Mindless self indulgence. I think websites such as youtube, facebook, perezhilton and many many more, are a great use for wasting time. And I think since how majority of us from students to those with careers we need to use the internet to help us get through our duties, we tend to need a break from it and wander off to such websites. These websites allows us to see what others are up to, may it be our family & friends to people across the world, there is something intriguing about someone else life that we seem to thrive on and I think with such websites it allows us to feed that pleasure. And even other websites like wikipedia, flickr and online gaming sites it allows us to gain access to the world and present our idea that is so exhilarating, i guess its the nice feeling that we are being heard and someone out there has to be reading what we have to say or show that makes us feel on top of it all. With all these variety of websites, I wouldn’t be surprised that they’d be so successful especially if it can have the ability to incorporate the things we like/need. For example, facebook allows us to have a profile, upload photos, write blogs, share videos, share news feed about your family/friends/co-workers, and stay connected with people. With everyone being in such a fast pace environment I would understand why facebook would be fairly popular and used often, because sometimes even I somehow can spend hours on it and not realize but all I am really doing is just checking up on other people’s profile/photos/notes…and whatever else may be posted up!

Clay Shirky mentions the use of blogs and what people write on their blogs is not intended for us, but meant for within their small group. My first blog was on xanga, and that was during high school, which was quite popular at the time, so everyone would write on their xanga and comment on each other. So blogging was meant for following friends to read, which to think about is a bit silly when we might as well of just talked in person. Anyways as years went by less and less people continued using xanga and moved on to another popular website. However I still kept blogging on xanga but not about what I use to blog about (like whatever I did that day) and I started to blog about thoughts and ideas. My intentions of continuing to use xanga wasn’t for friends to read, though already most of them stopped using xanga, but was to just be read…by anyone. It was just comforting to express how I felt online and that perhaps someone out there would read it, I didn’t care who I just wanted to be read.

Reading:

Clay Shirky, Chapter 4 “Publish, Then Filter” 81-108
Clay Shirky, Chapter 5 “Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production” 109-142
Clay Shirky, Chapter 10 “Failure for Free” 233-259

Reading Questions and discussion points:

The following are questions to guide your reading and get you started thinking and writing. Feel free to ignore these questions and explore issues that matter to you.

• What are the implications of “publish then filter”? Give examples.
• What motivations lie behind the success of platforms like youtube, Wikipedia or Albinoblacksheep?
• What limits our understanding of new social media? How should we rethink such concepts as: audience, community, collaboration, media, broadcasting?
• What is the role of filtering in new media production?
• How does failure function in open source production?

I enjoyed the example Clay Shirky gave about the use of flickr and the Mermaid Parade. Because it never crossed my mind to realize that events like these can easily get promoted by the people there, without even having to pay someone to advertise for them. At huge events like these, people to tend to want to capture these moments and share it via the web but merely for the intentions of sharing with family and friends. However once it reaches online, and as well as flickr being the most popular source for uploading photos, everyone has access to these photos. The difference between cooperating and sharing, would be sharing is the intention of giving people the access to your things and I think with the tool of tagging it, it pulls everyone’s common tags altogether so then we involuntarily cooperate all together. We have so much access to photographs online and the amount of photos that do get uploaded that it just seems it can easily be taken advantage without our permission or even be used without us realizing. For example, I had a friend’s sister picture printed in the newspaper because the picture she was in was with a guy friend who had been murdered. However she never gave the photo to the newspaper let alone permission to use it. It turns out they got the photo off of a facebook group mourning this young man. What was even worse they were using quotes and personal stories off of his and his friends facebook to write up the whole article about this young man. That they made him seem like he was a bad person, and that’s what I think gets ridiculous when even the newspaper are believing everything that is written online and even using it too. Thats when people really abuse the internet.

Reading:

Clay Shirky Chapter 2 “Sharing Anchors Community” 25-54

Clay Shirky Chapter 3 “Everyone is a Media Outlet” 55-80.

Recommended: Shirky, Chapter 1 “It Takes a Village to Find a Phone” 1-24

Reading Questions and discussion points:

The following are questions to guide your reading and get you started thinking and writing. Feel free to ignore these questions and explore issues that matter to you.

• How do tagging and folksonomies create spontaneous self-organization and produce value?
• How do platforms like blogging or flickr change the relationships between cost and value?
• Give examples of Shirky’s claim that “communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”
• What does your use of flickr relate to Shirky’s claims about the platform?
• What are the implications of the new “ease of assembly” (48) for politics, the arts, culture or design?
• What is the difference between cooperating and sharing? (47-54)

Reading about the use of the internet to find victims of Hurricane Katrina, it was a good attempt but it didn’t seem like it would work. Because I wouldn’t think the interent would be an easy access or the first thing you would want to access after going through that. Plus where would you even start looking? And it definitely didn’t make it easier when there was just more than one website that helped in looking for your lost ones. It just seems that it starts out with the good intentions of wanting to help out that it gets over done that it just seems to be a money-making opportunity for others. I think that’s when people take advantage, or scams start to happen. It definitely is the way to get the message across world wide and get people to donate what the uses like paypal. There are people who use the internet to do fundraisers, either with the use of youtube or blogs.
One thing I noticed using facebook, it allows people to create groups, or fan pages to get people to join and spread awareness of a cause or to promote a self-produced product (one of the most popular products would be t-shirt designs). The great thing about it is that no extra money is wasted to advertise ones product and with the ability to get others to join enables people to spread it further for potential buyers.

Reading:

Tapscott and Williams, “Platforms for Participation” 183-212
Tapscott and Williams, selection from “The Global Plant Floor” 213-224 only.
Tapscott and Williams, “The Wiki Workplace” 239-267
Wikipedia about page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
Radical Trust: about: http://www.radicaltrust.ca/about/

Reading Questions and discussion points:

The following are questions to guide your reading and get you started thinking and writing. Feel free to ignore these questions and explore issues that matter to you.

• How can platforms for participation function in the realm of politics?
• How can platforms for participation function in the realm of fundraising and social awareness?
• What hinders the development of these platforms?
• How can collaborative tools like wikis change workplace culture and structure?
• What roles can self-organization and socializing play in collaborative and creative work?
• While Wikinomics is focused on business, how are their four principles of openness, peering, sharing and acting globally relevant to creative work?
• How does facebook function as a platform for participation?
• Describe the tension between business and profit on the one hand and generosity and volunteerism on the other.
• What kinds of conceptual models and social organization define this “new mode of production?”
• What are the advantages and downsides to social media like Wikipedia?

Nowadays everyone can share their ideas online which gets passed on to friends, to their friends to family, co-workers until it reaches to the furthest of people imagined. And along the way people will take bits and pieces from that idea and create something else from it. The thing I find a bit challenging is knowing who is it really credited to? Or who is the actual person that came up with the idea in the first place. Because I noticed that it is easy to steal someone else’s idea off the Internet and claim it as your own because its a very slim chance that you will get caught, well as long as you find the source far enough that it can’t be so easily googled or at least altered a bit, then you’ll be fine. This is the reason why I feel hesitant to post up ideas because i’m afraid it will get stolen, though we do have the CC now to at least give us the credit it doesn’t really stop people from still taking the idea. But then again it’s hard to see anything as an original idea nowadays. With all this negative thinking aside, I applaud those who have trust in people online, or those who don’t take advantage of peoples idea but help add more to it. Especially with wikipedia, I use it quite often and what I enjoy about it is that it gets worked/edited by so many people but there is always a constant in the information when people contribute so at least you can trust it will be legit information, though it is still best to find other sources. It is like a book with more then a hundred authors from different places and age, it is just mind-blowing.

Reading:

Tapscott & Wiliams, “The Peer Pioneers” 65-96.
Tapscott and Williams, “The Prosumers” 124-150
Creative commons: Read the following short pages:

1. http://wiki.creativecommons.org/History
2. http://creativecommons.org/about/license/
3. http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses
4. http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ (select those FAQs that interest you)
5. http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Before_Licensing

Watch a few of these videos and you can learn a lot of stuff about CC.

Reading Questions and discussion points:

The following are questions to guide your reading and get you started thinking and writing. Feel free to ignore these questions and explore issues that matter to you.

• How should we rethink issues of hierarchy and control when faced with something like open source software or Wikipedia?
• What is open source software and what are its advantages over proprietary software? (Linux vs. Windows & OSX)
• What kinds of conceptual models and social organization define this “new mode of production?”
• What is radical trust?
• What are the advantages and downsides to social media like Wikipedia?
• How can profit be generated in open source, collaborative enterprises?
• How do we rethink the notion of consumer?
  • Of producer?
• What holds such possibilities back?

I think with the opportunity to share our ideas and work on the Internet expands our creativity and lets us reach possibilities we would not of imagined until now. Even before we had the Internet, places and people from all over were able to create such art works that we weren’t even aware of. For example how the Japanese do their printmaking; the style is far different from the western culture. The types of artwork from all over the world is a huge variety and were always kept within its area. But the further in our exploration we were able to try different styles/techniques, and the Internet enables us to push our creativity and knowledge of art even more further. But it seems with all this art collaboration it is beginning to be difficult to differentiate what is art and what is just tacky.

What I found interesting is the trust that Rob McEwan would give to complete strangers via the Internet. However wouldn’t people feel like they are taken advantage of since the Goldcorp Inc. would be the ones retrieving all the information and gold themselves. And if there are so many people involved how can the prize money be disribute fairly?

Reading:

Tapscott & Williams “Introduction” & “Wikinomics” 1-33.
Tapscott & Williams “The Perfect Storm” 34-64.
Cory Doctorow, “How Copyright Broke”

Reading Questions and discussion points:

The following are questions to guide your reading and get you started thinking and writing. Feel free to ignore these questions and explore issues that matter to you.

• How do Tapscott and Williams set up the dichotomy between older (corporate) economic models and those of mass collaboration?
• How can industry and business take advantage of Web 2.0?
• What prevents organizations from taking advantage of the web and mass collaboration?
• How do we redefine or refine the processes of production?
• Tapscott and Wiliams begin the “Perfect Storm” chaper with the challenges to copyright posed by digital reproduction; what are the implications for design art and media and its producers?
• How does creating, sharing and collaborating on the web change our notions of art, artists and artistic work?
• What role does trust play in this new cultural environment?
• Much of what we do on the web is socializing. Socializing becomes collaboration. Collaboration becomes peer production. You are part of this networked generation Tapscott and Wiliams talk about; what examples do you have of this kind of social collaboration?
• What are the implications of tagging and folksonomies? How does this practice create “collective intelligence.” How is this realized in delicious.com?

It ain’t the most fanciest flash video, but as long as we can get 10,000 hits that’s all that matters…oh and of course make a difference!

go vegetarian!

So this is the original poster before the text was changed to the top and in red.

Our product is for my friend’s little brother, Carson who is 6 years old. And we wanted to come up an object that would be able to build into different objects and be a marble shooter? but the tubes didn’t work out so perfectly so the marble idea would have to be left out.

( hahaha i really like this one, i don’t think it’s quite affective though!)

(i like this ad because they only use a few words and yet it really gets the message across)

(another clever idea, involved in the everyday)

( i thought this was quite beautifully drawn)

( if you can’t read it, it says “smoking isn’t just suicide. it’s murder.” i thought this was quite upsetting )

(a fairly old advertisement for cigarettes, “blow in her face and she’ll follow you anywhere” HAHAHA seriously? there’s so many things wrong with that sentence i don’t even know where i would start!)

my idea for my poster will sort of relate to this ad…but there’s actually a lot of really interesting facts about smoking i didn’t know that i’d like to do my ad about…so only time will tell on which fact i do my ad about! for now i have a few sketches down, while i’ll upload in a bit once i get near a scanner!!

” a man kept a dog with no legs. he named it Cigarette because every night he took it out for a drag.”

…haha i know it really sounds cruel but i thought it was funny…