Google Docs

I have been going between my house and my girlfriends house a lot lately and have been having to deal with multiple versions of papers. I save one to my laptop then copy it back to my desktop. So I decided to try google docs, its actually one of the only google apps that I don't use. But this week, with 4 papers due I didn't want to have 8 versions a week to keep track of. So I am using google docs to keep things straight. At first I was sure to copy my work from docs to my computer, just in case. I still do on larger papers, but now I just use it, type in it, and save it there. I can also share my docs with people so they can see where I am in the process and give it a quick once over proofing wise. It has streamlined my workflow. I look forward to google wave as well to use as a collaborative time saving tool.

Research

In one of the Elluminate calls I brought what I thought was an interesting point about research. This is my first graduate level class so this level of reasrch and writing is new to me. I am begining to understand how to research, but sometimes I am not sure what is a good, or valid piece of literature to use. I mentioned that a good class would be one that covers methods of research, and more importantly, what makes a piece of research better than another.

Elluminate

Am in a elluminate chat right now for class. Its my first meeting using this program, and I think it is a great asset to an online class. It fills that void of not feeling as it you are a part of a group. It is nice to hear Nick speaking and other members of the class. the topics are interesting as I am just getting used to research and annotation tools. Very good tool.

YouTube

The Youtube video, “The Machine is Changing Us: YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity” should be retained as part of the web 2.0 reading packet proposed by Professor Bill Wolff. (Wesch, 2009) In the video presentation Wesch maps the changes in society to the development of new technologies focusing on the social media site YouTube.com.
In his presentation Wesch posed the question, is society heading towards the world of Orwell’s 1984, where people are controlled by the state and told what to do, to think and to feel, or that of Huxley’s A Brave New World, where people don’t need to be told what to do, because they just do not care about anything. They are apathetic, they have all the technology but do nothing with it but provide themselves with pleasure. By tracking small trends and larger ones, such as Mtv, Wesch does an expert job in posing the question, “Is that where we are now, have we entered the world of Huxley.” He does this by juxtaposing images and quotes from different eras to try and prove his point. One of the more humorous ones is when he shows a picture of his class, obviously bored out of their minds in a class on technological participation, then, he shows a group of kids at an American Idol audition. The kids there are on their feet, screaming, and excited. (Wesch, 2009) He then uses a quote he found to illustrate why this could be, “What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life… and the prime cause is not vanity…but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass of civilization.” (Wesch, 2009) I believe this quote sums up the widespread use social networking sites. What makes the quote most interesting is that it was then attributed to Henry Canby who was talking about the loneliness and anonymity of living in large cites opposed to rural living. Both can be seen in parallel, a large impersonal city where individuals blend into the crowd directly relates to the large mass of information that is transmitted over the internet everyday. But how is it different? On the web people choose to be anonymous, they use anonymity to be able to say what they want. But is it used for political or social discourse? As Wesch showed more than once, instead of using social networking and Web 2.0 tools for change, they use them for making YouTube videos of their cats wearing pajamas.
YouTube has an amazing ability to bring people together as seen in the person posing as Guy Faulk and asking people to write on their hands a message they wanted to world to see. This post received over 600,000 replies with people holding up their hands promoting ideas. (Wesch, 2009) It is in this example that I believe Wesch does show that YouTube and other social networking sites can tie people together though ideas, small in this example, but as the web grows, so may the participation.

Finland

Just saw why Finland had so much online political participation this week. Heard and NPR story on a new law enacted there, where ALL homes are to be wired with high speed internet connections. Most already are. An this will be paid by the government, free to the public. I wonder if that would spark greater political activism in this country, or just a lot more YouTube videos.

Viral

I find the idea of viral information flow one of the more interesting aspects of Internet culture. I first learned this term from marketing books by the marketing guru Seth Godin. Especially in books, Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends and Friends Into Customers, Unleashing the ideavirus, and Free Prize Inside: The Next Big Marketing Idea.

I think this is one of the more unique ideas and phenomenon of the web. We all get caught up with these "viral memes" as Anderson refers to them in the Lister book, "New Media". Things catch on, people key into something that resonates with them or the movement of society at the time. These viral trends travel throughout the first adaptors and make it into the minds of everyday people through other pop culture filters.

But does viral marketing have staying power. I believe used as a tool to introduce a new company or product or to liven up an old brand it is useful. A powerful tool. But as with most pop culture trends it does not build brand loyalty. It is a starting point, or a point of action when what you are doing is failing and you need to jump start things.

Unfortunately it is not as easy as putting an ad in the newspaper or running commercials. You must have an intimate knowledge of your customers and never cross the line of "looking" like you are trying to do exactly what you are trying to do, sell them something.

Avatars/Identity

One of the things I mentioned in my paper was how people only show what they want. I thought the idea of that identity is fluid on the web and uncertain, but I believe that is the case everywhere, in the real world as well. Who knows anyone. It reminds me of movies and stories of the fifties where everyone seemed to live cookie cutter lives but had a hidden lives or were just different than they appeared. The more I read about how different the web is in regards to identity and community the more I think that they are actually exactly the same.