REVISION- Smart Mobs

Smart mobs are groups of people that band together using different types of electronic media to conduct protests. They operate out of the governmental eye while planning their protests, quickly and easily spreading news throughout the population. Electronics, specifically applications like BlackBerry Messaging and sites like facebook, serve as a way to expediate the process of communication. In the London riots of 2011, people were able to avoid police intervention about their planned riots by spreading information on riots through blackberry messenger. When an issue arises that upsets the general population, they often use texting to spread the word about things. Anonymous is a group that does just that. They are an online army essentially, who enlist the public by announcing protests that they will hold. They use youtube videos and their website to gather people together, and by gaining the reputation they have as an internet power they are able to get even more attention on the internet. Apart from Anonymous, people can help organize protests by sending mass texts and creating a collective intelligence quickly so that they can band together to fight the issue that has upset them. There are other kinds of programs that help put people together for other reasons than protesting, such as Upoc which allows you to join different groups that have different interests. In the article Smart Mobs: Power of the Mobile Many, the author talks about his experience joining groups such as an New York City terrorist alert group, which “promised immediate messages in the case of a terrorist account.” (167, Smart Mobs) While groups like this are more serious and useful, there are also tons of groups for fans of musical artists to chat, and groups that people use to stalk celebrities by notifying the masses when a celebrity is spotted.
The Occupy wall street movement is a prime example of how media and technology can help band people together and organize groups. The movement started when people realized that 99% percent of the American public don’t have any power because they aren’t extremely wealthy. The only people that can have a real effect on Wall Street are the people who have the money to invest in the stock market, and that’s only 1% percent of the people living in the USA. The protests really took an intense turn when the police started physically assaulting protestors, which just angered people more. “During a demonstration in Lower Manhattan, 20-year-old Brandon Watts of Philadelphia grabbed a police officer's hat and was subsequently tackled and arrested, sustaining a gash to his forehead.”
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/occupy-wall-street-finally-gets-face-bloody-153643148.html
This event has finally given a face to the Wall Street movement, and this picture is now circulating on the internet and being passed throughout all kinds of smart mobs. Apart from pictures being spread, protestors also carry webcams to they can record police brutality and incite even more intense protesting. Watts has become the bloody face of what is appearing more and more to be a war. The picture of his bloodied face will incite even angrier protesting because the Smart Mobs involved in the OWS movement will spread it as far as they can to give their movement more power. Tons of groups on facebook mention places where people should show up to protest. Facebook allows people to create groups that even show maps of where people should go, and provide links to the site where more knowledge can be learned about the subject. There are also pages that say nothing more than “Occupy Wall Street, September 17th,” these groups simply provide a date, and then hundreds of people comment on the page and organize further. This simple page got over 2500 “likes” and over a hundred people commenting on it saying things like “good job, keep it up everyone!” There are also people from other pages about the Occupy Wall Street movement that post on this page’s wall to provide vital information to everyone interested in the subject.
Link to facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Occupy-Wall-Street-September-17th/136981243051090
In this way a collective intelligence is created and the movement can grow stronger. It even incites more anger among the participants because people use the page to spread word of police brutality. Since the London riots began with a similar incident, these kinds of posts could start a snowball effect that could result in rioting similar to London.

Technology is essential to communication today, and is far improved from its counterparts in the past. It is much easier to covertly spread word of protests with mass texts and other programs, which means that police cant prepare themselves to deal with the mobs before they begin. This leads to much higher scale rioting than ever before, and allows information to be spread incredibly quickly. Rheingold speaks about all of the different mobile communication groups he was exposed to in New York City, and nowadays there are tons of twitter groups that do the same thing he was talking about except in reference to the OWS movement. Smart Mobs use their mobile computers to check twitter posts to see whats going on and to record police brutality and spread videos of it to the masses. People get minute by minute updates on happenings, even during a protest, which makes people far more organized than they ever have been. While protesting is a main use of Smart Mob technology, it’s used for things like dating and meeting people with similar interests as well. What makes it so easy for these programs and smart mobs to form is the fact that so many people have smart phones and are thus able to do almost everything a computer can do with their handhelds. This means that people can constantly be monitoring sites like facebook and twitter for updates on issues like OWS, and always have access to any other internet programs they would like to use.

EXTRA BLOG- Mobile Battery Life

Mobile battery life is one of the things that Smart phones and modern mobile technology is having a problem with improving. This affects the mobile culture because people need to constantly be charging their phone, and thus are not as mobile as in the days when cell phones had so few functions that they could last a week without a recharge. People need to constantly be looking for an outlet if their phone is running low on juice, and the fact that they can run out so quickly makes people more reluctant to travel long distances without an insured power source to charge their phone on. Battery life is one of the only complaints that people have about the mobile phones of today, but since people love all the features they have access to, this creates a paradox. People like being able to connect to wifi, 3g networks, and all sorts of other things that suck up battery life, but they don’t like the fact that these things decrease their mobile device’s longevity. Mobile companies are trying more and more these days to find out how to prevent this decreased battery life. An end to this problem may be in sight however.
Engineers at Northwestern University have developed a new battery that can make mobile phones battery life last longer than they have before. With all of the smart phones that are constantly using energy to stay connected to networks, battery life is getting more and more limited. The power consumption issue that plagues smart phones these days is a main issue that users of new mobile technology complain about, so this new battery could completely change the way people think of smart phone battery. The process of creating the battery involves poking millions of miniscule holes in the graphene sheets so that the lithium clusters replace the silicon sheets that have been used in batteries so far. It increases the amount of lithium ions the battery can hold which increases battery life, and allows for a faster oxidation process so they charge faster. An article published by BBC claims that “a mobile phone battery built using the Northwestern techniques would charge from flat in 15 minutes and last a week before needing a recharge.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15735478)
While this new technology would certainly benefit people since they would be able to stay mobile and do whatever they please for an entire week without having to worry about charging their mobiles, it could also lead to problems. First of all the makers of this technology said that “the downside is that the recharging and power gains fall off sharply after a battery has been charged about 150 times.” (see link above)This means that people would have to buy a new battery after charging their phone 150 times. While the new battery is certainly more efficient the batteries we use today, they are undoubtedly more expensive. Right now, something that separates people is how many are able to afford nice smart phones, and how many must stick to more basic models. With this expensive new battery factored into that, this margin would increase even more. So after increasing battery life, I think that the next important step is figuring out how to make these helpful new technologies available to the masses who may not be able to afford them.

Extra Blog- Technology has Alienated us from one another

Has technology alienated us from each other because it makes in depth and in person conversations few and far between? Is a facebook chat conversation worth less than a conversation held eye to eye? I think that people have started to devalue a face to face conversation because texting and using other forms of technology are much faster and more convenient. Some people have a problem with carrying conversation, and other people just get nervous with face to face confrontation. These people would have a much better time conversing with their computer monitor serving as a buffering zone, than actually seeing someone face to face. This also makes it easier for people to cyberbully other people, since they can post something cruel on another person’s facebook wall and that person wouldn’t be able to respond directly. This can lead to embarrassment and cyberbullying, and shows how this alienation from one another that technology has a hand in can be negative as well.
I remember one instance in which I was broken up with through a text message. This is a prime example of how some people find face to face confrontations so distasteful and difficult that they rely on technology to help them out. This shows how alienated people have become from one another. They don’t even take the time to have a good conversation with one another, or in my case a bad conversation. Getting broken up with through text made me feel even more bad than if it had been face to face, which is silly because I’m sure the sender assumed since it was easier for her it was easier for me as well. It was hard to believe that someone I spent so much time with speaking face to face would feel awkward breaking up with me face to face, but it just shows how technology has changed the way that people interact even people that are close to one another.
Not only facebook and texting have an effect on this phenomenon, but even sites like Twitter serve to mask this alienation. By using sites that allow you to speak to many people at the same time, people mask the fact that they are becoming more alienated from face to face conversation. They act like they are capable of expressing their ideas to many people, but twitter is still just a buffering zone so they don’t have to express those thoughts in person. With improvements in technology comes even more alienation from one another, so the next great new piece of technology that makes conversation over the internet even faster, will make conversation face to face even easier to avoid.

EXTRA BLOG- Mac vs PC

EXTRA BLOG- MAC vs. PC

                The age old question that has started arguments among computer users for years is which computer is better, Mac or PC? Many new sources have given up on trying to answer this question, since it mostly depends on what a user is looking for. In an article comparing the two based on a variety of different facets, in terms of things like color-matching, security, reliability and speed, Macs are better; PCs outperform Macs in terms of the amount of software that is released for them, their affordability, their variety, and their overall popularity. In 2009, overall sales showed that 11.2 million MACs were sold, which may seem like a good amount until compared to the 300 million PCs that were sold. (http://www.itok.net/blog/index.php/2011/04/mac-vs-pc/) This is largely due to the many different types of PCs that users can buy based on whatever the user is looking for, whereas Apple has made Macs in only 9 basic models. The affordability of PCs also has a huge effect on their sales, since for the benefits Macs give you, it is arguable if its worth the increased cost. Recently a very high-end mac was released, and its PC counterpart is more expensive. The big factor that makes PCs less expensive than Macs is that PCs allow you to strip features when buying them to reduce cost, whereas Macs don’t have that option. 95 percent of schools and businesses use PCs rather than Macs, which is another reason more people buy PCs. Once they have used one type of computer enough in school or at work, they would rather stick with what they know than try an entirely new type of computer out. While the Mac ad campaign showed the Mac as being a hip 20-year old, the PC was shown as a nerdy, older guy wearing a boring suit. The Mac basically just made fun of the PC, and picked out all of its flaws. It was a ruthless ad campaign, but was also humorous so the ad campaign didn’t get a reputation as being that bad.  

                In my high school we all got Mac computers to use, which was really nice because they are so fast and easy to use. We had to pay to loan them for the year, but it was far cheaper than buying one and the only problems arose when something broke on the computer. One thing that I noticed a lot was that within the first months of use, me and many of my classmates would experience our disc drives breaking. This wasn’t enough of a big deal for us to want to pay the however-many-hundreds of dollars it would take to fix it, so it just turned out to be a nuisance throughout the year when I wanted to play a disc. I really enjoyed using macs because the music and video editing programs were awesome for the filmmaking classes I would take. I really enjoyed using macs, but the PC that I now use in college is just as good. It was far cheaper than buying a macbook would have been, and opens up many more opportunities for gaming and other things that PCs are good for. I don’t think I can really decide which I like more, Mac or PC, since I have used and enjoyed both. But I’m not sure it really matters which operating system is used anymore, since the internet is almost all of what I use my computer for anyway.

A point was brought up on the subject in the following comic found on xkcd.com that makes fun of the Mac commercials.
http://www.xkcd.com/934/
This comic shows how rather than the operating system being the most important thing, as it has been in the past, the power of the internet has caused a shift to occur that makes the browsers the bigger deal. The cool hip Mac no longer holds any power since the main thing that people use their computers for anymore is browsing the internet. While the average Mac launches its web browser 3 seconds faster than a PC, is this three seconds worth the extra money you might be paying? It really doesn’t matter than much anymore whether one buys a Mac or a PC unless there is something specific that the user wants to use their computer for.  More artsy types would value the colorsync technology and better artistic software that Macs have, and more serious gamers could benefit from the gaming possibilities of PCs. I don’t think there can really be any true winner of this argument, since they are both good for the things they are made to be good for.

Smart Mobs

                Smart mobs are groups of people that band together using different types of electronic media to conduct protests. They operate out of the governmental eye while planning their protests, quickly and easily spreading news throughout the population. Electronics, specifically applications like BlackBerry Messaging and sites like facebook, serve as a way to expediate the process of communication. In the London riots of 2011, people were able to avoid police intervention about their planned riots by spreading information on riots through blackberry messenger. When an issue arises that upsets the general population, they often use texting to spread the word about things. By sending mass texts, people can create a collective intelligence quickly so that they can band together to fight the issue through protesting. There are other kinds of programs that help put people together for other reasons than protesting, such as Upoc which allows you to join different groups that have different interests. In the article Smart Mobs: Power of the Mobile Many, the author talks about her experience joining groups such as an New York City terrorist alert group, which “promised immediate messages in the case of a terrorist account.” (167, Smart Mobs) While groups like this are more serious and useful, there are also tons of groups for fans of musical artists to chat, and groups that people use to stalk celebrities by notifying the masses when a celebrity is spotted.

                The Occupy wall street movement is a prime example of how media and technology can help band people together and organize groups. Besides all of the word that is spread over texting and such, there are also tons of groups on facebook that mention sites where people should show up to protest. Facebook allows people to create groups that even show maps of where people should go, and provide links to the site where more knowledge can be learned about the subject. There are also pages that say nothing more than “Occupy Wall Street, September 17^th,” these groups simply provide a date, and then hundreds of people comment on the page and organize further. This simple page got over 2500 “likes” and over a hundred people commenting on it saying things like “good job, keep it up everyone!” There are also people from other pages about the Occupy Wall Street movement that post on this page’s wall to provide vital information to everyone interested in the subject.

Link to facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Occupy-Wall-Street-September-17th/136981243051090

 In this way a collective intelligence is created and the movement can grow stronger. It even incites more anger among the participants because people use the page to spread word of police brutality. Since the London riots began with a similar incident, these kinds of posts could start a snowball effect that could result in rioting similar to London's.

                Technology is essential to communication today, and is far improved from its counterparts in the past. It is much easier to covertly spread word of protests with mass texts and other programs, which means that police cant prepare themselves to deal with the mobs before they begin. This leads to much higher scale rioting than ever before, and allows information to be spread incredibly quickly. People get minute by minute updates on happenings, even during a protest, which makes people far more organized than they ever have been. While protesting is a main use of Smart Mob technology, it’s used for things like dating and meeting people with similar interests as well. What makes it so easy for these programs and smart mobs to form is the fact that so many people have smart phones and are thus able to do almost everything a computer can do with their handhelds. This means that people can constantly be monitoring sites like facebook for updates on issues, and always have access to any other internet programs they would like to use. The ease with which people can spread messages to many people’s phones with sites like twitter doesn’t hurt either.

Cyberbullying

            Bullying is often seen as something childish, such as boys picking on a kid on the playground or something, but bullying does not only occur amongst children, it also effects teens. As Boyd says in her article “The Drama”, bullying intensifies for teens but is just not always acknowledged for a number of reasons. For one, teens use the word “Drama” when really referring to things that could definitely be considered bullying, and since this word is tough to define the bullying is usually not taken note of. Boyd also says that bullying has changed from in person to on sites like Facebook, formspring, and Twitter. This shift makes “Drama take place in front of an audience.” (Boyd) In the paper Boyd makes claims that these social media sites are used to change public perceptions of people, so that assumptions can be made about them without even knowing who they are. When teens make fun of each other and say hurtful things online it’s a form of cyberbullying but among teens it is just known as “drama” so that parents don’t feel like they need to step in. Teens want to shape their own lives and learn how to survive in the world by themselves, thus hating the fact that they are put under their parent’s authorities. They avoid going to their parents often about drama amongst their peers because they don’t want to seem childish by saying they were bullied. Boyd claims that teens see it is a sign of weakness to have to run to your parent if people are making fun of you. Boyd wrestles with the question of what drama is but then uses the site Urban Dictionary, a site predominantly used by teens and younger folks, to help provide the answer “making a big deal over something unnecessarily.” Since this definition seems nonchalant and makes Drama seem petty, it answers the question of why teens use this word when referring to bullying. According to Boyd teens use the word so that whatever bullying they are connected to can be brushed off as nothing.

            Boyd talks about how drama is often circulated among teen girls, and this is something that I have seen personally in high school. There was a girl in my class during freshman year that was very flirtatious. She would always be talking to the guys and making them interested in her, which other girls didn’t like. Lots of drama started because girls would be openly mean to her and would talk badly about her behind her back. One time she was at a party and she got into a semi-physical fight with another girl because they had both kissed the same guy that night. People were never on her side of these sorts of arguments because everyone circulated bad things about her through facebook and formspring. She was eventually made fun of so much that after sophomore year she left the school because she couldn’t handle it anymore. This is an example of how drama and bullying was exacerbated by the internet, and luckily didn’t cause the girl to do anything more drastic than leave the school.

            Teen drama is sort of a staple in growing up, which is very unfortunate but also very true. It is hard to escape it because the teenage years are times when everyone is trying to figure out who they are and thus making some mistakes. During this day and age teenage drama is made way worse by the internet because it puts all of the hateful comments and rumors in the public eye. While in earlier times bullying would be on a smaller scale and had to be passed by word of mouth, now there are anonymous posting sites like formspring that allow users to tell people what they really think of them without them knowing who is saying it. This leads to drama escalating because it is put on the internet for everyone to see. Teens who might not be involved in certain drama are still filled in because they can just go on facebook or formspring and see what everyone is saying about it. While it is hard for teens to go through drama and deal with rumors, they would rather deal with it alone than go to their parents for help. I remember hating how I had almost no power when it came to my parents. Drama among peers is one of the only things that teens have any power over, because at home the parents are completely in charge of what they do. Boyd says they don’t go their parents because they want to save face and not be seen as weak, but I think it also has a lot to do with the fact that teens want to feel like they have some measure of power in their lives, and participating in drama amongst peers is a way of attaining this feeling of power.

The Power of Google

                Google started out as a small, underground company that became noticed because it was innovative and different. It allowed people to search the internet for any information in a way that previously hadn’t been so easy. Google did all the work for the person searching. Instead of having to research from books in a library, or try to find specific sites that related to your exact quarry, Google did most of the work for you. Google is able to look at what you’ve been searching, and sites you’ve been to, and guess what sites you really want to see. This would be purely beneficial, if the way that they were able to cater to your needs with such ease did not come at the expense of privacy. Google is only able to know what sites you’re looking for by having tracked all of the sites that you had been to. It basically knows what you’re going to search before you even finish typing. Before Google organized sites and listed them so cleanly, the internet was a mess of sites that could never be found quickly. Navigating the internet was like wading through tall grass, you could never find what you needed because everything was so jumbled and obscured. Google’s rise to power occurred because they made searching the internet and finding web sites easy, while simultaneously rising as a grassroots-like company that was seen as underground. Now since Google can essentially guess what you’re looking for before you even search for it, they have to have an awful lot of information about you. This is the main problem with Google; it has been collecting information about its users since its creation, and while its mission statement is “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” they don’t mention the fact that they organize information about their users as well. Google essentially uses surveillance to make itself useful. It’s impossible to not leave a footprint when using Google, and their privacy policy states that they will pass on information to their “subsidiaries, affiliated companies, or other trusted businesses or persons for the purpose of processing personal information on our behalf.” (Siva, Googlization of us, 85) Basically there’s no real way to know if your privacy is secure while using Google, since they change their policies so often and without warning that what you through was true one day can totally change the next day.

                A personal anecdote relating to the whole subject of privacy occurred my senior year of high school. Facebook has become universally used my parents, teens, teachers, students, and pretty much everybody who wants to network with others. Since privacy is such a tricky thing to control when you have tons of friends online, sometimes the wrong posts get seen by the wrong people. This happened to a fellow student at my school who posted a status that contained a little secret message that was offering drugs for sale. This status was seen by a teacher on facebook, who wasn’t necessarily the student’s friend, but was still able to see past his privacy settings. The student got in huge trouble for the status, and was kicked out of the school. This created a huge amount of debate at school because people thought it was wrong that his privacy was breached in such a way. This is just one example of how privacy can be breached, and how easily information can fall into the wrong hands on the internet. Perhaps if the student had better privacy settings, or just realized that anything he posted could be seen so easily, the expulsion wouldn’t have occurred; due to a lapse in privacy and the authority figure using this lapse to check on students, internet surveillance led to the possibly unnecessary removal of a student from school.

                Google is responsible for a lot of privacy mishaps today, but their new social networking asset, Google +, makes it easy for privacy of users to be maintained. Instead of just having a large list of friends, Google + allows you to organize your different “circles” so that only certain people can see the things you post. With Google +, the anecdote I described could never have occurred and the student’s privacy would have been maintained. Google clearly means well in the things they do, since they try to maintain privacy standards, and are constantly adding to their empire by releasing new things like Google +. The main problem with Google is that it is such a huge company that it controls a huge portion of the internet. Almost everyone starts off a browsing session with Google so that they can find what they’re looking for, people post Blogs that are read my thousands on Google’s Blogger website, and millions of users post and watch content on Google’s Youtube. Since they own so many sites where people go and leave information, they are in control of millions of people’s personal information. While they are determined to protect people’s privacy, this doesn’t mean that they won’t give it up if prompted by the right authority. In addition, if a hacker were to get into Google’s information, millions of people’s information could be stolen, and their privacy could be seriously breached. The realization of Google’s power is why authors like Siva are so opposed to the Googlization of our society since it will lead to less privacy and a completely different idea of knowledge.