Cargo ship blasts out of spaceport

May contain stolen battle plans sought by Imperial Police

MOS EISLEY – A cargo ship blasted its way out of Mos Eisley Spaceport during a portwide search for two droids believed to be holding stolen plans for the new Imperial battle station.  The Imperial Police remained unsure as to how the droids got into the spaceport and onto the ship; it is unknown as to whether the droids were aboard the ship when it left the port, but tracking devices have been placed aboard the ship, and Imperial Police are monitoring its whereabouts.

“There was a speeder with two droids aboard that entered the port through a checkpoint,” stormtrooper spokespeople informed reporters.  “Our guard was certain that these weren’t the droids we were looking for, and instructed the speeder to move along.”  Stormtroopers later received instructions to apprehend the owners of the droids; however, the parties in question boarded a cargo ship, firing upon troopers who attempted to question them.

The ship was able to evade capture and reach lightspeed upon exiting the Mos Eisley port.  The Imperial Press released a statement earlier today that indicated the presence of a tracking device placed aboard the ship before takeoff, which will allow Imperial forces to monitor the ship’s whereabouts once it comes out of lightspeed.

“If they attempt to return the battle plans to Alderaan, we will be waiting for them,” stated an Imperial spokesperson.  “They won’t get far.  The plans will be back in Imperial hands in no time.”

Youtube: It’s Full Of Crap, But We Like It That Way

awwwwwww! Box Cat haz a happy!

Viral videos.  The term alone sparks images of idiotic things that are popular for a nanosecond on the notoriously fickle Internet: dancing babies, cats jumping out of boxes, teenagers throwing epic temper tantrums (does anyone know if that video turned out to be fake?  I want to believe, but it’s just too crazy to be true…).  Most viral videos are a “Funniest Home Videos”-style hodgepodge of randomness that accidentally got caught on camera.  Is their rabid popularity culturally significant?  No, not really.  We as a culture like to watch crap.  I’m as guilty of it as anyone else.  Come on, dudes getting kicked in the junk is funny.

Another notably addictive cultural black hole/lightning rod of popularity on YouTube is amateur pop-culture commentary.  Some of the more sophisticated of these videos are akin to opening monologues on late-night talk shows: off-color jokes and banter about what celebrities are up to.  The hosts are usually affable guys in their early 20s who are slightly edgy (they all curse like sailors), but still cute and wholesome (if you brought them home to Mom, they wouldn’t curse in front of her).  This lethal combination has gained them a following: dimple-cheeked Philip DeFranco and mop-topped Shane Dawson, despite respectively annoying the crap out of me (boy, do I want to punch the lights out of those two!), rack up millions of views for each video they produce. 

I’m not sure if grownups watch these channels, but the teen set goes crazy for these guys.  It being that my inner teenage girl controls most of my actions, I have my favorites.  At the top of the list is Ray William Johnson, a motormouthed kid with boy-band hair whose show differs from the rest for a couple reasons.  One, he’s actually funny (i.e., his humor isn’t entirely dependent on making dirty jokes about Miley Cyrus).  Two, the theme of his show isn’t the usual celebrity/mass-media drivel.  Ray does commentary on viral videos - he picks a couple videos that went viral over the week, and talks about them, complete with goofy voice-overs (like I said before, dudes getting kicked in the junk is funny; it’s even funnier with Ray’s silly, chipmunk-voiced, potty-mouthed color commentary).  And three, the best part of his three-to-four minute show is at the end, where he picks a question submitted by a viewer (they can ask anything – he gets tons of submissions), and then in turn asks viewers to answer that question in the most interesting and creative way possible in the comments section.  The top four funniest answers get included in the next video.  Other channels have since started putting copycat comment-question segments at the end of their videos, but as far as I know, Ray was the first to use himself as a conduit for his viewership to provide the funny.  It’s such a cool segment, it almost makes me want to forgive him for his really irritating theme song.

I guess my point to all of this is that YouTube is a mirror held up to culture in general.  Are we more interested in Box Cat and Shane Dawson than videos that are culturally and/or artistically significant?  Yes.  Will that ever change?  Probably not – we don’t want to watch unpleasant things, we want to watch things that make us feel good (“gosh, that cat is cute!” “I’m sure glad I’m not stupid enough to play with lighter fluid!”).  We get addicted to the warm fuzzies.  Is this healthy?  Of course not.  Should I start watching more culturally relevant stuff than Ray William Johnson’s viral-video commentaries?  Most certainly.  Will I?  Yes, of course.  I’m gonna start tomorrow…really, I am…

I’m bringing Wiki-back: the strange story of the Nickelback Wikipedia page

I’m getting started on all the blog posts I’ve been procrastinating on lately.  The last few weeks have been full of fail, not least in the homework department.  Must get back to being a good student once again.  I put this blog entry on my music blog as well, as the topic pertains to music…well, sort of.  As I explain below, there’s some debate as to whether Nickelback constitutes music per se.

hey, give them a break, they’re Canadian…

I myself am not a Nickelback fan, and it seems like I am not alone in my non-fandom of this band. Their Wikipedia page has been vandalized so often, and with such fervidity, that the History page on Nickelback’s Wiki entry is something to go see if you are into lulz of the really, really offensive sort.  There’s even a video that pays tribute to the unabashed hatred that the wiki-community has for these poor guys.  Witness:  

(warning: the song that goes along with this video is pretty damn awful, so be prepared to mute it.  In its original posting on collegehumor.com, it has an equally awful but more appropriate Nickelback song playing during the video; I couldn’t embed the original and had to use the version someone put on YouTube with a different song, which I figured was okay because the viewer would probably be muting the Nickelback version anyways.)

This video has inspired a new wave of wannabe wiki-hoodlums to truck on over to Nickelback’s page, only to find it locked.  There was much discussion on the wiki about whether or not the widespread negative opinion of the band should be included on the main page.  After concluding that the sheer volume of negativity directed at Nickelback rendered this collective opinion both valid and relevant, editors opted to include a lengthy “Criticism” section at the end of the article, which has a much more neutral tone than the earlier vandalism, and refrains from the latter’s rampant use of the word “gay” *.

Wikipedia is one of the most interesting phenomena to come out of Internet 2.0, and everything good and bad about this site is encompassed on the Nickelback page.  Opinions occupy a space outside the realm of truth and falsehood; however, when an opinion is widely held, the very existence of this collective opinion becomes a fact in and of itself.  Pop culture by definition is shaped by the popular opinion of a large group of people; Nickelback, as entertainers, are part of pop culture as well, and if lots of people think they suck, this opinion is a vital part of the story of the band.

* – Seriously, internet vandals.  I’d be much more approving of your mischief if it wasn’t for the homophobia, racism, and sexism.  Surely you can come up with more creative ways of being ridiculously offensive.  Perhaps I expect too much out of the teenage-boy troll contingent, but if they know how to hack into things and write code and stuff, they have at least some working brain cells, which could be put to good use coming up with something more clever than “this shit is gay”.

Twitter makes journalists uncomfortable

This NYTimes article appears to talk about the benefits of Twitter – the title indicates the new ways users are finding to use Twitter and make the social-networking site part of their daily lives.  However, even the title of the article has a sort of antagonistic undertone – “Putting Twitter’s World to Use” alludes to Twitter not being very useful in the past.  The reader gets the same impression throughout the article: that author Clare Cain Miller struggles to find ways that Twitter is benefiting society.

“Why would [anyone] want to read short messages about what someone ate for breakfast?”  Miller asks us straightaway.  Thus, the skeptical tone is set.  When Miller writes, “if [researchers] make the effort to dig through the mundane comments [on Twitter], the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment”, her negative opinion is conveyed through this attempt at a positive statement.  Miller goes on to cite several examples of how Twitter is making the world better, but even these examples fall short.  She describes doctors Tweeting about a brain-surgery operation, and chooses to write that Twitterers responding to the doctors’ tweets chose to ask such inane questions as what music was playing in the operating room.  Thus, the reader wonders: sure, it’s wonderful that technology allows us to get live updates from the operating room, but how is the content of these updates making society better?

Ars Gratia Artis: when everything’s free, what’s the motivation for creativity?

I’ve been following this case for about a year now.  Joel Tenenbaum was a student who, in the late ’90s, downloaded some songs off Kazaa.  Unfortunately, he was one of the unlucky few who found themselves slapped with RIAA lawsuits seeking exorbitant damages for the act of music piracy.  Most people have settled out of court, but Joel decided to fight the RIAA.  He’s got help: Harvard law professor Charles Nesson and a group of students have taken Joel’s cause.  Witness:

The court recently ruled in favor of the RIAA, but Tenenbaum and his team are appealing the decision.  This case, and some of the stuff we’ve been watching and reading for class, have gotten me thinking about what happens after everything becomes free and deregulated, especially music, which, by the looks of things, might be the first casualty in the war between the traditional market vs. freeconomics. 

I have no doubt that it will, sooner or later – we will probably always have conciliatory laws on the books banning the piracy of intellectual property, but as piracy continues to pervade increasing numbers of households, these laws become nominal.  Most people who download music don’t take the laws seriously as things are now.  If Joel Tenenbaum had known that he’d be taken to court by the RIAA, he probably wouldn’t have downloaded music in the first place – it’s definitely not worth it, but in the salad days of Napster and its inferior little brother Kazaa, nobody thought anyone was actually going to get nailed for downloading free music.  I downloaded my fair share of illegal songs without giving the matter a moment’s thought. 

 My friend Mark, who was a musician in the early ’90s, is ardently opposed to free music downloads, and thinks people who download free music should be prosecuted.  His response to my indignation on the part of those getting sued by the RIAA was, “If they didn’t want to get sued, they shouldn’t have downloaded the music in the first place.  It’s illegal.”  Mark still gets royalty checks from ASCAP because of radio airplay and sales of his records; Big Corporate Music pays Mark’s bills, so it’s no wonder that he stands in opposition to free music downloads.  “How will artists be able to create if they don’t get paid?”  Mark asked me during the several discussions we had on the issue.  And he’s got a point.  If artists don’t see any revenues for what they’re doing, what incentive is there to create at all?  It seems to me as though artists should be able to devote their full attention to their work, and not have a 40-hour day job to pay the bills.  We’ll get better art that way…right? 

People forget that the record industry as we know it today is a relatively new invention.  Only in the last 75 years has making a living from selling records been a possibility.  The Romans had a phrase for what existed before then: ars gratia artis, art for art’s sake.  In other words, playing for the love of the game: creating because you love it, because you feel called to do it, because you need to and want to, regardless of the benefits.  In an ideal world, if everything is free, no one will be compelled to compromise their artistic integrity for the sake of making money.  Selling out will be a thing of the past if nothing is being sold. 

Again, though, this is an ideal situation; the more likely scenario is that the huge amount of amateur music available for free will cause the audience to become fickle, not willing to wait for a second album before moving on to the next artist, not willing to listen to more than one song by a particular artist before passing judgment on whether or not they like the music.  I’m as guilty of it as the next listener; if I’m rifling through musicians’ myspaces looking for new stuff to listen to, I’ll give an artist maybe ten seconds of my time, and if that first ten seconds of that first song isn’t to my liking, I’ll move on.  Is this fair?  No.  Is it inevitable?  Yes.  Our collective attention span is growing shorter as the internet changes the way we think and learn, and those musicians who can adapt to this are the ones who will succeed.

Web 3.0: we have seen the future, and it is…whoever can take down Google

People like to try and predict the future, but the truth is, predicting what will happen next is an exercise in luck.  However, I’m gonna give it a shot, because I have always maintained a belief that Web 3.0 is going to be about the filters.

The theory behind metadata is that the solution to too much information is more information about the original information, so we can organize everything and present this glut of info in a manner such that people can easily find and extract the pieces they need.  Everyone talks these days about the power of networks; networks are powerful because they allow people increased access to resources. 

This is also the purpose behind search engines.  Right now, Google has a monopoly, which they have been able to maintain because they continually expand the ways of filtering and organizing information.  There’s Google Maps, Google Blog Search, Google Reader, Google Docs…Google has become the last word in the transmission of information.  Anyone who can rise up and compete with Google may very well be the future of Web 3.0.

If someone does challenge Google’s reign, how will they do it?  Perhaps organizational methods that pay more attention to the folksonomical aspects of the internet will become the norm.  Google maintains a balance between traditional methods of organization and the more malleable methods that allow them to present pages in a ranking system by keeping track of links and tags.  Will we, in the future, move more toward the linking and tagging?  And if so, will viable pieces of information be lost in the rush to tag and link everything up and get a better page rank?

4chan.org: the internet’s last frontier

The concept of 4chan.org is deceptively simple.  It’s an imageboard, a message board made for posting pictures and writing responses to people’s posted images.  On the site’s heart of darkness, the free-for-all random-topic board known as /b/, content is unregulated, and most users post anonymously (or, mostly anonymously – we’ll get to that later).  Within this minimal framework has arisen what the Daily Beast’s Douglas Rushkoff likens to the net’s version of the Wild West, a lawless, somewhat barbaric frontier populated by hackers, gamers, and nerds, where mob rule and vigilante justice are the law.  However, this is the place where an astonishing number of memes find their origin – Lolcats started on 4chan, as did Rickrolling.  When you slog through the porn, the flame wars, and the trolling, the evolution of 4chan  is a sociologically fascinating petri dish of how people behave when no one is checked and everyone is Anonymous.

First off, 4chan is huge and powerful.  They’ve hijacked the European VMA’s and Time magazine’s Most Influential Person of 2009 awards (4chan users nominated the site’s founder, a college student who goes by the username moot; the nominations were so overwhelmed by 4chan votes that moot won, beating out Barack Obama and Oprah, among others).  Not even AT&T can mess with 4chan; when the ISP tried to block content on the /b/ board, bloggers reacted with a giant OH NO THEY DI’INT: Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch mused, “AT&T has just opened the most vindictive, messy can of worms it could have possibly found”.  AT&T quickly backed down before 4chan users could strike with one of their infamous guerrilla-style attack campaigns.

The site started off innocently enough, as a board on which users posted manga and anime pictures.  There’s still an anime section, as well as several other themed boards on which one can post, but the most notorious board on 4chan is the “Random” or “‘/b/” board.  And what, might you ask, do people post when they’re anonymous and unregulated?  You guessed it, lots and lots of porn.  One must have a strong stomach to go through /b/.  The proliferation of raunch serves two purposes: the obvious one, given the mostly young-male user status; and that of a barrier to keep outsiders out.  The insider bent of 4chan proliferates through much of board culture.  Users have no time for newbies, and will attempt to drive away outsiders using methods that are decidedly racist, sexist, homophobic, and all-around revolting.  4chan slang for outsiders is “fag” or “newfag”, which is to /b/ what the term “Muggle” is to Harry Potter; the term is used almost affectionately.  Things that are shocking and disgusting to the outside world are very different when you’re on the internet and no one knows who you are.

The setup of the site encourages users to post anonymously, which has resulted in the 4chan collective being nicknamed, simply, “Anonymous”.  Anonymous has become quite the chaos element, often taking their penchant for making mischief off-site.  Users will collectively decide on a site to hack into, at which point everyone goes over to that site, and woe be to those who court the ire of Anonymous: Last month, 4chan users got ahold of a list of Facebook usernames and passwords of conservative Christian users.  The cyberterrorists merry pranksters collectively raided the accounts, posting raunchy messages and photos.  The most massive 4chan prank, however, was the Chanology raid on the church of Scientology, in which Anonymous orchestrated DoS attacks on the Scientology website, hosted protests attended by users in Guy Fawkes masks, and generally made an example of the church, all supposedly in the name of Anonymous’ anti-censorship message.

Anonymous has its limits, though, and can turn on those who elicit its ire.  This past January, a teen boy posted a link on /b/ to a YouTube video of him horrifically abusing his pet cat.  Within hours of the video’s posting, Anonymous members had found the boy, alerted local police, and posted a website listing the boy’s name, address, phone number, his parents’ names, work phones, and other info, under a headline listing the boy’s name with the words CAT ABUSER next to them.  Advice to people who torture cats: do not make your actions known to the people who created Lolcats.  Although the story ends happily for the poor cat, who was taken away and placed into a good home, how far could this have gone?  Might people have shown up at this boy’s house and hurt him or his family?  Another case, involving a Canadian man who tried to solicit sex from children on MSN but who unknowningly made himself known to Anonymous, has a more satisfying ending: along with posting all his personal info, Anonymous contacted police and helped them set up a sting 0peration.  The pervert is now in jail.  When the internet polices itself, the results are quick, brutal, and often unscrupulous, which brings to question the ethics of net neutrality laws: can the internet successfully self-regulate without just creating more chaos?

Is 4chan good or evil?  Beneath all the porn and guerrilla smear campaigns, this site is, by nature, human.  4chan has become the internet’s collective id.  Is 4chan contributing to the downfall of net society?  Possibly.  However, in the battle over the future of the internet, it may just be the 4channers and /b/tards, with their porn and flame wars and sick pranks, who will win.  We have met the enemy, and they are…us.

Net Neutrality: Can smart cows herd themselves?

“[We need] the kind of community-oriented processes that blend the naivete of the [internet's] earlier years with some of the cynicism that’s necessary [to] stop a future that has the state coming in automatically to save us all from ourselves.” – Jonathan Zitrain

In order to examine the pros and cons of net neutrality laws, we must acknowledge that basic rules of human behavior apply to online interactions.  Although the playing field is drastically different on the internet, the game is basically the same.  Proposed net neutrality laws are based on the assumption that people will try to screw you over to benefit themselves.  Democratic governments that put rules on capitalistic societies are also based around this assumption: we need rules in place to prevent large groups of people with a common goal benefiting at the expense of the little guy.  Checks and balances are one of the reasons that the American system of government has enjoyed such longevity.  But do we need this on the internet?  Can we police ourselves, or are we doomed to be on the losing end of the prisoner’s dilemma if our governing bodies don’t step in and, as Zittrain says, save us from ourselves?

We haven’t solved that problem yet.  It may be many years (if ever) before the collective becomes sociologically savvy enough to self-govern.  In the meantime, we need net neutrality laws.  It’s definitely not the ideal situation, but it’s necessary.  Idealists such as Zittrain are correct in assuming that the massive collective intelligence of the internet can police itself better than offline society – the huge scope of the collective means that if ISPs are conducting any funny business regarding the filtering of information, someone’s going to find out, and they’re going to let everyone else know, at which point the collective will stampede in the opposite direction.  However, the sheer size of the herd means that if someone smells a wolf, it’ll take a while before the entire herd can get moving.  It will also take a while before the whole herd knows that the wolf is present, and a few on the periphery will inevitably get picked off.  Some of the little guys are going to get trampled in the mad rush to get away, and these collateral casualties damage the idealistic picture of the self-policing internet.  Long-tail theory emphasizes the importance of the little guy in the grand scheme of things, so it’s important to protect their interests.

The government must be careful when policing the internet.  Although the game is still the same, the playing field is vastly different – the rapid pace of information flow necessitates an inherent fluidity in any laws passed regulating the internet.  The government must be careful not to interfere in stuff like open sourcing and piracy; putting laws on these things stifles progress.  Any nets the government casts must be loosely woven enough to allow the little fish through.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been using a lot of very vague, metaphorical rhetoric on this post.  This is to facilitate an argument that I am entirely unsure about.  Although I think net neutrality laws should be in place, I could easily be wrong.  Another thing that we must keep in mind is that if it turns out we are wrong about net neutrality, the government must be willing to admit it quickly, step away, and find different solutions.  In courts of law, actions are careful and deliberate; this contrasts with the rapid-fire nature of the internet, and may prove detrimental to the even playing field that net neutrality laws are designed to protect.

Net Neutrality: the issue continues

I’m not a big fan of capitalism.  Sure, it works better than communism, but both systems are flawed, as they are created and carried out by inherently imperfect human beings.  Capitalism’s flaws play out like a giant version of the prisoner’s dilemma, with everyone trying to screw over everyone else and no one winning in the end.  At some point, government must step in and implement regulations when things get out of hand.  In the mid-2000s, it became apparent that the time had come for government to step in and regulate the huge, dense, largely unregulated jungle that is the internet.  The push for net neutrality is an ongoing one, as Personal Democracy Forum’s Nancy Scola reported earlier today.

Doesn’t the phrase “government regulation of internet activity” sound awful?  Keep Big Brother off my computer!  However, it’s not the government that’s seeking to restrict your access to certain websites.  It’s your search provider.  The concept of net neutrality is based around the idea that your ISP has the ability to filter your access to the internet, and because the ISPs are profit-driven, this could cause them to allow sites that pay them well, or who align with company politics, to load faster.  Net neutrality means that we get equal access to all sites.  When this scathing Huffington Post article hit in 2006, it brought the issues of net neutrality to a lot of people’s attention, and pointed the finger at AT&T’s CEO, who had stated that he wanted to make the internet a pay-to-play arena.

Enter the U.S. government.  When Barack Obama ran for president, he promised that, once elected, he would be an advocate for net neutrality.  This means that, yes, the government will be regulating things on the internet.  However, it seems as though it’s for the best.  Obama’s FCC has set up OpenInternet.gov, which is apparently going to be the online hub for the net-neutrality movement.  Although the idea of the government regulating the internet and passing laws regarding delivery of content isn’t the most savory thought, it is, if you think about it, democratic government working like it’s supposed to.

It is increasingly evident that Web 3.0 will be based around filters: who gets to determine how we access content on the internet.  This is a dangerous game, especially as powerful ISPs, and gigantic search engines like Google, hold most of the cards.  However, in keeping with the fundamental principles of democracy, the government is putting checks and balances on giant corporate interests.  It will be interesting to see how far this goes, and how much power the government is able to wield online.

Three Articles about New Media

Our assignment for Tuesday (I’m turning this in late!  Bad Laura! ) was to get together three articles relevant to class discussion, and link to them.  Here they are, two articles and a video, which will hopefully count.

About a week ago, fellow Emac student Ryan Tweeted a link to this really cool article about literacy in the information age.  It’s a short article, but Clive Thompson’s perspective about how the internet is changing the way we write is an interesting one.

I’m not very good at the Internet.  Sometimes I feel a bit left behind in class when everyone’s talking about different applications and technologies.  Googling these things can be intimidating (the internet is huge and scary, after all).   Lee Lefever’s “Plain English” Youtube videos make the internet seem less scary.  They may seem extremely base to the average technophiliac new-media geek, but those cutesy line drawings and patronizingly simple explainations are really reassuring to people like me who are afraid of the big bad Internet (it’s GIGANTIC! I’ve seen it!).  Today, I learned what an RSS feed is (stop laughing.  Stop it. I seriously didn’t know.)

And now for the Pimp My Friends segment: This article is by Howard Wen, who hangs out every day at the Starbucks where I work; he sits on his laptop all day hammering out awesome articles about tech and game development for really high-profile clients.  The article I’m featuring is about unauthorized OS apps that run software for both PC and Mac, created by users, for users.  The democratization of formerly exclusive software is at hand.