Social Media and Digital Technologies

On or off campus, students have the same amount of access to social media and are undeterred in their quest to stay connected to people. 3G and 4G networks are pulsing with activity on campus as well as the wireless networks located sporatically throughout campus. People want to stay consistently connected even while they are with people they would normally be communicating with via some network. However, in reference to digital technologies, students do not have as much access  off campus as they do on campus. The Avery Lab is an example of a conglomerate of digital technologies that no student would ever have access to off campus, possibly in the rare chance they find a cyber cafe but of course Pullman has none of those.

Social media and digital technologies make daily life remarkably more efficient for students. The Daily Evergreen, while still printing, has the same issues online for those that either have one preference or another. Sports and entertainent events can advertise through The Daily Green in the print and online versions as well as on their individual Facebook pages that students will undoubtedly follow. Going beyond social media, digital technologies such as cameras, placed in particular areas around campus, can act as crime deterrents. At least having a camera there will be better than not and is hopefully aid in capturing the most recent assault on the professor outside of Mike's bar. 

Meet the Spime

   In an age where information has never been more readily available, there is also an overwhelming amount of information that parallels this ease of access. As information becomes easier to access, more information exists. Bruce Sterling mentions two ideas that relate to one another in terms of information accessing and archiving. He discusses the relevance of bar coding and at the end of his article, he has a “map” illustrating the network of a system that employs ambient informatics. The barcoding, in general, is relevant because we now live in an age where everything has an associated identity attached to it. The barcode is the associated identity that is run by the Uniform Code Council and EAN International. Sterling mentions that organizations such as these are colossal, yet the barcode itself is so second nature to people that its existence goes practically unnoticed. The Uniform Code Council and EAN International create barcodes so they can name items or products to track consumption patterns, as Sterling notes. There is big business in consumption patterns and businesses use barcodes to track the real, tangible products that people want in stores as oppose to a virtual economy where consumption data is stored as cookies or mined by companies.

   Ambient informatics is similar to the barcode system in terms of networked information, but it is much less subtle and intended for public use. Rather than rely on centralized development of software applications (i.e. Microsoft), ambient informatics is a universal computing system that involves real time information sent from RFIDs, sensors, and cameras to name a few. This would allow for faster and better quality information such as real time traffic updates, shipping information, logistics, entertainment (i.e. if a show is cancelled last minute), healthcare, and much more.  As I mentioned before, while information is becoming easier to access, more information exists especially with a real time system. Ambient informatics is meant to deliver information to people when and where they benefit from it, so as to not “overdo” it when people are strapped for time.

Information As a Weapon

      One of the most prominent uses of information is just that: how it is used or misused. Flor and Shneier, while writing about completely different scenarios, explain how information is being misused to negatively impact others for their gain. Flor talks about the aftermath of a seemingly successful counter-insurgent skirmish by the U.S. where even though we had “won,” the insurgents immediately went to the press to claim that we had killed dozens of innocent civilians, which was not true. Nevertheless, the damage was done. Shneier explains a similar concept were large industries and agencies are waking up to the idea of empowering themselves through the use of the Internet. The main theme the articles are addressing is an informational gap suffered by the micro population. Individuals, in both the civilian and military world, are receiving the short end of the stick when it comes to the use of information. “No doctrine exists for the employment of information operations at the battalion level and below. Information operations in counterinsurgency suffer from a disparity in the definitions of the term as it is understood by the strategic and operational entities that resource and enable IO and the tactical units that can most effectively employ them. As a result, a doctrinal gap has opened between those best positioned to execute IO in counterinsurgency and those best resourced and trained to execute information operations in counterinsurgency.” (Flor, 2010)

      As I mentioned, the information gap is causing power and reputation to be distributed inaccurately. Of course, being a good propagandist for a cause I really cared about, I would avoid this disparity through the practices the Army has established for information dissemination among the Afghani population. In Baker’s article, he lists several lacking IO qualities that essentially mirror what marketing and advertising have been doing for many years now. For my cause, my audience would be the local population of Pullman since this cause would only affect them. The cause would be delivered, with the same repeating message, through a series of multimedia applications since one medium is never efficient. There would be flyers, a website, a Facebook page, newspaper ads, and possibly a YouTube video all with the same idea in one message. As Booker states, “All too often, organizations develop too many themes and messages for the target audiences they are attempting to influence. Doing this inadvertently impedes their ability to repetitiously drive home the intended message to a target audience.” Depending on the reaction time for the cause, I would continue to advertise for as long as is needed since changing to another cause too soon would be counter-intuitive.

Goldfarming and Microwork

    According to InfoDev, the largest ever real money transaction for a digital good was $9,709 in World of Warcraft that occurred in 2007.  Since then, that amount could have been exceeded but regardless, it is some noteworthy data that demands respect for the online gaming community.  Not only does this figure draw respect but also recognition for the fact that gaming, especially online gaming, has become mainstream. Through this explosion of gaming in the last decade, InfoDev points out that a latent function of microwork has been created from this industry. The latent function has become so popular that it is almost considered an industry of its own. Even further, the “companies” that exist have actually been outsourced, so to speak, where several developing nations participate in this grey market of goldfarming and microwork. People around the world (mostly teenagers to young adult) have the time in the first place to begin a “career” in microwork. In the U.S. alone, as I have read in the past, the goldfarming industry has accumulated over a billion dollars in real money since the concept first began. So to me, goldfarming and microwork do function as an economic activity simply because of the generated income where some people, surprisingly, make a living.

     I have dabbled in WoW myself and have even participated in an online transaction that netted me $400. As surprised as I was that I had become part of the statistics involving digital goods, I quickly became accustomed to the idea as well. A few of my friends and people online had already entertained the idea of me selling my account before I canceled. They had been involved in similar situations within other games like Diablo 3 and Team Fortress 2. The differences between their transactions, however, were official and non-official. For example, Team Fortress 2 has a virtual store where you can buy official items for the game and trade them with other people in game. In this case, it is a digital to digital transaction between players, as oppose to a digital to USD transaction more frequently found in WoW. In Diablo 3, a similar virtual store exists where you can either use gold to buy items off an auction house or switch the auction house to USD. Hypothetically, for a very rare item, one may pay upwards of a billion or more gold on the auction house or a player to player trade. In USD, a billion gold is equal to about $100-150 depending on the market fluctuation of the gold. One particular item called Ice Climbers ranges anywhere from 20 million to 900 million gold. That is between $10-$100.

Barlow vs. Shapiro and Varian

       The perspectives I got from reading Barlow vs. Shapiro and Varian are basically new vs. old. Barlow is adamant about the restructure of old intellectual property laws that can only really apply to the physical, such as tangible objects and inventions. He claims that the old laws have no place in a modern world built on the Internet and virtual ideas. Barlow is concerned primarily with digitized property and the legal who, what, where, when aspects of virtual content. He even describes old law as a boat that is only being kept afloat with political rearrangement, harsh warnings to those that do not abide, and ignorant denial.

“True, I don't get any royalties on the millions of copies of my songs which have been extracted from concerts, but I see no reason to complain. The fact is, no one but the Grateful Dead can perform a Grateful Dead song, so if you want the experience and not its thin projection, you have to buy a ticket from us. In other words, our intellectual property protection derives from our being the only real-time source of it.”                                                    

-John Perry Barlow

       On the other hand, Shapiro and Varian as I mentioned, are all about old law. They believe that in the midst of the chaotic progression that abstractly describes our technology, the fundamental models of economy that were established in the early 20th century still apply today. If one is feeling lost with the ability to decipher what is happening now with the Internet (economically) and what will happen in the future, just take a look at the major events that happened roughly one hundred years ago. Shapiro and Varian claim that even though technology is drastically changing the value of information, the economy behind it is still the same.

               “The technology infrastructure makes information more accessible and hence

                more valuable."

 

   -Shapiro and Varian

       I would say both of these authors are right and wrong since they are at two opposite ends of each other. If they combined their ideas and used a little of both, the old laws to help restructure new laws, they would be right where I stand on the matter. Having taken an economic class, I believe that some economic models will always be true, such as supply/demand and the Pareto distribution. However, many other economic laws, along with several other laws pertaining to the progression of technology (digitized property), must be restructured to meet the needs of intellectual property, digital rights, and economic change.