I/Encode: Manipulating Media Biases on the Internet
How do we codify information, thoughts? For millions of years, the most common way of codifying information and transmitting thoughts was through speech, through oral tradition. With the advent of written traditions, there was a perceptual revolution with a shift from the ear to the eye as an organ of language processing (Postman 12) Plato recognized this, that the transition from an oral transmission of knowledge to a written one created an entirely new way of conceptualizing, of codifying information, and this new medium then began to create a hierarchy of knowledge acquisition. As Meyrowitz states, “the skill and learning required to encode and decode messages in a message determines, to a large degree, who in society can use the medium to send messages and who has access to the information the medium carries.” (Meyrowitz 74) Reading proficiency takes years longer to acquire than does speaking proficiency in a given language and written works can then further be separated by the complexity and specificity of terms that only persons with specialized knowledge can easily decipher. Meyrowitz, McLuhan, and Postman wrote major treatises addressing the change in media accessibility with the advent of television and electronic media, most admittedly simplifying the contrasts to those between books and television. We have now passed the television and entered an entirely new realm of communication media, with the internet providing new means of communication seemingly every day with new programs and ways of codifying information and communication.
The internet itself is written with a base code that restricts what is possible to create on the code’s platform, however the possibilities for the communication structures that can be built on that platform are myriad. Within the last five years, communication media and information sources have proliferated with alacrity over the internet. “Older” media such as instant messengers, email, Wikipedia, blogs, and message boards have either been absorbed into new structures or have evolved into something barely recognizable from their nascent forms in terms of both respectability and ease of use. “The skill and learning” required to encode and decode messages on these electronic media have become radically easier to acquire and thus the media more accessible to a much larger population. New media such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, mySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, and even permutations such as RSS feeds have made more information and more communication media incredibly more accessible. It is no longer truly necessary to “distinguish between the inherent complexity of specific ideas and processes and the superimposed complexity of the means through which we encode and describe them.” (Meyrowitz 79) With an internet connection and minimal literacy, ideas, pictures, videos, and texts can be shared with literally millions of people with limited knowledge of how the actual inner workings of the media function.
However, with these new media ecologies on the internet, new methods of manipulating information are coming to light. Linguistic anthropologists have written about the media biases of oral communication media in Sherzer, Bauman, Ben-Amos, and Hymes, looking at performance and discourse. Analyses proliferate on the biases of the written and the typed word, as well on the effects of the telephone and the internet. Now we must look at these new electronic media on the internet are manipulated and how the very code is used and manipulated to publicize very specific ideas and appeal to select sensory biases. The collective known as Anonymous has effectively exploited the both the sensory biases presented by online text and media, but also the loopholes written into the media’s code. One could argue that groups like Anonymous flash mob the internet to get their ideas publicized through view-counts, but that is unlikely. The internet has often been likened as a place, a physical location that one must navigate. As Lessig points out in his book Code, a loose analogy can be drawn between internet collectives like Anonymous and the revolutionaries of the French Revolution, the ones who took advantage of the infrastructure of Paris to revolt (Lessig 91). The revolutionaries in the 18th century had an extreme disadvantage when compared to the governmental forces; the government had the absolute power with far more man and gun power. However, the students recognized the fact that Paris was a warren of small roads and alleyways with no real central boulevards; the small routes were extremely easy to blockade and hold with minimal personnel and firepower. The French revolutionaries recognized the bias in the city's infrastructure and took advantage of it (which is why Paris’ infrastructure was restructured in 1853 to include wide boulevards and multiple passageways to make it impossible for insurgents to take control of the city). The same can be said of Anonymous and their manipulation of the architecture of the internet media’s code.
Anonymous does not write the code of the media it uses; most of its members are NOT hackers or elegant code writers. They have critically looked at the current infrastructure of the internet and, recognizing the areas open to manipulation on Digg, YouTube, Twitter, del.icio.us, and others, have been able to effectively publicize their causes and mobilize masses. As Steve Cross put it, they are using the digital code to rewrite social code and to get action. They manipulated the vagaries of the internet code to get Oprah Winfrey to host a television special based on a comment about "9000 penises" posted on her website’s messageboard. They have also supplied the information that directly led to the legal investigation of Kenny Glenn and his brother after Glenn posted a video of himself abusing a cat. A website has been created, http://www.kenny-glenn.net/, that details the cat abuse and serves as a nexus for not only information on the case, but also as a launching point for people to take action against the cat abuser and to share their own creations. Anonymous also got the cat-abuse video mass media coverage via instigating an internet movement that exposed the abuse video and the personal information of Kenny Glenn.
The architecture of the internet can be envisioned as perhaps an imaginary warren of interconnected information streets, roads, back alleys, tunnels and byways. There is no one huge highway connecting it all; Google and other search engines might be considered the highway connecting the smaller routes, but they function more as a map or as a teleporter. To continue the analogy, manipulating groups like Anonymous are not building new streets or connecting the roads; they are, instead, like graffiti artists on steroids (not “Hackers on Steroids” – FOX News). They are the ones who would plaster the sides of buildings and alleys in major cities with posters advertising what they found important, or perhaps spray-painting their messages.
This analogy for what Anonymous does also fits in with Meyrowitz' argument on cultural lag, published in his 1986 book "No Sense of Place" wherein he talks about the change in society that occurred with the advent of television. Meyrowitz argues that a subset of a population will embrace a new technology much quicker than the rest of the population, necessarily causing some conflict between the two groups. He was referring to the 1950s arguments with the TV as the "devil" and a subversive influence on the day's youths. Similarly, the internet media have most fully been embraced by the younger generation and, as Lessig and others point out, the people most likely to generate and influence internet content are the teens-to-thirty-somethings that use the internet (especially the high school and college students with relatively more "free" time on their hands). Anonymous seems to be made up primarily of members from this age subset and their manipulation of media seem to be the new evolution of that age subsets rebellion in previous years; from the French Revolution's university students, the 1960s and 70s political protesters, graffiti artists and visual protesters all tend to fall in this age bracket.
Already, the biases, the ins-outs-twists of these information alleys, and some of the more overt form of manipulation are becoming public knowledge. Robots, spiders, offline readers, and automatically reloading pages to boost ratings and views on YouTube videos have gotten much coverage from news media already. Anonymous has been linked to the micro-celebrity rise of figures such as Boxxy and Tay Zonday. Beyond YouTube, Digg has also been the subject of much controversy. Some estimate that 56% of the frontpage content on Digg is generated by less than 100 power users and as much as 25% of that content is generated by only 20 users (randfish); this from a site that has stressed user-generated rankings and sold itself as a democracy. Another bias that Digg has is the "bury" option; it is anonymous, unaccountable, and burying a story is much more powerful than voting against it. With the anonymity of the “bury” option it is difficult to track, but there have been rumors of people forming "bury brigades" to effectively jettison stories on subjects of which the brigadiers do not approve.
The code, the groundwork, of these media ecologies have been susceptible to manipulation by the people who use but do not write it. Can users take control of the online code to rewrite social code? Will the codewriters rebel? Is there a threshold at which the creators of the structure, of the code, lose control to the users OR the code evolves to serve some function other than the one originally intended by the writers? The codewriters have already rewritten code when users began to use it for "unwanted" purposes; Digg deliberately deleted/buried an article on how to rip files (making users angry by their bowing to the "man" and foregoing what users considered to be Digg's mandate) (BBC News). YouTube limited video lengths in 2006 to 10 minutes after too many copyright violations were occurring with posts of full TV show episodes and movies. More recently, YouTube has begun to remove videos that loosely violate copyright law. Videos of people and bands performing covers of copyrighted songs are being taken down, as well as videos with a copyrighted song playing in the background (for example, a radio playing a copyrighted song playing in the background of a home video) (Arango).
Copyright issues necessarily become part of the argument when speaking of internet media such as YouTube, but the code itself is slowly but surely being rewritten. The internet media are incredibly fluid in terms of code; new media are being developed and modifications to the base code of many platforms occur more and more frequently. User generated content is becoming more and more the norm, rather than the exception, and internet users are learning how to find the shortcuts and back-alleys written into the code almost before the code is modified. The new electronic media have changed the way in which we must conceptualize the codification of information. Information is fluid; we no longer need to “distinguish between the inherent complexity of specific ideas and processes and the superimposed complexity of the means through which we encode and describe them”(Meyrowitz 79). The new media are not restricted to the limitations of spoken, written, or televised media. The internet media can combine all of them or none of them and anyone can be a generator, an encoder, of a message. The encoding of information on the internet is constantly evolving to be more accessible to both readers and writers of the code and the exploitation of the media comes from the speed at which the new media are learned and mastered.
Sources
Arango, Tim. “Rights Clash on YouTube, and Videos Disappear.” New York Times. 23
Mar. 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/business/media/23warner.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=youtube&st=cse
BBC News. “DVD DRM row sparks user rebellion: Attempts to gag the blogosphere
from publishing details of a DVD crack have led to a user revolt.” BBC News. 2 May 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6615047.stm
Cashmore, Pete. “Digg and the So-Called “Wisdom of Mobs”.” Mashable: the Social
Media Guide. 10 Jan. 2006. http://mashable.com/2006/01/10/digg-and-the-so-called-wisdom-of-mobs/
Hung, Tony. “ZDNet Not Immune To The “Bury Brigade”.” Deep Jive Interests. 9 Dec.
2006. http://www.deepjiveinterests.com/2006/12/09/zdnet-not-immune-to-the-bury-brigade/
http://www.kenny-glenn.net/
Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964.
Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social
Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show
Business. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
randfish. “Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg’s HomePage Content.”
SEOmozBlog. 20 July 2006. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/top-100-digg-users-control-56-of-diggs-homepage-content
Weinberg, Tamar. “An Open Letter to Kevin Rose.” techipedia.com. 7 Sept. 2007.
http://www.techipedia.com/2007/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose/
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
The Presentation to Be
So, I was working on my presentation yesterday and finally had an epiphany. I had read all of de Zengotita's Mediated and Lessig's Code and was listening to all of the presentations that my classmates had made the day before (http://www.livescribe.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/MLSOverviewPage?sid=SxK0wJv6xrDT) when something clicked. Lessig had made a reference to the French Revolution in Code, classmates occasionally referred to the internet as a place, and all of a sudden it fit together.
I want to look at the media ecologies, how the new media are used and manipulated to publicize very specific ideas. One could argue that groups like Anonymous can flash mob the internet to get their ideas publicized, but I do not believe that to be the case. In my mind, a loose analogy can be drawn between internet collectives like Anonymous and the student "rebels" of the French Revolution, the ones who took advantage of the infrastructure of Paris to voice themselves. The students in the 18th century had an extreme disadvantage when compared to the governmental forces; the government had the absolute power with far more man and gunpower. However, the students recognized the fact that Paris was a warren of small roads and alleyways with no real central boulevards; the small routes were extremely easy to blockade and hold with minimal personnel and firepower. The French revolutionaries (think Les Miserables) recognized the bias (if you will) in the city's infrastructure and took advantage of it. The same can be said of Anonymous.
Anonymous does not write the code, most of its members are NOT hackers or elegant code writers. They have critically looked at the current infrastructure of the internet and, recognizing the areas open to manipulation on Digg, YouTube, Twitter, del.icio.us, and others, have been able to effectively publicize their causes and mobilize masses. As Steve Cross put it, they are using the digital code to rewrite social code and to get action. They manipulated the vagaries of the internet code to get Oprah Winfrey to have a special on "9000 penises", they also have caused a cat abuser to get arrested after he posted a video of himself abusing the house cat. Admittedly, Anonymous is not a one dimensional "good" group. They are probably best likened to the trickster gods of myth; the ones who till trick and manipulate people to teach them lessons, the impart morality, or to make themselves laugh (for the LULZ) - look at Nordic myths of Loki or of SW Native American myths of Coyote and of the Trickster.
Now that I digressed a bit, I suppose that I envision the internet as a bit of an imaginary warren of interconnected information streets, roads, back alleys, tunnels and byways. There is no one huge highway; Google and other search engines might be considered the highway connecting the smaller routes, but I see them more as a map or a teleporter. To continue the analogy, Anonymous is NOT building new streets or connecting the roads; they are, instead, like graffiti artists on steroids. They are the ones who would plaster the sides of buildings and alleys in major cities with posters advertising what they found important, or perhaps spray-painting their messages.
This analogy for what Anonymous does also fits in with Meyrowitz' argument on cultural lag, published in his 1986 book "No Sense of Place" wherein he talks about the change on society that occurred with the advent of television. Meyrowitz argues that a subset of a population will embrace a new technology much quicker than the rest of the population, necessarily causing some conflict between the two groups (think of the 1950s arguments as the TV as the "devil" and a subversive influence on the day's youths...). The internet has most fully been embraced by the younger generation and, as Lessig and others point out, the people most likely to generate and influence internet content are the teens-to-thirty-somethings that use the internet (especially the high school and college students with relatively more "free" time on their hands). Anonymous seems to be made up primarily of members from this age subset and their manipulation of media seem to be the new evolution of that age subsets rebellion in previous years; from the French Revolution's university students, the 1960s and 70s political protesters, graffiti artists and visual protesters, etc.
That leads me into the "where does this leave us" question. The biases, the ins-outs-twists of these information alleys, are already being exposed and some of the more overt form of manipulation are becoming public knowledge. Robots, spiders, offline readers, and automatically reloading pages to boost ratings and views on YouTube videos have gotten much coverage from news media already (also from Anonymous - Boxxy anyone?). Digg has also been the subject of much controversy; it is estimated that 56% of the frontpage content on Digg is generated by less than 100 power users and as much as 25% of that content is generated by only 20 users; this from a site that has stressed user-generated rankings and sold itself as a democracy. Another bias that Digg has is the "bury" option; it is anonymous, unaccountable, and burying a story is much more powerful than voting against it (there have been rumors of people forming "bury brigades" to get rid of stories about things that the brigadiers don't like). Those are two examples.
So where will the code go from here? Can users take control of the online code to rewrite social code? Will the codewriters rebel? Is there a threshold at which the creators of the structure, of the code, lose control to the users OR the code evolves to serve some function other than the one originally intended by the writers? We've already seen the codewriters rewrite code when users began to use it for "unwanted" purposes; YouTube limited video lengths in 2006 to 10 minutes after too many copywrite violations were occurring with people posting full TV show episodes and movies and Digg deliberately deleted/buried an article on how to rip files (making users angry by their bowing to the "man" and foregoing what users considered to be Digg's mandate).
I want to look at the media ecologies, how the new media are used and manipulated to publicize very specific ideas. One could argue that groups like Anonymous can flash mob the internet to get their ideas publicized, but I do not believe that to be the case. In my mind, a loose analogy can be drawn between internet collectives like Anonymous and the student "rebels" of the French Revolution, the ones who took advantage of the infrastructure of Paris to voice themselves. The students in the 18th century had an extreme disadvantage when compared to the governmental forces; the government had the absolute power with far more man and gunpower. However, the students recognized the fact that Paris was a warren of small roads and alleyways with no real central boulevards; the small routes were extremely easy to blockade and hold with minimal personnel and firepower. The French revolutionaries (think Les Miserables) recognized the bias (if you will) in the city's infrastructure and took advantage of it. The same can be said of Anonymous.
Anonymous does not write the code, most of its members are NOT hackers or elegant code writers. They have critically looked at the current infrastructure of the internet and, recognizing the areas open to manipulation on Digg, YouTube, Twitter, del.icio.us, and others, have been able to effectively publicize their causes and mobilize masses. As Steve Cross put it, they are using the digital code to rewrite social code and to get action. They manipulated the vagaries of the internet code to get Oprah Winfrey to have a special on "9000 penises", they also have caused a cat abuser to get arrested after he posted a video of himself abusing the house cat. Admittedly, Anonymous is not a one dimensional "good" group. They are probably best likened to the trickster gods of myth; the ones who till trick and manipulate people to teach them lessons, the impart morality, or to make themselves laugh (for the LULZ) - look at Nordic myths of Loki or of SW Native American myths of Coyote and of the Trickster.
Now that I digressed a bit, I suppose that I envision the internet as a bit of an imaginary warren of interconnected information streets, roads, back alleys, tunnels and byways. There is no one huge highway; Google and other search engines might be considered the highway connecting the smaller routes, but I see them more as a map or a teleporter. To continue the analogy, Anonymous is NOT building new streets or connecting the roads; they are, instead, like graffiti artists on steroids. They are the ones who would plaster the sides of buildings and alleys in major cities with posters advertising what they found important, or perhaps spray-painting their messages.
This analogy for what Anonymous does also fits in with Meyrowitz' argument on cultural lag, published in his 1986 book "No Sense of Place" wherein he talks about the change on society that occurred with the advent of television. Meyrowitz argues that a subset of a population will embrace a new technology much quicker than the rest of the population, necessarily causing some conflict between the two groups (think of the 1950s arguments as the TV as the "devil" and a subversive influence on the day's youths...). The internet has most fully been embraced by the younger generation and, as Lessig and others point out, the people most likely to generate and influence internet content are the teens-to-thirty-somethings that use the internet (especially the high school and college students with relatively more "free" time on their hands). Anonymous seems to be made up primarily of members from this age subset and their manipulation of media seem to be the new evolution of that age subsets rebellion in previous years; from the French Revolution's university students, the 1960s and 70s political protesters, graffiti artists and visual protesters, etc.
That leads me into the "where does this leave us" question. The biases, the ins-outs-twists of these information alleys, are already being exposed and some of the more overt form of manipulation are becoming public knowledge. Robots, spiders, offline readers, and automatically reloading pages to boost ratings and views on YouTube videos have gotten much coverage from news media already (also from Anonymous - Boxxy anyone?). Digg has also been the subject of much controversy; it is estimated that 56% of the frontpage content on Digg is generated by less than 100 power users and as much as 25% of that content is generated by only 20 users; this from a site that has stressed user-generated rankings and sold itself as a democracy. Another bias that Digg has is the "bury" option; it is anonymous, unaccountable, and burying a story is much more powerful than voting against it (there have been rumors of people forming "bury brigades" to get rid of stories about things that the brigadiers don't like). Those are two examples.
So where will the code go from here? Can users take control of the online code to rewrite social code? Will the codewriters rebel? Is there a threshold at which the creators of the structure, of the code, lose control to the users OR the code evolves to serve some function other than the one originally intended by the writers? We've already seen the codewriters rewrite code when users began to use it for "unwanted" purposes; YouTube limited video lengths in 2006 to 10 minutes after too many copywrite violations were occurring with people posting full TV show episodes and movies and Digg deliberately deleted/buried an article on how to rip files (making users angry by their bowing to the "man" and foregoing what users considered to be Digg's mandate).
Sunday, March 8, 2009
yo necesito trabajar
yo no ablo espanol, pero no quiero escribir de DigiEth. Tristesse.
Ca serais interessant a ecrire la plupart de mon blog en francais. Ce n'est pas extremement difficile et il n'y a pas beaucoup des personnes qui lit ce blog et peut le comprendre. Oi.
So... update. I have been busy like a bee (not necessarily with the class) and am trying to finish both Code and No Sense of Place, as well as following the evolution of Tay Zonday, Boxxy, etc. The rise, the fall, the etc. I like the et cetera part of the research.
For the presentation that I must make shortly, I am trying to focus my thoughts into some form of coherency on the basics of media ecology theory and then get a decent handle on at least one example of an idea/person who was publicized through multiple media to "blow up" and become both a meme and a microcelebrity. Examples of that are Tay Zonday's Chocolate Rain and Boxxy, to name two.
Ca serais interessant a ecrire la plupart de mon blog en francais. Ce n'est pas extremement difficile et il n'y a pas beaucoup des personnes qui lit ce blog et peut le comprendre. Oi.
So... update. I have been busy like a bee (not necessarily with the class) and am trying to finish both Code and No Sense of Place, as well as following the evolution of Tay Zonday, Boxxy, etc. The rise, the fall, the etc. I like the et cetera part of the research.
For the presentation that I must make shortly, I am trying to focus my thoughts into some form of coherency on the basics of media ecology theory and then get a decent handle on at least one example of an idea/person who was publicized through multiple media to "blow up" and become both a meme and a microcelebrity. Examples of that are Tay Zonday's Chocolate Rain and Boxxy, to name two.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Research methodology
So I already kind of covered this in the last post, but my research methods are going to be heavy on the traditional style. I'm going to try to get a strong background in the theoretical background surrounding media ecology, specifically about electronic media and then apply those theoretical models and adapt them to what I see happening now. For the "field work" side of things, a lot of observation, lurking, and interaction on Twitter, blogs, etc. are going to be required.
If I can get a good enough sense of what is going on, my ultimate goal is to follow Neil Whitehead's example and try to test what I have learned about the sensory biases and ecologies to then make a message I see well-publicized. I need to look through Whitehead's article again, as well as examine the ethics of this idea, but if I deem it ethically upright I think that it could add validity to any conclusions I find. Or I could hopefully find a thread and track the evolution of it as Anonymous pushes it to the forefront of the web.
Simply put, research begins with media ecology theory followed by exploring the new ecological domains on the web, and only then will "participant observation" and message creation take place. Interwoven throughout this all will be attempting to track how Tay Zonday or Boxxy or any of the others were pushed into microcelebrity or destroyed by people like Anonymous. That should give me some excellent hints into the biases... Also (I forgot to mention), looking at code will be included in the theory research (specifically Lessig's work...).
If I can get a good enough sense of what is going on, my ultimate goal is to follow Neil Whitehead's example and try to test what I have learned about the sensory biases and ecologies to then make a message I see well-publicized. I need to look through Whitehead's article again, as well as examine the ethics of this idea, but if I deem it ethically upright I think that it could add validity to any conclusions I find. Or I could hopefully find a thread and track the evolution of it as Anonymous pushes it to the forefront of the web.
Simply put, research begins with media ecology theory followed by exploring the new ecological domains on the web, and only then will "participant observation" and message creation take place. Interwoven throughout this all will be attempting to track how Tay Zonday or Boxxy or any of the others were pushed into microcelebrity or destroyed by people like Anonymous. That should give me some excellent hints into the biases... Also (I forgot to mention), looking at code will be included in the theory research (specifically Lessig's work...).
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