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

Harry Potter and the Internet Pirate

In today's society piracy is rampant. With access to the internet we also get access to movies, music, books, and just about anything else we want that can be seen or heard through a computer. Though intellectual piracy is not a new concept, it is done in different ways than it was in the past few centuries.

In the Johns article we read about the dispute between Tycho Brahe and Nicolai Reymers Baer on who first made certain astronomical observations. It came down to one accusing the other of plagiarism. This sort of thing could happen quite easily due to how slow information traveled. If one of them received a copy of the other's work, they could easily reprint it with their name on it and claim it theirs. This is very different in today's society. Authors now-a-days tend to copyright everything they can that is related to the story they wish to tell or the information they wish to convey. It is rare for there to be a dispute about who was the original author (though they do happen on occasion). The problem authors have now is not other people claiming the work as their own, but distributing it without their consent. It would take any internet literate person about 30 seconds to find a copy of just about any popular book that has came out in the last 50 years. There is also a problem with books being leaked to the public before they are meant to be. There was a big deal a few years back of someone copying down the new Harry Potter and posting it on-line before the release. This release ended up being a fake.

Before the advent of the printing press fixity was a very hard thing to maintain. After making a copy of a copy of a copy, you don't know exactly how accurate your version is from the source. Since the printing press was invented, documents could be easily copied exactly raising the level of fixity from copy to copy. Since remediation is so prevalent in our time, it is hard to believe that there is any difference in the book we read from the author's original words.

Although intellectual piracy is still around today, it has changed its shape. It no longer pens books in other authors' names, but instead distributes the books for free and it no longer is a mystery as to who the original author is. Times have changed and so has piracy.

Although it's not common in Western cultures, it seems to be popular in China to write your own bootleg books to take advantage of a popular franchise.

为什么妈和马不一样字？(blog #4)

If any part of this appears as empty squares, it means that you don't have the east asian languages enabled. If this is the case click here

In reading most languages we seem to forget to look at the form of what we're reading. Sure, we might notice a fun or annoying font that they used, but rarely does this take away from the meaning or add to it (although some font choices make you seem like a tool). There are, though, a few languages who's pictographic roots left the written language with a system in which you have to pay attention to the form and structure of each word for it to make sense.

If we take a look at written Chinese we get a great example of how the pictographic roots of the written language keep us from "being seduced from attending to graphical features and codes". A good example of this is how the Chinese language uses a something called radicals. A radical is part of the character that helps you derive the meaning of words you don't yet know. The popular examples are 马，吗，and 妈. These mean horse, a question particle, and mother respectively. They are all pronounced in very similar ways /mɔ/. Their difference in meaning comes from the radical. Horse doesn't have one, the second one has the mouth radical and mother has the female radical. In traditional Chinese there are 214 different radicals that can point to the meaning of something.

While quite a few of the radicals have changed over the years to not really resemble the original pictograph. There are still many that remain very similar to their roots. 日is the symbol for sun. 日startedout looking more like Ɵ and through the years became the character it is today. Whenever a native speaker/reader of Chinese sees the sun radical they automatically know that the character they are reading has to do with time. We can look at the characters 昨，明, and 时. Which mean yesterday, tomorrow, and time respectively. The 女 radical means it has something to do with women, 心means that it has something to do with the heart or emotions.

The translated title of this blog means "why are mother and horse different characters?" Even through they are pronounced almost the exact same (someone who doesn't speak Chinese couldn't tell the difference) they differ because of a radical system that uses symbols to help impart meaning on characters. In written Chinese people pay close attention to how each character is written. Some spend their entire life learning how to write the characters beautifully.

Also in Chinese, this can't happen. "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

The Alphabet and Our Brain

I believe the best example of "writing restructures consciousness" would be the alphabet. There were many early scripts, such as cuneiform, Arabic, Hebrew, but there wasn't a "proper" alphabet until Greek. The Greek alphabet was different because it had symbols for vowels and that the letters did not stand for words. (The example from the article was aleph meant ox while alpha had no meaning) It was at this point that writing stopped being a purely bureaucratic venture and began to record stories, poems, and other forms of literature.

The advent of the Greek alphabet was a major paradigm shift when it came to orality versus literacy in that it made it so anyone who could sound out the letters could read what had been written. We might not speak Spanish, but with a few simple pronunciation lessons we could read it just fine. On the other hand I don't think many people could gather that 女(nü)+ 子(zi) = 好(hao). I believe that the alphabet restructured our consciousness because it gave the ancient Greeks a 1:1 ratio with sight to sound. It could be easily taught and helped bring about a much higher literacy rate. Ong said that "The Greek alphabet was democratizing in the sense that it was easy for everyone to learn. This ease of access and use started changing us into a more literature based society and species. The alphabet allowed us to be a society that seems to value text over speech. The Ong article also had part about the neurophysiological aspect of the alphabet. Kerckhove (1981) found a phonetic alphabet increases left-brain activity helping increase abstract and analytical thought.

Clash of the titans! Orality vs literature

What struck me most about these readings was how much they loved Homer as an example. Homer was also the example used in Gened whenever they talked about early literature. While writing might have been around long before Homer's epic poems were first transcribed, they seem to be the first stories that had been.

While reading Ong I decided that Homer caused a great evolution in the way stories are taken down. Throughout the two chapters we read this week, they kept talking about how Homer's Iliad and Odyssey changed how poets did things. Instead of keeping everything as an oral tradition where people passed down the story, generation to generation, they now used writing to put down their poems, stories and other literature. They still used the same style as they did when they were oral stories, which is why it's a tough decision if this is remediation or evolution, but the fact that Homer's poems caused a paradigm shift.

From text to talk (Blog#1)

One item I believe has been remediated is a book to book on tape. Over the summer I was working long hours and didn't have time to sit down and read a book. So I decided that I would listen to a book on tape while I commute and while I work. I believe this change from a physical book to book on tape is a good example of remediation. The original book would probably be just a normal book, but the audio I listened to was an mp3 I downloaded to my iPod. Going from a cassette/CD (I don't know the original medium) to the mp3 was also a form of remediation.

Going from a physical text to cassette/CD to an mp3 is a good example of remediation as reform because going from a text to an audio version made the story accessible to me while not having access to the physical text book or time/place to read said book. We can also say that going from cassette/CD to mp3 is also remediation because instead of having to carry around multiple cassettes/CDs I could carry the full story on one small device. Thus rehabilitating the media.

HI NEW FRIENDS!

Oh hai there! My name is Erik. I am in my last semester here at WSU getting my degree in Linguistics. No, you don't have to know 25 languages to be a linguist. Linguistics is just the study of how language works and other fun stuff like that.
I really like watching TV and movies and will usually have a movie or TV show playing in the background while i work, or play video games, pretty much while I do anything. I'm not a snob about cinematography or anything like that. I watch movies and TV shows to be entertained. If you want a real treat watch a movie called "The Room" It's so god awful that it's damn funny.