Blogarythm

From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond

According to the author of “From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond,” journalism has played a critical political role in this country from the very beginning. It doesn’t sound as though journalism in revolutionary times bears much resemblance to the modern news-and-entertainment industry, however. Journalists intentionally biased their message with their own thoughts in those days, or used their printed mouthpiece to disseminate a political perspective. In that way, the early journalists were more like modern bloggers than modern journalists.

Thomas Paine, apparently, wrote his pamphlets in the same spirit as modern-day bloggers, too, which would seem to place modern bloggers, all 60 million of them worldwide, in very good company. That is the critical difference between Tom Paine, or at least Paine’s time, and today’s mass of communication: can there be a revolutionary leader when there’s this much writing going on?

The article goes on to highlight the contribution of the muckrakers, independent journalists such as Edward R. Murrow, and the few larger media corporations that have been able to remain independent, such as the New York Times. Those days aren’t gone completely, but it is definitely true that commercial considerations rule the newsroom now, and in some instances, such as with Fox News, the pretention of unbiased coverage is very dubious.

This is the backdrop against which online, or open source, news blogs have come into existence. I’m completely pro-blogs, but I am also shocked that we’re now looking at 60 million of them. With those kinds of numbers, how do you start to find anything useful? It’s a problem Paine didn’t really face. As long as this number of people are emboldened to hold forth, there will be so much static and random noise online that we’ll still probably end up with something like mainstream news as a handful of prominent and popular blogs start to stand out. It isn’t ultimately that different from any other form of press.

It is interesting to note how blogs contribute during times of failure on the part of the mainstream press. September 11^th provided a uniquely cathartic episode for most people in this country, and it proved difficult to make sense of those events, certainly for me. I missed it personally, but this article mentions the role of NYC resident’s blogs in the days after the attacks. Many wrote of their personal experience, to communicate that they were alright, or to gather in more depth information that the mainstream press hadn’t provided. It’s a powerful illustration of how, in times of crisis, blogs have a unique role to play, so long as you can find what you’re looking for.

Role of the Internet in National and Local News Media Use

This somewhat dry article discusses how people, who perceive their primary news source to be television, actually receive quite a lot of their news from online news sources, at least in a supplemental capacity. They may see a quick news byte on the television, which on today’s cable news networks is usually extremely brief, and then go research the story in more detail online. This study proposes that online news site usage in pursuit of further information than is available on television accentuates the likelihood that the user will seek information from all sources. Also, the study hypothesizes that most online news is more comparable to national news than local news.

I don’t really watch news on television, so in that regard I’m probably atypical and would fall outside the bounds of this study. I do read news online, but even then I’m more interested in local news. I’ll scan the national headlines, but on reflection it’s the local stories that I actually read. I get my news from the Seattle Times online, Seattle PI online, Seattle Weekly online and the Stranger online. Sometimes, if I’m really interested in a topic, such as the route of Sound Transit through my neighborhood, I’ll scour the local press for any information. I now know that there are over 20 local neighborhood oriented journals, websites or action oriented neighbor coalitions within my immediate area. In the case of Sound Transit, several of us were united in our interest – our houses would have been knocked down with one of the two possible routes through Roosevelt.

FLAT OUT

"The Tragedy of the Commons", by Garret Hardin

It's provocative to read this argument in favor of forced population control immediately after reading Friedman's "The World is Flat." At a time, according to Friedman, when most of the non-western world is rapidly working towards an education level, relative income, and lifestyle that is comparable to the west, we're clearly accelerating the problem of competition over rival resources. China is already strategically purchasing oil production companies in preparation for a certain spike in oil demand. Imagine gas prices when there are several hundred million new oil consumers in the market. This is the stuff wars are made of.

Yet, it is basically inconcievable that any western government would implement the sort of population control measures that China has. We seem to hope that it won't come to that, or people will recognize the problem and take corrective action. However, as Hardin describes, there are mathematical and psychological reasons why we will never be motivated to address the problem volunarily: anyone who denies himself access to the common asset will be something of a sucker. Consider the smug condescension of your SUV driving friends when they regard a toyota prius. Culturally, this country has a long ways to go before we even approach European levels of sensibility, where gas prices have long been sufficiently high to make small, economical cars a fact of life.

So maybe the market has the answer. If higher gas prices will slowly, painfully correct this country towards a greater appreciation of sensible vehicle technology (and I do love the thought of SUV drivers forking over a hundred bucks at each fillup), then maybe something similar will inevitably apply with children.

Now, admittedly, I don't have children. I can discuss them with the sort of logic and distance that probably makes me look insane to parents, and that is a core problem with this particular issue. Cars, we can discuss. The need to procreate, further your bloodline, spread your seed, etc., these are urges so fundamental to human survival that it's a little off the table to start discussing legislation.

But what about the market? It's becoming very expensive to have kids, I hear. College is a luxury that is galloping off into the distance in terms of cost. Food is expensive, and a family sized house in most American urban areas is sufficiently costly to pretty much define a home-owner as middle class. Maybe the added cost of raising a family will, itself, have a corrective effect. It's probably exactly what the neocons are thinking when they decrease health and human service funding -- let the market rule.

CRASH

"Communities in Cyberspace", by Peter Kollock and Marc A. Smith.
"Media Technology and Society", Winston, ch 18, Conclusion.

Massively multiplayer online game designers have a fairly straightforward design challenge: how to hook their audience and get them invested in the game. Story is important, and so are the game-play devices that allow a player to advance, develop a character, acquire virtual objects, or accomplish objectives. Conventional wisdom now, though, is that most people are most likely to invest themselves in a persistent massively multiplayer online game if there is suitable opportunity for social interaction. It is a prime directive of game designers to provide useful mechanisms to allow people to communicate, collaborate, compete and interact on as many levels as possible.

The internet, combined with increasing broadband penetration and alternative high speed access channels, has made a wealth of communication opportunities possible. Massively multiplayer games are but one of many modes the consumer can use to socialize, all built on the same infrastructure. As Kollock and Smith point out in this week’s article, "Communities in Cyberspace," this is a double edged sword. The ease of communication does entertain, does inform, and is in most visible ways very gratifying, but there are also social implications. Anonymity is threatened. The network provides ways to track and manipulate people’s uses and communications. To quote the article, "(Critics) do not rule out the idea that computers and networks increase the power of individuals, (but) they believe that networks will disproportionately increase the strength of existing concentrations of power." The exceedingly creepy "Total Information Awareness" proposal Darpa was throwing around after 9/11 is an example so extreme and preposterous as to be discounted by most people I know, but it isn't technically impossible, or won't be soon. And the Patriot Act is a reality that points in that direction.

Online games, however, are for the time being obsessively proprietary, and online security is increasingly a top priority. It's simple business sense -- if the game is hackable, manipulable, or even has the appearance of being untrustworthy, online players will instantly recede. There's the issue of protecting whatever personal or financial information the game servers need to store in order to authenticate the player, but more importantly games become very much less fun when there is the perception of an uneven playing field. The unintended side effect of this technology, this necessity to create very sophisticated security, is that online game environments may conceivably become a safe environment to communicate with relative anonymity. This would reinforce the trend towards the virtual worlds I've referred to before, those depicted in the novel Snow Crash. It all depends how antagonistic private enterprise is towards government oversight and intrusion.

Another reinforcing property games possess is the ability to offer personality or individuality to the user, especially compared to text based online communication. Kollock and Smith discuss, on p. 9, the way online communication removes most indicators of individuality. It is the reason email is so often misunderstood, and likely the impetus, or supervening necessity, behind the innovation of emoticons. On the other hand, online games provide new social abstractions that may allow people to become much more intense in their friendships, or much more violent in confrontation, than they ever would in a non-virtual setting. The layer of removal from direct human contact may be disproportionate, or have a distorting effect, to online relationships that simpler text based communication would not encourage.

Most likely, however, the vast majority of people will continue obliviously using email, text chat, usenet, and instant messenger with a false sense of privacy, and only the most sophisticated digerati will embrace massively multiplayer online game environments. It remains to be seen whether this is harmless for the mainstream -- it is possible that the sheer volume of communication will make it unlikely for these practices to represent much of a threat to civil liberties. If Roger’s diffusion of innovation theory describes an inevitable forward progression, with the online games industry finding itself now approximately in the early majority phase (gross revenues did just surpass Hollywood, so somebody is clearly playing games), then eventually online game developers will have to acknowledge their role, or opportunity at least, to provide and arbitrate a secure communication environment.

The possible irony, though is that the internet, originally created as a decentralized information transfer technology to safeguard government communications in the event of a nuclear attack, as Winston points out in his discussion of the supervening necessity behind its invention, may become a critical tool of communication for terrorist groups bent on organizing just such an attack.