Media Issues Class Final: The New Media Landscape: What should we be concerned with?
This is a final for my Media Issues class. It’s based on three books covered earlier in the semester. I wrote blogs for these books which you can find by clicking the Interactive Media Issues link. The final centers around a conference covering new media issues. I was supposed to outline each of the books read in class and then critic two.
Robert W. McChesney Opening Remarks
Reasons why Journalism and its future are your concerns:
- Journalism and the news is how we stay connected.
- Marketing is forcing professional journalism to lose its objectivity, so this is the reason for more entertainment news over hard hitting journalism and investigative journalism.
- Capitalism is also creating conglomerates and mergers that force news to parry to someone else’s interests.
- What we know as professional journalism will be destroyed by commercialism leaving room for weak and superficial news from bloggers and corporate puppets!!!
Ken Auletta Opening Remarks
Looking to Google’s success as a method for building companies today:
- Google is a multibillion dollar company whose corporate model is “Don’t Be Evil”.
- They’ve made their success on making things simple and giving users what they want.
- Their corporate money maker, Google Ads, falls within’ their guidelines of helping the user find the best match while still making money.
- While Google has had some bumps along the way, their main goal to cure inefficiency of everyday life still holds true through each of their corporate ventures.
Daniel J. Solove Opening Remarks
Why we need to think about Privacy and Reputation on the Internet:
- Looking at examples like Dog Poop Girl and Star Wars Kid, we’ve learned that the Internet can bring a permanent dent to your reputation.
- Professional and Personal lives are blending through social networking. With corporations following their employees on the internet.
- Blogging is becoming more professional, so what does this mean for reputation?
- New norms on the internet frown upon anonymous commenting something that was common only a couple of years ago.
Jonathan Zittrain Opening Remarks
The Internet is changing for the worse:
- Things that were once open source or generative are becoming closed in order to protect corporate interests.
- This non-generative trend in products for the internet, are stifling creativity that will allow for innovation.
- The Internet is slowly becoming more privatized and controlled.
- Fears of viruses are unwarranted because there have only been a few major examples.
Moderator’s Criticism
Auletta and Google: Google is run by robots, literally. That’s probably the best way to describe the efficient engineer thinking that runs Google. Instead of thinking like most corporate giants, Google instead focuses on making life simple, easy, and to the point. It’s no wonder, my brother, who is also an engineer by the way, loves them. While Google may see themselves as humble robots who want to help humans, what they don’t realize is that they are a multibillion dollar corporation whose actions affect a huge number of people. And while they spend a lot of time telling us of their “don’t be evil” motto, we are a people full of suspension and even Internet giants like Google are not immune.
For instance, what about Google’s “scale” model? While we were using Google’s search engine, Google was storing data, data that would be able to tell the corporation were to move next. The information that Google has collected has made into relatively easy to move into any kind of business venture on the Internet from cloud computing to selling books. Google has put itself in an interesting situation to “scale” into anything (Auletta 323), and because of this Google becomes a huge target (for anyone, hackers, governments, terrorists) and a danger to control on the Internet. We’re are still mulling over issues of privacy (Solove’s The Future of Reputation, FutureWeb 2010 conference Privacy session), and Google is moving at a rate that could be detrimental down the road. Google Baggage as Solove calls it is not helping.
Solove and Reputation: While the internet may seem as if it’s giant baggage for any person looking for a job or wanting to protect their reputation, it should also be important to wonder why people live their lives on the internet as if no one is watching. Something that Solove doesn’t cover or bother to really think about is that the Internet has created this image of transparency, so much so that networks like Facebook continue to lower privacy settings and Twitter doesn’t mind giving away your tweets for the government to save. In your book towards the end (189), you discuss the fact that as people we simply enjoy talking about ourselves and each other and because of this we’ve been placed in a pickle.
The problem lies with ourselves and buying into the Internet’s moniker of transparency, as consumers we need to learn (or rather relearn) that while blogs can be a place to share our thoughts, that anyone can get to it and that sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google are not bound to protect us. At the same time while corporations want to know more about the person their hiring, using Google and a person’s Facebook may not be the best practice for creating trust with a new employee.
