Digital Rhetoric in Discourse

Internet trusted ID

2011-04-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

The White House has unveiled a plan to create a system for the internet to ensure identity online. While this may help to alleviate the issue of authenticity that has been discussed in class, I worry that it could be used to exclude users from certain portions of the internet. Anonimnity on the internet is part of what makes it great; users are free to express their views/opinions without fear of reprecussion if it is against the status quo.

Internet addiction is real

2011-04-06T13:19:00.000-07:00

During a University of Maryland study, participants were asked to give up all media for a full day; many showed symptoms of withdrawal. It's interesting how there is no physical addiction, but a psychological addiction to being connected at all times. I remember how my father used to complain about cellphones, about how he enjoyed just getting away from things. I look back on that and wonder how it would be to live like that; I sometimes feel like it's necessary for me to have my cellphone in order to function.

Anyway, link for the interested:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/04/23/us-internet-addicts-life-idUSTRE63M4QN20100423

Privacy vs convenience, pt 2

2011-04-03T05:05:00.000-07:00

Recently I posted an article about how Richard Stallman chooses not to carry a cellphone due to their tracking ability. As further evidence that this is not a paranoid or crazy idea, see the following article

In short, the article describes how a German politician went to court to determine how much information cellphone companies collect. He found that in a six month period his telephone provider had logged his GPS coordinates more than 35,000 times. The fact that information like this is recorded and maintained without notification is frightening.

Using open record laws to intimidate/coerce

2011-04-03T04:56:00.000-07:00

The shift to digital records has given the public an unprecedented amount of access to federal records and an ease in which to do so. Sunshine laws require that certain document be released to the public upon request. It's unfortunate that some attempt to use these laws to coerce and intimidate their opposition, such as this attempt in Wisconsin:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/opinion/28mon3.html?_r=1

Complex Numbers

2011-04-01T11:13:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP4fWMLofvo

Even though he didn't communicate his point across, he definitely held his audience's attention. This was presented in two mediums simultaneously: both digitally and physically. Just imagine if someone did something similar to try to ACTUALLY get a point across.

If the internet disappeared...

2011-03-22T17:47:00.000-07:00

http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_90_the-world-tomorrow-if-internet-disappeared-today_p21#21

I was amused.

Privacy for convenience

2011-03-15T06:57:00.000-07:00

Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement has stated that he is unwilling to use a cellphone due to the ease with which they can be used as a tracking and recording device (source: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/031411-richard-stallman.html?hpg1=bn ).

While this may sound crazy, it is something that has occurred in the past and will continue (source: http://www.zdnet.com/news/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdropping-tool/150467 ).

Given this knowledge, is it crazy that Richard Stallman refuses to carry a cellphone in the technologically dependant society that we live in, or is it crazy that we are so willing and anxious to give away our privacy for the convenience of being in reach of everyone 24 hours a day?

Reality TV

2011-03-14T10:31:00.000-07:00

http://www.cracked.com/article_19101_6-studies-that-prove-reality-tv-causing-apocalypse_p2.html

I saw this article, and found a section of it that embodies the view I've always had on blogs:

"Growing up with reality television teaches you that sharing every irrelevant thought as publicly as possible isn't the province of lunatics in trench-coats and attention whores but is "normative" and "prosocial," which we're fairly sure are psychobabble words for good things. Keeping Up With the Kardashians being taken as the basis of a society makes 1984 look like a nice future. Hell, it makes Fallout 3 look good.

It's a cargo cult: They see people with absolutely no ability becoming famous, sharing absolutely every irrelevant detail of their lives with the world, and confuse one of the effects with the cause. They then proceed to pour out every pointless emotion in a never-ending toxic spill of weaponized boredom."

I've heard some people described as having "diarrhea of the mouth" when they just keep talking and tell you details about their lives or whatever strikes their fancy that you just don't need to know or care about.

I also remember a character from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a book by Douglas Adams, named Ford Prefect, who is an alien writer for an intergalactic guide book, trying to decipher why people talk so much. His theory based upon years of observing people from earth was that if we ever let our mouths stop moving, our brains might start working.

All of these summarize what I feel most people have to say, especially in blogs: nothing of value.

Disconnect

2011-03-12T13:29:00.000-08:00

I've got two friends who are both going through the same program I'm in to get their degrees and go back into the military. Consequently, we're all good friends and hang out almost daily. The other night we had a conversational disconnect. One of our number had never seen the youtube video of "Leeroy Jenkins." Someone had pulled up a youtube video that was a compilation of the top 100 youtube videos in 4 minutes. It showed the funny clips from these top 100 videos. When the clip from the leeroy jenkins video came up, the two of us that HAD seen it were rolling, but the one who hadn't had no idea what we were talking about. So through discussion and futher watching of this top 100 video, we also discovered he had never heard of "rick rolling." Just goes to show that not everyone is familiar with the same internet memes as us.

Bad parenting

2011-02-22T08:56:00.000-08:00

As an ultimate example of how digital rhetoric can affect our normal lives, the following link explains how an Egyptian couple has named their newborn daughter Facebook in appreciation of the role that the social networking site played during the revolution.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/egyptian-father-names-his-daughter-8220facebook-8221-after-revolution/342

It's sad, this child will have to live with her parent's poor decision for the rest of her life.

Electronic monuments

2011-02-15T09:36:00.001-08:00

After listening to the guest speaker (though I disagree on one or two points he brought up), I've come to the conclusion that Electronic Monuments are only unique or different, in that you can more easily juxtapose ideas with the electronic monuments than you could with physical ones. Normally if someone tries to associate ideas in a physical monument that are not normally associated, it winds up being a "piece of modern art" who's point is lost on most people looking at it. It becomes easier to blatantly make your point or comparison in an electronic medium, where you can put an exact image or sound that represents your ideas to most everyone, rather than having to interpret certain symbols in a particular way.

2011-02-10T08:58:00.000-08:00

"So....you're a blue troll?"

Programmers

2011-01-30T08:57:00.001-08:00

One of our readings for this week refers to things like quotations, footnotes, and proper citations and the foundations of basic literacy. While I'd argue that you don't need to know how to do ANY of that to be literate, it also raises an interesting comparison later in the reading. None of those things just sprang into being. The author actually references when they were invented. At some point, some dude somewhere had to sit down and say "You know, I've got a GREAT idea!" Then they had to convince everyone else that it was brilliant and we should ALL start doing it. Someone had to write a paper (or maybe letters) describing these processes and extolling their virtues to convince everyone else to adopt them. The author later states that similar standardized methods/practices haven't crystallized for video media yet. That you can't "link" a particular hat of a character on the screen to other hats of a similar type in other movies in real time yet. Thinking about it, as a comparison, if somebody DOES establish a "standardized" way of accomplishing this, they'll need to write about it and convince others to use their method. But Computers don't exactly work like that. What this means is that some programmer and/or mathematician somewhere will eventually tackle the problem and write out a mathematical formula or function in code to perform this task. They'll package it in a library and everyone else will just include that library and call their function.

Programmers are writing the "research papers" of "video literacy" in math formula's and software functions. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If one person gets a function to work decently, then other people will just use it in their libraries. They don't NEED to be convinced by anything other than results. I guess that's this generation's different way of looking at things, eh?

First!

2011-01-26T07:30:00.000-08:00

I went to write out our response to our first reading today, and though I originally thought I wouldn't have much to say, I broke the 2-3 page limit. This class looks as though it may be pretty interesting.....

On a separate note, I was reminded of these things during our discussions in class:

Stealing files:

http://www.cracked.com/funny-4003-the-pirate-bay/

Modern Arguments on the internet sound like this:

http://machall.com/view.php?date=2005-03-14

And finally, as an example of people remixing other people's work to make "new" art:

http://djearworm.com/

(I'm a huge fan of the work he did for 2009. Not so much for 2010.)