This is totally random, but ridiculously funny! Whether you like South Park, YouTubeian phenomena, or both, this one combines them in a rather creative manner (it was a matter of time until someone would do it with this episode :). It definitely made me smile and i hope it will have the same effect on you. Thank you Veronica for sharing this!
Even though I didn’t make it to Telecom Africa, I couldn’t escape the African motive. Recently, I came across some optimistic numbers about adoption of ICT in the region. The ITU report, cited here, suggests that (a) there is currently more technology in Africa and (b) it is more evenly spread across the continent (the more interesting observation in my view). At the same time, it suggests that people in Africa find mobile more useful, compared to the internet, which is not surprising provided the price of internet access (the cite states a figure of $50 and that is a lot!). In fact, the mobile market is showing impressive growth in other developing countries, which makes it supposedly an interesting aim for foreign investors.
I wonder though, what is the impact of adoption of these technologies on the lives of people? Do they make their lives easier? Happier? More prosperous? How do they use it? How different these ways are from what we are used for? What business and technological innovation is taking place in this process?
Quite fascinating…
I blogged earlier about thoughts prompted by reading students’ papers in Tarleton’s COMM 320 course. In my previous posts I wrote about perception of social networks as a platform for unifying “digital culture”. Another common idea in numerous papers was that the “new” media offer an open platform where users can create any content they want, particularly in the political context. The “new” media are often discussed in comparison to the “old” media (newspapers, TV, etc.), which suffer from institutionalized bias and are constantly under political and economic pressures. The “new” media are different - they are open platforms and the “new” media companies do not intervene in discourse as long as it is within the limits of the law.
The questions however, is it so? Is it so black and white and are the differences between the “old” and the “new” so great?
I thought about this now because I ran into an interesting example on YouTube. A few days ago, i heard about Mike Gravel’s attempts to recruit Obama Girl for his campaign. For those of you who do not follow, Mike Gravel is still in the race for Democratic nomination to run for the presidency (yes, there are more candidates than just Clinton and Obama). In fact, Gravel’s campaign is a good example to support the “new” argument about the “new” media. He has been continuously marginalized in the mainstream media and as a result he is trying to rely more and more on the alternative channels such as YouTube.
Watching the video of Gravel dancing with Obama Girl, lead me to his YouTube channel, where i found the following video, where Gravel is complaining about YouTube now marginalizing him as well:
Indeed, i went and checked. If you look at the “You Choose” page on YouTube there is no doubt that there are only two candidates in the democratic camp. While i can understand that Gravel has no chances to win and thus it seems like a logical decision to keep the page cleaner for maybe aesthetic purposes, i cannot stop wonder about the questions this act rises about the neutrality of the platforms.
In this case we have YouTube priming certain political preferences on expanse of the others. They may not do it for political/ideological reasons, but the result is the same - the marginalized are pushed back to the margins. Of course there are differences and you can still find all Gravel’s videos on YouTube, but would you know that he is still running if you’d look at the main political page on YouTube these days?
I think this is an interesting case that is bringing back a series of concerns we had previously about the mainstream media. Moreover, it raises questions about the interaction between the mainstream media, “new” media, and perceived public opinion. I find it really interesting.
What do you think?
I read quite an interesting article in recent Newsweek. In the article Fareed Zakaria (who is apparently the editor of Newsweek International) is summarizing the main thesis of his recent book, “The post-American World“. I would say that this is an interested and a quite optimistic take on current affairs including globalization, raise of nationalism, violence, and shift in the balance of power. Although the article is written from a very US-centric perspective, it is read as a call to US public to re-assess current geopolitical situation and acknowledge that things have changed - the US-led globalization project succeeded to a great degree and US has to adjust, or more so to reconcile to this new environment. The article made me definitely interested in reading the book.
Just read a blog post about the new CEO of the OLPC project, who seem to envision the project in more technological and less educational terms. Then i read a response to that post written by Gaurav Chachra, who presents himself as “founder member of OLPC India Student Chapter“.
Gaurav is actually making a very good point about the (unrealized) potential of the OLPC project to impact the power balance between people and technology as a primarily commercially-driven institution. He asks a simple question about why would we want OLPC to run Windows XP in first place? I can think of potential answers such as Windows being the most commonly used platform and thus it is necessary to work with it in order to compete in the modern economy. At the same time, I wonder where does it put those, who are joining this competition race at this stage, in the technological hierarchy. It looks like if those who are joining now will have to catch up, while on the other hand there is knowledge in the system that could potentially allow them to leap-frog the catching up or just approach the entire situation from a different angle.
The latter point brings an even larger question about the “digital culture” and this is where the question of power relations. Naturally, Microsoft has an invested interest in making Windows XP the primary operating system for any vast technology-literacy project/movement in the developing world. If we learn that the world is flat, we will be hesitant to go and explore the ages. Similarly, if we learn that computers are Microsoft, we will be hesitant to explore the alternatives (even if there would be people who explain to us that the alternatives are better). The question of the OLPC’s ability to run Windows XP is a clear outcome of this path dependency and us being used to a specific kind of computer mediated experience. However, the point Faurav is making is that the vast populations of children in developing world have never been socialized in the ways we are using technology in the more privileged parts of the world. So, what not using this opportunity to re-examine the values underlying our efforts in the technology and development realm?
I wonder if taking the OLPC to the Windows-dominated reality would not constitute something that looks like innovation for conformity?
I read a post from “Technology Evangelist” (who in turn replied to Micro Persuasion, who in turn quotes Edelman Trust Barometer :) on how much people trust various sources of information ranging from “a person like yourself” through academics, employees, executives of companies, etc., to “blogger”. The result, unsurprisingly i think, is that people trust “a person like yourself” the most and “blogger” the least (i am pasting the graph below).
Ed Kohler offers a few points of criticism about the way the categories are labeled in this question and i tend to agree. Moreover, it got me thinking how often we tend to place issues in well defined conceptual bins. “Blogger” in this case is some esoteric creature on the internet, which is probably far from being truth for many of the regular blog readers. I wonder how does this trust question correlate with blog-reading patterns or more generally with media consumption patterns.
Regardless, I think one interesting thing in this graph is how the general trends of trust fluctuate in time. Note that while the absolute values vary among the different categories, the general trend is the same. Interesting.
Veronica’s comment reminded me of a post i was thinking about for a few days already and today is a particularly appropriate day to do that. Today is Yom Hashoa, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is felt much more when you are in Israel where it is institutionalized, compared to when you live abroad.
These days, when it becomes fashionable to question everything and history is many times getting twisted for political or other reasons, I think this history lesson is a very important one to remember. “Gladly”, I am old enough (cannot believe i am writing this) to remember the stories of my grandparents and their families that were brutally killed by the Nazis. However, not many had that “privilege” of hearing first hand witnesses and the web is particularly full of “not necessarily reliable” sources on this subject to say the least.
This is why i was pleasantly surprised to discover that Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Museum, decided to catch up with the modern media world and launched two YouTube channels. Of course, launching the channels in English and Arabic suggests and agenda, but for once i think this is an important one. You may also want to take a look at their website, which has a lot of information and links to research on the topic. This is an important history lesson that should never repeat itself.
This one is just for fun.
Apparently, “my cat ate my homework” can be a valid excuse these days:
Thanks to my sister for pointing that one out.
Happy May 1st everyone! :)
Quite a while ago i read this post about the rise of cheap computing solutions. In light of the growing critique of the OLPC project, it got me thinking that perhaps, by focusing on the details of this specific project we are overlooking some of its most important contributions.
Just three or four years ago OLPC was the only project explicitly targeting the developing world and the market for low cost, simple computers. Today, we have over 7 competing models targeting this very market (potentially more). As long as this competition continues we can expect better machines and lower prices in this segment. Perhaps that is good, since industry is probably better in taking care of the technical aspects (even if sometimes it needs a push, such as the OLPC project), leaving space for the educators and activists focusing on developing a decent educational infrastructure to utilize this technology.
The main critique of OLPC from the very beginning was that it should be an educational and not a technological project. And I agree that the technological solution alone is meaningless and the true potential for change lies in appropriate adoption framework, particularly when we talk about education. At the same time, I think that its contribution to the technological push should not be underestimated. Does it make any sense?
On an unrelated note, now you can also use Skype on XO computers. I think this is really cool, even though Skype has been recently loosing its quality.
(Images taken from laptop.org, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5.)
I recently finished grading a lot of papers on the topic of “new” media and culture for Tarleton’s COMM 320 class. Our students had to react to the following statement using the class readings:
Digital media technologies tend to individualize us, to make us feel more separate; digital culture (i.e. the kinds of content those technologies give us access to and the cultural meanings that content regularly offers) tend to connect us, to make us feel more a part of something.
One of the prominent examples to how the “digital culture tend to connect us” was the social networks websites. This is probably why the following post caught my eye. It summaries results of social media study from Universal McCann, which shows major differences between the US and Asian countries in terms of online social networking. It seems that people in different parts of the world tend to join different social networks, which actually makes perfect sense, but undermines that globally-unifying factor that many of our students highlighted (also note the white spaces on the map). It also shows that even in the US itself there is not homogeneity in these environment. In fact, Eszter had a paper showing, among other things, that different ethnic groups in the US tend to join different social networking website.
It could be interesting to look at the complete report since it also suggest differences in patterns of grassroots content production in various regions of the world. I think when talking about “new” media and “digital” culture, it s very important to put things in context (and that is one of the ideas in my eyes behind thinking macro :). I wonder though what would be the best way to incorporate that in teaching.
