My World

For many years I have been toying around with the idea of using VoIP, mostly because it would be an affordable way to keep in touch with my family in Europe. I’ve always had some doubts, however, that came from an insecurity to use this new form of communication. What if it doesn’t work on moments when it counts? And should I really be investing money in VoIP that may or may not be there in a few years?

For about a year I have been using VoIP at work, and overall I am pleased with it. The only glitch I see and have experienced is total loss of communication abilities. If the network goes down, it really goes down, and there’s not much you can do about it. That being said, I now do think there’s a future for this technology and suspect that it might eventually take over the “oldfashioned” way of making phone calls. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if the regular telephone will be like dial-up, and eventually disappear. VoIP is very flexible, and even though there are still some kinks that need to be worked out, the fact that my company, a Fortune 1000 corporation, has chosen to implement VoIP throughout the company all across the world is quite impressive.

• How long will it take for VoIP to completely take over regular phone systems?
• According to Howstuffworks, geographic location is not determined by using VoIP, perhaps endangering citizens when making 911 calls. What are some other dangers to society with this new technology?
• What groups of people will be most negatively impacted by a full implementation of VoIP?

Cyberspace has come a long way over the years. Right in the beginning it was still fairly expensive, thus not accessible to everyone. But as time went by and the cost went down more and more people were able to afford it. So here we are today with so many “lily pads,” as Michael Best describes it, that many people now in rural areas, for example, are able to use the internet, as well. This is great news, especially with regard to the attempt to eliminate the digital divide – to get more people access to the internet.

I’m not sure what is meant by accessibility standards. Is it using WLAN or WMAN as a standard? By looking at the chart that Best provides on global Wi-Fi policies, it becomes pretty obvious that different countries maintain different national policies when it comes to using wireless LAN’s. If we want to do something about the digital divide, isn’t it crucial to streamline policies across the world?

I wonder what will happen if everyone got access to the internet, even those people who live in rural areas and don’t live according to the western ideologies on capitalism that dominate the Net.

• What advantages does it have to get access to the internet for people in remote areas whose lives are “off the grid?”
• What is the ultimate goal of connecting the world together through the Internet?
• How much money are we willing to give up to connect poor people to the Internet?

Electronic commerce plays a big role in my life. From banking online to buying music and clothes online, it has almost entirely replaced shopping in stores or banking at my local branch. Mostly, it’s because it’s convenient; I don’t have to fight traffic or wait for the cashier to ring up my merchandise. But, it’s also because the internet offers reviews of products, something I find very helpful in purchasing certain items. You can even start a sort of conversation with any other people who you may agree or disagree with. On iTunes, for example, I’ve seen it several times where one person really likes a certain album and gives it five stars, but the next person responds to that post and totally disagrees for so-and-so reason and gives it only one star.

The internet also makes it possible to very easily compare products, and find the best price available. I’ve never been someone who likes to drive around for bargains, because it’s so time consuming. As a result, I used to simply settle for whatever price showed on the tag and be done with it. Now, with e-commerce, not only do I save time by going to stores, I also actually save money! I am not sure what the benefit is of creating many online communities for shoppers like Murphy mentions in her article about Circuit City. I think there could be a market for that if there are rewards, but without any of that, what’s the point? Why would you spend so much time creating a profile with avatar and no real reason to do it (besides killing time…)?  

• How do online communities improve the shopping experience online?
• What type of businesses should focus on e-commerce more and which ones less?
• When will we become “over-e-communified?”

The way Trippi has reinvented campaigning by using new technologies is quite impressive. It proves how effective digital media can be, and in this case how it has impacted a political campaign. The basic idea of using new media for the purposes of campaigning is to get the “cost per body” down. If this can be achieved, then it means that a greater audience can be reached with the same amount of money. It also means that less effort can be put into reaching this audience, leaving more time to focus on the content of a campaign; communicating your ideas and plans, which is what running for office should really be about. Not only that, it opens doors for those people who want to run for office, as well, as they now have a better chance at competing with those candidates who have more funds available. This means that more citizens can be represented. Campaigns in this way are less driven by money, and more by the means of how to use technologies to your advantage. In the end, this is great for United States’ citizens, as they are then able to more effectively participate in their constitutional right of choosing their government, and voting for a candidate who best reflects their ideologies.          

Kathy Gill’s “The Race of the Web Sites 2004” shows the impact of one aspect of using internet technology in politics; web sites. The article shows that making certain decisions on how to put a web site together can have great impacts on the audience that it wants to, but is impossible to reach. This is huge! Because, if you’re not able to reach your intended audience, then those votes are gone, along with your chances of becoming the next President of the United States. I certainly agree with Gill on the need for improvement. After all, this impacts me in the end, as well.

• What are some of the negative aspects of using internet technologies in politics?
• How could internet technologies negatively impact minorities and their constitutional rights?
• When do you think politicians will use internet technologies as their primary means of communication?

The established media are working in an interesting era. Whereas only a few decades ago they only had to concern themselves with having sufficient reporters around the world to deliver them news or scoops, today there are blogs to take into consideration. Blogs are interesting, and I don’t think I have the ability to fully grasp the power of it yet. That being said, I can imagine what sort of implications this new technology might have on established media.

As Dan Gillmor mentions in his first chapter of “We the Media,” blogs can be incredibly powerful. Tamim Ansary and his cautionary statement, or Glenn Reynolds on his Instapundit.com both show what an impact it can have. For the established media this could be a great thing, because if they notice an interesting blog, they can use that as a lead for a story. Pretty soon, correspondents aren’t a necessity anymore, since anyone could provide news to the established media in this way. Imagine all the money this would save, and perhaps even create the ability to reduce on annoying advertising?

Looking at the relationship between media and the political agenda, this could also mean that any “regular Joe” now not only has more opportunity to make his voice heard, but could even influence the political agenda if it gets enough attention by the media, and they in turn put pressure on Washington. This is especially so if more people get inspired on the same topic and start mass-blogging about a pressing issue that they feel needs to be revisited.

Some food for thought:

• How could blogging negatively impact the media?
• In what ways does blogging change the relationship between the government and the people?
• How does blogging affect each of the sides of the triangular relationship between government, the media, and the public? 

Perhaps it’s my marketing background, or the fact that I work in a highly “corporate” environment, but I can’t agree with Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger in their article “Markets are Conversations.” It seems as if these authors hate everything corporate so much that they can’t see the benefits of advertising or PR. True, the internet has brought back conversations in the marketplace and its benefits, but that doesn’t mean that there is no good purpose for advertising in the old fashioned sense. If I want to buy a product, then I will consult several sources for information. A part of what you pay for in a product is branding, and people WANT to pay for that because it creates certain factors like prestige, or style, and it creates an association with a social group they want to belong to.  

The Long Tail just may be the best invention in the last decade. I remember a time when I refused to buy an entire music album, simply because I didn’t like 3 or 4 songs on it. Or, I was forced to listen to songs I didn’t like because they happened to be on the album. Now, I, as the consumer, hold the power of choosing what I want to buy instead of it being decided for me. It would be really interesting to see what scholars find when looking more closely at the Long Tail. It will give us a good idea of consumers’ behavior in making purchases, and to find out what changes we could make to improve what we have today, not to mention what we are really interested in. Given that the physical stores only carry a certain amount of books, CD’s, etc., we are now given unlimited choices (or at the least less limited) in what we can purchase. And, we can find out more closely what the correlation is between the open source software movement and information overload.

• What will happen to the Barnes & Noble’s, the Borders bookstores, or the Blockbuster video stores when more people switch to iTunes, Amazon.com or Netflix?
• How could the open source software movement be further improved?
• How could Long Tails change the odds of new products breaking through and penetrating the market?

How can you define intelligence? The article “Being Analog” argues that computers won’t be truly intelligent until they are able to deceive. So that implies that deception equals intelligence. Hmm. Does the opposite apply, as well? Are humans who can’t deceive not intelligent?

Donald Norman points out that it now takes several decades to become a well-educated citizen, because our knowledge is cumulative. If we look at computers, we can really say the same thing; without cumulative knowledge in technologies we can’t further develop these either. In fact, you could argue that computers are far more intelligent, simply because they don’t have to start the learning process all over every time – the information is already stored in its system.

So it takes several decades now to become a well-educated citizen. Being a well-educated citizen means you’re intelligent. But look at our society a few decades ago, and compare it to today; I know plenty of generation X people who’ve had limited education, and they are very successful today. These are intelligent people. It is true, however, that more education is needed today to acquire a similar kind of success. I feel an enormous pressure to continue my education, even after I finish my B.A., to be able to compete in the market.

What I think is happening is simply that times have changed. And the word “intelligence” has changed. What intelligence used to mean has been replaced by a different kind of intelligence in which man and machine live and work together. Machines can’t live without humans, because we create and operate them. We can’t live without machines, because they are helping us in becoming intelligent, and are aiding us in our ever-expanding education. We just need to find a balance in combining the two, a way to be analogically digital, or digitally analogical.

• How much education will one need a century from now, as a result of the move from analog technologies to digital technologies?
• What sort of new issues do you foresee arising given our rapid globalization and digitization?
• How can you define intelligence?

Last quarter I had to write a few articles for a class that were related to the different roles that communication media play. For a couple of these, I had to use external data to illustrate how some of these roles work in real life. So I started my search on the Internet with full confidence that I would find information I could use. Boy, was I wrong. Doing a simple search through Google is not too hard. The hard part was interpreting the data and ensuring that I was looking at something that was not only accurate, but also appropriate, and current. I also had to make sure they weren’t “false drops” as Nelson points out in his article “We Have the Information You Want, But Getting It Will Cost You: Being Held Hostage by Information Overload.” Eventually I found what I was looking for, but it took a long time.  

Just the other day I had to obtain a copy of an easement at the King County administration. Again, finding their website wasn’t too hard. It was getting through the design of the website to find a record that supposedly is “public” that proved to be almost impossible. Time is money, so when I still couldn’t find what I was looking for I decided to simply e-mail them. They replied by giving me a URL through which I found my easement in about 30 seconds. It WAS actually on their website, but without that URL I wouldn’t have found it without spending my expensive time on it.  

Long story dull; my success in life depends strongly on information. I can’t do my job without external information, and in writing insightful papers, information is crucial.  I wouldn’t say that my life is affected by information too much or too little. I would say that we simply have a problem getting to it. Quantity isn’t important – quality is.

• If everyone has so many struggles finding information on the Internet, what can we do to make finding it easier?
• How can we get around “false drops?”
• Instead of being held hostage by information, how can we change the hall of mirrors back to a window to the world? 

In both the reading by Roger Fidler on mediamorphosis and the reading by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin about remediation, the authors present media as ever-evolving tools in society. This seems fairly obvious. What hadn’t occurred to me is that every new medium is a compression of the previous medium. Cellular phones today, for example, are often smaller than a credit card, whereas the very first of these devices were too large to put in your pocket. I wonder; how small can we really go with all this compression that we’ve already gone through?

“A medium is that which remediates … earlier technologies,” according to Bolter and Grusin. And yet we have media and technologies today that we didn’t have a century ago. If we keep growing exponentially as we have, what new technologies will we have a century, or even a decade, from now? In “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush in 1945 describes a device he named “Memex” that for its time seemed like a futuristic idea, and hard to grasp. But here we are now in the 21^st century with technologies that describe just that what seemed implausible. This device, Bush said, could be consulted with “exceeding speed and flexibility,” which is exactly what personal computers and the internet make possible. But not only that, it holds an incredible amount of memory as well, not to mention easy search functions to look up whatever we need more information on. But what will the Internet look like a century after Bush wrote his article?

I can see a very strong emphasis on blogs, or anything else that enables citizens to make their voice heard. It seems likely that more people will take on a journalist role, and maybe even go into danger zones to get a scoop they hope on getting and thereby making it possible for them to have their five minutes of fame. If new media is going to be further compressed, then more information will be at our fingertips. But, what impacts will all this have on our society?