Digital democracy?

The Public Sphere (Jurgen Habermas)

Habermas' piece was clearly written from a different time period, but I think there's certainly some topical relevance to a lot of what he has to say. Regulation, as was also argued by Lessig as a major concern in Code, clearly has become a force that needs to be considered in this society, and I think that there is some truth in the argument that newspapers (and other current-day media outlets) have largely become "weapons of party politics" (353) as Habermas argues, as we have become increasingly polarized politically, and people tend to identify with which outlets, of the few big/corporate-sponsored ones that remain, they see as being either left- or right-wing. I believe that this sentiment is hugely detrimental to the democratic process, as both sides begin to ignore solid arguments presented simply due to its source. This represents a "fake" participative democracy, to me, as we can all go online to read articles and vote on polls, but really all it eventually serves is the corporation getting the advertising dollars that come with drawing more visitors to a website.

Media and the Public Sphere (Nicholas Garnham)

Garnham's argument that "the space between civil society and the State" has certainly become increasingly small, if non-existent in many cases. He brings of many of the arguments that I had in my mind from reading the previous piece by Habermas, but I would be interested to see how Garnham would respond to the increasing use of discussion forums and comment forms on news websites, which seems to be in contradiction with his idea that both politicians and journalists have failed to "distinguish between two communicative functions within the public sphere: the collection and disemmination of information, and the provision of a forum for debate" (364). I think that this is certainly enabled (at least in theory) by many of the websites making up this new breed of news portal, but I think it is a sticky point whether these features truly do enable useful political discourse, given the prevalence of flame wars and ALL-CAPS SHOUTING MATCHES that tend to occur as a result of disagreement.

Structural Transformations (John Keane)

What I found most interesting from Keane's argument for the three public spheres -- the micro-public, meso-public and the macro-public -- was the idea that I feel that the Internet has truly forged a new middle ground between micro- and macro-public, while the meso-public has slowly faded into the background, as globalization becomes more and more commonplace via computer networking. It seems as though people from all over the world can come together for any random interest and find a message forum where they could find at least dozens, if not millions, of other people with a similar interest. They then can form smaller communities based on their more specific interests, in fact, creating a micro-public out of a seemingly clear macro-public. The lines -- particularly that between public and private -- have never been more blurred, and as Keane puts it: "Public spheres can and do develop within various realms of civil society..." (374).

The Internet as Public Sphere (Zizi Papacharissi)

I feel like Papa... stuck to fairly tame and ultimately difficult-to-argue-with theories on the affect of the Internet on the so-called "public sphere", and I do think she has some good points. It's obvious, especially on a campus like UW, that the Internet has allowed for a great increase in the ability to access information from a wide variety of research sources and information, and that globalization and capitalization both are helped greatly by the technology now available. Also, I agree with her that even if some of these fall short of the Utopian view of what a "public sphere" should comprise, that this is a concept that served as a fallacy of sorts to previous societies, as it never really was all that democratic.

Surveillance all around

Panopticism (Michel Foucault)

I think that this selection from Foucault's theory on the panopticon is quite possibly my favorite thing that we have read all semester. Although it was pretty bulky in places, it was still not too terrible to get through. I think that his view on the "delinquent" as being mostly a product of the same system that is attempting to monitor his activities (if I understood this point correctly), is a little bit short-sighted, however. Although I think this does relate back to the idea that many younger people in this society feel the need to "act out" just to draw attention to themselves, I don't really think this holds for the majority of adults -- we become socialized, rather, to stay within the boundaries of the law in order to get the good jobs and lead the "good lives", which shows that it is inevitably economic in nature.

I also do think, however, and maybe I'm kind of missing the point, that these sorts of surveillances are somewhat needed in many circles of lives. When implemented and used correctly, they have great potential to protect citizens, and many of the surveillance techniques used today are really more of a response to what the market wants than anything. Yes, credit cards, online shopping, bus passes, etc. increase the potential for us to be tracked and surveilled, if power is misused, I think that the majority of citizens enjoy its added convenience utility so much that they probably are somewhat apathetic to this issue -- it's kind of fun to just swipe a card and be on your way! This is the world we live in.

Managing the Informated Organization (Shoshana Zuboff)

Yes, technology has changed many things in our society... I don't think that this will come as a surprise to anyone. We've also discussed the loss of face-to-face social contact within the workplace as a serious issue as well as the overdependence on technological interfaces that are lofty and difficult to use, as it somewhat spins out of control and becomes ultimately useless, which was revealed by the plant manager from Cedar Bluff who mentioned the question "Is the technology right?" (325). This tends to be a basic question that I think gets missed much of the time when people are setting up new systems to manage business operations, as well as in many other settings today. It is a teleological fallacy to assume that whatever is "new" is truly "improved" -- Are we reaching a point where the cons are starting to outweigh the pros? It's difficult to say... but honestly, I don't think we're that far off from this happening.

New Directions in Theory (David Lyon)

I couldn't believe when this text started with a reference to "The Net". I have a very real affinity for this film, and when I knew we were looking at surveillance with these readings, I was just waiting for someone to bring it up.... Sandra Bullock in her finest hour, for sure. I would have to agree with Gary T. Marx's argument that we are heading toward the "maximum surveillance society" (328) and I think that much of Lyon is saying sounds really nice -- with a "return to the body", but ultimately, I think that in many ways, this is what people are asking for today, as I argued with the previous text. You can't blame business enterprises for responding to this market demand, and I'm not sure what good it truly does to only put the "bodies" into the role of the victim with this issue.

Dividing digitally for dummies

Data Deprivation (Herbert Schiller)

Schiller touches on a lot of interesting arguments in the segment of his research included in this reader, especially considering that it was written in 1996 and remains topical today. Schiller's statement that plans to commercialize the Internet "may be expected to be implemented in the time ahead" (271) is perhaps the greatest understatement of the entire book, but that aside, his concerns about the loss of true democracy and of pure, unsaturated information in our society thanks to the overreliance on corporate power. The idea of the "commercialization of activites once social" was the most interesting aspect of his argument to me, and made me picture the faceless figure dancing across the screen in Apple's iPod ads. Apple has captured the essence of a lot of what Schiller is talking about with how they have propagated the idea of self-expression and dancing to your own iTune with incredibly profitable results. They have made the iPod something that our generation has to have. As a result, Apple can gain control over what people listen to through their online music store, the sort of news they hear via podcasts, and to a large extent, the very lives we lead. It's scary, and is just one example of the power that corporations can control in the way their information is represented.

The Digital Divide (Pippa Norris)

As Norris describes in this chapter, I would have to say that the digital divide is very real and a serious issue that this administration is largely ignoring. I think that many of the ideas Norris discusses are very accurately described as "rosy scenarios"(278) that get so wrapped up in nostalgic ideals of reclaiming the democratic grandeur that we never truthfully possessed. As a result, they really don't actually apply to the world that we actually live in. With the human rights struggle, for example, how can anyone realistically describe how the use of cyberspace will end the racial violence occurring currently in Darfur? What about female genital mutilation in Egypt and Somalia? Or the seemingly endless struggles in the Middle East? NGOs face a strong wall of stubbornness with their attempts to enforce any international standard of human rights as these countries are unwilling to give up their national sovereignty. A "global platform" on this issue enables the production of a snazzy PHP site where all of the unenforceable "reports" can be uploaded, and little more. (Sorry, that got a little bit ranty, but human rights is another area of particular interest to me and over-simplified, Western "solutions" to very real human rights atrocities grate at me.)

Degradation of the Practical Arts (Christopher Lasch)

Lasch's argument is sounding very familiar now, compared to some of the previous writings we've read in this class. I think it is true that a trend in some industries has turned toward eliminating some of the "human limitations" as much as possible in order to ensure higher productivity. This has occurred as many industries have downsized to meet the pressures of increasing costs and a somewhat patchy economy. This certainly pushes the power/capital into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of "key" players. It is my hypothesis, however, that we are heading away from this ideology, as humanity will become increasingly valued by our society. I think many have come to realize that cyberspace truly does have some limitations, and that some experiences and encounters need to be kept face-to-face. As a result, perhaps us "information workers" will be able to find some decent jobs in the future, once people grow tired of spending 10+ hours a day sitting behind a computer.

Zook (Part 2)

In concluding his work, Zook goes deeper into the dot-com boom, examining how venture capital played a pivotal role in funding the influx of start-ups that infiltrated the market in the late '90s. He points out that, instead of playing the societally-assigned role of "technological gatekeepers" as they had been for years before, they instead went madly searching about for new investments, without much thought given to the business plans and details behind the start-ups. As Zook puts it, the venture capitalists "descended into a rout of chasing companies to invest" (122).

In finishing up the text, I was glad to see that Zook did acknowledge that vision in hindsight is almost always 20/20, and that it's easy for us to say that this whole boom was based on squandering funds and hasty decisions. As Zook argues, however, many WERE convinced that the Internet would change everything for any number of industries. I don't think that the dot-com boom was really that different than any other market oversaturation that has occurred in other, offline contexts. As Zook describes it, the boom was "just another phase of the ongoing creative destruction of innovation" (150), particularly in the Bay area. This is simply the nature of capitalism -- When there is a new way of doing things, everyone jumps on it, but only those that are truly the best equipped for the long-haul (such as Yahoo, Google and Amazon) will be able to see the market through its boom and inevitable decline. In this way, the Internet marketplace isn't really that different from any other industry, and I don't think that anyone is to blame for the eventual downturn.

That said, I think that we have grown overly skeptical at this point with e-commerce ventures, as a result of the dot-com bust. The future isn't quite as bleak as Zook makes it out to be... I feel there is still a mini-boom of sorts to follow. Cyberspace does offer a lot of potential for changing the way that we do things, and I think it is only a matter of time before some of these activities become less localized in the Silicon Valleys of the world. It takes time for this technology to filter down through the social hierarchies, and as it continually grows more, there will be many opportunities to earn large amounts of revenue that we can't even envision right now.

Zook Suit Riot! (Part 1)

I must admit that I was a bit biased coming into this course about the concentration of Internet enterprises in larger metropolitan areas, such as Silicon Valley. I have always ate up the highly romantic, American dreamy notion that any Joe Blow can go out and start a highly successful website from the boonies, without needing to move to San Francisco to do it. Zook's argument seems pretty plausible to me to this point, however.

It is interesting to me how he views venture capitalists as "technological gatekeepers" (59) when it comes to start-up Internet ventures, and this is fascinating to realize that the gatekeepers of information and products for society as a whole are, in fact, subservient to gatekeeping themselves. This presents some of the struggles presented in "Digitizing the News" by Mr. Pablo, as an idea being a creative success was far from always the same as being a commercial success. It's almost as though the venture capitalists have been stuck playing Double Jeopardy with the dot-com boom, as there is at once a pressure to be the first on the bandwagon, as well as a need to research companies and know what one is getting into.

I do think that, as technology continues to evolve, we will find more and more ways for the so-called tacit knowledge to be transferred effectively from firms/individuals that are not located geographically near each other, however. We have seen the trend come with multi-national firms encompassing ever more broad expanses of land across different continents, and yet they have managed to maintain integrated marketing communications, procedures, and standards even within bounds of differing cultures. Yes, we do largely "learn through interaction" (51), but this interaction is going to only continue to become more possible as technology advances beyond geographical restraints.

Sociology, cyberbots, and the three jobs of the future!

Mobile Sociology (John Urry)

As a student who has often contemplated a Sociology double major here at UW, I was very interested/slightly troubled in seeing an alternative view of the “society-centric” model of sociology with Urry’s argument for a mobile sociology. That was a nice way to put it – it actually really pissed me off. As a whole, what troubled me the most with this selection was how Urry’s idea of mobile sociology seems focused not on globalization, but rather on a Westernization of cultural practices in lands that far different from the Americas. I’m sorry, Mr. Urry, that some of these practices have proven to be inconvenient for your view of how the world should run, but missing in this argument is the idea of celebrating diversity.

Additionally, I would guess that he is a heterosexual, upper- to middle-class white man, because from that standpoint, it is much easier to say things like “sociology has a tendency to treat what is ‘outside’ the society as an unexamined environment” (193) and that we need to leave the “relatively safe boundaries of bounded societies” (200). Sociologists don’t typically examine what is “outside” the society, because there really is nothing that exists in such a way. Our entire being from the moment we were born has been socialized and is the product of centuries of social practices – I agree with Urry when he says that these are not necessarily set in stone, but it is extremely difficult for change to occur quickly. Additionally, I would love to hear his explanation of how bounded societies’ oppression of racial, sexual, or religious minorities (in examples such the Darfur struggle, the Stonewall riot, or the Holocaust, to name a few) were “relatively safe.” Pffffff.

The Three Jobs of the Future (Robert Reich)

It was fairly clear from the onset that this was an older text, but it turned out being from 1992, when I really thought it could have been about ten years older. With statements like “we are increasingly in different, smaller, boats” (205). Americans’ economic independence is not a new concept at all, I would argue – it doesn’t matter how wonderful the economy is doing, there will probably still be some people without a bed to sleep in at night, and that has been the case for some time.

As for Reich’s definition of the “three jobs of the future”, it all seemed fairly straightforward, although it seems like he had some sort of thing against symbolic analysts/academics, which is somewhat ironic to me because this is his own profession. He points out how repetitive and meaningless what some of these analysts do, and seems to think that most are somewhat overrated in that they are not true “professionals.” I’m not sure if he was using this example to further his example about the growing challenges facing the job market with the global economy, but it seemed a little

Economic Structure of Knowledge Societies (Nico Stehr)

Stehr’s piece was almost like a continuation of Reich’s, written two years later, emphasizing the increasing symbolism behind jobs in the knowledge society. I’m not sure I totally buy a lot of his analyst about how ground-breaking some of the changes being seen truly are, and in all honesty, this reading was the least engaging of the four for me to read this week, so it was difficult to stay totally focused on the point he was making. One thing that did stand out to me was his thought that there would be a decline in the overall quantity of jobs with the knowledge society, and I’m curious to know what the statistics today say about this – I’m not so sure it’s fully come to be.

Forms of Technological Embodiment (Anne Balsamo)

Balsamo had me at the beginning, and then the cyberbots came up and I was totally lost. I think that it is completely true that technology is slowly infiltrating our bodies and our true being in the same way that it is greatly influencing the way we go about our every day lives, but some of the exact terminologies that she used seemed extremely abstract and a little bit vague. As a pseudo-sociologist, I enjoyed the mention of the marked body, and this has always been a concept that was very interesting to me. Our bodies are increasingly technologically determined and this will only become more of the case in the future.

Digitizing the News

As I used to edit a completely obscure, now-defunct webzine, I really enjoyed this text and identified with a lot of the issues discussed in various ways throughout the work. I did feel that it was difficult to really grasp onto much of his argument as something that one could counter or argue against, so I'll keep this post limited to some general comments..

First of all, I feel that the 'distributed contribution' that Pablo discusses in relation to the New Jersey Community Connection truly is a sign of the direction where online journalism is going, as it moves further and further from newspaper editors simply copy/pasting their stories from print into Front Page and hitting 'Publish'. The popularity of blogging is just one example of this sort of concept, and I think that budget cuts in newsrooms will also make it easier for the production to shift more into the hands of the users.. The tools used to accomplish this and allow for the balance between producer and user will need to be tinkered with, but I think it's only a matter of time before this concept becomes even more "mainstream".

To a certain extent, I feel that the vicarious experience emphasized with the Times' Virtual Voyager is a concept on the way out. People are increasingly using the Internet to take care of everyday tasks and errands that they would have previously needed to leave the house for (for shopping, banking, etc.), or pick up a newspaper for, and I think that being simply 'entertained' by things on the 'net is becoming less prevalent. Some of the technology with computers has lost its novelty, and projects like the Virtual Voyager were definitely more of a reflection of the newness of a lot of these features more than anything.

With the first case study, I question Pablo's idea of what exactly a 'new journalist' needs to know how to do. Although I do realize that it is growingly important for journalism schools to instruct students on new software and technological updates, their primary role as reporters has not changed, and I feel like Pablo (and other scholars) might be expecting a bit much out of journalists that are still being taught mostly under the pyramid scheme-centered old-school of journalism. I do think that we are in a time of transition with this concept of the "new journalist" (as seen with some of the reluctance writers faced with reading feedback from readers), but that this is something that will take quite a bit of time before the shift is comfortably made.

Meanwhile, I feel that design for e-news ventures will, and probably should, remain for the most part within the "design for lowest common denominator" tenet Pablo bemoans (91). This reflects my view of websites as needing to be focused toward utility rather than razzle-dazzle, in order to be useable for the largest majority of readers possible, but I'm also likely biased because I was raised in a 28.8K modem household throughout high school, so I developed a strong dislike of graphic-heavy and slow-loading pages.