Final Blog Post

Apparently, Professor Winokur has told us we don't have a blog post due this week. He wants us to focus more on the final exam next week, but I just briefly wanted to close out this blog formally.

I promised I'd give some thoughts on the book Neuromancer, though. I will say as much as I liked reading this book, I couldn't read it without mentally comparing it to and mentally framing it in the context of The Matrix as I'm more familiar with it and they both carry very similar themes. In fact, it almost seems like the Wachowski Bros. just rewrote Neuromancer and then changed the names and the ending for The Matrix.

However, both authors do deserve some credit for their work. Seeing as Nueormancer was really a seminal work that kicked off the cyberpunk genre, the Matrix really couldn't exist without them (and yes, I do realize that almost accusing the Wachowskis of plagiarism was NOT a good segue into that statement).

I do have to credit the Wachowskis for creating the work that holds up better of the two. The Matrix was released in 1999 and Neuromancer was published in 1984. By 1999, such progress was made in terms of personal computers and the internet becoming household items that The Matrix seems more believable and realistic as a commentary on the current state of technology and where it will lead. However, as we touched on in the second to final lecture, Gibson did successfully predict today's youth "hookup" culture with the surprisingly tasteful sex scene between Case and Molly he included. I don't even think we need to get into how sexting and snapchats exacerbated that.

Well, I'd like to close out this blog by saying it's been fun and this class has given me some of the best discussion I've ever been a part of. I hope this blog in particular has been as fun for you to read as it has been for me to write.

Inside Art, Media and Materiality

This week's blog post is in response to the Hayles reading Material Metaphors as well as Manovich's article Avant-Garde as Software.

In regards to the readings themselves, I found that as a whole they supplemented each other better than they did this afternoon's lecture in class (which itself felt like a bit of a retread of the lectures early on about authorship in certain spots).

The Manovich reading had some relation to our class discussion, but overall it felt a little too vague in spots. Manovich is a great writer and he explained his concepts in regards to software and media very thoroughly, but he should've spent a little more time on the art history lesson he tried to introduce at the beginning. He should've better explained how that tied into his article.

The Hayles reading was substantially better due to its relative brevity and scope. Hayles did seem to branch out too much in the middle and try to introduce several new points of discussion at once, but he tired it all back together nicely at the end by defining his concept of "materiality".

I leave you with my final takeaway from Monday's very interesting and engaging class lecture on the creation of art. Everyone has their own different idea of what constitutes art. Art can be both in the eye of the beholder and in the intent of the creator. The creator can create something they believe to be a work of art which could be panned by some and praised by others. The beholder can in return trash something or hail it as a great work of art.

Most works of art are usually trying to express some message or point of view on life. A creator of some work could have their intended message either widely misinterpreted or completely ignored by the general public. It is up to the beholder to gleam the creators intent or see an alternate form of expression.

That's all for now. Next week, will be my last blog post for this class. I will be blogging in response to the science fiction novel Neuromancer which I plan to start reading Wednesday morning at work. See you then!

Inside The Matrix

This week's blog post is merely in response to our class viewing of the 1999 sci-fi thriller The Matrix last Thursday as well as this Booker article on the film.

I believe this is the third time I've seen The Matrix. I remember my dad renting it from Blockbuster when it first came out (remember those?) and the second time was when we were learning about "the hero's journey" in my ninth grade English class. It's been so long since I've seen the film that I there were some parts from Thursday's screening that I didn't even remember that well.

Still, it is quite a captivating and dynamic effort from the Wachowksi brothers that still seems to hold up better than both it's released-within-six-months-of-each-other 2003 sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. The Booker reading didn't quite add to my takeaway from the film, but it did raise an interesting point on pages 258-59 about how the film industry is seemingly hell bent on exploiting the creativity of filmmakers and distorting our reality only for their personal gain and profits. Otherwise, the only real purpose it served was to point out what elements of other works The Matrix had "borrowed" from.

In class these past two weeks, we have already discussed The Matrix and its relationship to Plato's Cave, Baurilliard and the Simulacrum adnauseum. Rather than retread along those points, I'd like to reiterate what my real "takeaway" from The Matrix was as I had previously mentioned. I took it was a chilling warning of things to come in regards to our own technological advancements.

In class, we mentioned how the The Wachowski brothers had obviously meant the film to be some kind of rant against modern technology and how the filmmakers chose to include shots of phones from the 20s and 30s as well as 50s TV sets (and what looked to me like 80s era computers) in a 90s movie. I thought that choice was deliberately made to supplement the film's message and illustrate how far we have come technologically to that point in time. The Wachowski brothers wanted to show us the then current state of technology so they could bring it to it's logical conclusion by showing scenes of people addressed as "coppertops" wired into an alternate technological reality while the real physical world around them has turned into a wasteland.
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All this time, characters are talking about how this is the "real world" and what we previously experienced as real was just an illusion meant to hide all of this from us. The message of The Matrix may carry more relevance in 2013 than it truly did in 1999. With the rise of both the smartphone industry and social networking platforms as ever advancing billion dollar commodities, people are now carrying around a technology that is consuming them every where they go and easily allowing them to enter into new worlds where their real or true identity carries substantially less meaning. It hasn't quite gotten to the point where we are so wired into this technology that we've adopted it as our one true reality, making us unaware that we are really just living in a vast wasteland (at least not in the most literal sense yet) but I have a feeling that this could be the not too distant future.

I think I'll stop here as I intended to make this blog post shorter and the fact that I have a film paper to write for media ethics right now. See you next week!

Inside Play and Second Life

Before I begin, I'd just like to point out that last week's blog referenced an article that was actually supposed to have been read for this week instead of the week before. That article was LaFarge's Winside Out. To make up for this glaring oversight, I will use this week's blog entry to respond to the two readings I missed from last week which are Julian Dibbel's A Rape In Cyberspace and the Boellstorf excerpt The Subject and Scope of this Inquiry. I will also discuss an article meant to be read this week and that is Huizinga's Nature and Significance of Play.

Huizinga's article was very well written. The author really explained and established the concept of "play" well and provided some well chosen and vivid examples. Dibbel's piece was quite provocative, obviously, but it was an interesting personal narrative on MUDs and MMORPGs as well. I took it as a warning of things to come and as a look at how the anonymity of cyberspace and its possibility of a brand new identity for any user can seriously take its toll on the human psyche. Boellstorf's piece took on essentially the same subject matter, but it was obviously much less dark and surreal. Boellstorf took a more genuine almost journalistic approach to the effects of Second Life, essentially telling it like it is.

Again, rather than raise a whole new point from these readings I'd like to reiterate a point I made in the lecture. Different cultures are willing to except different things as real to different degrees. One thing all cultures can agree on is that they are willing to except anything, any character or creation, as real if they see that it represents something very much real or something they believe in. It could be a product being advertised or simply an abstract concept, as long as people see something real behind something they believe in, they will accept it as real.

I would've spent more time on this entry if I wasn't so incredibly busy this week. See you next week!

Inside Virtual Worlds

This week's blog post is in response to both the excerpt Simulacra and Simulations from Jean Baurillard's Selected Writings as well as Antionette Lafarge's piece Winside Out: An Introduction to the Convergence of Computers, Games and Art.

Despite its relative brevity at only five pages (in print anyway) the Baurillard reading was plagued by applying too many examples to its premise. As I was reading this, I felt the author applied roughly a baker's dozen  examples to his rather lofty concept.

It seemed that they all attempted to make their own points that were wildly different from each other and that there were so many of them that they ran a serious risk of contradicting one another instead of all tying back to the central theme of the article which in this case was to explain the concept of the "simulacrum". Baurillard's writing should've done a better job of getting in, unpacking its central premise, applying two or three simple and relevant examples to it and getting out.

However, the article does make more sense when read with Lafarges' piece on video games as it is a good companion concept to simulation. Lafarge does a considerably better job with her writing style at first. She starts off great drawing lots of relevant parallels between life, art and games and is slightly better at engaging the reader and keeping focused than Baurillard.

However, Lafarge quickly loses steam at the end because she appears to be explaining modern video game concepts that appear to be common knowledge to the target audience for this article. If she were trying to broaden her audience by including a "glossary" of terms at the end, this would be the wrong way to go about doing that.

Still, going back to Baurillard, his reading is based around a concept that it quite relevant to digital technology in this day and age. I'd like to explore this concept just based on the following quote from Ecclesiastes he opened his article with.

"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

The simulacrum is true."

Applying this statement to the way we interact, online this could mean that no matter how many avatars or alternate identities we hide behind online to try and keep "anonymous", our real selves can never be concealed. Other online participants who we react with will see right through them immediately. While our online activities may be referred to as "simulations", our online identities are not necessarily the "simulacrum." Our real life identities are the "simulacrum" because "the simulacrum is always true".

That's it for this week. I have other homework to finish. Bye.

Inside Archiving and Memory (and ANOTHER new blog?!?)

This week's blog post is in response to both Mike Featherstone's article Theory, Culture and Society and David Carr's semi-provocatively titled piece Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I really liked reading both of these articles. They were both very thorough and yet succinct at the same time, although Carr's piece felt like it may have left some loose ends untied.

Speaking of Carr's article, I see where he's coming from with his argument that the internet is in some way tinkering with our brains and our memories. However, I view this phenomenon in a different way that I don't believe he really touched on.

The internet isn't destroying our brains or our memories as much as it is just changing how we retain information as well as what we are more likely to retain.

The human brain seems to be more likely to remember information that  it took a lot of effort to track down (i.e. spending hours in a library combing through stacks and poring over a book). With the advent of Google and the rest of the internet's database of information, the entire concept of "tracking down" information has become pretty much obsolete.

We take the internet for granted in the assumption that it will always be there with us. Knowing a vast wealth of information is always going to be available at our very fingertips, we are less inclined to remember anything knowing that we can always easily look it up in the exact same spot in cyberspace later on with little to no effort on our part whatsoever. Carr kind of glossed over this in favor of writing about how the internet is shortening everyone's attention spans this way.

That's is for this week. I won't have a blog post next week because I don't have one due over the week of spring break. I leave you with a link to a brand new blog that I am a coauthor of with classmate Taylor Reed. This is for my big semester project in my Digital Journalism class. This makes five blogs that I now am expected to maintain. So long!

Inside Authorship

This week's blog post is in response to three articles. They are The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, Models of Authorship in New Media by Manovich and Michel Foucalt's piece on the function of the author.

They were all very short HTML based pieces (which I appreciate at this time of year) but they were very straight forward and got their points across wonderfully (even if Manovich's writing felt a little unfocused).

Barthes' piece was rather unusual for it's length. I felt like I was reading the CliffNotes for a much larger piece of literature I was supposed to have read all the way through for this class, but since that wasn't the case here, I appreciate the brevity of this article.

Still, Barthes and Foucault had the most interesting takes on this subject. The concept of "authorship" is something fresh and clever to me in this context as I haven't read or heard of it being bought up in a digital media context until today.

It is a very relevant and important topic for this class and I'm glad it was bought up. While Barthes and Foucault's articles were written quite some time ago, they can be applied to today's world much more easily. Barthes and Foucault viewed authorship mostly as a deep philosophical concept and applied it to the medium of books and literature. This can be better applied to the internet and social media. Manovich briefly touched on this, but didn't quite get there as he was more interested in talking about how it applied to writing software.

Both articles claim that some insight into the author's identity is key to deciphering their text so, in essence, if one were to "remove" the author form said text then figuring out its meaning would be virtually impossible. It is true that whatever the medium you write in, your writing stays with you forever. At the same time, it belongs to the public and whatever you write will be associated with your identity forever not just as an author but as a human being. Your writing both consciously and subconsciously reflects who you are inside.

This especially holds true for the the internet and especially social media. You can remain as anonymous as you want to online, but what you write is attached to an identity and said identity is forever bound to you as a person. Social media is different because your putting your real identity there and whatever you write and produce is associated with you personally and will stay with you forever as the internet becomes less tangible and more consuming of our lives and memories. Books are one thing, they are in print which is a tangible medium. Still, the stories within become part of our culture and consciousness. The internet is also different because if you're not constructing a work of fiction, then you must be consciously posting what you yourself are doing or thinking at any given moment in real time.

I guess what I'm really trying to say here is no matter where you're writing, be careful and responsible of what you write because you don't know how wide your audience reach could get.

That's it for this week. For now, I leave you with this link to my new website where I've made some major design changes. See you next week!

Inside the Digital Divide, Cyberqueers and Social Networking

This weeks' blog is in response to the readings Social Network Sites Definition, History and Scholarship by Dana M. Boyd, Cyberqueer by Nina Wakeford and The Digital Divide in a Global Perspective by Castells.

They were all very informative and fact based reads, however flawed they might have been. As an avid Facebook and Twitter user myself, the article on social networks wasn't terribly revelatory to me, but I did like learning how early on social networking had gotten started and how narrowed in focus it was in the late '90s/early 2000s. I really learned more about the origins of social networking than I expected.

The Digital Divide pieces, however, was all over the place and had little to no real focus whatsoever. I felt like I couldn't pick up anything worthwhile from it. The Cyberqueer article was interesting as it offered a unique perspective on how identities (particularly sexual orientation) play out online. It didn't really land with me on a personal level or anything, but it was certainly something to think about and it could apply to all of us in ways we aren't even aware of.

This social networking article did actually raise an interesting point about how we may or may not define the concept of "friendship" differently in the 21st century as connections get more and more impersonal. Sure, they are "connections" to say the least, but are they really "friends" if we've never met these people in real life? They could be if we ever do get a chance to meet them. It all depends on how one uses networks social via social networks (for lack of a better phrasing). Does one use such platforms to stay in touch with current real life friends or to meet new people alter on in real life? Does one use it for social friendships or for business contacts? It's hard to always know.

I think I will just leave it there for now. I didn't plan to spend much time on this week's entry as I'm already getting sick and I have a midterm on Thursday to study for. I will just end by saying that you can expect some new changes at my website for a Digital Journalism project by the end of the week. This is another thing that should be taking up some of my time this week, so goodnight!

No Blog Post This Week

There will be no new blog post this week because Professor Mark Winokur wants us to use the time we would normally spend writing one to alternatively prepare and study for this weeks midterm exam.

For class this week, we just read Nakamura's article Digitizing Race. While it proved to be an insightful read and made for a lively presentation, I really have nothing else to add on it as it was pretty straight forward. Plus, because of the midterm he said don't worry about writing anything on the article since we don't have a blog due this week.

Next week, I will return with another traditionally full length entry on topics such as digital communities and identities as well as social networking. I would tell whoever is reading this to wish me luck, but I doubt I will need it!

Inside Computing and the Uncanny Valley

This week's blog post is in response to Turing's article Computing Machinery and Inelligence and Mori's article on The Uncanny Valley.

Both these articles are fairly short reads, which is great for me this week because I had to do a lot more reading to finish a literature review for a big group research paper in another class. For its length, Turig's piece seemed quite densely packed with information. Still, Turig does a fine job giving the reader some insight into the process of digital computing as a mindless machine views it even if the examples he used seemed a little bit far fetched.

For two pages, Mori's piece also turned out to be an engaging and fascinating read. Now, the "uncanny valley" is a concept which I already have some vague passing familiarity with as I've read several CRACKED.com articles on the subject already. However, this piece does raise one interesting question for me. Are we still dipping into "the uncanny valley" if we are using it to help people?

According to my own completely subjective view of  where "the uncanny valley" begins, we don't really get into it until we stop using things like robotics and prosthetics to help others live more fulfilling and empowering lives and until we use them to create a full fledged humanoid form.

For instance, creating prosthetic robotic limbs for a war veteran doesn't quite bring us into the "uncanny valley" to me. That would just be an arm or a leg and not a full human figure. Also, the vet would truly appreciate this as it would allow him to continue his life as he once knew it with renewed vigor and serves as an inspiration of others, I would imagine. However, building a fully functional human robot just because you can or just to see how close you can get it to the true human form or true human companionship...now, THAT hurtles us straight on head first into the valley if you ask me.

I leave you now with this CRACKED piece explaining the whole concept of the "monkeysphere" which I had bought up in class in case you would like to learn more about it. Have a great week and I hope you enjoyed reading this post just as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Inside My New Website and Old Blog

In my Digital Journalism class with  Professor Stevens, he recently had us doing exercise in class writing HTML code so we could create our own website for his class. Even though this assignment isn't due for another week, I've already finished mine. Also, I found my old blog that I had to do for an assignment in my Contemporary Mass Media class two years ago. I may start updating this again, but I am definitely adding a link to this on the site! See you next Tuesday with a new Info Tech post!

Inside The Internet's History and Cyber Identities

This blog post is in response to the O'Regan article The Internet Revolution as well as Bell's article Identities In Cyberculture. Obviously, these articles have very little to do with each other, but they proved to be fascinating reads nonetheless.

Most of Regan's article I was already familiar with from doing background research for my groups presentation on the history of the internet tomorrow (as well as a lecture from my Digital Journalism class) but I enjoyed reading it anyway.

However, one thing this article mentioned was that the development of the internet could be traced all the way back to the 1940s when scientist Vanevar Bush began work on an automated network to solve differential equations for the Us Navy. This is an intriguing development, but it seems like something that isn't quite relevant enough to be included in our presentation. The 1960s DARPA/ARPANET era turned up several times in our research but this is the first I've read the name Vanevar Bush in reading about the development of the internet.

Other than that, this piece really laid out a nice timeline of the history of the internet in a way that mirrors it's developments as I remember reading and hearing about them in various news media when they happened. It was really relevant to me and I liked that.

Bell's piece was also intriguing in its own way. However, I think it would've made a better supplemental read to the previous week when we were learning of the concept of the panopticon. I say this because Bell's reading dealt mostly with identities people assume online and it reminded me of my comments during the panopticon lecture (as well as from last week's blog entry) about how each of us constructs our own panopticon online in that we each allow all of humanity a certain amount of surveillance in our lives and they in turn can comment on what we are doing. This could influence people to alter how they present themselves online as well.

Rather than raising an entirely new point form this week's readings, I would like to direct your attention to another reading from my Digital Journalism class that I think you might find to be quite interesting. This is a piece written by Robert Capps or Wired magazine. It was published about two and a half years ago and is entitled The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine. It is about how we as Americans have been slowly sacrificing quality and clarity in our digital media for cheap convenience. As long as we can take pictures, listen to music and upload video to the internet in real time, the low quality and relative simplicity of it all is merely "good enough" for us. I highly recommend reading this.

Well, since I have nothing else this week, I will simply conclude by saying that I hope you enjoy my presentation tomorrow...or hope you did previously enjoy it...just regardless of when you happen to be reading this I hope you thought my presentation was great!

Inside Digital Panopticism

This week's blog post is in response to Michel Foucault's piece on Panopticism as well as a social capital blog entry concerning social media and the "Arab Spring". Both pieces were very interesting and thorough even if Foucault's lost some focus toward the end with the discussion of Julius Ceaser. I particularly liked the Arab spring piece as it was an expert examination on the role of government in regulating the internet. Of course, every country has a different take on the subject but it's good to read about a foreign country where the internet is a little bit more controlled and restricted than here in the US. It's even better to read about how their citizens are actively trying to change it. I had previously done some research on the "Arab spring" when it was actually in the news a couple of years ago and incorporated it into my application essay for the old journalism school here at CU. Although they said it the topicality of it at the time made it a really strong essay, I didn't get in until they completely changed the SJMC and reopened it just last year. Even though I would say I'm somewhat familiar with the subject of the Arab Spring, this blog post uncovered some facts I previously hadn't seen.

Getting back to Foucault's "panopticism", I would say it's an interesting metaphorical concept to apply to 21st century life. It still holds up and is still relevant to all of us, however I think today's lecture in class did a better job of getting the point across and defining the concept to me. It had relevant examples to student life and was more engaging than a straight dry reading of the definitions. The lecture made the concept seem more applicable to all of us, which is important because it certainly is more and more relevant to life in this digital age than ever.

Rather than raise an entirely new point based off these readings, I would like to restate a point I made in class earlier today and elaborate on it further. The concept of "panopticism" is roughly defined as being monitored under surveillance of some governing body forcing one to obey their set of rules or face some form of reprimanding. This concept can be seen in action anywhere from prisons to workplaces to classrooms to even home life and even on the internet. However, the internet is where it gets a little bit tricky.

Everywhere else, the surveillance and governing bodies have already been put in place for you (teachers, parents, employers, wardens, etc.) and so has the amount of surveillance access they might have over you. For example, you're only under a teacher's surveillance when you attend their class, but you can't be under your parent's surveillance during this time because you're not at home. When you're at home, your teachers don't have surveillance over you as you're not in their class and they don't live with you at home. If you're in prison, the wardens and the guards most likely have surveillance access to you at all hours as long as you're there. On the internet, virtually anybody on earth has some surveillance access to you at any given time. This could be close friends of your with whom you interact with in real life or complete strangers from all around the globe depending on the setting and context. However, you ARE completely in control of how much surveillance access others have over you in this case.

Social media gives those one loosely defines as "friends" surveillance access to what you're doing and where you might be doing it at any given moment of the day. Still, you have the ability to post as many or as few social media updates as you may see fit. Therefore, you control how much surveillance your closest friends have into your daily life. One who goes on Twitter every week to post Instargam photos of all their meals, give their location on FourSquare about 27 times in a day and then go on Facebook and post roughly 400 photos from their weekend get together provides people more surveillance than one who just goes to their social media outlets only when they have something new or witty or important to share. Video services ara whole other story entirely. A person who is running a 24 hour webcam into their own apartment is obviously giving us more surveillance than someone who uploads videos of themselves to YouTube every so often as YouTube clips may be moment frozen in a specific time frame, but anyone can still see them anywhere and gain some insight into your life from them.

Also, the definition of "punishment" is a bit looser online than in other forms of panopticism. Your online friends can offer their own comments on whatever you may post whether they praise you, judge you, shame you or even attempt to offer some of their own constructive criticism. However, they have no real power to punish you merely via social networking portals. Still, you can take their words to heart or you can completely ignore them. However, those who run whatever site you're on still have some power to delete your content or ban you from ever using their site again entirely. In that case, it would still be partly other's responsibility to report you if they find you offensive to their own sensibilities and it would partly be on you to obey the rules and guidelines and codes of behavior of said site so that you don't post anything that might get you reported or kicked out.

Everyone has a different amount of surveillance into their lives that they are willing to give others total access to. In this era where social networking is all the rage, everyone is building their own digital panopticon to fit their own needs and desires. This may be the first and only era in human history where such a feat could be possible, albeit in a less tangible medium. What do you think?

Inside Old and New Medias

This week's blog post is in response to Manovich's article What Is New Media? as well as excerpts from Winston's book Media Technology and Society A History From The Telegraph to the Internet.

I have to say they were very thorough histories of all of our modern technologies and they were fascinating reads but I they seem a little dates to me. They read as if they were written at some point during the mid to late 1990s or early 2000s and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they were.

These articles (and Manovich's piece in particular which is my main basis for commentary here) have a particularly interesting point of view regarding technology. For instance, Manovich's piece is meant to determine how we distinguish between "old media" and "new media" but looks at the issue from a very functional and technical perspective. Manovich essentially describes how technology has advanced in a way we interact with the technology itself. However, when most people in early 2013 are asked what distinguishes "old media" and "new media" they think about how we use it as a channel to interact with other people and less about how the technology itself functions in order to do so.

If Manovich had written his article today, his distinction between "old media" and "new media" would no doubt have to be modified to discuss how the flow of information and content is controlled. "Old media" such as print, radio, television and land line telephones were little more than one way conduits of information that we took in very passively and didn't use to contact others. "New media" today such as mobile devices (smartphones, tablets), social networking platforms (Twitter, Facebook) and other corners of the internet such as YouTube, message boards and even blogging sites just like this one (basically, for better or worse, anything with a comments section) encourage much more active consumption.

Nowadays, anyone can post pretty much whatever content they may want anywhere on the internet in any medium and anyone else who sees it can post a response or begin some forms of discussion. Thanks to the internet and its increasing accessibility and ease of use over the past few years, media control has been gradually shifting from the big corporations and media conglomerations to average everyday people like you and me. These articles missed out on that as they seem to have been written in a time where it wasn't really happening yet (unless I'm mistaken).

Inside Hacking and Hacktivism

This blog post is in response to the articles The Hacker Work Ethic by Hinamen and What Is Hacktivism 2.0? from metac0m.

To first offer my critique of what I just read, I would say that both articles start out really strong, but gradually lose their focus by the end. The metac0m article starts out really strong with providing several definitions of the term "hacktivism" as well as its basic underlying ideals and principles, but starts to run out of steam when it cites actual cases of hacktivism occurring on websites in the early years of mainstream internet prominence (which the article classifies as the period between 1997-2000). This portion of the article jumped back and forth from case to case without providing any real insight into their significance in history or elaborating more on some necessary details of how they pulled off such acts.

As for the Hinamen chapter, it came off a s just a little too ambitious for its own good. Hinamen did a fine job of reiterating the concepts and beliefs held by hacking enthusiasts, but when it starts going into events form the history of Western Civilization such as the histories of Christianity and the Protestant Reformation, the reader starts to wonder how this is relevant to hacking until they read the conclusion. The conclusion did a serviceable job of tying the whole article together, but it would've served the article better had the author went back to how his ideas relate to hacktivism as he mentioned something from history.

Now, for my commentary on the idea of hacktivism. I believe the idea has some great potential, but we just haven't seen it applied in a meaningful way in real life yet. The metac0m article bought up some instances of hacktivism, but those were examples that didn't really change a whole lot in the long run and ultimately seem forgettable in retrospect.

Hacktivists have some admirable tenements in that they believe information should be easily accessible to all who wish to see it and that they hate censorship (which in itself is kind of an ambiguous phrasing). It would really be something if they could get into the government records of a country like China which is known for actively trying to censor information from its citizens particularly on the internet. and made such information more easily accessible. Anyone who was following world news closely around two years ago has seen what kind of effects mere social media has had in orchestrating "the Arab Spring". I believe hacktivists can acheive something similar and that it would be a better use of all their time and effort than targetting online shopping websites.

Inside Future Posts

Those of you actually reading this blog should expect a new post every week by around Tuesday night or Wednesday morning as they are due by the start of Wednesday's class every week or so I've been told.
Also, I just decided to start a new third blog just for fun that's not for any class. There's no real point to this post other than an excuse for me to try out the new Blogger Android app I got for my phone. Anyway, see you Wednesday!

Inside Expectations and Uncertainties

One of my expectations is that this class will give us the tolls to take advantage of today's social media in a way that will be beneficial to our futures. After all, social media is the next hot commodity and this class is to fulfill a requirement in some fields of study. Countless people have been insightful and fortunate enough to use it to make a semi-successful name for themselves, integrate it seamlessly within their own careers or just put themselves out there more easily. I hope this class gives us all that same potential. As a Media Studies major in the J-School, I am curious to see how the TAM certificate can integrate with my own career path.

One of my uncertainties is exactly how much of this class will have to do with technology and how much it will have to do with communication. Maybe communication is a cornerstone to social media and digital technology, but it's still an entirely different field of study from this class. I know it's only the second day of class, but the introduction to this site and this blog assignment has been the only relevant technology discussion so far. I'm sure that will change immediately in the coming days.

Another expectation of mine is that this class will also be a chance for our generation to hone our writing skills. In terms of social media, long form blogs like this one are really the last bastion of actual semi formal writing skills that are still necessary not only in college and academia, but also in most workplaces. Blogs are really good for the texting generation to brush up on the essentials of the English language even in college.

Another uncertainty is that I may not be able to my time wisely enough between this and all the other classes I am taking this semester. This is the second blog I have to maintain for this class. I have a lot of reading to get done in my Media Studies class here soon. I also have to present a paper abstract in this class by next week. MY new work schedule at Norlin isn't all that conducive to studying during my shifts. This first week has just felt packed so far but I guess that's all on me, right? This being my senior year, I guess that's to be expected.

Other than that, I am excited to be taking this class.

Inaugural Post

Welcome to Dissecting Information Technology with me, Casey Killingsworth. The main purpose of this blog is, much like my Digital Journalism blog, to post assignments for ATLS 2000-002 class (Meaning of Info. Tech) at CU Boulder. There's not much else to say here except that later on today I will be posting my first assignment response about my expectations and uncertainties regarding this class as soon as I have a little more time to put some actual thought into it first. Stay tuned!