SOCS 300 – Power to the people to force changes in promise, tools and bargain

We all understand that with mutual interest in the promise, tools, and bargain of a group, people normally come together and actively participate in them. Groups without a sufficiently enough common interest tends to fall apart. But what happens when  people begin with strong interest in a particular cause and then falls off the edge because they are no longer within the demographical Venn diagram of the promise?

Case in point, for the Student Art Sale collaborative project for this course, the promise is to connect ECU student artists to potential buyers. However, since it is catered towards the students, after graduation, are they no longer eligible to be part of the community? You might be better off asking a painter to refrain from using paint. If the equipped tools permit them, do they leave the group willingly and perhaps join another group that has promises, tools and bargains that they can adhere to? If they choose not to do so, they can remain within the group and continue to publish and sell their works with the tools, but that would be a breach of pre-determined bargained conditions. If enough of such situations arise, expanding the terms of bargain to include them would be a forced move on the creators’ part.

This makes me think about the power of the collaborative masses. They champion to take control when situations arise for them to stand up and be counted. Of course, as much as I wished that that would be the ideal result of any given situation, the recent Pirate Bay legal trial was evidence that sometimes, we need to have some form of legal governance, despite the faceless entity of the Web, allowing us the opportunity to misbehave.

SOCS 300 – Politics 2.0

The power of the Web 2.0 was and still is severely underestimated in the ring of political operations. Call it Politics 2.0, and just look at how it has changed the political landscape of the media power balance. Shirky calls it a change from ‘an affiliate model to an Internet model’.

With advertisers increasingly relying on viral spreads of information on the web, politicians cannot help but follow suit. What better way to mass organize, generate more awareness, and reaching a bigger audience than disseminating information through the same pipeline. Shirky mentions that the press do not make the headlines anymore; it is now the people who re-distribute the info. This branching of political awareness through community campaigns and organizations speaks volumes for the general public, who used to be ostracized and observing from the back. People who used to stand and watch can now be a part of it, because motivation is derived from ease of collective organization and management with social tools. They are now active participants, observers and public, all rolled into one. Also, sometimes, with the vast global knowledge of other political climates in other countries through the web, communities might urge their own congressman to advocate similar policies. Through progressive discussion and discourse with other community members, they might discover an alternate (perhaps even better) idea to go about championing a certain political/social cause.

The current ONE PASS NOW campaign is a testament of this phenomenon. Gordon Campbell promised a fair fare (haha…fair fare) pricings for all post-secondary students, and we have yet to see any action being done. Through the ease of gathering community members (or as Facebook call them, fans) and organizing movements with these social tools, this campaign is a championing for call to action for a consensual U-Pass for said students.

However, this begs the question, with more people giving more opinions and being heard by more people with less time, won’t there be more politicians? Should everyone consider themselves a politician then?

I beg to differ.

If this were so, whom would we listen to? This phenomenon of citizen politicians would result in a massive clutter of opinions on how to govern a country. Politicians would no longer be a legitimate job, except a faceless drone and figurehead for re-conveying information already available to the masses. They could be better off re-terming the word ‘politics’ to ‘Opinion-giving-istic’. Sure, the country would then be truly governed by the people, but without the proper training as one, are we all qualified to pick up the mantle?

As a tool, the web removes obstacles for better efficiency of campaign managements, but politicians must never forget that they are potential leaders and they must lead the people, not the other way around.

SOCS 300 – Us Now (documentary)

http://www.vodo.net/usnow

do check that out!

its a documentary about the political implications of radical self-organisation and collaboration of  social networks and communities in the digital era.

SOCS 300 – podcast!!!

i am having trouble uploading my podcast to stream on the website, so until i have fixed that problem, the link to download my podcast is here..

DOWNLOAD HERE

EDIT: i finally managed to upload it! thanks podomatic!

click here to hear!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.

SOCS 300 – Non-contents’ contents

Two-way interaction and communication were never possible between the content creator and the content consumer in the broadcast medium. Television was always one-way. Newspapers were also made to inform in a unidirectional manner. The notion of interactive TV being interactive is an oxymoron. We have no control over the content that we watch on the tube. However, by default, we can record/pause/rewind live shows and select when to watch a specific movie (demand TV), but calling it interactive is a stretch. It is as good as referring to the motion of people switching channels as interactive. The material remains intact despite all these so called ‘interactivity’.

However, now, the times are a-changing.

With the advent of the web age, the attention and interactivity are reciprocated. Through community sharing websites like Wikipedia or youtube, one can easily share material and then get feedback and better one another. This constant trade of opinions between creator and consumer generates a sense of involvement and might lead to inspiration for another project. I believe this is what Shirky refers to as the community of practice. The collective media now supports tools that aids making and sharing, tapping in to our latent human desires to make and share. But is all the attention really attention that is worth its weight in gold?

In today’s world, just as the numbers of content creators are exponentially rising, there will also be an exponential increment in the amount of content. And as likely as good and professional material will arise from this, a great deal of it will be personal, day-to-day musings, something that holds not much academic value. To avoid this stigma, a lot of webloggers tend to stick to technical mumbo jumbo to over-glorify whatever it is that they are saying. They believe that they can garner attention with their gibberish and seep through the cracks of the overarching filter. Sometimes, I wonder if the art of writing coherently and concisely is completely lost on them. They will resort to such means to attain their 15 minutes of digital fame. Readers will have to try and decipher its meaning. With or without fully grasping the statements, it leaves them with the impression that the writer is highly educated and cultured, even though the writer did it for the sake of boosting his own worth, and ultimately his ego.

As readers and ultimately a potential creator, next time we encounter someone talking/writing in art critic speak, think about how much they actually know what they are talking/writing about. I think we need to start reading between the lines and focus on what the content creator is NOT saying, instead of fixating so much on what is there. In the midst of sheer volume of material that is out there, we need to unlearn content comprehension and re-learn that of non-content.

Spare change for the world

this kinda reminded me of how small the world really is…also made me think about the professionalization of non-professionals.

even the homeless are no exception to this global phenomenon.

we need more of this..

SOCS 300 – Me, you and the whole world

Social media tools like youtube or MySpace generally rely on user-generated content to continually churn out interesting materials for the masses. With a computer, and perhaps a video or still camera, anyone could just upload their own creations and hope it finds an audience to reach out to. Let’s face it, we all have this compulsive urge to share. It is burned deep within our innate human nature. When was the last time you linked the ‘laughing baby’ video on youtube to someone? With these tools at hand, creating and sharing these materials becomes all too easy. Obstacles are removed, allowing the masses (non-professionals) to take control. Indeed, just as Andy Warhol puts it, we all crave for our 15 minutes of fame.

Resource websites like Wikipedia rely on the distribution of labour within the masses. It is strange because we get no monetary benefits, or any benefits for that matter, but yet we contribute to its growth by just sheer participation. Every small contribution counts. This collaborative effort of the mass of amateurs is better than just the research of one specialist. The ease in which anyone can just pick up and start editing (no programming skills or knowledge are required) makes it all the more accessible to the common Joe.

I am reminded of the film, Be Kind Rewind, where the community comes together to work on a film together at the end. This is just the average neighbourhood, not one that had professionals in areas pertaining to making a film. They collaborated and worked on it, despite knowing that the end product is incomparable to an actual production of professional standards. It was this bond that drove and motivated them, because each of them knew that they played a specific part in the process. When they were finished with it, they sat down to watch it together. This communal effort of coming together and working on something together is so powerful because everyone knew they played their part and they played it well. It is the same with Wikipedia: motivation from collective collaboration.

Of course, with communal efforts, there comes a larger volume of material that has to be filtered to weed out the good from the bad. Wikipedia is, in all its intents and purposes, a good recipe, but too many chefs ruin the pot of food. Anyone is now capable of being a ‘chef’. With only a minuscule percentage of contributors actually filtering out the material, we can become overwhelmed with the sheer volume. Even though it has several policies to ensure that the articles are unbiased and in compliance with the “neutral point of view”, the varying cultural, social, national and lingual backgrounds can have an enormous influence.

We have to tread this road carefully now. Where it leads, nobody knows.