[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 There are servers that could afford only a smaller bandwidth, slower server computers with outdated DB programs, or simply have no other choice than to be routed through some slow switches (such as servers in far away countries).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.