10/25/11

I found the speaker's discussion of the role of the internet in business today very interesting. When I use google I often forget that I'm not just getting the most relevant results for my search. Businesses pay huge amounts of money to be at the top of key searches, and where a business shows up in a google search has a huge effect on whether or not that company will be successful. Considering that anyone can pay to be at the top of a google search, google is not as impartial or unbiased as it may appear.

Personally, I am not as likely to trust the pages that paid to be at the top of a search as the results that are just there because of relevance or popularity. If a business pops up at the top of a search I will look at it, but I will also look at ratings from actually people to make sure they're not just at the top of the search because they paid to be there.

fall break

Over fall break I went to NYC. While I was there the "occupy wall street" protest was taking place. It was really interesting to see the role of technology in the protest. Social media allowed enormous number of people to very quickly gather (at one point the estimate was around 100,000 in Times Square). The protesters were broken up several times only to quickly reconvene because instant communication via Twitter and other social networking sites made it possible to almost instantly reorganize.

Although the protesters were unified by social media, it was interesting to hear that most people were not unified in their message. Some people even argue that the internet has made it too easy for protests to take place, and that it is responsible for the protesters lack of a unified message. I agree that the internet made it very easy for just anyone to join in on the protest, but I found that the message of the protest was actually clearest online. Very few people could say exactly what the were protesting, but online there were very specific grievances, such as the repeal of the McCain-Feingold campaign reform act.

missing blogs

It looks like two of my blogs from the beginning of September are missing. I can't remember what I originally blogged about so I guess I will go ahead and do some extra blogs for the past few weeks.

week of 10/15/11

This week we began the presentations. The Dumbest Generation and Against the Machine both seemed to take a fairly one-side pessimistic view of the internet. While I think there are some negative aspects of the internet, I feel that it is very difficult to argue that it is all bad. Like any other major technological advance, it has caused a paradigm that has profoundly and permanently changed our society, but that change is not necessarily a good or bad thing.

10/4/11

I'd never heard of 4chan before reading the article for class. It's really interesting how anonymity can bring out the best or, perhaps more often, the worst in people. I was going to check out 4chan but from how people described it in class, due to the open and yet anonymous nature of the site, it is very difficult to find anything of interest among the meaningless chatter and pornographic images.

I liked how the article compared anonymous sites, like 4chan, were compared to the psychological id, google was compared to the ego, and Facebook, the superego.