are potentially huge. For example, fishermen and farmers can call ahead and see what prices their products will sell for at market, and compare different markets to get the best prices.

Other cottage industries have popped up around cell phones in these areas as well. In Bangladesh, women buy phones on credit from a Nobel-prize-winning bank, then resell them, or time on them, in their villages. These women now can save up money to start their own stores or other businesses.

This is clearly a technological tool that has brought certain people out of poverty. By making cellular phones cheap enough for poor people to get, and making cellular plans (like pre-paid and these cottage industry situations) available to people without credit or references, economic progress has been made. Maybe the Internet is not the telecommunications tool that can help poverty because computers and the electricity to run them are very expensive compared to cell phones.

One group, though, is trying to make cheaper computers for children in developing nations. The One Laptop Per Child program has developed the XO, a $100 laptop with rugged construction and a simple operating system. It has antennas to connect to wireless Internet systems (skipping the plug-in Internet just like they skipped the plug-in phone). It can also be manually powered, with an attachable crank or pedal for children to use at home if they don’t have electricity.

Projects like this have the potential to be able to connect poor people to the Internet. The developers of this project were forward-thinking enough to consider that the reason poor people weren’t on the web was that they couldn’t afford the tools. By making this an education project instead of a telecommunications project, and targeting it at children, they’re really, clearly trying to do something for the future, instead of trying to make money or solve poverty in one quick step. By giving children the tools to learn how to behave in the new digital world, they are making future technologically-savvy adults.

So, that’s what I found in my deep search for information on Poverty and New Media. It’s not great, but it’s a great start.

Poverty and New Media

So, I'm going to digress a bit here. In my very first college journalism course, I co-authored a short essay about Muted Group Theory. It's not a great essay, but I was 17 years old. It was one of those things I never thought I'd use again.

Now I need it.

Muted group theory is a sociological/anthropological/communication-studies theory that came out of analyzing ethnographic projects. People conducting ethnographic studies were usually talking to leaders of groups, which were usually men. Women's voices were not being taken into account in these ethnographic studies. Thus, women were a "muted group." Since then, it has come under the guise of a communication theory. Non-dominant voices and viewpoints are marginalized.

Another group in that course wrote about Spiral of Silence theory. SofS says that basically, people are less-likely to voice a minority opinion, and by not voicing it, they are self-muting. When the opinion is not brought up, it is silenced, and then may enter into a spiral of further silencing from being ignored and marginalized.

So, yesterday, after leaving work, I headed over to the college library to look for books on New Media and poverty. Plenty of new media texts, but very few poverty books. I ended up checking out a book by Barbara Eherenreich about white-collar unemployment. I found another book by her I wanted, but it was lost. Next, I went to the local public library, and was able to put another book on poverty (by David K. Shipler) on hold for pickup later this week.

Is it obvious that the poor in America are a muted group? At least in new media studies? Poor people may not have Internet access, and when they do, what are they using it for? And, most importantly of all, will Internet access really level the playing field for poverty worldwide?

I'm concerned about the lack of information on this topic. A disappointing search of the New Media Institute Web site found no matches for even the word "poverty." Maybe this is a topic for the communication theorists, the sociologists or the social workers. Does it prove this is a "muted group" locked in a "spiral of silence" (at least on the Internet) because I can't find anything about it (on the Internet)??

I've found a few articles to share on this subject. I may also try to write one this quarter. Let's discuss.

Poverty in America, a project at Penn State has several articles, including one on broadband Internet in rural and urban Pennsylvania

A paper on "Information Poverty" from Harvard University (in PDF form)

A pretty interesting UN statement on the media's role and responsibility in sustainability

Today's Reading, take two: Race and Gender

Ok, so I was so disappointed by my film readings today that I’m skipping ahead and reading the race and stereotyping essays I found for tomorrow today.

The first essay, by bell hooks, is titled Gangsta Culture—Sexism, Misogyny: Who Will Take the Rap? and is featured in Mass Culture and Electronic Media.

This is a great essay on race and gender issues in rap music, and it’s not what people would expect to hear. Ms. hooks explains that frequently, people call her to appear on television or radio shows to talk about her black, feminist perspective on rap music. Instead, what they get is commentary that doesn’t blame the rap musicians, but the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” She explains that to the white mass-media, the controversy over rap music is “great spectacle,” but that most people won’t look for anything more than what they expect. For Spin magazine, hooks interviewed rapper Ice Cube, and the interview never ran because he talked about the need to respect women. When hooks comments on the cover of Snoop Dogg’s record Doggystyle, she doesn’t criticize the artist or the musician, but the misogynist politics of the “powerful white adult men and women who helped produce and market this album.” She goes on to discuss how mainstream white culture doesn’t care about black male sexism and misogyny against black women, but it does pay attention when young white males utilize black pop culture to disrupt “bourgeois values.” This is some steep commentary, and hooks does not back down.

While I can’t really bring this back to new media (music isn’t really new), it does have a lot of value in a macro view. Does the status quo only take notice of a fringe element when it threatens to disrupt the way things are? This idea can be extrapolated in to tons of situations. Will newspapers finally take notice of the Web when it threatens to put them out of business? Yes, they will and have changed their views of the Web. Will the record companies take notice when peer-to-peer file sharing finally destroys their profit margins? Yes, they will, and they’ll start suing. There are so many new media issues to think about when you view this essay as a small example of a bigger-picture problem.

The next essay is by Patricia J. Williams and is included in the same book. In this piece, Hate Radio, Williams describes how the powerful new talk radio moguls (Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, etc.) are constantly making mountains from molehills and enraging the already-enraged middle-class-white-republican males. The magazine the Economist explains “Mr. Limbaugh takes a mass market—white, mainly male, middle-class, ordinary America—and talks to it as an endangered minority.”

I remember this controversy. I remember people on the radio becoming outraged about Mexican and African-American people taking their jobs and their money. I remember them outraged about Hilary Clinton and gays in the military. I remember them outraged about me: your typical left-wing feminist. And Williams remembers them outraged about her: your (in her words) “militant black woman, cranky femi-nazi.” She explains it’s a type of resegregation. The us-vs-them mentality. But in this case, it’s being taken up by the majority, not the minority.

But, she says, there are a few places radio is still used for good rather than evil. She recounts an anecdote from a KMEL radio show in San Francisco. A Samoan teenager was killed apparently by Pilipino gang members. The Samoans called the station threatening retaliation. Then the dead Samoan’s father called and said he couldn’t tolerate the thought of more dead young men. He said there would be no retaliation. And there wasn’t. After hearing this story, Williams says, you can’t help but wonder about the powerful advice ladled out by Limbaugh and friends daily.

This is another case where I feel like radio isn’t really a new media, that early-to-mid-90s right-wing-shock-jock phenomena was something interesting in retrospect. I’m glad most of those people don’t broadcast anymore, or were relegated to bad timeslots on worse frequencies. It isn’t because I’m anti-Free-Speech. I’m not. These people should get to say whatever they want, but not on MY radio. That’s right folks, the radio airwaves BELONG TO THE PEOPLE! Me and you. And the FCC regulates the broadcasters based on what they think we want. And apparently, the masses spoke, since Howard Stern is now on satellite radio and off my airwaves. I just don’t see the point of tolerance of this kind of ignorance and hate. And Williams doesn’t either.

I also think this is another instance that can be brought out into a macro view. If this type of speech is allowed, which it is, thanks to the first amendment, which also gives me the right to say this, what will it mean for the future of our country? “What future is it that we are designing with the devotion of such tremendous resources to the disgraceful propaganda of bigotry?” Williams writes in her closing sentence.

To what end will this go? And what other forms of media will it take with it?

The last essay I read on race and gender is titled Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction. The essay is by Lisa Nakamura and is included in New Media, Old Media.

Nakamura explains that who you are on the Internet is not always who you are. For example, she notes that most people who don’t reveal their gender or race on the Internet are assumed to be white males. And in many studies, even people revealing themselves as women or persons of other races are just white males pretending. This is so interesting because it totally marginalizes all women and all other races.

Furthermore, Nakamura says that since the Internet was developed by superpower countries, and we were the first to access it, it’s seen as the Western world holding dominance over developing nations. Right again.

Over time, Nakamura says, there has been proliferation of women and people of different races onto the Internet, and in response, the white men have made sites to sell us things. Oxygen.com, ivillage.com, and other women’s sites are supposed to be gathering places for women, who have not divorced their Internet selves from their physical bodies.

In another case, Nakamura explains, two African-American plaintiffs are suing a web-company that delivers products to people’s homes. The company, Kozmo.com, only delivers to zip codes with the highest rates of Internet usage, which can be seen as discriminatory to neighborhoods where not many people can get Internet access. However, it gets worse, as certain people in a specific Washington-DC-area neighborhood can’t get deliveries either, even though this upper-class African American neighborhood has equal Internet usage statistics to white neighborhoods being served by the company. Apparently, in some places, you can’t divorce your Internet self from your physical self.

This theme of fluid personification is very interesting when you apply it to race and gender, and even more when you apply it to other qualities. How about old people? Poor people? Illiterate people? Maybe the Internet can make us Post-Racial or Post-Gendered, but only for the people privileged enough to access it.

Nakamura concludes by saying that there are two ways to fix this. The people online can change how they think, or the people getting marginalized can get online with them. I feel like the real question here is access.

In all of these essays, groups being marginalized are the people without access. The rappers are being marginalized because they don’t own the record labels. The minority voice is being marginalized because they aren’t on the radio or the Internet. It’s easy, as all these essays prove, to talk about race and gender issues, but I think one of the real issues here is social class and economic standing. This is something we don’t talk about in America enough. There is plenty of attention paid to race and gender issues, but I feel a seriously lacking amount of attention is being paid to poverty. I’m going to try to look for essays on poverty and new media this week to see what might be being written about it. We’ll see.