January 2004 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

capitalism always lies ?
by Barry Wellman 30 Jan '04

30 Jan '04

I learn something new from this list all the time. Reading the digest today, I learned that Capitalism is basically responsible for media lies. Which I guess excludes socialism, fascism, theocracies, authorianism, etc. Guess that's why the USSR called its leading newspaper The Truth. And why when I was at a conference in Moscow in 1982, I was handed -- on arrival -- the "final report" of the conference. We already knew the truth before meeting. And so it goes. My only comment on this subject. All flames will be ignored. Barry _____________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 To network is to live; to live is to network _____________________________________________________________________

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RE: [Air-l] howard dean, social movements and clay shirky
by Art McGee 30 Jan '04

30 Jan '04

> >That's never been asserted. What's been said is that the > >dependence on online technologies can lull some people into > >a false sense of security. > > To the contrary, that is more or less Shirky asserts: I see, you're talking about Shirky and I'm referring to the people on this list. My mistake. Well, the first problem with Shirky's assertion is that as an elite not connected with grassroots social movements, he speaks from the place specifically having to do with political campaigns and the existing social structure, i.e., voting and elections. That is the extent of what he is referring to, and in that sense, there is no evidence to back him up, because Dean is pretty much the first politician to put any of this into sustained and consistent practice. So yes, Shirky has his head up his ass. On the other hand, if we're talking about grassroots use of the Internet to support and sustain political *organizing* and various forms of action and intervention (in other words: movement building), we already have numerous examples of that, including everything from the anti-Corporate Globalization Movement to the work I did with the Black Radical Congress. So the issue is really what type of political actions are we trying to identify? If we're merely talking about voting, then yes, the evidence is weak there. If we're talking about grassroots political action, then there's plenty of evidence of it's effectiveness. Part of the problem is defining what effective action is. Shirky, and I suspect many others, only see that which results in the election of officials from one of the two Corporate-owned parties as "real" effectiveness. Art

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Dean's campaign
by bakera＠ohiou.edu 30 Jan '04

30 Jan '04

I think all of this may well be true, Art, and thank you for posting the material about Koppel et. al. Certainly the 'lower tier got almost no coverage' from my observation. Can we add to that questions, as people are asking, about who was online and who was at Dean headquarters, and the overlap? Also, what proportion of active supporters campaigned in Iowa and New Hampshire? If anyone is studying these questions, would you please post to aoir? At least someone who is outside the traditional channels and viewpoints, Dean, emerged from the pack and became a frontrunner, and the internet organization certainly helped him do that. --andrea

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Best practices in e-learning?
by gdtaylor 30 Jan '04

30 Jan '04

Monica -- I also subscribe to the DEOS-L listserver. DEOS-L is a forum for educators and interested others to discuss issues pertaining to distance learning (e-learning). This listserver is administered by Penn State University. You might want to make a posting to that listserver as well. The subscribers are in disciplines other than communications but experienced in terms of distance learning technologies and online pedagogy. Prior to posting to the listserver, you might want to check out the archives. You can find quickly find the archived by doing a search on 'DEOS-L.' Hope this helps! Gail >Monica Murero wrote: >Dear AoIR's, dear friends, >I am working on a new project to develop an e-learning >graduate course in the area of digital culture and communication. > >I am gathering information and I will greatly appreciate >your suggestions about best practices available >around the globe and/or distinguished teachers using this >approach (job opportunities will be available). >Thanks in advance for your toughts, > >Monica >---------------------------------------------------- >AoIR Executive Committee -Appointed Seat -------------------------------------------- Gail D. Taylor, Graduate Teaching Assistant University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Human Resource Education "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change." Charles Darwin

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The Internet Is Changing The Way Canadians Socialize
by Michael Gurstein 30 Jan '04

30 Jan '04

Vancouver, BC - Online Canadians, especially young online Canadians, are embracing the Internet as a way to meet new friends and stay in touch with old friends according to an Ipsos-Reid study. Almost seven-in-ten online Canadians (69%) have used the Internet for social interaction. This includes such activities as taking part in online chat, playing games with other people, using the Internet to contact someone they've lost touch with, participating in forums or bulletin board discussions, using online personals or dating services, or taking part in an online telephone call. Younger online Canadians are especially likely to use the Internet in their social lives. In fact, 82% of those 18-34 years of age have taken part in some form of online social activities. The study involved 1,000 telephone interviews with Canadian adults and 1,000 online interviews with Canadian Internet users in September and October. http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/pressrelease.cfm?id=2008

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RE: [Air-l] howard dean, social movements and clay shirky
by Art McGee 30 Jan '04

30 Jan '04

> I find it implausible that people who are using the > internet to retreat from offline life would choose a > political action online community in which to do so. That's never been asserted. What's been said is that the dependence on online technologies can lull some people into a false sense of security. Look folks, this isn't aerospace engineering. There are a whole range of factors that determined why Dean is where he is, and none of them are simple. I don't understand why people assume they are. I have some questions: 1. Why do we assume that Iowa and New Hampshire speak for the entire country? I live in California, and don't understand why other states get to decide the field of candidates before I've even had the chance to vote. For all we know, Dean could have 100% support in other states, but due to the nature of the primaries, people get knocked out before we can discover that. Anyone here done some research on the flaws in that? 2. Most of the focus on Dean was about the internal organization of volunteers and core supporters, but little was said about voters not a part of the campaign (that includes people who didn't have time to waste going to MeetUps). Dean's strength was his staff and volunteers, but that can't be equated with votes. Too many people made the assumption that one would lead to the other or that they were one and the same. Why? 3. Dean would be nobody without the net. Why is there an assumption of failure? If Bill Clinton was running with the same figures as Dean, that would be failure, but that would also assume that he was somebody already. Dean was a nobody, who used the internet to become a somebody. That's not failure, that's incredible success. Why do the idiots like Clay Shirky and all of you smart researchers wholly swallow the false paradigm of failure that Capitalist media feeds us? 4. Why is everyone ignoring the politics? Why do people assume that the reason people didn't vote for Dean was something other than his politics? Lots of the people who were assumed to be Dean supporters don't really like him or even know who he is. Remember the article talking about the lack of support among African-Americans for Dean? Did Clay Shirky and the rest of those blog idiots have much to say about that? Well, African-Americans are one of the core constituencies of the Democratic party. If they weren't all that enthused how do you think other people might have felt? 5. Too much of the focus on and of Dean's campaign was about youth. That's nice, but youth don't vote. Youth aren't stupid, they're just rightly cynical about the lies fed to them by Capitalism. While Dean had tremendous youth support that doesn't mean that he had lots of eligible voting-age support. Too much high-tech focus on youth and gadgetry and not enough on the offline old folks who actually go to the polls and those city council meetings consistently (which are important, whereas a MeetUp don't mean shit to them). Art

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Re: RE: [Air-l] howard dean, social movements and clay shirky
by Jonathan Marshall 29 Jan '04

29 Jan '04

----- Original Message ----- From: Nancy Baym <nbaym(a)ku.edu> Date: Friday, January 30, 2004 9:28 am Subject: RE: [Air-l] howard dean, social movements and clay shirky [snip] > Shirky asserts: > > "We know well from past attempts to use social software to organize > groups for political change that it is hard, very hard, because > participation in online communities often provides a sense of > satisfaction that actually dampens a willingness to interact with the > real world." > > My question (and I think Ren's) was not whether this is an > accurate > explanation of what's going on with Dean's campaign, but whether > there is any evidence to support this claim in general -- what is > the > evidence from the use of social software to organize groups for > political change that participation in online communities results > in > less willingness to interact in "the real world"? For what its worth, my experiences with online groups who tried to organise anything, and its only subjective and limited, is that it is exceedingly hard to translate online enthusiasm into actual *sustained* action of any sort - taking the action offline makes it even harder. Furthermore it seems that stuff eventuates when it can be largely all be done by one or two 'fanatic' people - or it can be done through personal ties between a few list members, or there is already some kind of offline organisation propelling people. I think this would be harder still when you are going against established power or communication systems, or when your class of members is largely not able to do what you need them to do - say if, as Art suggests, Dean's web campaign attracted people who were too young to vote, and not enough of the voters. These kinds of effects may well be of social origin, not innate to the Net. Ie to use an old term, in a place were people are already alienated from action, then talk may well be the only action people are willing to take or risk. But as i suggested earlier this may also vary with the kind of social action we are discussing, and the kind of resistances to it. It is not necessarily an all or nothing thing. Ie with Dean, it seems much easier to find the mainstream media's coverage of the 'i have a scream' thing and how it disqualifies him in some people's eyes, than to find out anything about what he actually said. That probably has something to do with already established powers. jon UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER ======================================================================== This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the views the University of Technology Sydney. Before opening any attachments, please check them for viruses and defects. ========================================================================

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Re: [Air-l] howard dean, social movements and clay shirky
by Jonathan Marshall 29 Jan '04

29 Jan '04

I don't know if people saw Weinberger's response to Shirky. Weiberger wrote "small peices loosely joined" and is Dean's web campaign person. http://www.corante.com/loose/archives/001636.html The arguement seems to be the old one. The Net leads to fantasy, or online satisfaction, rather than real world action (Shirky) vs. the Net challenges everything and is a new public space going to forge new social alliances [social software](Weinberger). At the moment this seems to a matter of assertion. Weinberger asserts the Dean campaign would be nowhere without the Web and it has allowed the raising of funds etc. It would be nice if we could actually get beyond these kinds of dichotemies even if it was just to ask "what kinds of offline social interaction is furthered by the Internet, and which is not?" It may be that established powers are not yet threatened by the net, they can use it better etc. It may simply be that people forget that the Net is embedded within a society which has very specific conflicts and dominances and is thus not simply going to escape those dominances, who are as good at colonising new spaces as ever. However it might be worth asking if there some aspect of power - what Michael Mann calls 'interstitial power', which is invisible to the dominancies and thus able to be organised through the net? Or is it simply that we old folks, have not yet got into the habit of integrating online life with offline? Is the perception of the gap the problem, both ways....? Oh well, nothing useful i guess.. jon UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER ======================================================================== This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the views the University of Technology Sydney. Before opening any attachments, please check them for viruses and defects. ========================================================================

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Think Tank: Greeting Big Brother With Open Arms (fwd)
by david silver 29 Jan '04

29 Jan '04

nice ny times piece featuring air'er Mark Andrejevic. david *** Think Tank: Greeting Big Brother With Open Arms January 17, 2004 By EMILY EAKIN For 50 years, Big Brother was an unambiguous symbol of malignant state power, totalitarianism's all-seeing eye. Then Big Brother became a hip reality television show, in which 10 cohabiting strangers submitted to round-the-clock camera monitoring in return for the chance to compete for $500,000. That transformation is telling, says Mark Andrejevic, a professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa at Iowa City. Today, more than twice as many young people apply to MTV's "Real World" show than to Harvard, he says. Clearly, to a post-cold-war generation of Americans, the prospect of living under surveillance is no longer scary but cool. Media critics have frequently portrayed the reality show craze in unflattering terms, as a sign of base voyeurism (on the part of viewers) and an unseemly obsession with fame (on the part of participants). But Mr. Andrejevic's take, influenced by the theories of Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, is at once darker and more subtle. Reality shows glamorize surveillance, he writes, presenting it "as one of the hip attributes of the contemporary world," "an entree into the world of wealth and celebrity" and even a moral good. His new book, "Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched" (Rowman & Littlefield), is peppered with quotes from veterans of "The Real World," "Road Rules" and "Temptation Island," rhapsodizing about on-air personal growth and the therapeutic value of being constantly watched. As Josh on "Big Brother" explains, "Everyone should have an audience." At the same time, Mr. Andrejevic (pronounced an-DRAY-uh-vitch) argues, the reality genre appears to fulfill the democratic promise of the emerging interactive economy, turning passive cultural consumers into active ones who can star on shows or vote on their outcomes. (The series "Extreme Makeover" takes this promise literally, he notes, "offering to rebuild `real' people via plastic surgery so that they can physically close the gap between themselves and the contrived aesthetic of celebrity they have been taught to revere.") As seductive as this sounds, in Mr. Andrejevic's view reality television is essentially a scam: propaganda for a new business model that only pretends to give consumers more control while in fact subjecting them to increasingly sophisticated forms of monitoring and manipulation. As he put it in a telephone interview: "The promise out there is that everybody can have their own TV show. But of course, that ends up being a kind of Ponzi scheme. You can't have everybody watching everybody else's TV show. And since that's not possible, in economic terms, the way it's going to work is according to this model of a few people monitoring what the rest of us do." Think of TiVo or Replay, he said. These digital recorders allow people to watch the television shows they want when they want to. But in return, he points out, the recorders' manufacturers get a stream of valuable information about viewer preferences. The same principle, he argues, holds true for online shops that offer custom CD's in exchange for data on personal musical tastes. Or Web sites that use "cookies" to track users' movements on the Internet. Marketers aren't interested in exceptional behavior, he added. They want to know about the routine aspects of daily life, the same material that shows like "The Real World" and "Big Brother" - in which banality passes as authenticity - strive to capture on film. In short, Mr. Andrejevic said, reality television's true beneficiaries are not the shows' cast members (who can wind up making little more than minimum wage for the hours - or months - they spend before the camera) or ordinary viewers (who don't really choose what happens on their television screens) but the marketers, advertisers and corporate executives who have a large stake in seeing surveillance portrayed as benign. Of course, he conceded, his students don't necessarily see it this way. Raised on Web logs, Google, cellphones and instant messaging, they "divulge much more information about themselves on a daily basis than previous generations," he said, and they don't associate the idea of surveillance with a totalitarian Big Brother. "The concern I have is that self-expression gets confused with the inducement to assist in marketing to yourself," Mr. Andrejevic said. "But my students say they've got nothing to hide. And until there are some consequences they perceive as detrimental, they're not going to be concerned." At least in one respect, he added, reality television does conform to real life. "It portrays the reality of contrivance, the way consumers are manipulated," he said. "I look at it with the fascination of somebody watching a car wreck." _________________________________________________________________ Rethink your business approach for the new year with the helpful tips here. http://special.msn.com/bcentral/prep04.armx

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Re: [Air-l] The Internet Is Changing The Way Canadians Socialize
by Jonathan Marshall 29 Jan '04

29 Jan '04

This peice of journalism about Australia might be interesting in this context. It interviews a sample of one teenager:) http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2004/s1033543.htm Extracts: People from 12-23 in Oz generate the bulk of the 400 million text messages made on mobile phones each month. this is at 25c per message. The head of Virgin mobiles in Oz says that voice calls have plateaued but text messaging has become the new way to communicate. He says its shorter, it's quicker, it's discreet. It seems that the need for being in contact without disturbing the current activity is powerful. Also used to make more money out of TV shows, by making them seem interactive. Leads young people into serious debt because of ways of billing. This all *suggests* that the medium of communication while not giving us new formats of community may act to intensify old ones jon UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER ======================================================================== This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the views the University of Technology Sydney. Before opening any attachments, please check them for viruses and defects. ========================================================================

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