*Note, this is a fake news article written for my Emerging Media and Communication class
Princess Buttercup was apparently kidnapped for the second time this month. Count Tyrone Rugen sustained multiple stab wounds while defending the castle from the intruders, and died from blood loss, said royal police officers.
Prince Humperdinck was found earlier this morning, tied to a chair in his bed chamber and gagged. Buttercup was not with him, though he was the last person to see her.
Humperdinck made no official statements to the police, and was not available for comment this morning.
No official search is planned to retrieve Buttercup, said royal police official.
The captain of the guard, John Doe, said three intruders entered the castle during the wedding yesterday. He described them as a giant with brown hair, a Spaniard with a black mustache and curly hair and a white male wearing a black suit and mask.
“They set the giant on fire and wheeled him to the front gate,” Doe said. “Most of the men ran. I stayed behind, but I couldn’t keep them out by myself.”
Four white horses were found missing from the stables this morning. Jimmy Doe, a stable boy, was on the scene when the animals were stolen.
“There was a giant,” Jimmy said. “And I didn’t recognize him, so I ran for help. By the time I got back with the police force, he was gone and so were the horses.”
Four sets of hoofs prints were found leading west, said royal police officials.
“They must have ridden off into the sunset,” Doe said.
A man matching the description of the Spaniard was reported disturbing arrests in Thieves Forest earlier this week. Members of the brute squad claim to have also seen a man matching the description of the giant at this time.
Willum, a member of the brute squad, said that he saw the giant dunking the Spaniard’s head into buckets of water.
“He was drunk, and the giant was trying to revive him,” Willum said. “I assumed they were friends.”
If you have any information regarding Princess Buttercup’s disappearance please call the princess rescue service at: 1-800-SAVE-HER
I still remember coming back from my camping trip last November. My father, boyfriend, and I had gone with our church for their annual family camp out. James–my boyfriend–and I had brought homemade pumpkin pie. It was the perfect way to celebrate turning eighteen. But what made it perfect wasn’t the pie, camping in the woods, with the hushed sounds of wind blowing through the trees, the fresh air, or any of kids we spent the weekend entertaining, it was the moment my phone alarm went off, telling me that at last I was a legal adult, and I could ask James to marry me.
I’ll be honest, I don’t actually remember changing my relationship status on Facebook. It wasn’t a big deal to me. Most of my closest friends had known I wanted to marry James for nearly a year, and I never believed in “Facebook official.” What I remember about changing my status was how almost immediately the ads on my page changed. They were no longer the familiar links to artist websites, or canvas suppliers. They were all for photographers. Wedding photographers.
I was dumbfounded at first. “What the hell?” I kept thinking. “Does Facebook keep track of my status?”
Somehow in the haze of college, I had failed to notice that the ads had been tailoring themselves to my preferences with ever more accurate precision. But after the initial shock wore off, I didn’t care.
And maybe I should care. Maybe we should all care. But somehow, what happens on Facebook feels like it should stay on Facebook. Should I spend my time offline worrying about what I did online? Maybe, but I won’t. I’ve always preferred to be disconnected. And when I think about Facebook taking my information to third parties, I can’t help but think that it’s more worth my time to log off rather than fight the system. If I don’t tell them where I am, they can’t find me.
While most people won’t take my “log off and stop complaining” attitude, something tells me that most Facebook users aren’t concerned about the security of their information.
The idea of remixes has been around a long time, but traditionally only music or art becomes collage. The technology provided on the internet, and video broadcasting sites like YouTube, changes that. When Kanye West stole Taylor Swift’s microphone at the VMAs, it was like a great gasp echoed across America. But the famous fiasco could not have been mashed up the way it was without help from sites like YouTube.
Though millions of people watched with horror as the events unfolded live, it was YouTube that allowed millions more (or the general public) to experience the action for themselves. The VMAs may be popular, but they don’t have the sheer number of watchers as YouTube. They are narrow casted. You like popular music and celebrities? You’re probably watching the VMAs. But everyone else–the geeks, the moms, the business men, the parents who work two jobs and missed it–we watched it on YouTube. YouTube provided an immediate oppurtunity for us to see for ourselves what happened, not just read about it the newspaper, and not have to wait for big news groups to catch up. That established something essential for mash ups: a cultural referrence. What otherwise would have been a front page news story that may have been glossed over, was suddenly what everyone was talking about.
Cultural references are important. Without them, you could make a mash up, but no one is going to get the joke. With the internet, the obscurity of your reference is much easier to gauge. Chances are if it’s on the front page of YouTube and a trending topic on Twitter, it’s a cultural reference.
But once you recognize there’s a cultural phenomenon you want to join in on, you have to actually splice footage. YouTube helps with that too.
Unlike traditional media, which most people do not know how to screen capture, there are a plethora of programs willing to help you hack YouTube. This is an unwitting function of the site, but having large amounts of footage in a digital format in one location makes YouTube a perfect tool for finding exactly the clip you’re looking for. And what better way to use your resources than splice clips of Kanye interrupting the president’s health care speech?
But now that a hundred mash ups are sitting on everyone’s computers, what are we going to do with them all? Put them on YouTube of course!
This is perhaps the most beautiful and amusing truth about YouTube: it’s cyclical. Users of YouTube are known for their creative recycling, and what was once their junk yard for source material is suddenly their broadcasting station. Without YouTube, there would certaintly be other sites they could post their content on, but the main feature of YouTube is not the videos. It’s that everyone visits it. This kind of mass audience is all the encouragement mash up makers need to spill their creative juices. And without a community backing it, the art of home editing would be a drastically different medium. It wouldn’t be the sharing, cultural exchange program it is right now. It’d be insular. And that would just be sad.
In my Emerging Media and Communication class, we were given the assignment to make a substantial edit to a Wikipedia article. I chose my alma mater, the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science (TAMS). TAMS is an early entrance program to college located on the University of North Texas (UNT) campus. Nearly 400 juniors and seniors in high school live in McConnell hall, the oldest dorm at UNT, and take college courses for two years, receiving both a high school diploma and at least 60 hours of college credit at the end.
The section I edited was about the dorm itself.
All TAMS students live in McConnell Hall. The hall consists of three floors, segregated by gender. The hall is furnished with two common rooms (the Smitty Study and Mac Café), a kitchenette, and multiple meeting rooms. Besides serving as a study area during quiet hours, the Smitty Study serves as a public recreation room, featuring a broken ping-pong table, pool, and foosball. Mac Café is one of the common rooms in McConnell. It host various student activities, and also serves as a gathering place for both academic and social activity.
This was the section as it stood. I decided to add something a little bit more specific about the student body. I knew it was something that the school had always objected to being public knowledge. (Several of my friends had attempted to get similar edits to stick before.)
A group of students styling themselves the “Mac Rats” spend most of their time there, and even sleep on the couches.
That was all I added.
This statement is in fact true, being that I was one of the Mac Rats and slept on the couches on multiple occasions. The administration of TAMS was never happy about our antics however, and preferred that knowledge of Mac Rats stay contained to the school. But we were well known within the walls of McConnell and even had a Facebook page. For a while Mac Rats even had Facebook pages about how much the other students didn’t like us. (One even claimed that we didn’t have souls.)
The post was deleted quickly after I wrote, however. I looked up the IP address for the computer that made the edit, and was able to trace it to Denton, TX, where TAMS is located. (The screenshot of the IP search results is pictured to the right.)
It seems a little frustrating that since schools have a vested interest in their reputation, and far more resources than their students, their edits of their own institutions are what prevails. Wikipedia prides itself on it’s objectivity, but there are some subjects that are more objective than others. Wikipedia runs into problems when only a small pool of individuals possess knowledge of a topic, and also have a stake in the article’s content.
If you have ever heard the phrase, “One bad banana will ruin the whole bunch,” and felt confused, you probably have not seen the effects of having a ripe banana in the same bowl as unripe ones. It’s disastrous. Bananas release a chemical called ethylene as they ripen, and the riper they are, the more ethylene is released. The big problem is that ethylene also ripens bananas. What does ripening bananas have to do with Wikipedia talk pages? It seems that humans are a type of banana. Once one persons starts acting opinionated, everyone else does too.
The following discussion has been transplanted from the talk page of Fred Phelps, a preacher in Topeka Kansas, who is known for his belief that “God Hates Fags.” The discussion begins with a somewhat innocent question onto Phelps’ political leanings, but eventually becomes an exchange of more stereotypes than facts.
Can I mention that Fred Phelps is right wing extremist? All the activities he was doing is usually what a right wing pereson do (bashing homosexuals and minorities and such?).–Dark paladin x (talk) 02:38, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
This comment is not unbiased, since Dark Paladin is basing their reasoning on stereotypical categories and not on evidence, but the question itself seems harmless at this point.
If you can document it with direct references without violating the No Original Research or Synthesis policies, feel free. –TechBear (talk) 04:26, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
TechBear makes a valiant effort to maintain the neutrality on this discussion, but as more comments are added, it becomes apparent that the tenancy towards opinion is stronger than the dedication to objective truth.
He is so removed from reality that I don’t believe left or right politics can really be applied to him or his cult, I have met several actual Nazi’s and nothing they said was anywhere near as intense and extreme as Fag Phelps-Ted Fox 09:37, 23 June 2008 (GMT)
This is the point of the discussion that it goes down hill. Fox begins by name calling, a comparison to Nazis, and ends with more name calling. I would actually identify him as the ripe banana in the bunch, because after his comment, no one even attempts to get the discussion back on track.
Are we sure that this guy is really a Dem? Except for the anti-military comments, he seems to align himself with almost all the stereotypical right-wing view points, albeit to the extreme. Has anyone ever considered that his attempts at running as a Democrat was a subversive tactic; Trying to sabotage the party from the inside, that sort of thing? Just throwing out theories here; because his membership in the party doesn’t make any sense to me, at all. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mary Larade (talk • contribs) 21:23, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
My guess is that he’s a Dem because he’s an old white man from Mississippi, and that’s how old white people from the South used to always vote (tradition, you know), but then again, Phelps made his fortune by representing mostly African-Americans in civil rights cases during the ’50s and ’60s, so there goes the “Dixiecrat” theory, he must only make sense from the “inside” (of his mind & church). –173.16.124.196 (talk) 23:29, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
The problem is that people operate on schema, a list of characteristics and associations. It makes us capable of categorization and sorting, but also gives us a tendency to believe stereotypes and become racist. We have to fight every moment to analyze instances in an isolated and nuanced manner, based on facts alone. It’s actually impressive that we have a concept of unbiased news articles and encyclopedias. But that doesn’t mean that we have trouble maintaining that, especially when discussing a heated issue, especially when someone in the virtual room is reacting based on emotion or their schema.
Many people bemoan the invention of Twitter, which threatens to melt our brains in the span of 140 characters. But this is not the whole story, as Clive Thompson readily points out. Twitter, though misinterpreted and often misused, over time can provide what Thompson calls a sixth sense.
Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter… is cumulative. It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. For example, when I meet Misha for lunch after not having seen her for a month, I already know the wireframe outline of her life: She was nervous about last week’s big presentation, got stuck in a rare spring snowstorm, and became addicted to salt bagels.
Thompson says that this information helps facilitate conversation during meetings or phone calls after not talking for long periods. To him it replaces the “what have you been up to?” question that often begins reunions.
The need to follow our friends, even peripherally, has occurred long before Twitter. For anyone who’s been separated from their best friends because of college, they know how valuable text messages and Facebook are.
Over the weekend, my best friend in Corpus Christi sent a text proclaiming, “I’m walking on sunshine!!!” We used to burst into song throughout high school, so to me it was a sweet reminder of time spent together.
Twitter almost perfects this by sending a “mass text” to all our followers. It’s almost like saying, “to everyone that loves me, I’m alive.”
It’s this ability that (in part) drives Twitter, texting, and Facebook.
[Twitter is] almost like ESP, which can be incredibly useful when applied to your work life. You know who’s overloaded — better not bug Amanda today — and who’s on a roll. This awareness is crucial when colleagues are spread around the office, the country, or the world. Twitter substitutes for the glances and conversations we had before we became a nation of satellite employees.
Thompson does not explicitly state, but implies that Twitter can also be used as a crisis diverter. If one of my friends seems upset, I can call. Many criticize Twitter for being narcissistic, but it allows you to keep in touch when it matters most.
Monitoring your friends works better in small groups, though. Applications like TweetDeck can extend your perception by tracking different groups without them directly competing.
Follow too many people, and you find that the tweets you want to read are buried under tweets you don’t. I’m only following 47 people on twitter, but have already dropped two from that list because their tweets were clogging my homepage.
Scrolling through random Twitter messages can’t explain the appeal. You have to do it — and, more important, do it with friends. (Monitoring the lives of total strangers is fun but doesn’t have the same addictive effect.)
The desire to block out the lives of people we don’t care about, or don’t want to follow, can be seen in the new ability to hide feeds on Facebook. We have more friends than we can handle, which decreases the effectiveness of Facebook other social networking sites.
I include Twitter in this catagory. On the surface, Twitter was started as a broadcast/communication system, hence the term “microblogging.” But it can also, as Thompson dicussed, be used to strengthen ties with our friends, or even make new ones. It is what you make it.
The Sistine chapel, painted by Michelangelo and commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church.
Before their was copyright law, there was patronage. The system of patronage originated because it was so time consuming to produce one piece of art that artists could offer monarchs, wealthy landowners, and the church a unique and valuable piece of work in exchange for their livelihood.
Usually, artists were commissioned to write well of their patrons and create works that bolstered their reputation and fame. This led to the countless commissions by the church. Because of the prestige that patrons were gaining from their artists, epics were popular, and literature was written in Latin (the official language of the Catholism) until Dante wrote “Inferno” in Italian.
Once the printing press was invented, however, and copying works was no longer the job of monks, copyrights were established. According to “The History of Copyright in America” copyright was established to protect authors from a monopoly created by printers.
As the number of presses grew, authorities sought to control the publication of books by granting printers a near monopoly on publishing in England…in 1710 Parliament enacted the Statute of Anne to address the concerns of English booksellers and printers. The 1710 act established the principles of authors’ ownership of copyright and a fixed term of protection of copyrighted works (fourteen years, and renewable for fourteen more if the author was alive upon expiration). The statute prevented a monopoly on the part of the booksellers and created a “public domain” for literature by limiting terms of copyright and by ensuring that once a work was purchased the copyright owner no longer had control over its use. While the statute did provide for an author’s copyright, the benefit was minimal because in order to be paid for a work an author had to assign it to a bookseller or publisher.
As time went on, however, third parties gained the right to buy copyrights. Since publishing companies were formed of people, they were able to purchase these rights. Even as companies grew to be controlled by large numbers of stockholders, these rights remained, effectively giving companies the rights of citizens and the control of artists.
In this next video clip, taken from “RIP: A Remix Manefesto,” at 6 minutes and 25 seconds until 7 minutes and 7 seconds into the video, is one consequence of giving companies the rights of people.
Because companies do not die, there is no foreseeable end to the ownership of any license. Since companies control more capital than artists, their lobby in government is stronger, and copyright law will reflect their interests. Disney was able to extend their copyright on Mickey Mouse after his expiration date of 70 years.
But the technology originally leading to copyright has changed again. This time however, instead of protecting artists from a printers, who profited from the work of artists, copyright claims to protect artists from their fans.
The ease of reproducing art has another side effect. It is now possible for artists, who no longer have to worry about distribution or overhead to manufacturers and employees, can out compete companies in the market place.
If I chose to publish a 400 page book that was 6″ x 9″ and ordered 3000 copies from book printing revolution, it would cost me $2.84 per book. If I charged $4.00 for that book, I would make a $1.16 profit. I could never expect to make that much per book if I signed with a publishing company. And with that margin of profit, I only have to sell 50,000 books to make an annual salary.
$4.00 is much cheaper than the $10.00 or more customers have to spend to get new releases from big publishers. The more copies I order at once, the cheaper the books are for my readers, making it increasingly hard for large companies to compete with me.
Or, I could put a PDF of my work online for free, and let my readers distribute it as much as they wanted. Many artists are now offering their work online for download, and letting their fans choose how much to pay. This serves two purposes: free advertising for artists, and building a system of distributed patronage (which I will get to later.)
As I said, large companies have difficulties competing with this business model, even though the artist makes less money, because they have more employees and overhead.
This business model does not protect artists from other individuals, though. If someone decided to publish 10 different author’s works, they could still make and annual salary by selling books for $3.00. Copyright has to remain in some form to prevent copying work for profit.
This is where creative commons comes in.
One of the benefits of the creative commons system is that artists can choose the level of restrictions. They can grant permission for others to distribute, but not profit from, their work. They can grant permission for others to profit from their work. They can grant permission for others to remix and alter their work, or refuse others of this right. It is their choice. This choice allows artists to protect their work from competition to any degree.
Now comes an important question. How would an artist make money if they gave free distribution rights? Distributed patronage is the answer.
Wikipedia defines patronage in the following way:
Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organization or individual bestows to another. In the history of art, arts patronage refers to the support that kings or popes have provided to musicians, painters, and sculptors. It can also refer to the right of bestowing offices or church benefices, the business given to a store by a regular customer, and the guardianship of saints.
Note that patronage relates to the consumer. In the model of a consumer patron, the consumer gives money to the business or manufacturer in exchange for a product. If artists (of any discipline) provided their work to their fans directly, and their fans provided them with income, the fans would become patrons of the artist.
Because art is no longer difficult to copy (in many cases the artist can do it for free), they don’t have to rely on a small number of patrons to supply their income. Artists can even supply copies to more people than just their patrons. In this system, patrons would supply artist’s income in approximately $1.oo – $50.00 increments. If enough fans became patrons, then the artist could quit their day jobs.
This is not to say that any one artist would make millions from their work, they probably would not. Exceptions would be artists who charged their fans to see them live. But they would be able to make a living and devote themselves to their work. This might encourage artists who love what they do, rather than those who seek wealth or fame, into the arts. (But who would mourn that?)
But there are still questions to be asked, namely: why would fans become patrons if they could get art for free? Some wouldn’t. But others would do it for the original reason behind patronage and copyrights: to support and encourage the arts. As long as artists can devote themselves to their work at least part time, that is enough.
During the 2008 elections, viral marketing and Internet campaigns transformed two virtual unknowns in National politics into fundraising powerhouses. And while all the candidates established some Internet presence, it was Barack Obama and Ron Paul who harnessed the Internet’s potential, allowing them to out perform many better-known and better-funded candidates.
In the world of politics, it is established that fame, power, and money are linked. With any one of those resources, you can acquire the other two. The internet did not eliminate that rule, but it did give candidates with less power, less fame, and less money the ability to use their meager resources more effectively than those who had more at their disposal. Old fashioned campaigns are expensive, even using basic marketing techniques. In an interview with Time Magazine, Joe Trippi, a strategist for John Edwards, compared the cost of making his successful YouTube pecan pie fundraiser ($20) to conventional mail solicitations.
…a direct-mail solicitation can easily run into hundreds of thousands of dollars once a campaign has paid for the cost of buying a mailing list, high-quality paper stock, personalized laser printing and postage.
Obama's use of social networking sites attracted a younger audience of supporters.
After sparking initial interest in a campaign, however, as the mass media helped Obama do for free, the Internet could be harnessed for more free publicity through social networking. For Obama, social networking helped generate interest, a sense of that he was connected to the people and their new way of connecting, and revenue. According to Time Magazine, his 2008 campaign used the Internet’s social networking power to attract donations from average voters, not just wealthy supporters.
No campaign has been more aggressive in tapping into social networks and leveraging the financial power of hundreds of thousands of small donors. Nor has any other campaign found such innovative ways to extend its reach by using the Internet–more than $10 million of Obama’s second-quarter contributions were made online, and 90% of them were in increments of $100 or less.
But for Obama, this was not just about raising money, he had to best the far more famous Hillary Clinton at the polls to gain the democratic nomination. He used the Internet to organize volunteers, who would go door to door, campaigning, acquiring phone numbers, and enlisting more volunteers. They could then report their results and the neighborhoods they covered back to a website that would continue to direct volunteering. Wired reported his use of internet tools to direct volunteerism a number of times, culminating in the following:
Volunteers used Obama’s website to organize a thousand phone-banking events in the last week of the race — and 150,000 other campaign-related events over the course of the campaign. Supporters created more than 35,000 groups clumped by affinities like geographical proximity and shared pop-cultural interests. By the end of the campaign, myBarackObama.com chalked up some 1.5 million accounts. And Obama raised a record-breaking $600 million in contributions from more than three million people, many of whom donated through the web.
Ron Paul at his desk.
Another candidate, Ron Paul, also used the internet to bolster his support, though the problems he encountered and used it to overcome were vastly different than Obama’s. Though Paul was running under the Republican banner, he was traditionally a third party member, had a reputation of openly opposing party platforms, had ideas that were often labeled as revolutionary or crazy, and was ignored by the mass media. His disgruntled, small government, counter-culture movement found it’s perfect audience on the web, as surprised news groups and supportive bloggers are willing to testify:
Paul has more than 67,000 Meetup followers, about 20 times more than his nearest competitor, Barack Obama. That virtual presence has translated into more than just donations. Five thousand Paul supporters showed up at a November rally in Philadelphia, and his poll numbers in New Hampshire reached 8 percent in a mid-November CBS/New York Times survey—exceeding both Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson.
Though not remotely as effective as Obama at harnessing the management tools of the internet to organize traditional campaign techniques, his “Revolution” logo was posted as fliers on college campuses across America. His supporters also donated record amounts to his campaign, according to a Tom’s Guide article about the Internet’s combative effects against campaign apathy.
On November 5, 2007, in honor of the anniversary of Guy Fawkes Day, some Ron Paul supporters unaffiliated with the Ron Paul 2008 campaign decided to give Ron Paul a monetary boost. On that day, over 37,000 Americans donated $4.3 million dollars in a single, 24-hour period. And yesterday, December 16, 2007, the 234th anniversary of the 1773 Boston Tea Party, the same organizing group helped over 25,000 first time donators, and an undisclosed number of repeat donators, raise over $6 million in one 24-hour period. The previous record for single-day donations came from John Kerry’s $5.7 million in 2004.
The reason for Paul’s success was not his particular use of the internet, or his magnetic personality, two advantages which Obama used to win the presidency. His success can be largely attributed to his connection with a previously apathetic and unharnessed minority group, a.k.a. niche market.
Because he was and is still seen as the only representative of this group, made up of liberals and conservatives but mostly libertarians, his popularity has not diminished since he lost the candidacy. (Partially proved by the success of his latest book, “End the Fed.”) The same cannot be said for John McCain.
Tom’s Guide summarizes the Internet’s involvement with this phenomenon nicely.
…the Internet is literally opening the door to a new form of grass roots activist, the kind that mostly stay home building up ammunition to then go out and directly move, going door-to-door, standing at street corners holding up signs, and even plastering “Google Ron Paul” banners all over their local communities, over bridges, bill boards, sides of buildings, schools, everywhere.
To compete with politicians in the future, especially in 2012 when Obama is expected to run for reelection, candidates will have to learn to effectively implement the Internet in their campaign strategies: to network, publicize, and raise funds. Those who do not will not only be outstripped in the recent elections, but they will fail to court the next generation of voters. And that generation will not wait. Previously unsolicited demographics will find their champions.
Change is already here.
The tagline for the National Sex Offender Registry reads, “awareness is the best defense.” In a culture where politicians suggest placing GPS systems on child predators and middle school cops are fired because of their friends on Myspace, this phrase has encapsulated a generation of surveillance zealots.
At the center of the fervor is public schools. While enthusiasm to spy on neighbors has reached beyond the school yard, the goal to protect the innocence of childhood seems to be too noble to resist. What was once expressed by banning books is now accomplished by tracking and banning people.
When Angie Chen Button ran for the Texas House of Representatives in Fall 2008, one of her key positions was to place GPS tracking devices on all registered sex offenders. According to the site,
Texas must do more to keep our children safe from predators. Cities should ban registered sex offenders from living within 1,500 feet of schools or day care centers, and the State should set aside taxpayer dollars to fight legal challenges. Angie supports changing state law to require that all convicted child sex offenders wear GPS tracking devices upon release from jail.
Though some might say that these actions are a major infraction on liberty or privacy, Button was elected in November. Children who walk home from school seem like easy targets, and it is understandable for parents to worry. Instead of taking personal responsibility for the safety of their children, however, they have placed pressure on the system, and infringed upon the personal liberties of citizens who have already served their sentences. Gone are the days when former criminals could escape their convictions.
But as police officer John Nohejl discovered, suspicion and culpability are not restricted to felons.
Gulf Middle School resource officer John Nohejl didn’t have porn on his MySpace profile, and he didn’t link to porn. But one of the 170-odd people on his friends list, which seems mostly populated by students at his school, had a link to a legal adult site. Now the New Port Richey Police Department and the Florida attorney general’s elite cyber crimes unit are investigating him for making adult content available to underage children.
Nohejl was eventually fired for allowing children access to porn in what the St. Peterburg Times counted as “three clicks.” While the repercussions of this case were less severe, the potential harm to students was lower, the officer was not directly responsible for the link or may not have been aware of it, and no crimes were involved. He was fired for the inappropriate behavior of a friend.
What to do about known sex offenders and access to pornography by minors are charged issues. But legislators and constituents need to distance themselves from the issues and evaluate the actual risk to minors, instead of focusing on perceived risk. Having a former sex offender in the area does not necessitate that they are molesting children. In some cases, the age gap between the victim and perpetrator was only a few years, the relationship was mutual, and the perpetrator is not a threat. The police officer posed no threat to the students of his school, and could have been asked to remove his friend from his site or the have the link removed.
Our legal system was not designed as a preventative one. The principles of due process necessitate that crimes be committed and proved before punishment can take place. But in a society of constant surveillance, there is a tendency to enact preventative measures at the expense of freedom and privacy. Awareness of potential threats are foundations to install defenses and more surveillance.
In 1984, any perceived anomaly in behavior was used as evidence of criminal activity. There were no crimes against the government or others, but innocent people were tortured and killed. If we begin to master the science of watching others and analyzing their actions, we may be able to prevent crimes, but at what cost?
Back in 2007, the guys at The Washington Post had something to say about Net Neutrality: it can wait.
They argued that enforcing net neutrality would stifle internet innovation. The main problem I had with their argument is it assumed that only big players would be the ones delivering this innovation. Throughout their article, they referred to the user as customer, creating deep tones of corporations controlling internet services.
Blocking premium pricing in the name of neutrality might have the unintended effect of blocking the premium services from which customers (customers) would benefit. No one would propose that the U.S. Postal Service be prohibited from offering Express Mail because a “fast lane” mail service is “undemocratic.” Yet some current proposals would do exactly this for Internet services.
Most of the internet, however, does not have customers. It is driven by the user, who can explore with little cost to themselves. What David Farber and Michael Katz have overlooked is that net neutrality is not an argument against premium technology, or broadband being more expensive than dial-up, but rather an argument against gatekeepers for the content on the internet. Supporters don’t want filters on their bandwidth.
Farber and Katz also oversimplified the problem of bandwidth allocation. According to them, networks are enormous, providing both frivolous and important services (which is admittedly the case in some instances), and easily overwhelmed by traffic jams.
When traffic surges beyond the ability of the network to carry it, something is going to be delayed. When choosing what gets delayed, it makes sense to allow a network to favor traffic from, say, a patient’s heart monitor over traffic delivering a music download. It also makes sense to allow network operators to restrict traffic that is downright harmful, such as viruses, worms and spam.
Servers are used for separate sites, and often there are more than one server for large sites. Any service large enough to encompass both music downloads and heart monitor readings is more than likely going to have multiple servers. Even with net neutrality, it is possible for the different users to interact with the different servers, and if the music downloading server went down, the heart monitoring server would be fine.
Farber and Katz tempered their argument though, and I agreed with several of their later points.
Some forms of discrimination can be harmful, especially when service providers have market power. For example, if a local telephone company that is a monopoly provider of both broadband access and plain old telephone service for a community blocks its broadband subscribers from using an Internet phone service offered by a rival company, this discrimination can harm both competition and consumers.
They agree with the purpose of Net Neutrality, but do not admit its purpose, and to the end present the internet as controlled by businesses. This overlooks a key point, that servers and services can be hosted to the web from any source, and that these services are at risk by those who seek to control bandwidth, whether or not market values or monopolies are involved.
Source:
Farber, David; Katz, Michael. “Hold Off On Net Neutrality,” The Washington Post. January 19, 2007.
