Occupy Again

It looks like the Occupy Movement is making headlines again in Fort Wayne, but not for any legitimate news of its own. It seems a reporter with the News Sentinel is still trying to make a federal case out of the fact that the Occupiers get to camp out stay rent-free in a city park, while he can't park downtown without feeding the meter. Maybe he has a point. But even if you agree with him, you would have to say the media seems to be missing the forest for the trees on this one.

Hackers Revisited

Check out this News-Sentinel article about some hackers from the group Anonymous getting arrested after one of their leaders turned informant. It's considered the first significant prosecution of Internet hackers. I think it's interesting to note the language employed in the article. Authorities accuse them of a "deliberate campaign of online destruction, intimidation and criminality." Remember the Nissembaum article talked about this kind of ontological shift.

One of their alleged "exploits" was hacking into the PBS Web site and planting a fake story that Tupac Shakur was really alive in New Zealand, which they did in retaliation for what they perceived to be "unfavorable news coverage of Wikileaks on the PBS news program Frontline." Hardly what you would consider terrorist activity. And kind of funny actually. One might say more of an act of insurrection than mere sabotage.

....Some people even wondered if the whole story of the arrest of the 5 hackers wasn't a fraud as well.

Occupy-Tea Party Forum

If anyone's interested, there's going to be a televised discussion tonight on politics and economics between members of the local Occupy and Tea Party movements. 7 p.m. at Walb Student Union.

YouTube in the 2008 Election

I’m sorry it took me so long  to get this up. I Was planning on having it done on Friday, but have had an extremely busy week/weekend. I decided to write about Aaron’s piece because I thought it was interesting and completely agreed with it. The videos that we watched in class last week helped me to understand his article much better. The 2008 election was such a huge deal at the time. I personally was not very concerned with it at the time because I was young and had different things going on, but I do remember how the media played a huge role in the election. I recall people making Obama seem as if he was some type of terrorist.  It seemed as if there were two extremes in the election; either you hated Obama or you hated McCain.

“it is important to note that the vernacular videographers are engaging in crafty editing practices in their arguments. In many cases, they have selected those individuals who perform the most extreme actions (Sunstein, 2007) and portray them as evidence for the whole. As a type of argument of guilt by association, the videographers present montages of the supporters, telling viewers to vote because of the horrors found at McCain rallies.” (Hess 113) This was an excellent way to sum up how the videographers were portraying Mccain/Palin supporters. These videographers were brilliant! Had I not known any better, I would have thought that supporters of McCain/Palin were very uneducated and biased. They seemed to find the most judgemental people who simply hated Obama because of his race. They didn’t really know that much about him, all they really knew was that they did not like black or muslim people.

Another concept that Hess discussed was the “mash up” technique, “Which combines existing footage

together to create a new video. In this case, a selection of YouTubers combined elements of

both news, institutional, and vernacular sources to make new videos. At the most basic level,

some YouTubers, such as Chris NYC (2008), Cmdrgmh (2008), and VoiceofAmericans2008

(2008), merely reposted local or national news regarding the issue of the McCain mobs. In

other cases, however, YouTubers used more elaborate editing to make connections between

vernacular videos and national news (camerontr, 2008). Kaffemoka (2008) mashes part of

McCain's speech at a presidential debate with bloggerinterrupted's (2008a, 2008b) Strongsville,

OH, videos and a collection of pictures, likely taken from a simple Google image

Search.” (Hess 115) This type of technique that the videographers used established a strong sense of credibility. I think that when people see real clips of the News, they assume that what they are viewing is accurate. If the News channels deem it worthy of being on television, then we should as well. I found this strategy that the videographers used to be very interesting as well as effective. I spent a little time searching YouTube to try and find videographers who used this same strategy in a different situation, but I was not successful in doing so. Has anyone else come across videos that have used this mash up technique, and what did you think of it? Did it strengthen the credibility of the author, in your opinion?

~Brittany Huggins

Social Networking caution

Class

I am sure you realized that I was not in class on Monday. While in my 430-545 class my house was broken into and $3000 worth of stuff was taken. I wanted to inform you all of this to remember to use caution when using social networking sites such as facebook. The "check in" function could allow people to know your schedule and potentially put you at risk of theft. Even though I don't use that function often it can be an open invitation to someone.

Whoever broke into my house was someone that knew me and had been in my house before. I have a 120lb dog that is quite threatening and she was not harmed nor did it seem to deter the robber. They also knew exactly where expensive items were hidden.

I just thought I'd let you all know to take caution. It could happen to you.

Hackers

I thought the Nissembaum article on hackers was pretty thought-provoking. Her point that society's view of hackers is no longer that of cyberspace pioneers or digital mavericks but as deviants and criminals represents a major ontological shift and reminded me a little bit of another group of maligned individuals.

The original pirates of the Caribbean (the people not the film) were privateers employed by the British navy to attack Spanish and Dutch ships. Once the war was settled, these privateers were out of job and their acts of smuggling and sabotage became illegal and punishable by death.  Like the hackers, the pirates were now being hunted down for what they have previously been allowed and even encouraged to do.

In the case of the hackers, corporate interests, government institutions and the popular press have conspired to make hackers into criminals in order to justify greater security standards, regulation and enforcement of private property right. In our lifetime, we have witnessed the online world  transformed from a sort "Wild West" scene to a kind of gated community where users have to register domains, create passwords and rely on Internet providers to obtain access. Nissembaum makes the case that the original hackers held to their own credo and code if you will and were responsible for many of the early innovations in computer programming and the development of the Internet, but now all hackers are reduced to villains and white collar criminals, the so-called "enemies of the Information Age" (p.199).

Even in Hollywood, we have seen this shift in public opinion of hackers play out on the big screen. Think of the 1983 movie War Games where a young Matthew Broderick hacks into a military computer program and almost starts World War III and compare it to a more recent film like 2001's Swordfish where Hugh Jackman is the world's greatest hacker who is employed by a terrorist to steal billions of dollars. Broderick is considered an innocent and naive computer whiz, where Jackman is a dangerous criminal and thief (Another example might be Keanu Reeves character in the Matrix).

I must admit that I don't usually think of hackers as freedom fighters or ideologues, but as vandals who steal and try to infect our computers with viruses. And maybe that's because the hackers who gain notoriety are the ones doing it for selfish and malevolent purposes. Or maybe it's because the media is mislabeling what it is to be a hacker. Either way, it's still worth thinking about. This effort to tame the online world and to drive hackers  - and by extension, those who want freedom and autonomy in the online sphere - to the margins of society continues. Yesterday's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 is today's SOPA and PIPA regulation.

The Public Screen

Class – I am deeply sorry for getting this up so late. In my defense I thought I had posted this on Thursday from work and when I went to go check the discussion today I see that nothing posted. So I rushed back into work today to pull the saved version from my work computer. The only thing I can think of is that it had something to do with Government security on my work computer. Once again – terribly sorry.

“Ideally the public sphere denotes a social space wherein private citizens gather as a public body with the rights to assembly, association, and expression in order to form public opinion”, Jurgen Habermas. In this article, Public Screen, the authors talk about how we can no longer limit ourselves to just the Public Sphere due to how the Internet and Television has changed out culture. He introduces the Public Screen as a new metaphor to thinking about places of politics.

In the article the authors say, that the ideal public sphere is seen as the seat of civic life, participatory democracy, through the marketplace of ideas such as coffee houses and salons, town meetings, where anyone can say his or her piece, the public sphere is imagined as a place of embodied voices, of people talking to each other, of conversation. Now, in this day in age, I believe we have the means to have these conversations in a broader landscape. Facebook, twitter, myspace, blogs posts, you tube, and many other networking sites gives us the possibility to a more conducive public sphere.

The authors go on to discuss the public screen. The public screen starts from the premise of dissemination. Communication is characterized by dissemination. The public sphere is said to be limiting and is simply a guiding metaphor for social theory. Using the “public screen” as a metaphor for thinking about the places of politics and the possibilities of citizenship. The public screen recognizes that the most important public discussions take place via “screens”, television, computer, and newspapers. The public screen takes technology seriously.

Television and the Internet has transformed the way our society acts and perceives things. The authors hit on TV and newspapers as a form of public screen but I am going to stick with the Internet. “They physically shrink the world while simultaneously mentally expanding it, producing a vast expansion of geographical consciousness”. This quote really stuck out to me. It is so true about how the internet has made things so much more accessible to us and how easy it is to jump on the internet and read todays news, or get in on a political debate, or send a facebook message. Something this is personal to me that really made an impact on my life is the ability to send an email to someone 7000 miles away or even skype with someone that far away. When I was deployed to Iraq the Internet was a life saver. It allowed me to communicate with my loved ones at home instantly and in a sense helped keep me going everyday. It has given us the capability to do so much making every day life easier and at times more difficult. However I think right now the good out-weigh the bad.

The author goes on to discuss how the public screen as made a shift in public opinion. In the public sphere, public opinion is designed to criticize and control the power of the state. It shifts public opinion by forcing not only criticizing and controlling the power of the state but also of the corporations. Corporations are forced to maintain a positive public opinion to protect their public image.

The public screen is a constant current of images and words, a ceaseless circulation of technologies of television, film, photography, and the Internet. It can be characterized as a “distraction”. Real life is becoming indistinguishable form the movies” (pg 135). Do you agree that the theater of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film…? A German social theorist recognized this as a new mode of perception. The theorists understand distraction not as a lack of attention but as a necessary form of perception. I find this idea very interesting. The authors state that this theory suggests that they be read not morally but analytically as signs of the emergence of a new space for discourse, the public screen, that entails different forms of intelligence and knowledge.