My attempted Lit. Review about new media ecologies (Twitter, Digg, etc.)

This research attempts to uncover the biases inherent in new electronic media and then to explore how those biases are exploited by groups such as Anonymous to make their message heard above the rest. Over the last ten years, the internet has been beset by tens of new forms of media, new ways of communicating. Ambient intimacy has been heightened through the use of Twitter and the Facebook Newsfeed, not to mention blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and any of the other new media sites. Each of these new forms of communication essentially has created new media ecology, with unique sensory biases and loopholes written into their code. Anonymous, as a whole, has learned the ins-and-outs of most of the common media and has used this knowledge to increase the exposure of what they deem important. I hope to learn how each media platform functions, the biases written into the code, and then how Anonymous has learned to manipulate these loopholes.
As of this moment, there is not much formal research on platforms such as Twitter, et al. The media themselves are too new. However, there has been much written in the field of media ecology. As Casey Man Kong Lum mentions in his research on the history of media ecologies, new media change our sensorium; the manner in which we comprehend and construct our world and the internet is a multi-media environment that has different languages emerging, pictures, videos, music, vlogging, blogging, fanfiction, and hundreds of different ways of expressing oneself. Authors like McLuhan, Meyrowitz, and de Zengotita have looked at the effects of media (television in particular) on society and then how the media shape and become the message. As de Zengotita states in his book Mediated, "what counts is the code - digital or DNA, both are susceptible (and subject) to mediation, to human control of what it expresses". The message truly is in the medium.
Continuing on in the realm of published academics, authors such as Lawrence Lessig have written extensively on the future of code and its legalities. He details how to develop credibility and identity on the internet as well as exploring some of the new opportunities that internet code affords people in terms of expression. Lessig’s book Code is one of the newer published sources on code and new media; it will serve as a good reference for my exploration on exactly how the new media function. C-SPAN also recently interviewed the co-founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, quizzing him about many of the complaints of Twitter’s biases and the accusations that Twitter is used by terrorists; this interview gives an insiders description of one of the central new media that is being used.
The published literature is limited by the very newness of the media that I wish to explore. The media have not been in existence long enough to have a wealth of scholarly articles written about them; ergo I will be using the work of media ecologists like McLuhan, Lum, Meyrowitz, de Zengotita, Spitulnik and others to learn the theories of media ecology and sensory biases and effects of the various media. It then turns to academes such as Lessig to discover the finer points of code and biases. All of this will serve as grounding and a baseline research for a further exploration into the new media. The C-SPAN interview with Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams (http://cspan.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-A-15634) and research into complaints about Twitter, Digg, and other media sources will become the key pieces of my research. I am looking at understanding the ecology of these new media and how they can be exploited, specifically the medium and NOT the message that Anonymous broadcasts. To confirm the validity of my research and understanding, I might then experiment with getting my own information publicized in the same ways as Anonymous (using my knowledge of how the code and biases function to boost the visibility of a message). This topic is fairly under-researched simply because of its novelty, but it has lots of resources available for study and past academic work to refer to concerning other media.


C-SPAN interview with Evan Williams http://cspan.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-A-15634

Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: the Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. http://books.google.com/books?id=0Xx5Hm8M5g8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=no+sense+of+place#PPP1,M1

Lum, Casey Man Kong. “Overview of Media Ecology.” http://www.scribd.com/doc/12284025/Overview-of-Media-Ecology-by-Lum?secret_password=1gb0osm8bchhw52a43sq

McLuhan, Marshall -> collected works concerning media

De Zengotita, Alexander. Mediated. http://books.google.com/books?id=XqAyGwAACAAJ&dq=de+zengotita+mediated

Spitulnik, Debra. “The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of Communities”

Lessig, Lawrence. Code. http://books.google.com/books?id=xTyn4Zt3AKEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=lessig+code