Vector Images

 

Top pro logo vs. bottom sad attempt.

Marshall McLuhan's idea of the message being the medium and mediums being made up of one another and representing extensions of ourselves is depicted in our photoshop collages of mediums.  I chose to depict the Android phone and all of that it encompasses and is capable of.  An Android phone is made up of a telephone (voice communication including recordings and live chat), text messaging, the internet, email, Facebook, music, games, video, not to mention it connects people to one another between a wide variety of networks and carriers which offer android phones.  Android phones are popular for their powers of communication and customization which rivals that of the iPhone through the Android market which allows users to purchase or download for free applications which enhance their Android experience.  As is the case with many individuals these days phones become an extension of us, they are what keep us feeling connected to others and the Android allows a user to do anything from call their grandmother to schedule an appointment to tweet about a concert as they record videos of it happening.  When you see someone holding an Android phone is it both a literal and figurative extension of their limb and smart phones are what take social networking and mobile media and communication to the next level at speeds nearly the blink of an eye using computers that fit in the palms of our hands.

Andrew Keen
1.  Keen’s definition of democratized media essentially indicates that users generate the content on the internet themselves in this Web 2.0 world.  It used to be that administrators provided content and the internet was simply a means for looking up information, but now it is highly interactive and latent with user-generated content.  Keen refers to Wikipedia, frowned on by academics and hailed by high schooler’s and anyone looking for a quick fix of info, a “cathedral of  information on the internet.”  As he points out though on sites such as Wikipedia and nearly anywhere on the internet itself, information can change within minutes or even seconds, being updated whether that be an improvement or a correction, or complete misinformation at the hands of someone who is not a credible source but has access to adjusting information on the web.

2.  Keen and Rushkoff are recent authoritative voices in the debate on democratized media and web 2.0, what it all means and how we should feel about it.  Rushkoff is not blindly unaware of the possible detriments to such democracy but he believes that Constitutional free speech applies to t he internet and that freedom of information for all cannot be infringed upon because once we start to, where is the line drawn and when does it start to encroach on our civil liberties outside of the cyber world.  Keen however is strongly opposed to the wealth of unfiltered information available on the internet that is often inaccurate, misleading, offensive and of poor quality for consumption.  While Rushkoff believes in the exciting equal opportunities of the new frontier that is web 2.0, Keen is openly skeptical and in opposition to such grand scale open source chatter.



Folksonomy & The Folks
     The internet has proven to be both an enormous blessing to our modern era and also a curse when it comes to accuracy and quality of information.  Determining reputable sources has become a struggle for people using internet search engines because the web is a reflection of American society in the sense it is now a democracy where free speech is exercised and largely unregulated.  Information that used to take hours to obtain by skimming through books in a library using the dewy decimal system is now literally a click away and can appear in seconds, but how accurate is this information?  That is where the conflict of folksonomy occurs.
    Folksonomy is defined as a type of classification system for online content,created by an individual user who tags information with freely chosen keywords; also,the cooperation of a group of people to create such a classification system, by dictionary.com (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/folksonomy) and by wikipedia.com as a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy).  So what does folksonomy mean?  It means that users of the internet can generate content and tag said content using keywords and phrases in order to classify that information, eliminating the need for an administrative position to process information and creating freedom of unfiltered information organized by the people, for the people. An example of a use of folksonomy is tagging photos on facebook or keywords on a wikipedia page to link them to a larger wealth of information and content.  Folksonomy is what allows you to search for a restaurant in the Poughkeepsie area and gets you everything from the Culinary Institute of America to Baby Cakes on the street corner over by Vassar along with directions, reviews, a phone number and things to do around those restaurants as well.  However folksonomy is also what in recent months bing commercials have begun to poke fun at and how easy it is with most search sites to get irrelevant information to your search coming up within the first few hits, playing a game of six degrees of separation from mother's day cards to mom jeans and gene splicing.
   So what's wrong with folksonomy if everyone is in on it, not to be discriminated against and to be apart of the greater good of information?  Well, the fact of the matter is that we are not all educated experts on every subject known to man and so user-generated content may be misleading, conflicting or just plain inaccurate.  When content is tagged on the internet with keywords, search engines are not able to filter opinion from fact and that is where intellect and the discretion of the researcher must kick in.  We as humans with common sense which even Watson the IBM computer has not fully grasped must look at information, its source, its tone and any conflicting or supporting information and determine whether or not it is credible.  A good rule of thumb is that anything from a blog or most .com sites is not reputable, where as .edu sites are usually well researched, confirmed and fact-based.  Despite popular belief when a search brings you to a .org site you should also be leery to believe everything that you read because .org means organization, and though major organizations may be reputable they also still have their own agendas and may have a bias to the presentation of facts and information.
    Democracy on the web is not detrimental to us in my opinion just as I do not think free speech in print and in the media is, I think if anything it requires us as educated beings to push ourselves to sift through information, use our gut instincts, common sense and critical thinking to determine what information is worth crediting, and what is just a bunch of hot air being let out onto the internet.  I will always remember once my freshman year of high school I was doing a research project on Charles Dickens and found myself on wikipedia.  Now I may not have known much about Dickens but I knew well enough to raise an eyebrow of uncertainty when the site was trying to tell me about his life in gay porn under the stage name Dicky.  Thank you folksonomy for teaching me a valuable lesson in reputable sources and the pitfalls of wikipedia.  Though not all errors are so glaringly obvious and other sites are harder to distinguish as unreliable, I think folksonomy keeps us on our toes as an intelligent species while also allowing us to express our opinions as individuals.