Cairo Continued

Just saw this post on the google blog, "Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard."  Google with Twitter, and SayNow worked this weekend to provide a way that people in Egypt can circumvent the down servers by calling international phone numbers and leaving voicemails that will then be tweeted.  People can also listen to these tweets by calling the same phone numbers. This is a pretty cool use of technology.

Cairo

When I teach the introductory class to the major I am always trying to find ways to engage my students politically. I think it is really important to try and encourage students to become more interested in the world that surrounds us. Last semester when the Wikileaks cable story broke, I was amazed (and a bit saddened) that only about 10 percent of the students had any real information about what was going on.

Later in the semester this class will be talking about Wikileaks as well as the coverage of social media in the Iranian protests last year.  But it might be hard to wait, especially with the events that are now unfolding in Egypt.  One of the aspects I found extremely interesting was Egypt's attempt to block off access to the Internet.   Bobbie Johnson explains what happened in the essay, How Egypt Switched Off the Internet which was written for GigaOM.

Some writers also began to question the recent plan by the Obama Administration to gain the ability to close down some of the more sensitive areas of the Internet (.gov sites?) in the case of a cyber attack.  Information about this plan can be found in Grant Gross' "Obama 'Internet kill switch' plan approved by US Senate panel."  

This third essay, "Could a U.S. government crackdown take America off the Internet?" by Annalee Newitz, connects these two stories and speculates if something similar could happen in America due to the proposed law.

What do you guys think?  Is anyone following the events in Egypt?  What do you make of the way social media is being discussed in relation to the protests?  How is the media playing a role?

@?

I think that at least a handful of my students were born in 1994.  Only 17 years ago this is an interesting glimpse into the way that the Internet was being adopted by mainstream media.

Facebook Envy

When I first started researching the Internet as a graduate student, one of the first topics that grabbed my attention was webcams.  There were webcams showing fish bowls, traffic, pizza shops, and people's private lives.  JenniCam was created by a woman in Washington D.C. who had five cameras placed through her apartment that were always recording her life as it happened.  In reading about JenniCam one of the common ideas related to its popularity was that everyday people liked turning on and watching how boring and normal her life was.  It made them feel good that someone else was at home alone on a Friday night.

There were also a lot of discussions about the authenticity of these people centered web cameras.  How much did these people censor their lives, knowing that cameras were capturing the daily details of their lives?  How did they attempt to control the images being sent out to an anonymous public?

Which brings us to Facebook. Is there something reassuring to people that they can always visit a place where 'friends' are always hanging out?  Are we never really alone?  In what ways do we use facebook to connect with each other and in what ways do we use it to create a controlled identity?  How do we censor how we present ourselves through the status updates we write?  Do you post mainly good things that happen in your life or do you use facebook to vent about the hard times?

In my own experiences I try to keep personal emotions out of my statuses, using it more to share pictures of my kids or to relay my interests. I do notice that a lot of my 'friends' constantly post about the good things going on in their lives.  They seem to exist in a state of perpetual happiness.  I also have 2 or 3 'friends' who are more likely to post about the misery and unhappiness in their lives.

I found a blog post on Switched tonight which is about a study of facebook completed by a doctoral student at Stanford.  The post "Facebook Makes Us All Sad Because Everyone Is Happy But Us" by Lella Brillson talks about the findings of the study.  The major argument is facebook presents a filtered version of the self and that our exposure to these types of idealized identities makes us feel even more inadequate about the level of happiness in our own lives. 

Do you agree?  Are you using facebook in a similar way?  Have you noticed this as a trend or does the study overstate the level of idealizing and censorship occurring on facebook?

Technology Loop

I mentioned this in class but there is a new show on IFC called Portlandia which seems mostly to be about making fun of 90's alternative culture.  The show was very hit or miss but this was probably the highlight.

Unplugged

In MCS 222 I have always included a 24 hour media deprivation assignment that I adopted from Danna L. Walker which she wrote about in her Washington Post essay "The Longest Day."
Recently an episode of Modern Family featured a similar story line, where the Dunphy family competed to see who could go the longer without using their cell phone or the Internet.  As I was reading some of the more current books that I was considering for this class, many included discussions of the benefit of disconnecting.  I saw this essay on Salon the other day which was written by Susan Maushart, "When my kids unplugged."
As a mother she decided to restrict access to the Internet and cell phones at their home.  She reports that the experiment was a huge success.  How would your family change if you faced a similar ban?

Social Media is...

If I have time the first day I might have students do a short writing assignment based on Ollie Adams quick analysis of Google's suggest algorithm for guessing our search behaviors.  Here is a link to the screenshots gathered on "Google Suggest on Social Media."

Appify Old Media

What would society look like if tablet computers become the dominant form of recording and retrieving information in our society?  In the television show Fringe, there is parallel universe where this has happened.  While the show doesn't go too deeply into the implications, what do students think of schools without text books and writing?  Is there an app for education and learning?  What qualities make for a successful app? In her essay, "To Appify Old Media, We Need a New Approach Diane Burley examines some of the unique aspects of the tablet as a medium.

Safe Cyberspace

One topic we will be discussing during the semester is the early mainstream scholarship that began to appear in the early 1990's that were about the political potential of the Internet.  The students will be reading Steve Silberman's 1994 Wired essay, "We're Teen, We're Queer, and We've Got E-mail."  The essay discusses the way the Internet became a safe space for young gay people in communities where coming out would have been dangerous.  While with all the recent discussion of gay marriage and the end of "don't ask, don't tell" this reading seems slightly dated, it is interesting how globally the same discussion continues to appear.  I was checking out digg today and found an essay about South Korea.  In his piece, "South Korea: Online Haven for Gays," Michael Rhee outlines the ways teens in the country are finding a safe space on the Internet to discuss their sexuality outside of the homophobic public discourse.  One of the questions I want to ask the class is if they feel the popularization of the Internet in America during the late 1990's was in any way related to changing perspectives about homosexuality among the mainstream.

Welcome to the course

This is the course blog for MCS 370, Media Ecology: Everyday Life in the Digital Age.  The course is taught by Dr. Donald Snyder in the program of Media and Communication Studies at UMBC.  Here is the course description:

 How central are media and communication technologies to the ways we pattern our everyday lives?  As a field of study, media ecology is interested in examining the role that the structures and content of these technologies shape our identities, social interactions, and understanding of the worlds we inhabit.  Since the introduction of the computer in the second half of the twentieth century, our lives are becoming more and more mediated; what are the implications of living in a digital age?  Through course readings, and various media projects, students will examine the relationship between media and everyday life.

Class topics are going to include postmodern theory, new media, the nature of information, web 2.0, intellectual property, social networking, privacy, and the effect of technology on our environment.

Students will use this blog to share interesting online content related to our class discussions.