The Google Eye In The Internet Sky

Google is now the big eye in the internet sky.  They have their hands in almost everything.  Though every new venture that Google attempts does not always end up smelling like roses, the company itself is leading the vanguard charge and staking claim to a wide range of unsettled or sparsely pioneered wild west.  They did start out as a rag tag outfit in some dorm room- the internet start up fairytale- but have now expanded beyond the edges to where only a challenger touched by the hands of the Gods could rival or even take down the empire that Google has become.  Is this a tumultuous development that all those in the free world should rise up against?  Many rhetoricians fear and question the future of the Googlization of Everything, but though their moto and battle cry "Do No Evil" might not harken the same angelic ideals as it did before corprate shares hung like gillitines over the necks of Google's top dogs, it still speaks volumes in that very few leaders of any industrial or technilogical revolution screamed at the walls of Jericho with such a politically correct and bright and sunshiny call to arms.

The invention of the printed word due to the Gutenburg's printing press often becomes the model of human evolution in regards to thinking and the disemination of knowledge when we are disecting and predicting the onslaught of exponitial change that the internet and the digital revolution has brought to modern man.  Certainly there are many correlations, but within this treatise on Google's omnipresence I wish to employ another model.  John D Rockefeller and several other parteners created the Standard Oil Company at he hight of the rise of the global demand for kerosine and gasoline deue to the invention of the combustabol engine.  At the time fortune hunters were all out seeking the next great cash of oil reserves, but Rockefeler and his crew sought a different angle.  They initiated to become the only oil refinery conglomerate to sasiate the ever growing need for engine fuel.  Due to brash bussiness tactics and a lot of blood sweat and tears Rockefeller created an empire that dwarfs Google.  Many writers have discussed and cronicalled John D Rockefellers rise and interesting enough he too seemed to have idealistic for the betterment of human kind ideals swathing umungst his moral intelect just as google's captain's of industry wish to "Do No Harm".

The Rockefeller family and empire often gets allot of flack.  They are often the subject of conspiracy nut jobs attempts to connect aristocracy to some sort of Illuminati world dominance, but if you really take a truthful look at the circumstances one will indelibly find out that much of the Rockefeller  fortune was disseminated throughout the United States in the forms of social charitable institutions.  Many library, hospitals, university, government buildings, and museums are all accountably traced back to large donations made by the Rockefeller Foundation.  It is easy to try and suggest malice undertakings about those in positions of industrial power, and of course corporate evil is real, but there are those that fate and ingenuity have betrothed as leaders revolutionized industry.  Just because you were smart enough to climb to the top of the hill does not mean that you house evil intentions.  Certainly those at the top of the food chain must stay within the scrutiny of the public eye, but there seems to be allot of haters around quibbling over the latest technological convergence.  The invisible hand of economics has and always will be the guiding light of these quandaries.

Net Neutrality

I never really understood the implications of Net Nuetrality.  I Just usumed that the Net was still the "wild west" and always would be.  Today, for me a middle class white boy, there is a wide range of freedoms associated with the net, but that is all changing.

If it were all left up to the guys who created the internet there would be no censorship or controls placed upon the net.  Their motto as put by Jonathan L. Zittrain in his book "The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It "We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.  We believe in: rough consensus and running code."  This type of strategy is what has lead us to the net we know today and the concepts of Net Neutrality.  It is an open ended approach where in whatever information is fed into the system is reconfigured into and out of packaged bytes of text. (text in the sense of media)  Of course the whole thing is far more complicated than my rudimentary understanding could even attempt to portray within this far too short treatise, but that is the gist in layman's terms.  Where the whole trouble of Net Neutrality comes into play is when we begin to consider the network and its physicality.  Right now these typed symbols are being converted into electrical impulses that are being sent out amongst the net to a server somewhere in which this blog resides.  Who knows how many wires, patches, switches, and router thingy doodads these words travel as I post this highly insightful discourse.  Someone, or rather a group of someones own all of those wires, patches, switches and doodads.  All of this hardware exists and is maintained by large corporate conglomerates.  As we all know to well, corporate conglomerates only care about the bottom line- MONEY.

Given the realities of consumerism and the exponential growth of the net though wireless device demands, we can only attempt to fathom the net's future.  The crux of the situation within the sphere of Net Neutrality is that all bits are treated as equal regardless of the media application they are designed to run at the end of the networked chain.  This mode of operation is probably due for, and is assuredly under corporate planning schemes to undertake, a complete overhaul.  That is specifically; expect things to change.  These changes might not feel so warm and fuzzy while they are being developed into the public net usage.  Certainly tiers of net bandwidths could and will probably be sectioned off where in the consumers willing to pay for higher bandwidth service will receive adequate positioning amongst the information ques.  Wireless data plans are already beginning to slice up the access pie into pieces that only the upper middle class can afford and justify.  Having access anywhere and everywhere is awesome, but paying close to $100 a month for that privilege really sucks...especially when you are a student and your gross income for the year is way under what most middle class suburbanites consider reasonable or even tolerable.  Net Neutrality will only exist within the reaches of your pocket book.  It's a pay to play world out there, and despite the intentions of the original internet designers, your bits have got a price tag.

Privacy

Privacy is a huge consern.  It is esspecially important within this didgital revolution.

Competition vs. Cooperation (Masculine vs. Feminine)

I found the conversation in class this past Wednesday to be very interesting.  To set the scene, we began the conversation around the topic of collaboration verses competition. this topic was initiated by the Howard Rheingold video that we all so diligently watched.  Rheingold postulates in this video that some forms of sharing can be economically benefiting to one's own self interest.  All of this; the video and our conversations about it were very intriguing, but I observed what seemed to be a much more interesting development within the classes conversational dynamics.  Within our class discussion, it seemed to me that the majority of those whose argument supported competition were more inclined towards masculinity and those whose argument favored cooperation expressed more feminine qualities.

Now let me back up a bit here to give perspective to my observation.  I am not suggesting that the  men favored competition and the women favored cooperation or that my observation is dependent upon sexual orientation.  I am suggesting that from my own perspective and judgment, the students who display masculinity predominantly within their personality seemed to favor competition and the students who display femininity predominantly were more inclined towards cooperation.  Of course I am not presenting this observation with any evidential validity.  I am only making assumptions based upon my own interpretations.  Personally, I was given the physical attributes of a man but I often exhibit many feminine characteristics within my personality. As suggested in the article  Femininity/Masculinity written by Jan E. Stets and Peter J. Burke from the Department of Sociology at Washington State University;

Femininity and masculinity or one's gender identity (Burke, Stets and Pirog-Good 1988; Spence 1985) refers to the degree to which persons see themselves as masculine or feminine given what it means to be a man or woman in society. Femininity and masculinity are rooted in the social (one's gender) rather than the biological (one's sex). Societal members decide what being male or female means (e.g., dominant or passive, brave or emotional), and males will generally respond by defining themselves as masculine while females will generally define themselves as feminine. Because these are social definitions, however, it is possible for one to be female and see herself as masculine or male and see himself as feminine.

 Essentially gender and sexual orientation are not at the core of this discussion.  What I am suggesting is held within personality characteristics.

Within the class debate no student proposed that competition verses cooperation was essentially a one sided argument.  This particular class is filled with intellects that tower my own but even I intuitively  understand the duality of this competition verses cooperation argument.  Of course the appropriate conclusions to this discussion involve a blending of both competitive and cooperative forces to maximise group benefit.  What I am commenting on were the dynamics of the group discussion and the polarities of the arguments dependent or perhaps more accurate influenced by personality characteristics.

I have recently within the last few weeks been recovering from illness and am still medicating my symptoms.  An unfortunate side affect of my medications are cloudy-headedness.  if I were not under such medicated influences, I would have liked to have proposed my observations within our class debate.  I find this matter interesting and wonder what response my observation would receive.   it is quite possible that my observation about our class discussion  is filled with logical fallacies.  I do have a tendency towards equivocation.  Of course this class was not designed to focus on philosophy or psychology, but I feel it is prudent to evaluate all realms of possibility within each situation.

Hive Mind

The concept  of the hive mind is new to me, but of course it has been around since before I was around.  Some of the first attempts towards hive culture "could" be traced back to religion, or totalitarianism.  In these examples group thought and action were directed and controlled by a small select few.  Often some form of punishment was the motivation of this type of hive mind.  Of course these types of hive coercion still exist, but a new dawn of hive consciousness is taking root within or culture.  this new hive mind lives, breathes, and grows exponentially on the web.

There are several examples of hive mind that reside within the confines of the net.  The most prominent example to date is the hive mentality of Wikipedia.  Wikipedia was born in 2001 and has quickly become the first stop reference for the majority of internet users.  each article within the Wikipedia hive is written and maintained by volunteers.  This is the crux of the Wikipedia hive.  In Jaron Lanier's article Digital Maoism, Lanier states:

Wikipedia is just one experiment that sill has room to change and grow.  At the very least it's a success at revealing what the online people withe the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and that's actually interesting information.

Lanier's comment directs me back to the idea that within hive cultures of the past, only a select few are the dictators of information and the masses adhere to guidelines of the select.  This is in some relations true of Wikipedia.  For all the hundreds of times I have quickly glanced or entranced myself in the articles of Wikipedia, I have never contributed to or questioned the information that I was receiving.  Typically, I just accept that the information on Wikipedia is valid enough for my general knowledge purposes.  Of course I am not writing in depth articles solely on the text of a Wikipedia article, but I do often utilize it as a source for links to specific information found on the web.  In this sense, the hive mind does have it's advantages but this hive consciousness does create several unsavory potentials.

There is so much going on within the web.  Everyone has a blog or two, a Facebook, and or a twitter feed to maintain.  Information for these constantly updating feeds becomes regurgitation.  Very little real writing is being done.  In fact, without throwing myself to far under the bus, there is extremely little important information proposed within the blogs, Facebook persona, tumbler, and twitter accounts that I maintain.  the majority of the information that I contribute to the net is of no consequence except for personal entertainment and the entrainment of my peers; and I am not alone.  Andrew Keen in the Cult of the Amateur puts it this way:

Everyone was simultaneously broadcasting themselves, but nobody was listening.  Out of this anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what was governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated.

Keen goes on to describe hive consciousness as a minutia of amateurs where in truth, discourse, expertise, and talent have been undermined for the sake of advancing the self within the collective.  if the ideals of digital Darwinism as Keen suggests are true, then each  amateur content creator is responsible for the decline of relative substance that permeates the web.  I do feel that the Internet is altering culture and changing human consciousness. Certainly armature content creation is the wind at the Net's sail, but I do not feel that this is acting towards the detriment of culture as a whole.  The Internet is evolving.  What the Internet is most utilized for is subjective as per each member of the Net's global hive.  A balance between the collective and the individual seems to be the guiding direction towards a greater evolution of the collective.

Everyones Got to Get Paid.

There is a paradigm shift happening within every aspect of our modern lives.  This is evident in all technologies and within the content that these technologies afford the public.  No one is certain of the exact direction this shift, but it is encompassing all aspects of of our culture.  The stale worn out models of commerce and distribution of knowledge are on the way out.  Many institutions are fighting this change tooth and nail, but the wave is on its way to shore.  those without the capabilities to ride this new tide ashore are destined to become fish food.  What this really boils down to is money.  Everyone has got to get paid, but with the exponential change of the digital revolution  in regards to the dissemination of knowledge we must break free from out of date revenue streams.

Larry Lessig discusses creativity and intellectual proprietorship models both past and present in his TED Talks lecture on laws that choke creativity.

In his lecture,  Lessing describes in detail the evolution of culture and the ways in which culture is spread.  He suggests that digital technology is reviving a read/write culture and how this current movement is breaking control restrictions on content.  This new movement is is inspiring new avenues of creation through the concepts of remixing existing cultural content.  Lessing further discusses copyright laws and the movement towards Creative Commons. 

This leads to the discussion of copyright restrictions and technology suppression.  With increasing vigor organizations that control the rights to specific copyright protected content are slowing the process of the current digital revolution.  They are doing this through suppression of technologies both in software and in hardware so that they might retain revenues of existing content propagation.  Unfortunately this is not a new story.  Huge cooperate conglomerates have for a long time been suppressing advancements in technology for sole benefits of profits.  This leads one to question the possibilities and advancements that might be actively solving the problems of the world.

The existing infrastructure of content control is reaching a new horizon.  Consumers are now content creators.  Social media has instituted new methods of distribution of original content.  Artists no longer need to bow to the gods of media conglomerates.  If the content is good and promoted online it can rise to the top and become popular cultural content.  The question still remains as to where monetary supplementation will play into this new field of distribution.  Access to content will become an ever increasing importance within our culture.  No one seems to have a complete handle on the situation but it is evident that change is on the way.  

The Video Game Game

If you breathe, then you are aware of the power and importance of video games.  Even if you have never even played Froger or Excite Bike, you can see the tide of change revolving around video games.  The whole concept and understanding about what will become of video games is so far from comprehension.  Our current understanding and video game creation is mere archaic drawing s on the cave wall.

Video games are the future.  Not necessarily video games as they are today, but digital interaction and simulation is the nest altered consciousness.  Even as it stands today countless corporations and every branch of the United States military use video simulations for training.