[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.