Plague at Ashdod

Following this first pandemic, survivors – Justinian included – made efforts to rebuild and restructure their empire and its economy but due to the latent effects of the plague, the empire would never fully recover or return to the level of prosperity it once enjoyed. In keeping with points made by Oldstone about viruses and their long-lasting effects on major events and decisions in history and economy, I think it is exemplary of the basic viral-to-host transaction that the bubonic plague, generally believed to have reached Byzantium due to the far-reaching nature of its then thriving economy (trade with neighboring areas, etc), ultimately weakened the same economy that allowed it to spread so quickly in the first place. Should all past, present and future major outbreaks of viruses/plagues be viewed, not as an anomalies, but as inevitable – part and parcel of human advancement much in the same way immunization is devised to combat them?

Biological or (more important and pertinent) computational, is the virus solely responsible for successfully infecting and altering a host cell or should the environment that allows it to spread rapidly be credited for however high a level of virulence the virus is able to achieve? In the specific case of memes in meme culture, how much credit should be given to a video that goes viral for having the right qualities/ingredients to make it go viral? and how much credit should be given to the platform on top of which the video was able to spread so quickly? Does the nature of that platform change over time to reflect the long-lasting effects of highly successful memes on pop and internet culture?

Successful memes go viral, less successful memes don’t. What is the deciding factor for judging a meme as successful or as an isolated incident? Is it quantitative? Is it based on how the meme originated (from an outside agent or as part of the internet turning on itself)? Should a distinction be made between memes that spring up “naturally” (genuinely born on the web… eg: “double rainbow”) and memes that are “manufactured” (perhaps as part of a carefully constructed marketing campaign with deliberate “going viral” potential… eg: “old spice guy”)?

Top 10 Worst Plagues in History

But it may be that we understand the Fourth Amendment to protect a kind of dignity. Even if a search does not burden anyone, or even if one doesn’t notice the search at all, this conception of privacy holds that the very idea of a search is an offense to dignity. That dignity interest is only matched if the state has a good reason to search before it searches. From this perspective, a search without justification harms your dignity whether it interfaces with your life or not.

Although I generally agree with this interpretation of the fourth amendment, I disagree with the argument made that all digital survellance violates the amendment. If a worm or a bot is installed on your computer and it is programmed to performed just one query, I don’t see it as being in violation because even though that search might have been performed without your knowledge, there’s a good chance that it wasn’t performed without your permission. Everyday, we give permission to monitoring mechanisms by using the technologies that we use. We might not know that we are giving permission to the government and to corporations to put us under constant surveillance. We might know and agree to use these technologies anyway, thinking of it as a price to pay for the conveniences that they offer. In this respect, in the corporations’ view at least, dignity isn’t being violated because you sign user agreements that give them the permission to do that. Where one can strongly argue that dignity is being violated is when the technology involved isn’t technology that you agree to use or had the option to sign a user agreement for. Methods produced by these technologies might be unobtrusive but the feeling of knowing that the sole purpose of this technology is surveillance and that there’s nothing you’re getting in return might create a clear feeling that your dignity is being violated.

If the argument is that the fourth amendment protects against offenses to human dignity, what exactly does dignity mean and how is it violated? Digital surveillance and search occur en masse unobtrusively because new technologies make it easy to do this. If they occur en masse, I don’t think personal dignity is an issue because it isn’t like being singled out, monitored and searched. There’s an example Lessig gives which I don’t think is a very good example because it doesn’t factor in the massive aspect of modern-day surveillance. To explain how search can be undignified even if the person being searched doesn’t feel like it is intrusive, Lessig uses the example of young teens being stopped and searched by police officers after an incident was reported nearby. Simply put, there were singled out and searched. There were probably bystanders, onlookers and passers-by present during the search. Online, there are no bystanders, onlookers or passers-by, we are all subjected to the same search and monitoring. In Lessig’s example, I think the youth who vividly expresses his outrage is also accounting for bystanders, onlookers, and passers-by when he feels his dignity is being violated. Online, digital surveillance is a shared experience and to me, doesn’t feel like an affront to dignity so long as when I find out that I’m being searched, I don’t feel singled out.

Without shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a much more difficult time in addressing social problems. People may even find it hard to understand one another. Common experiences, emphatically including the common experiences made possible by the media, provide a form of social glue.

Sunstein talks about viewing the Internet as a street or a public park. Most streets and public parks are by law open to speakers looking for a diverse audience for their opinions, arguments and ideas. Street corners and public parks are public spaces and the Internet by its initial definition is also a public space but it is also becoming an increasingly commercialized and privatized space. Sunstein’s description of the tension between our roles and rights as consumers versus our rights as citizens mirrors the tension that exists on the Internet between truly public aspects and commercialized spaces governed by corporations. All the major websites and SNSs are owned by corporations which, by definition, make it good practice to deliver consumers what they want. Websites like the Facebook, Netflix and Amazon would not be nearly as successful today without many consumer-centric practices which include filtering. In addition to filtering, some of these websites, rather than push the feeling of being on a street corner or public park, strive to make visitors feel like they are at home by allowing them to customize and filter their experiences online. Sunstein talks about the difficulty of convincing lawmakers to officially recognize the Internet as the new street corner because of this tension.

This tension is even more complex when we consider mobile experiences and how smartphones, mobile devices and social media apps used to access the Internet are viewed and marketed as highly personalized extensions of ourselves. Apps like Tweetdeck and Facebook for iPhone make it even easy to filter not only your online experiences, but your offline experiences as well. Before the emergence and ubiquity of mobile Internet and all the services that plug into it, your filtered online experience ended once you were away from your computer or out of the house. Today, your filtered experience follows you everywhere. A conservative leaning citizen doesn’t have to make the effort to process ideas in a speech from a liberal politician when bloggers and politicians that share his political views are also listening in and live-tweeting their reactions. During the State-of-the-Union address, Republican senators in attendance can live-tweet their reactions so that their conservative followers don’t have an unfiltered experience of the President’s speech. This practice of live-tweeting and live-blogging, when consumed from a narrow group of like-minded sources, flies in the face of Sunstein’s optimistic view of general interest intermediaries and advances consumer sovereignty even further. When consumed from a wide range of diverse sources, live-tweeting and live-blogging promotes political sovereignty:

The idea of political sovereignty stands on different foundations. It does not take individual tastes as fixed or given; it doesn’t not see people as simply “having” tastes and preferences. For those who value political sovereignty, “We the People” reflect on what we want by exchanging diverse information and perspectives.

When you have a smartphone with you, you can literally be on a street corner or public park, point your device at something you disagree with and get instant instructions on exactly how to feel about it. In essence, your mobile device becomes not only a live-filter, but more importantly an interpreter of unplanned, unanticipated experiences so you don’t have to do it yourself. The filters you set up or have set up for you online become so powerful that even shared experiences end up having little effect on your preconceived opinions and points-of-view. You don’t get the feeling of being in a public space when you have your consumer-centric smartphone with all its apps and filters with you at all times filtering your environment so that unfamiliar ideas and arguments come to you in familiar interpretations.

Morozov calls this a resurgence of long-standing optimism about democratizing the world that was birthed in the Cold War – now viewed as the Google Doctrine. According to the reading, the biggest flaw in the Google Doctrine is failing to see the Internet as an indiscriminating place – open not simply in the sense that it advocates freedom and democracy for all, but open in the sense that it adapts easily to any and all agendas, good and evil. On the inability of the doctrine’s proponents to see past the good, Morozov observes: “that Al-Qaeda seemed to be as proficient in using the Internet as its Western opponents did not chime well with a view that treated technology as democracy’s best friend.” This observation about the Internet as a double-edged sword and about the inability of many to see this fits nicely with the analogy of the Internet as a tool with no handles, we’re uncertain of what it can be used for, but even more uncertain of what it can’t be used for. According to Morozov, this uncertainty is very dangerous when it isn’t acknowledged. The November 2008 attacks in Mumbai show how connectedness in the information age can be harnessed for evil… many seemed equally surprised by the tools used to coordinate the attacks as they were surprised by the attacks themselves. Blackberry Messenger, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook are all tools more frequently identified by their ability for social good when their propensity for aiding evil-doers should be just as apparent.

On the subject of the American government’s awkward relationship with these technologies in times of civic unrest, Morozov talks about government officials doing more harm than good when they assign more influence than is need to the Internet in uprooting authoritarian regimes. After reading about the actions of the state department official who requested that twitter hold off on its scheduled maintenance for a few hours during the Iranian protests, it seems less like pure paranoia to me that governments in India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have been pushing for telecom companies like Research In Motion to grant them unrestricted access to data on the mobile phones. Carelessness on the part of the US government in deciding how much distance to maintain between itself and Internet services like twitter (that count on their apolitical standing to gain open entry in many countries) has led to even more restriction of access to information in countries under authoritarian and oppressive regimes. Terrorist cells aside, oppressive governments also have as much a penchant for new communication technology as do activists and bloggers. The Internet is just as accommodating to being used to maintain oppression as it is to being used to spread ideas of freedom and democracy.

Wikipedia

During a recent performance, a comedian observed that the difference (or distance) between “knowing” and “not knowing” has virtually been erased because access to tools like google search is now available everywhere – in your pocket, by your bedside, etc. To summarize his observations, trying to track down a specific piece of information years ago was an almost adventurous undertaking. When you were done, you felt like you grew or advanced a little as a person. Today it’s as easy as entering a question into google’s search bar. You don’t seek out information anymore. In a sense,  information comes to you on command. Unlike information you receive through older traditional media outlets, this information can be remarkably specific to your interests. What was a character referencing on a recent episode of your favorite show? What parts do you need to build something from scratch? What’s the fastest, most convenient way to get from one part of the world to another? (a question Google will soon become even more involved with after its proposed acquisition of travel management software ITA is done) The answer to very specific questions like these are usually a couple of clicks away thanks to the efforts of active participants on the Internet.

Active participation is more responsible than any technological innovation for closing this gap between knowing and not knowing. This observation that the feeling of having acquired an obscure piece of information isn’t as satisfying anymore is only compelling when you aren’t an active participant. Admittedly, I’ve made this complaint myself once before, which is why it stuck out when I heard it. Most of the time, I’m a free-rider – I mostly use the Internet to get information but I rarely offer any information back in return. As a free-rider, it is easy to notice the closing of this gap because your media experience is still very passive and reminiscent of old media-consuming habits. New communication and networking technologies aren’t taking the fun and excitement out of learning or searching for information, they are simply shifting the fun and excitement to a new form of individual participation that isn’t limited to just getting information but also sharing and producing information in return. The satisfaction in the end now comes from seeing how much of an impact you can make in your network by sharing what you stumble upon and contributing whatever information you have, however obscure or broad. Simply finding information and holding on to it gets you nothing anymore because it has almost become a purely automated act, made even more lifeless when the information is received through tools like Google or Wikipedia.

There are lots of networking tools in the market today that seem to take the fun out of knowledge consumption when used incorrectly. Wikipedia is a good example of a website that many visitors use only as a tool to acquire information. If more people were willing to participate fully in Wikipedia the way it was intended, many of the complaints about it (misinformation, hive-mind, etc) wouldn’t be as prevalent. The satisfaction and excitement that comes from participating actively and contributing to discussions would increase the user’s knowledge (or knowledge of the knowledge) on whatever subject he/she wants to learn more about by encouraging him/her to take ownership of the subject and search for more answers than are readily available.  When that happens, more people will see Wikipedia not just as a knowledge source, but as a source of empowerment. There are other information gathering tools that are encouraging active participation even more explicitly. They push for participation that involves gathering information, not simply seeking information. I think that if everyone (me included) kept this in mind, we’ll see that there’s more than enough fun to be had in this era of fast, readily available information.

Mumbai Attack

Recently, an oil industry expert went on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show to explain how oil prices go up due to speculation about possible dangerous scenarios that could happen in oil producing countries like Libya. I think this is an example of how we are forced to adjust in many ways, including in media coverage and consumption habits, to how situations might play out before they even do. Beyond calculating supply and demand for resources, speculation is also becoming more intrusive on the way we communicate everyday via the Internet.

Recently, Research In Motion (the company behind Blackberry smartphones and other devices) has come under pressure from a few countries — Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates, and India — to grant government access to encrypted data and emails that travel between their devices. While the governments have stated (in India’s case especially) that this is a policy being enforced on all smartphone manufacturers that want to provide services in these countries, Research In Motion is finding itself at a crossroads because its business-minded consumer-base use Blackberry devices largely for the security it provides for their information. Given the reputation it has built around its data encryption capability, Research In Motion can only make a few concessions (like granting access to its Blackberry Messenger service data in a few countries already) before privacy and security concerns become perhaps their biggest problem. Perhaps not.

Could these concerns really become too much for Research In Motion (and other smartphone manufacturers for that matter) to quell? Privacy is of utmost importance to most consumers of media and technology but concern for security is something that the public shares with the state. Looking at this issue from the perspectives of the governments however, security means something slightly different from what it means to Research In Motion and its loyal customers. At the same time, both meanings often overlap and point to the same thing. By outlining what concerns for privacy and concerns for security mean to governments, Research In Motion, and Blackberry users, I think I can see how speculation, paranoia and anxiety in the wake of 9/11 is affecting democracy in the digital space.

Security from the government’s perspective goes beyond security of information to a broader concern for national security. The Indian government is certainly concerned with not seeing the events of November 26, 2008 repeated. The terrorist attacks on Mumbai were significant for the way they were coordinated via mobile phones. According to the Indian government’s reasoning, unrestricted access to information traveling via blackberry smartphones will give them the ability to preemptively visualize potential terrorist attacks and prepare proactive — rather than reactive — counterattacks.  I don’t have much to go by on the Indian people’s general attitudes toward government infringement on their rights to privacy but relying on the definition of national security as protection from terrorism, many consumers in the U.S. might see this as pretty solid reasoning. Here in the U.S., there’s been a long history of the people willing to suspend some of their basic human rights in exchange for a greater feeling of security. Surely Research In Motion is hoping that the memory of Mumbai attacks, still fresh in its citizens’ collective memory would help alleviate the amount of backlash they’ll receive if they eventually cave to the Indian government’s demands.

Where this reasoning isn’t as sound is when the definition of national security expands to include protection of the ruling power from uprisings. The protests in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya are proving that social networks and all their entry-ways (smartphones included) have an unrestrainable ability to facilitate, coordinate and publicize social unrest. In times of political turmoil, activists, bloggers and casual observers value their privacy even more. It isn’t simply ironic that some of the same methods used to coordinate the Mumbai attacks were also employed in the successful Egyptian revolution. Rather, it is one of the defining characteristics of network dynamics in which network phenomena can take the form of uprisings or terrorist attacks and still be viewed as signs of a functioning network.

In order for Research In Motion, Nokia, and other mobile device manufacturers to not find themselves complicit in regional acts of oppression against their customers, they must weigh both these issues (protection from terrorism and freedom to organize against oppression) against each other and see how much of one can be given up in favor of the other. The future of democracy is at stake.

Sheep

With the influx of new communication technologies and Internet software in everyday lives and activities, there are many misconceptions among which are the ideas that the flow of information on the internet can now be uninterrupted, many-to-many, and on equal footing. In reality, the truth is that most of the content we receive today still goes through a one-to-many outlet and most of the content we create is still as censored and filtered as it was before the internet due to big media corporations privatizing the internet. Robert McChesney, in his interview with Megan Boler, points out this illusion:

… the logic is that with the Internet now here every market is blasted off, open, it’s completely competitive. So you don’t have to worry about whether one company owns all the radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers in the community because you know people can go online and blog to their heart’s content.

Big corporations are counting on the general public overestimating the internet and new media and underestimating the manipulative powers of traditional media conglomerates to deter efforts of grassroots media. As has been discussed in class, the Internet, as apt as it is for facilitating discourse in the public, can just as easily be usurped by oppressive government and corporate entities and manipulated to maintain the status quo. Oppressive government policies aren’t seen only in extremely overt examples like that of Egypt before the recent successful revolt of its citizens, but also in the subtlest ways in countries like the United States in forms of censorship, archaic intellectual property laws, etc. If the people aren’t educated on the media policies and the infrastructure of the Internet, the false sense of openness and strength afforded by the Internet in its current state in combating the stronghold of corporate interests in the media will continue to permeate.

The Internet might have once been a place for freedom of speech, expression, creativity, information, and conversation (as it rightfully should be) but at the turn of the century, corporations quickly began to divy it up for profit and find ways to commercialize everything that was once promising about the space (blogs, academic papers, creative content, etc). Communication on the Internet gradually backtracked from the many-to-many model to a mostly one-to-many model with corporations monopolizing many services provided on the internet and prioritizing what information got free reign and what information didn’t. Computers, routers, smartphones seem to assure users that anything is possible but behind this promise lie a lot of restrictions. Sadly, the people’s perception of this space hasn’t caught up to the reality quickly enough, and the reality according to McChesney is that:

In the United States, it’s clear that merging profit seeking with the Internet has not done anything to improve our journalism, or very little. If anything it’s part of the process of seeing it continue to unravel.

Today, most of the media hardware and software we use, both on the consumer and production level, is increasingly becoming so hardwired in very sophisticated ways for censorship, content filtering and restricting access to all available information. Ronald J. Deibert talks about this in Black Code Redux when he describes material factors as the media technologies (software and devices) we use to communicate:

I have argued that the media through which we communicate are not neutral or empty vessels but present specific constraints and opportunities for the nature and type of communications that can take place through them.

This new form of controlling new media is dangerous for many reasons: because controlling new media essentially grants corporations ability to control the dialogue and because knowledge about these preemptive measures is mostly kept secret and if you’re not compelled to know much about your devices and favorite online apps beyond what manufacturers and designers want you to know, you’ll go on believing the Internet, in it’s current state, is perfect and the thought of reform probably wouldn’t cross your mind. This is exactly how the corporations want it. While the Internet is certainly instrumental in a lot of grassroots movements of the day, it is nowhere near perfect or at its full potential yet.

The advice McChesney gives is that we stop seeing ourselves simply as citizens on the Internet, but as governors, after all, in a true democracy, we govern ourselves. This means in order to be fully immersed in the new magical place we call the Internet, we must actively take responsibility for it and educate ourselves in order to hold accountable those who should be held accountable. We now have the ability to be online at every waking (and sleeping) moment, it’s only right that we make efforts to be as fully aware of the inner-workings of this new neighborhood as we do our physical neighborhoods. The alternative is to be treated as Internet sheep being fed chemically altered feed in the form of highly censored, regulated, and subsidized information that we have no control over. It’s incredibly easy to get stuck on the new technologies and all the conveniences they provide without giving much thought to how much we’re constantly having to give up in order to enjoy these technologies. Even in cases where the technologies are being used to rally support behind grassroots initiatives, Internet/media infrastructure is often overlooked. Without strong positive change in this area, corporations will continue to tighten their stranglehold on the web, making it increasingly difficult to use it to rally behind other causes that matter to us.

Here’s my response to Megan Boler’s book for EMAC6300, which I think echoes McChesney’s sentiment that it is a sad situation when the comics are able to attract more attention than the journalists on pressing issues:

Also, here’s a post I did on the Yes Men, also from EMAC6300.

This idea of constantly being online, regardless of where you are or what you’re doing (even when you’re asleep) is important because I think it marks a middle point between when being on the internet was considered something you had to make time and sit still for, and a time in the future when being connected to the web will simply become synonymous with being alive. Today, cell phones come with the promise to help us do just about anything on the go: read, compose emails, take pictures, edit video, compose music, order takeout, pay bills, pay for coffee, and through social network apps (also available on cell-phones) tell everyone about everything you just did. More importantly, mobile devices help us more easily bring aspects of our daily lives, which were usually left out of virtual spaces in the pre-mobile internet years, into cyberspace; private aspects, mundane details, everything can be recorded, remediated and shared instantly. As a result, I think the internet is going from being just one aspect of our daily lives to eventually becoming an essential component of everything we do. Another way of putting this, as Mark Poster does in “CyberDemocracy”, is that Internet is best understood not as a tool to use when needed, but as a place that we all inhabit, and everything we do might eventually be done inside the walls of the Internet.

As the technology develops, mobile devices may eventually give way to some other form of communication technology that weaves itself even more seamlessy into our lives. This all sounds impossible to some and nightmarish to others because even today not everyone has internet access, and of those that do, not everyone wants to live every aspect of their lives on the web. As is so often the case, in order to address both these concerns, there are two things to consider in the mobile era we’re currently in: access and privacy.

Surely the internet can be credited with expediting the transformation of the public sphere from Habermas’s exclusive vision of it to what it looks like today, all its imperfections aside. However, I don’t think increased access to the public sphere regardless of class, race and gender is something that didn’t happen (or wouldn’t have happened) outside of the internet, or without the internet. When Poster talks about hurdles of “prevailing hierarchies” that the internet reduces, I think of two different hurdles; hurdles to access and hurdles to enjoyment of the public sphere. Once again, I think many hurdles to access have long been reduced (and continue to be reduced) before the internet (and without the internet). I think hurdles to enjoyment is what Poster has in mind when he talks about people having a desire and ability to subvert gender distinctions during self-definition online. I also think hurdles to enjoyment is what happens when certain groups with distinct interests cannot get their needs met because they’re in the minority. They can voice their needs louder on the internet but in today’s politics, the minority opinion is the minority opinion online and offline.

The problem with the face-to-face public sphere is that even if access is easy to attain, levels of enjoyment are usually pre-determined by conventional beliefs about gender roles and attitudes about race and class. Also, because the internet is increasingly blurring the distinction between public sphere and private sphere, people are free to insert themselves into the public discussion without having to reveal race, class, gender, etc; public participation becomes more enjoyable for many because certain defining aspects of their personalities are kept private. Perhaps this affordance, made possible by the internet, is needed today; and perhaps it is too optimistic to assume that sometime in the future, everyone will eventually be on a level playing field in face-to-face public spheres.

Diversity

Networks reflect individuals within them and their interactions and collected information. There are many factors that contribute to network growth including access to information, protection of privacy, and technological innovation. Because of new communication technologies that get introduced every year, networks become more global and more inclusive than previously imagined. Inventions of language, the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, television, and the internet all mark some of the most important milestones in accommodating more participation in the network and increasing its span. Privacy and anonymity must continue to be important issues to consider in order to protect against nefarious elements of the network like cyber-bullying, hive-mind, trolling, etc. Ability to receive and share information freely is also important for fluidity of knowledge that makes networks work. However, in addition to these factors, I think a very important factor that needs to be considered more in order for the global network to become even more inclusive and global is diversity of information.

I’m enjoying the overlap from some of the reading materials that’s happening between my classes this semester and last semester. I’ve recently been reading about the differences between strong ties and weak ties and how they both influence network activity. Last semester I researched and wrote an essay on the dynamic between the individual and the networked collective. While strong ties are important for reinforcing the bond between social groups, weak ties are even more important because they help enrich the quality and diversity of information that is passed around within a given social group. The chance that close friends and acquaintances have information and resources that you don’t already have is unlikely considering that you’re both so close because you’re probably into the same things. It’s the friends you only see from a distance that are usually better equipped to come to your aid with new information when you need it the most. While researching my essay last semester, I learned about treating the individual within the network as a quality of the network and treating personal identity as a piece of information in the stream of information being exchanged in the network.

Diversity of information happens because of diversity of individuals within someone’s network or social group. Too often, we unintentional subvert the goal of new communication and media technologies by using them to reinforce our circle of knowledge and validate our ideas and beliefs. No new knowledge or wisdom is gained. Instead, old knowledge and beliefs are reinforced by people who share the same points-of-view. I think the goal of new communication technologies isn’t just to bring like-minded people together who would otherwise find it difficult or even impossible to be in the same place at any given time, it is also to introduce diverse ideas, information, and resources to social groups and individuals within those groups.