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).