Fixity and credit in the twitter age

In the digital era, there have been many enemies in the battle of fixity, credit and and reliable information. They have come in the form of wikipedia, where just about anyone can edit an article causing a big issue with fixity, to issues of credit with pirating, through programs like bittorrent and limewire, and to what I believe is one of the biggest threats to internet fixity and credit, Twitter. I believe the proliferation of twitter, coupled with how new it is, is creating an environment where lack of fixity and credit can lead to disastrous consequences.

We'll look at what twitter is and how it has spread across the world as a medium for a huge variety of messages. Twitter is what's called a microblog. It is essentially a blog that can be posted to 140 characters at a time. We will then look at how the microblogging medium is used and it's rise to popularity.

Then we'll look at is the ability of people to take credit for whatever they want, and more importantly, how people can use other's identity (especially celebrity's) for their own gain or evil purposes. I will talk about the lighter side of being a "tweetthief" and how harmless it can sometimes be to send someone else's plagiarized ideas. Then I will discuss how fake celebrity twitter accounts can be used to spread malicious viruses and false content. Then I will move onto how twitter is trying to keep people from using celebrity credentials for their own personal gain.

Next I will talk about fixity and how it's been taken advantage of in the digital age. People are used to official-looking text to be accurate. I will then discuss how people use legitimate "retweets" but change a link address in it for malicious purposes. I will then discuss the hoaxes that have been carried out through twitter and then finally discuss the possibilities of twitter to cause panic.

Bibliography

Cascio, Jamais. Fast Company. 17 June 2009. 2 12 2010 .

This article discusses the possibilities of social networking, specifically Twitter, to be used to help perpetrate genocide under the right conditions. I will use it in my paper to demonstrate the power that social media can hold and how, possibly, horrific the outcome could be

Heussner, Ki Mae. ABC News/ Technology. 15 January 2010. 2 12 2010 .

This article talks about the different twitter hoaxes that have been perpetrated over the last few years. It shows real world scenarios that show how misinformation through media like Twitter can cause panic and the spread if said misinformation

Johns, Adrian. "The Book of Nature and the Nature of the Book." The Book History Reader. Routledge, 2006. 255-272.

In this book Johns talks about the history of fixity throughout the print age and how the printing press increased fixity and helped establish the credit of the author. I'm going to use this chapter to contrast how the print revolution helped establish fixity and credit while the digital one is seeming to do the opposite in some cases.

Pierson, Garrett. Social Media Vision . 8 January 2009. 2 12 2010 .

Garrett uses this article to shed some light on the etiquette of "retweeting" and how people can use it to their own gain. I'm going to use this article to show how easy it is to steal other people's ideas and also how easy it is to modify a retweat to sneak in your own link.

Schofield, James. Technology Blog. 12 June 2009. 2 12 2010 .

Schofield's article talks about how twitter is trying to combat fake celebrity profiles and some of the backlash caused by some of these fake celebrities. This article will help me further show what a person can do when there is no proof of credit, that is, no proof that the real celebrity is writing said tweets.

Stengel, Richard. "Technology and Culture." Time 15 June 2009.

Stengel's article discusses the cultural changes that things like twitter has brought about. He also argues that the phrase "the medium is the message" holds true in twitter. I'm going to use this article to demonstrate the popularity and power that twitter is gaining.

"Twitter power // Learning from ourselves, in real time." USA Today 25 May 2010: 01a.

This article goes into more depth into the power that twitter is gaining as a distributor of media despite its limited character content. It talks about the good that twitter can do, citing the Haiti relief efforts that were organized through social media like twitter. I'll use this article to show that while fixity might be on the decline, it might not be a bad thing

Yates, S and T Summner. "Digital Genres and the New Burden of Fixity." IEEE (1997).

Yates and Summner's article might be a little more dated then the rest of them, but it gives us a great insight into how the idea that media should be fixed is a a little out dated in the digital world. I'm going to use this article to show that media is migrating away from needing to have fixity.

Blog post 11

Throughout the course we read a bunch of interesting articles, but the ones that I found most interesting were the ones by Ong, specifically how "Writing Restructures Consciousness". It's strange for us to think about writing as a technological advancement and the cognitive side effects that came about because of it. I also found it interesting how Ong described the evolution of the alphabet, as well as other scripts and writing systems. Even though I'm a linguistics major, a lot of this information, the writing systems and the timeline from oral to literate cultures was completely new to me and furthered my knowledge of historical linguistics.

I wasn't really able to use it in any other blogs except the one where we were specifically asked to make the connections. If I were given infinite time and resources, I would try to extend Ong's article to the digital age. I believe that just as writing did before, now hypermediation in the form of websites, video games, and other digital forms (save for the traditional) are restructuring our consciousness. This would be quite the undertaking because it would involve surveys and cognitive ability tests of different age groups and different computer habits. As for the final project, I don't know if I'll be able to work it into my final project. I would have loved to have done the theory I stated above, but when I tried to research it, I didn't find much information to help support that claim.

Generation X, Generation Y, Generation Digital (Final proposal)

Through history we have gone through many media phases. We started out as an oral culture, then with the advent of writing, we saw how writing has restructured our consciousness and changed us into a literary culture. Now we have come to the digital age and with it, many new mediums. I believe that humans are migrating away from pure text or speech cultures and are becoming a digital culture.

I will use Ong's "Writing restructures Consciousness" to show the similarities between the switch from an oral culture to a literary one, and the switch from a literary culture to a hypermediated one. Just as Plato argued that writing subjects down "enfeebles the mind the mind by relieving it of too much work", the baby boomer generation and perhaps some in Gen X believe that the internet does the same thing.

The next thing I will do use use a University of Idaho page to reference what makes a culture unique. http://www.cnrhome.uidaho.edu/default.aspx?pid=88955 . I will use the bullet points (Communication, Space, Time, Social organization, etc) as my main catagories of proving that this new digital culture is unique.

Then I will use "Language and the Internet" By David Crystal, to talk about how the internet has brought about a new language and what the new language entails. Crystal uses the term "Netspeak" to describe the language that has emerged from the internet and other digital mediums of communication and discourse.

Because there is no physical space in a digital environment, I will use the idea of internet privacy, or lack thereof, to talk about the idea of the use of space as a culture. I will use Anne SY Cheung's article titled "Rethinking Public Privacy in the Internet Era: A Study of Virtual Persecution by the Internet Crowd" as a source of the current state of privacy on the internet and how it differs from current American ideals.

There are many different subcultures on the internet. They range from more real world type societies, like myspace or facebook, where the social structures might seem relatively normal, to online communities, like digg, reddit, 4chan and the pirate bay, where anonymity allows all social norms to go out the window. Ya-Ching Lee's article titled "Internet and Anonymity" talks about how being anonymous on the internet has allowed a culture of brutally honest people to prosper.

I will then talk about how this culture is becoming more prominent and things like Twitter and Facebook are now staples in news reporting. Then and talk about possible naysayers and how it's just a subculture instead of being a fully formed culture on its own.

I'm hoping to find at least one more source per culture point for my final paper.

Video games vs Electronic literature. FIGHT!

In reading the first chapter of Hayles' book titled "Electronic Literature: What is it?" you get some mixed signals about the validity of video games as a form of electronic literature. Hayles even says, "The demarcation between electronic literature and computer games is far from clear;" My question is, after reading the first two chapters of Hayles book, where do you stand on video games as electronic literature?

On one side of the argument we have people like Markku Eskelinen who were paraphrased to say "with games the user interprets in order to configure, whereas in works whose primary interest is narrative, the user configures in order to interpret." I on the other hand, believe that video games have just as much literary validity as any other form of electronic literature. Electronic literature is literature that is "digital born" and is made on and usually read on, a computer. Hayles goes on to describe interactive fiction by saying "The interactor controls a player character by is­suing commands. Instructions to the program, for example asking it to quit, are called directives." I believe that video games are just an expansion of interactive fiction.

Let us go back to the Eskelinen quote for a minute. The order that he has for games are interpreting in order to configure the story. While this might be true about some of the old games like Super Mario, games in the 21st century have become more complex in the story and how it's presented. In modern role playing games, or RPGs, you guide your character from narrative to narrative by solving puzzles related to the theme of the story, or perhaps by fighting, but no matter what you do to progress to the next narrative section, it helps progress the story. It helps you configure the story so that you can interpret it.

While there might be video games that lack any story telling mechanisms, and believe me a lot of games today do, there are still a lot of games who's fundamental goal is to tell a story. In that aspect I believe that video games are indeed a good example of electronic literature.

Darnton 2.0

According to Adams and Barker, the publisher has "the initial decision to multiply a text or image for distribution." Then according to Darnton's communication circuit, the publisher would then hand the text off to the printers, then to the distributors, and so on through the cycle. Adams and Barker continue on to explain that one of the main duties in commercial publishing (the most familiar form of publishing) is to weigh the pros and cons of a particular piece of literature and decide if it is financially worth it for the company to print it. When you have a physical book that doesn't sell, the company is at a loss because of the cost of the materials it took to print and transport the book.

In the 21st century we have an (almost) free method of "printing" and "distributing" literature. Publishers have a medium for books that they aren't sure will sell. Instead of rejecting the books outright, they have a way for the company to make money off of these iffy books with very little overhead cost. While there are still traditional publishers like Random House and Penguin Press, there are now many on-line publishers who will publish your work for (sometimes) free. So now a publisher is not just merely the person who says ya or nay to your book being distributed, but instead become a nonjudgmental distributor.

A publisher has changed from being someone who decides weather it is fiscally responsible to print a book to an indiscriminate website that is fused with the printers, shippers, and sellers.

I pledge allegiance to the cow?

I pledge allegiance, to the cow, of the United States of America.

We are a nation centered around our flag. American's today believe that anyone who defiles a flag is a communist Al Qaeda member, who hates America and all it stands for. In America we seem to almost have a flag fetish. I tried to find another country that had such strict etiquette with regards to their national flag, but I was unable to find one. As a matter of fact, I only found one sight that talked about the etiquette of other nation's flags other than America.

While A might stand for Apple Pie or An Archer, the US flag stands for freedom and democracy, to Americans at least. But I ask, would things be different if we made a pledge to a different object? Would we still care so much about flags? Instead, what if Francis Bellamy decided that America's national symbol was not the flag, but the cow. Now we find ourselves pledging allegiance to the cow of America. After 9/11 there was a back order of cows because of the upwelling of patriotism. There are numerous laws that tell you how to handle your cow and how to dispose of an old one. This sounds rediculious because we have been reciting the pledge almost daily in primary school. I believe this is one of the reasons why flags are so important in American culture.

We started every school day by pledging our allegiance to the flag. Crain talks about how these images are ingrained in us from childhood. Passing on our culture and heritage. Crain says that "the child is similarly the medium through which the alphabet permeates culture." (p.56) We can see how the previous generations try to instill upon us the importance of the American flag.

We have the idea that the flag is the symbol of American, but it could just have easily been another figure. We try to convince others that the US flag represents liberty and freedom, but wouldn't a cow do just as good of job?

The End of Cartographers

When first thinking about this assignment, I found it very hard to think of other examples other than those in the text. I believe this is because in today's world, maps aren't really payed attention to. Sure we use our GPS systems while driving, but it is still very rare that we actually look at a map, especially a physical map.




This is an internet meme that went around a website called reddit. This was the first thing I thought about when reading the question. The meme is in the form "I'm from _____ and this is how I see America." The picture above was made by someone from southern California. The person who posted this image took a stock map of America and reduced it to a map of stereotypes. Almost a caricature of America. It was posted on-line as a joke, but some of these maps really do show how the rest of the country/world views the United States. The outcome of these types of maps are usually taken with a grain of salt. Since we live in the digital age and can easily access an accurate map, I don't think anyone would mistake this for a real map of America.

It seems that in our time the map is reasonably stable. I found a wikipedia article that lists the changes to the world map from the last 3000 years. It seems that since the fall of the Berlin wall and communist Russia, there haven't been many changes to the map that aren't countries splitting or name changes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_map_changes