[Rn_Grp6] Wikipedia issue

The essential question that can be raised in the Wikipedia phenomenon is obvious: why does it work? This question is specifically this: why do people so passionately contributing tons of organized information voluntarily, spending a significant amount of their own time? Nobody pays them - no money nor credit. What could be the motivation system for them, and could it work for other things than a giant Internet encyclopedia and thus revolutionizing the very concept of information society itself?

My theoretical assumption is that it deals with the desire to take over the hegemony of the social knowledge system. The shift is from the small group of established experts to the more non-institutionalized people in general. They have the immense need (or the feeling of necessity) of the general public to (1) produce knowledge that was not considered to be worthy of being formalized into knowledge, and (2) participate into the process of production of social standard reference knowledge. The first element reflects its results on one of the characteristics of Wiki: a giant pool of trivia, especially on popular culture, tech geekery etc. The second element is evident in the open discussion pages and editing policies.

It means that there is the need to fill in the structural gap in the communication network of knowledge. The players existed and expanded, but their roles were excluded in the knowledge production system - now they want to fill in the hole. That explains in parts why Wikipedia is so popular while other projects of the Wikimedia experiences less general support (e.g. Wikinews, with only about 10 articles being updated daily). Simply accumulation of information does not provide motivation. It is the goal of filling up what should have been there, and setting a standard body of reference for a particular knowledge that gets motivates the contributors. At least that's my hypothesis, which I should be positively proving from here on... a long way to go.

[Rn_Grp5] Open source...

The ideal of open source is promising - common sharing of the production means, to use them according to own needs. It's the communists' dreams come true, in a good sense. Sharing the source code does not use up the original resource, and people can contribute to diversifying and updating the original. And by allowing commercialization of one's own version as well (except the core GNU believers in the tradition of Stallman), the contributers don't have to starve. As it was shown, it worked pretty well on Linux, Mozilla-based web browsers and countless other programs.

However, there is a fundamental limit to the applicability of the open source idea. The first is, that it does not work on areas where the source itself is the commodity. Rhetorically, open source is more like making the ingredients and the recipe public. The competent chef still can sell his skilled menu, or even get more rich and famous for it. However, it would not apply to a book publisher. By making the recipes free for public, he/she is deprived of his selling commodity, thus destined to starve or find another job. There are countless information related jobs that rely on the source as the commodity, such as news journalism. Programmers are more like chefs - their own expertise is the commodity. However, the enterpreneurs have to make money by selling the products, and do not want too many competitors with similar concepts. Then, the problem becomes what should be regarded as commodity and what should not be utilized as them. A hard struggle, in this hyper-modern capitalist world where everything eventually turns into commodities.

[RN_Grp4] bloggers, journalists

A simple premise: most bloggers are not journalists, but the reader doesn't care. As long as it looks informative and/or shows (or even strengthens) some empathy to my views. Newsworthiness for the humble reader is that simple, as apart from what the jornalists would like to think. Things like objectivity and crediblility are some nice options to make the news more newsworthy, but other 'virtues' such as empathy and sheer speed of the information can outweigh them in some contexts. The overall news discourse space of a society overarches the whole array ranging from the gossips to the journalistic articles to deeper formal analysis. While traditional journalism specialized itself to the narrow array of the standardarized news article, bloggers are all over the spectrum.

Thus, it is not the case that 'blogs' are some things or not. Blogs are just a form of networked communication (fundamentally, it is nothing more than just an easy-to-update webpage!), that has become so technically sophisticated that it can also be used for functions that was thought before to be only possible for trained journalists in a solid commercial media organization. Rather, it is the use pattern of the blog writers/readers that is to put focus on. The role of social news and opinion production has been spread to a wider pool of its members. It is no threat to the readers, only to the journalists.

[RN_Grp3] Copyrights

Zune, Microsoft's futile attempt to dent the iPod empire, recently hit the stores.

1) Its main offer to the users: the music sharing function ('Welcome to the social"). A nice idea, regarding the sharing culture of the younger Internet generations. However, the function turned out to be frustrating. You can download a song from a peer's machine, but the song will last only three plays or three days whichever comes first. After that, the file self-destructs, leaving only a ad tag that indicates you should buy it if you liked it.

2) Then, the card it offered to the industry: give Universal records $1 for each machine sold. The record companies have long been asking Apple to share the hardware sales profit with them, in vain. Now Microsoft kisses their backs. I wonder how Microsoft will deal with all the other numerous record companies.

Both instances indicate the ridiculous outcomes, if you want to exploit old-fashioned copyright concepts and at the same time pretend to be up-to-date. In the former, even the self-recorded garage band demos cannot be effectively shared and spread through the Net - that is, you do not have the ability to control your own copyright. In the latter case, Microsoft is paying a mutated form of 'copyright fee' to the record company for making their music available on their machine, by providing them with a fee for sales of a machine that the company does not have anything to do with.

Copyright, like all the other individual rights, become laughable caricatures of their original intent if left without proper restrictions. In a country where Disney successfully modifies the laws over and over again to prevent Mickey Mouse from coming into the public domain forever, it can be safely said that such restrictions are largely lacking. If the law does not provide the restrictions, the user practices and common sense should step into play. It is the gap that must be bridged, between the already present structure of networked information use by the general users and the commercial industry system that would rather like to stick to the old days where you could sell... Vinyl records and stuff.

[RN_Grp2] Net Neutrality...

Free and open information flow rests on a crucial foundation: equal access. Luckily, the creators of the Internet had this in mind and took care of it by building an open and decentralized network where anybody with a server and line can jump in. The address system they invented also provides equal access, unless you are a client while your server filters some particular ones out. Everybody can be equally connected to anybody else, that was the premise.

But the commercial interests of a capitalist society rests upon the concept of differentiation. To provide something special for some more money, and provide something crappy for less money, thus motivating people to spend more. Since the Internet structure itself cannot be profoundly changed now (though there are constantly attempts to do that), there is only one other way left for differentiation of access: slow down the line for some, make it faster for others. To hell with the net neutrality principle, that was in the world since radio and telephone.
Unlike the server hosting market where it is a fully competitive market, the ISP market is an oligopoly. It requires a lot of capital and time to construct the infrastructure. So users, server managers and Internet companies do not have much alternative than following the rules of the ISPs. Information society for sure, but still the ones with the capital can control the information flow. Without net neutrality, even more so.

However, it does not necessarily mean that now all Internet access is of the same speed. There are servers that could afford only a smaller bandwidth, slower server computers with outdated DB programs, or simply have no other choice than to be routed through some slow switches (such as servers in far away countries). There already have been differences on the server side for mostly commercial reasons, and now the ISPs want to implement differences themselves for their commercial interests. Probably, people will be able to buy faster connection speeds from the ISPs, just as people can buy faster servers, programs and bandwidth now. I'm not saying that net neutrality is unimportant, but that we shouldn't forget that even with the net neutality principle we are already somewhat short of the ideals of equal access. There's a lot more to be done.

[RN_Grp1] Patriot Act...

It is very difficult not to go crazy, having faced an unexpected threat to life (how exaggerated it may be). In the wake of 9/11, Sen. Feingold was the sole person sane enough to oppose an absurd restriction to civil liberty of free expression. As he notes, free speech is the foundation of American democracy. It is not some kind of measure that can be compromised for a bigger goal, because it is the very value that the policies seek to protect. And free expression can only function when it is not intimidated by extraordinary surveillance and the resulting punishment. Though not directly prohibiting free expression itself, it has the power to clog the information flow by making people self-censor.

However, let's leave all the civil liberties talk and privacy matter aside, since it's so obvious anyway. My question is, where will a regime run by information surveillance ultimately lead to? Surveillance from the government, if known to the public, can prime a domino of many surveillances. If somebody can always intercepts my communication and make backups of it to use it against me, then I must also make my own backups of everything so that there can be no faked data. Even when implementing ways to obscure my own communication traces, my backups must exist just in case. And the commercial sectors will also want to make use of (more) surveillance, since surveillance is being justified as something necessary rather than an intrusion to privacy. The results? A bureaucracy hell where everybody starts recording everything for no particular reason.

Of course the imminent intrusion to privacy and civil liberties is a profound matter. But the long aspect of the PATRIOT act can be that unlimited surveillance itself will be regarded as something natural, to be followed by everyone.

How I stopped my feed (and fought withdrawal symptoms)

The assignment for this week: to stop one of the information feed s that one has been relying on for more than 24 hours, and to report on what happened. A tough quest, I must say, for a serious information addict like me.

The first thing to do was to select which feed to cut off. But what is a feed? it is not simply information per se, but information that is selected and given to me, according to what the feeders argue to be the things that I want. Thus, it is not what I actually search for, but what I am supposed to long for. Of course it is not something that is one-sidedly, but an analysis based on the information of my taste that I have given them - or at least left traces on their system. A feed is something that I have taken part in, more or less voluntarily. Let's think what kinds of such feeds I have on my daily basis... email, that's for sure. An email account for personal matters from Korea, one for personal matters from US, one for academic stuff. Then there's the news syndication feed. Google news for international news, Naver news for Korean ones. And there are at least a dozen blogs I visit everyday. Since I enjoy browsing around, I don't use my RSS reader often - but this is still a kind of regular information feed for my way of living. Amazon, Ebay and all the other stores that provide me with personalized 'choices'. It's not that I buy from them everyday, but it is a nice entertainment just to browse around what the stores and people have to offer, a kind of cyber eye-shopping. Also part of my daily routine.

Okay, back to the task... which one should I cut off? First, I cut off the Google News. But after a couple of hours, it made no sense. If I cut off one feed, there are always so many alternative feeds. Yahoo news, for example. Cut off all kinds of Internet newsfeeds? there is still the vast array daily newspaper that can be red in the Journalism Reading Room. And, there's the TV. It is not a single feed, but the whole media sphere of information feeds that one is dependent on. My first lesson.

How about feeds that have less alternatives, say Amazon? Yes, NOT visiting Amazon made me feel uncomfortable the first day. Then, it sent me an email with the list in it. I deleted it. Now, an email from Amazon Japan with my 'preferences'. Also deleted it. Need to focus... so I browsed Google Scholar for some papers I needed to read for another class. Oh, there seems to be an extensive review on the book that the researcher had done. Without paying much attention, I clicked on it. Voila. Amazon pops up. Hey, the feeds are so much interconnected so that one cannot completely shut just one particular thing off. My second lesson.

How about getting more radical? Something like... not turning on the Outlook Express for a day - no, for half a day for a starter. That should be manageable, since people usually sleep for some hours a day anyway. Okay, no email. Well, after some hours I received a call saying "I sent you an email, and wasn't sure if you'd received it." My third lesson: the information feed cannot be shut off by me alone. It is mutual in some sense.

All in all, information feeds are embedded into my daily lifestyle of receiving information in such a complex way so that it is virtually impossible to cut it off without changing my way of thinking and living itself. And I'm pretty sure that I won't be able to change that so easily either, without changing some significant portions of my social surroundings as well. c'est la vie.

[Week 11] FEED

MT Anderson's 'Feed' is a great novel to summarize a good deal of the Information Society Reader we have covered during this semester. It is a kind of "Clockwork Orange meets Neuromancer meets Futurama". Though the author extensively warns the commercialization of information that govern everything in our daily lives, the really important notion of his vision is that (almost) everybody is perfectly content with it. This could be effectively shown by laying out the whole story in the protagonist's view. Nobody does, or can, raise any question about the commercial information regime any more.

Would it be possible to resist - or at least reconsider - that huge inevitable mainstream of voluntary stupidity? Well, the author is not very optimistic about it, and does not hesitate to kill off the only sane protogonist at the end of the story. In fact, he does not suggest any concrete idea to topple at least a fraction of it, unlike the predecessors of cyberpunk. But then again, most of the researches we have been reading in the book were not different. Describing the problems, invoking the need for reconsideration, but that's pretty much it. No experiments of e-democracy, no account on the rare moments of civic success in the online struggle against the commercial or governmental sector. Maybe we'll have to anticipate for a sequel to the book - maybe it could be titled 'Feed 2.0 - The Revolution of Titus' or something like that.

[Week 11] Virtualities

This week's reading deals with how information technologies shape or alter traditional concepts of social identities such as gender, the 'self', and ethnic culture. Poster's article on the post-modernity and the decentralized fleeting identity is a typical approach to this. And a decade after his words, much of his theories have become commonplace. In Wikis where people have collaborative knowledge building systems completely devoid of personal identities, and in blogs where individuals strive to become instant celebrities among the vast mass of indistinguishable users. Though Poster does not talk about how resistance is possible in this kind of information dominance, I think the decentralized nature of this space already has the necessary elements. Whether people care to find them is not merely dependent upon information technology, but proper social education.

Eric Michaels' piece explores the cultural identity changes that went on with the introduction of vast new information flows. However, I think the crucial thing was not information per se, but whose information it was. In this case, it was the Western viewpoints on a large scale that overflooded the lifeworld of the natives. They were put to view themselves through other's eyes, which separated their identities from their world. The quest is to find out how mediated information and the actual lifeworld can be integrated into a organic whole.

Sadie's piece is less theoretically intriguing, but an inportant historical recap nonetheless. Though she focuses on the role of the females in the information technology, the same could be applied to a whole set of other identity clusters such as 'third-world' programmers, unknown websurfers for Yahoo! during its initial days, and so on. After all, Information technonogy is characterized by the white smart Sillicon Valley male programmer-enterpreneur image, marginalizing everybody else. If the information society is to affect the whole society, all the social identities in this society has its unique share in it.

[week 9_2... in fact, week 10?] Latter half of Bimber.

Bimber is a careful person - he simply does not overreach. Though he lays out the pattern of the information revolution and other valuable breakthrough findings in the first part, he says in the latter part of the book that it won't alter significantly the level of civic participation and political knowledge of the individuals living in that society. The possibilities of a more informed participation is balanced by the disengagement and disinterest. Information technology enables individualization, which is good in the making one's voice heard but disables the common experience that is crucial for the public-ness.

But to look deeper, it is not simply individualization (disguised as the rather positive-sounding term 'personalization') in itself that is the concern. It is the gap between the social system of modern democracy that needs some forms of common public-ness to function and the consuming desire that wants to put on sophisticated / differentiated identities. Because of this gap, people are constantly confused on which level of collectiveness they should put their values on. Can this gap be bridged? At least not by mere information technology per se, for sure.

[Week 9_1] How about information against democracy?

In this book, Mimber talks about how major information technology changes brought about particular aspects of the democratic political systems, such as majoritarian, interest-group, market-driven, and post-bureaucratic ones. A valuable insight indeed, if we consider the fact that the information flow has always been a huge factor on how people organize themselves to make make political decisions.

The author is careful in making bold statements. He wants to avoid both technological determinism and social construction by simply not jumping into those. However, he has a strong opinion that the information technology has contributed to some forms of democracy. I wonder what he would say of instances and forces that are to the opposite: information technologies contributing to political stupidification of the individual, government control over the masses and so on. Although even those things are also conducted on the premise of democracy, it leads to less power of the people in general. I hope there are some answers to this in the latter half.

[Week9_1] Internet, public sphere?

Habermas' public sphere is the ideal where open access and full communication governed solely by rationality for a common public goal exist. However, it should be noted that the concept is a ideal communicative state rather than an actual place, though he attempts to find historical examples where public sphere has been taken place. The Internet is not and will never be a public sphere, but some communication forms(modalities) in it could have certain elements of it when moderated well. In short, PS for the Internet is a normative goal rather than a description or practical object. And as such, Papacharissi says the Internet can create a new public space, but does not ensure Ps per se. The question would be what then those elements are and how they can be fostered.

On the other hand, Garnham tries to apply the PS concept to broadcasting, and suggests the public service model to be implemented. However, he as well as most other theorists always seem to forget that though a channel is made public, it is still in competition with the commercial, and thus more attractive other channels. The same on the Internet too.

Then Keane argues that there is no single immense PS but a "complex mosaic of differently sized, overlapping, and interconnected public spheres". His different coexisting levels are important in understanding the complexity of the current society. However, he does not dig into how these spheres are or can be interconnected. I think that the media and communication could and should play an important role in that, which is one of the foci of my own research interests.

[Week 8_2] Surveillance.

The Panopiticon of Bentham is a useful rhetoric for Foucault to describe the functions of knowlege/information power in modern social systems. In conditions of unverifiable surveillance for order, people start self-monitoring according to the rules that have been set by the man in the central watchtower (or, said to be there). On the Internet, since surveillance can occur in the code-level, such notions have a more direct connotation. However, it should be noted that the true core of Foucault's Panopticum lies in the voluntary participation of the surveilled. It is not the oppressor versus the oppressed, but the rule-setter and the rule followers. Furthermore, the rule-setters could be the system itself, instead of some evil dictators. The whole society may be voluntary prisoners of the Panopticon, so to speak. It's not how we topple the man in the center, but whether we can critically reconsider the familiar rules of the information and communication pattern that we call our own. Lyon talks about four kinds of surveillance theory: state, bureaucracy, techno-logic, and political economy. In lieu with Foucault, I think the 'voluntary' cultural dimension should be added to them.

For Zuboff, the disappearing human interaction is a key threat for the management of the modern information society that tends to rely heavily on the non-humanized information skills. Not for humanitarian reasons, but because it isolates managers from the still 'humane' realities of the organization. Good thing to mention, but a little outdated in a age when information technology has already taken the direction of IMs and personal networks. I wonder what Zuboff would say to those developments where information has developed to enhance the interpersonal networks rather than the social 'machine'. I don't mean to say she was wrong, but that there is a certain portion of unignorable self-purification in play since we are still living in human bodies.

[Week 8_1] Divisions...

In 'data deprivation', Schiller argues that corporate power has been growing to govern the flow of information that are crucial to today's life. He points out three important aspects in which it has taken place: deregulation of economic activity, privatization of the public functions, and commercialization of social activities. Though information is proliferating in this age, we are deficient of the necessary social information(p271). However, even taking Schiller's solid explanations into account, there are not many possible measures to counter those trends. Re-regulation and restoring private commercial sectors to the public would be an easy answer in theory, but not very realistic. Can the public domain be restored without sacrificing (capitalistic) efficiency? Not very likely. All you can force the corporates to pay taxes and contribute to build other new parts of public domains.

Norris notes three kinds of digital divide, which are the global divide, the social divide and the democratic divide. He mainly sticks to the divide of the hardware, which can in his view be overcome by more and cheaper technology. However, in my view digital divide is not about simply hardware. It is about how some people know how to gather and utilize information, while others cannot but merely follow the models and rules set by the former. The episteme setter get all the big money and power, while the follwers are spending time and money desperately and vainly to keep pace with them. These things cannot be easily fixed even with $100 laptops w/ Wikipedia Offline installed on them.

Finally, Lasch talks about how the modern technologies have been invented and implemented to reduce dependency on skilled labor, to achieve total control. However, it is not one-sided. Some technologies are chosen by the managers, while others are chosen by workers, playful teenagers and others for their own purposes and style of life. Total control is only possible when the most prominent field of decisions - the market - is governed by a single force. Sure, the corporates have much more power than anybody else. But let's not give up hope already...

[Week7_2] Concentration...

Though Zook does not dig deep into the lives of the ordinary workers (programmers, webmasters, ordinary users etc) and mainly sticks to the big money movers such as the enterpreneurs and enture capitalists, the dot-com boom/burst was more than a simple high-profile money business. It was a vision for a way of life that bloomed and faded, ultimately giving way for again something different. The dot-com boom era told us ordinary people to move on to the wonderful new world of information and networked connections, or else you will become kind of 'obsolete'. It was stated as something like a new starting line, where anybody could 9and should) jump in. But as Zook demonstrated, the spatial aspects of concentrated personal networks and financial capital has not been pushed away an inch.

Then another question arises. Will it be any different in the era of the Web2.0 boom? With contents producer/consumers taking the lead, we are again flooded with the myths of decentralization by media coverages on the Chinese Lipsync brothers or the guitar wonder from South Korea. But still, it gained popularity when it went through Youtube and gained its English-speaking audience in the US. I wonder if there is some work on a map of the Internet user 'thunderlizards'. I can pretty much predict that they will as well be concentrated on some already culturally(that is financially) established metropolitan areas. All aspects of developments are never fully arbitary from each other, and we know that most of them are geographically bound.

[Week7] Geographical centrality

The findings of Zook that geographic locality plays a significant role in the current shape of Internet industry is sound but not surprising (After all, the name Silicon Valley has not faded at all). First of all, unlike the Internet itself, industries are located in physical buildings and are run by people with physical bodies who interact in a real space. Steve Jobs' keynote speeches may be available on Youtube, but you should go to San Francisco to actually experience the infamous 'reality distortion field'. It may be about the Internet, but it is still industry. In that sense, Zook's mention of 'tacit knowledge' is more than valid. Moreover, on a global scale it isn't even tacit knowledge but simply the problem of money. Heavily wired cities in more 'developed' countries are the central regions. Because it takes a significant level of infrastructure to use the Internet inexpensively and on a daily basis in the first place.

Then, the question arises: how will it change overtime? Will the centers become more central, or will they be distributed (or simply shifting from one center to another)? Or a more fundamental one: is this kind of centrality adding up to a form of geographical digital divide, or simply the result of it?

[Week6] Transforming societies

This week's readings deal with the changing elements of the society. Urry argues that sociology should be redefined in a era where a multitude of interactions of both physical and social systems occur. In his view the flow of networks and mobility is the prime concern. However, more often than not he tends to ignore or underestimate the role of existing social bonds and boundaries such as nationstate, ethnicity and cultural clusters. Even today as we are talking about the new mobile sociology, some hermit dictatorship has launched a nuclear explosion test due to nationalistic reasons. I think that the concept of mobility is only valuable when the still existing fixed structures are taken into account as part of the interacting element.

Reich's three jobs - routine production services, in-person-services, and symbolic-analytic services - are helpful for young people looking for employment in today's service job market, but don't contribute much to the job structure of the society in whole. I wish there was more talk on how those new forms of services combine and interact with the traditional forms of jobs including manufacturing and farming, instead of simply showing us what new future jobs emerge.

Stehr notes that the changes in economic structure of 'knowledge societies' will be the shift into the symbolic interactions. I'm glad that somebody finally mentions that the manufacturing sectors are not declining in importance. However, contrary to his argument that the system of industrial production is changing via the knowledge paradigm, in fact it is only being pushed away to somewhere else (such as China) - out of the sights of the 'service workers of the information society'. Instead of only looking at macro numbers, he should probably look into what kind of industrial labor is required to provide the daily commodities of the service worker. It has grown in global scale - that is, the 'developed' nation as the big spenders who make big money with some patents and copyrights while the rest of the world is cleaning up after them. (Look at this map: http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/worldmapper/display.php?selected=99 )

Finally, Balsamo emphasizes the role of the body in the technologically advanced society. Her argument that gender identities are reconstructed in the technology contexts is a continuation of the body discourse that has been in circulation in media cultural studies. Though using the term body, it refers more to the individual 'being' in physical terms: if societies can be redefined in the information paradigm, so can the basic units that constitute the society. Though Balsamo mainly sticks to gender identities, in this light all physical identities can be viewed as important constructs that are actively defined in technology and information contexts. And until the day we become some kind of pure information life forms, the body politics will prevail.

[Week5] Digital News Ventures...

In Digitizing the News, Boczkowski attempts to look into the ventures of the News production systems that have been coping to integrate new media technologies into their tradational processes. In the age of the Web, he gives us three examples of what kind of combinations of conditions has led to the different forms of ventures: online news section, multimedia news and user-created news. In short his research focuses on the changes in the production side of the news, that those changes are fundamentally cultural rather than simply technological.

Interesting for sure, and valuable piece of history. However, it would have been better if the focus would have been more on providing actual evidences of changing interaction between news producers and users, and what kinds of impact it has on the quality, quantity and orientation of the news contents. For example, does user news production necessarily contribute for better journalism? user-friendly for sure, but other factors such as fact verification suffer. Archiving and browsing changes the time concepts of news reading pattern to a more flexible level, however the 24-hour-update system forces news readers and producers to hang on the new pieces of information all day. It is not the news production culture, but the culture of news in everyday life and society that changes.

[Week4_2] Networked societies.

When Castells talks about the 'Information Age', he refers mainly to the networked nature of social forms. One of the most important unique claims he makes is that "the communication between networks and social actors depends increasingly on shared cultural codes". And to think of it, shared cultural codes are derived from communication between networks and social actors. Thus the role of communication becomes more and more important in a information society. Information is not only a form of new 'goods', but the essential bond that holds this kind of society together.

He continues his argument of the networked society in his second piece, that the role of networks emphasize the new economy, and the city becomes even more important as the social unit. Networks are on the rise, but personal isolation and loss of shared meaning occurs as well. The remedy he suggests is a more networked society (as illustrated in his example of Europe), where values are shared among people. Well, if that kind of 'sharing' proves to be economically profitable, it will be solved sooner than expected. However, Castells seems to separate the economy functions and the social process a little too distinctly.

Garnham considers Castells' explanations as a form of dominant ideology of today. Being an ideology does not necessarily mean that it is false, but it implies that it is a kind of interpretation with its specific intentions rather than the naked truth. And in this ideology that puts information-communication technologies as its main engine, it is taken lightly that the networked society is an extension of the previous capitalist society. That's a valid argument, but I can't help but think that Garnham underestimates the role of communication structures - networks - in our daily life and social behavior. ICTs are in some aspects merely reproducing and enlarging existing communication patterns, but in other aspects they build new forms of social communication as well. It is not a either-or quetion, but what elements are introduced and what their specific roles are.

[RN_Week4_1] On Labor

This week's reading deals with the role of 'labor' in the post-industrial age. Bell argues that in the economy the labor issue will remain, but the sociology and culture will behave otherwise (p.102). True, in a 'information' society where one easily forgets the actual labor issues that go on the way it has always been. However, I think that the interest in community as Bell has hopefully put it is not a genuine one but a mere distraction from the existing class conflicts. The 'post' industrial age still has its feet deep in the industrial age.

Krishan Kumar talks about the continued Taylorism. New technology builds on new division of labor, striving for efficiency. In his sense, information is also a part of the produced goods in the capitalistic system. I agree to the point that the Information society is not a stand-alone ideology, but an extension of (industrial) capitalism with all its social practices. Not only extension, but intensification.

Urry argues that what is viewed as the shift from the industrial to the post industrial is in fact the same old manufacturing society but dislocated by globalization and fragmentation. Labor still has its place, but is somehow put into nostalgia. Those arguments lead me to one important question: Why are people made to believe in the novel post-industrial age, while quickly forgetting the same kind of labor pattern that constitutes one's own life and society? Who are the ideologues and what kind of people are benefitting from this? Moreover, why do the ones that do not benefit from it also easily agree with them? Classic hegemony theories could be of some help, but I'll have to think things over.

[Week3_2] On 'Code' (2/2).

The second half of CODE deals with the real-world cyber issues that we encounter, such as copyright, privacy, free speech and sovereignty. Regulations are being implemented in all those issues via code, and the resistance against it should be also made through opening of the code, in Lessig's view. And being a practical person, he has concrete solutions on hand: (creative) commons, P3P and open access.

However, it is not clear on how he adresses the boundaries of the individual nations and the Internet as an international entity. Law and policies are enforced by each nation, but the net code is regulated in an international standarization process (or, is it really international, with ICANN being a private organization in California?). Also, the root domain name servers are located mostly in the US. And ECHELON, the urban legend that proved to be real, deals with intercepting communication from all over the world. I don't mean to say that the US sets to conquer the world , but that code-counteractions to resist the regulations need to divided into more dimensions. For example smaller online communities, bigger services, nationstate, and international. Only then will the solutions actually work on all levels of the cyberspace life.

[Week3_1] On 'Code' (1/2).

Lessig is coherent with previous week's reading on Webster, in that he asserts that the cyberspace (which is easily regarded as the literal symbol of the information age) is not a completely new and optimistic thing. Here he focuses on the fact that the cyberspace can be regulated just as much as, and even far more than the previous real world. technology(architecture), markets, laws and norms in combination limit and guide people's behaviour and the system itself. At the same time, markets, laws and norms decide the architecture, in the form of 'codes'. And it requires a lot of active actions to deepen the liberal aspects of the Net, and he proposes it can be done by opening the "Code".

I couldn't agree more with Lessig's point that the cyberspace is the result of regulation, weighted among the players and institutions of the various sectors (I wonder what views Lessig holds on the mess that is ICANN ). And I also admire his continuous efforts on Creative Commons, to achieve what he has manifested. However, his concepts of a liberal cyberspace only works when there is already an established liberal social system or norm. For example, one can't expect to have freedom of expression on the Internet, in a society where freedom of expression is not granted in the offline world... I mean, look at the Internet in mainland China. Ideally, the liberal nature of the cyberspace will drip down to make the real world liberal as well, but normally it is the other way around. Even the concepts of Creative Commons or Copyleft only work in societies where Copyright laws are firmly established. I wished that Lessig would talk more about how to modify the larger structures of the 'East Coast Code' of the offline world, so as to make permanent progress feasible.

Free Culture (Presentation by Lessig)

If you've liked what you read in Lessig's book (Code)... Here's what he tries to build on the grounds that he set out (Free Culture).

http://lessig.org/freeculture/free.html (presented in the classic 'Lessig style presentation')

[Week2_2] Doing what they've always been doing

The main premise of Webster and Robin is that the information society is nothing new, and rather a extension of the industrial capitalism society. I completely agree with this view. Most of the early optimistic, even utopian views on the democratic and subversive potentials of the Internet were raised before everybody was online, when the cyberspace was more or less a ghetto of liberal intellectual geeks, so to say. They simply did what they had been doing in the age of analog libraries, only to a greater extent: developing a collaborative and open network of information (the reference list and footnotes of academic journal articles were the primitive forms of 'hypertext'). First, the non-geek users came in and thought in high hopes that this atmosphere was due to the technological /media features of the net. But then the merchants came in and did what they had been doing: painting ads all over the place, screaming to gain more money and so on. Governments came in and tried to eavesdrop everything and bring regulation (in worse cases, censorship) as they always did elsewhere. Hate speech, non-sensical trolls in the forums, winner-takes-all competitions and every other communicative patterns that were present in the real world appeared in the cyberspace. Amplified, because the cyberspace is a world of pure interaction, thus making 'communication' more salient. The so-called problems of the information society are nothing more than the problems of modern (I hate the misleading term 'post-modern') brakeless capitalism.

[Week2_2] information fetish

Roszak's mention of 'Data glut' reminds me of Umberto Eco's famous anecdote quite some years ago: "...Years ago, when I needed to write a paper on Israel, I went to the library and pulled out about a dozen of references from the selves. I read them carefully, developing thoughts and wishing to have more material. now that everything is digitalized, my wishes came true. I typed in the keyword in the search engine. it gave me 11000 search results. I gave up writing that paper." Indeed, information fetish can be misleading from the true goals of why they were created in the first place. Reflecting on this, it should be noted that the information technologies are not evolving at the speed of the evolution of the circuit integrating density (such as the ever-exploited phrase 'Moore's Law'), but at the speed of what the humans and their society can adjust themselves to. The development of the 'information society' itself is controlled by the patterns of the present society.

[Week2_2] Information has always been...

Reading notes on Langdon Winner's piece. Though I agree with Winner's conclusion that a democratic populace should explore new identities and the horizon of a good society in the cyberspace, I can't quite grasp why this paper was classified on the 'con' side. Sure, he says that what's important is not technology itself, but the utilization of it as social means. But then again, the boost of thechnologies that were centered on information and communication technologies have been about building social networks, from the beginning on. information never was generated by itself or by machines. People produce them, endow specific values on some of them, and communicate it to certain people in the way they intend (or do not intend but turn out to be done anyway). He may be a con to the 'post-' but still 'industrial' society, but IMHO he seem to be laying most of his hopes in the information society in its own meaning. The one who is sticking to much to technology perse is maybe Winner himself.

{Week2_1] Viva capitalism?

A couple of hundreds years ago, the native Americans did not live with the concept that "land can be owned". But the settlers did, and then they came to own all the land through their own set of rules. Similar things are happening with 'information'. Some people come up with new ideas on how to possess (that is, buy and sell) them. Others who are not capable of catching up with those rules fall hopelessly behind.

In the three pro-information age readings, the premises are remarkably simple. "We have found a new way to carry on, even expand with our way of brake-less capitalism! Hurray!"(exaggeration inside). On first look it seems that they are advocating a new era that is completely different from the previous industrial age, but a careful reading reveals that they are in fact celebrating the new powerful capitalism and the social system that is built upon it. It is no wonder that Masuda's categorization uses terms such as market, product and intellectual 'industries' frequently.

Leadbeatter argues that information society will provide a solution to the problems of the market and the community at the same time, and Dyson et al. are discussing about how the institutional systems should be modified to adapt the change. Their goal is to overcome the limits of the present 'industrial' capitalistic society by changing their main products, which happen to potentially enable collective, decentralized aspects. I don't means to say that industrial capitalism is neccessarily wrong, but that the fundamental capitalistic social problems such as unquality, political brainlessness and consumerism don't simply disappear by changing the main product from this to that.

[Week1_2] "Fine. Now, where's the other half?"

Judging from the introduction, The Information Society reader is a vast ambitous project to cover the various social aspects of the so-called information society. Indeed, the editors are doing a good job in laying out the pros and cons, changes with existing social structures, and also manage to bring up issues that are specific to the information-oriented society such as surveillance. If the individual chapters are as good as introduced, this book will be an invaluable read.
However, it should be noted that it looks already a little outdated. The problem sets leave out some of the prominent aspects such as flexible social networks (enter Myspace), collective knowledge (enter Wikipedia), social discourse production (enter citizen journalism and blogs) and over-reliance to information (or information addiction, as some call it), among many others. In short, the book focuses on the macro level where the society is read as a whole, but leaves out insights to the meso and micro level where the lives of actual people are. I hope that this area can be discussed via the other readings and possibly the group presentations...