Chap. 3 – Controlling the Volume (Always On)

The author maintains that although speech and writing are social activities, people are not continually connected with one another, not “always on”. People always try to controll their interactions with other people, including establishing zones of privacy, even in societies offering little space for seclusion. What changed over time is the amount of control and the mechanisms for affecting it, reflecting new technologies and the ways they let you multitask. There are different ways of managing communications, such as access (increasing chances of talking with particular person), avoidance mechanisms for averting linguistic encounters, and manipulation. And these have a role in adjusting the volume on spoken or written language.  Especially, computer-based language technologies increase the volume-control options. For example, email allows us to avoid or manipulate communication we’ve received and in the IM, people can make themselves appear to be offline simply by changing the mode.

Chap. 7 – 1984 (The cult of the amateur)

The author discussed several privacy breach cases, including identity-theft and publication of private data, which can occur public humiliation,gathered by advanced search engine. All these cases can happen these days in our lives and severely harm related people. As the author describes, Big Brother in the book, 1984, written by George Orwell, might be very much alive.

In the short-term future, Greenfield, the author of “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing”, predicts, small computers will become embedded in everything. Consequentially, we will be interfacing with computers in everything we do and these interfaces will produce data. All this information will end up in a Google-like database. This kind of system can represent the dawn of the age of surveillance. All the collected information can be networked and distributed. It can be called a world without privacy, a world in which individuals are turned inside out.

In the end, the author asked us, what happens to the human beings of the future who must coexist with Google’s ultimate search engine, which would understand everything in the world? What becomes of us in an age of total digital surveillance?

Experiment Discussion

Chap. 3 – Controlling the Volume (Always On)

The author maintains that although speech and writing are social activities, people are not continually connected with one another, not “always on”. People always try to controll their interactions with other people, including establishing zones of privacy, even in societies offering little space for seclusion. What changed over time is the amount of control and the mechanisms for affecting it, reflecting new technologies and the ways they let you multitask. There are different ways of managing communications, such as access (increasing chances of talking with particular person), avoidance mechanisms for averting linguistic encounters, and manipulation. And these have a role in adjusting the volume on spoken or written language.  Especially, computer-based language technologies increase the volume-control options. For example, email allows us to avoid or manipulate communication we’ve received and in the IM, people can make themselves appear to be offline simply by changing the mode.

The other crucial tool for manipulating communication language is to do something else at the same time - to multitask. While it sometimes decreases performance level, multitasking is becoming increasingly common among adolescents and young adults, especially when it comes to multitasking involving media such as computers, video, and music.

Chap. 7 – 1984 (The cult of the amateur)

The author argues that

Experiment Discussion

 8. Whatever

Is the Internet destroying language? The author argues that its effects on traditional language are highly tenuous. Internet technologies, such as spell-check, auto complete, and electronically-mediated language, such as abbreviations or acronyms, make people to have careless writing habits, but the culprit is not the technology. For example, some abbreviations appearing in electronic language are really representations of spoken abbreviations and not unique to online or mobile communication.  The author maintains that fault lies either in ourselves or in the widespread ‘whatever’ attitude regarding regularity in language. This ‘whatever’ attitude goes along with changing educational policies and shifts in social agendas to some extent. With respect to speech language, the author also argues that the potential effects of the Internet are negligible at best.

However, the author maintains that the Internet and electronic language may have a profound effect on the ‘volume’ control aspect of interpersonal communication. That is, we can block incoming IMs, package ourselves on Facebook, write vigilante blogs, and use ring tones or caller ID to screen incoming call on our mobile phones. These are subtle effects, but definitely these are influencing on the ways we communicate with one another.

 9. Gresham’s Ghost

Gresham’s law means that bad money drives good money out of circulation. That is, ‘good ‘coins, which contains less silver, were hoarded, while bad coins, which contains more silver, were left for doing commerce at home. Similar phenomenon is occurring in the context of modern writing culture. The growth of online and mobile technologies has fostered a steady increase in the amount of writing. We distribute our thoughts and knowledge in blogs, on Facebook, and on Wikipedia. We outpour text fostered by information communication technology and this phenomenon redefines our standards for the written word.

When considering the above phenomenon, what will be the future of written culture? The author argues that whatever eventually becomes of modern written culture, it seems unlikely that its material manifestations will disappear soon. People will still read and write and paper mills will continue to do a brisk business. Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble continue to do land-office business in marketing the printed word. However, there are many questions whose answers remain uncertain. For example, how much reading will be done online versus in hardcopy? How much writing will be done manually?  There might be many possible scenarios, but the future of written culture will be a product not only of education and technology but also of the individual and social choices we make about harnessing reading or writing materials.

How we will communicate 50 years from now

Let’s think about 50 years ago. How many people could have imagined that a tiny mobile device can be used as a communication medium?  Only some people such as scientific fiction writers could have dreamed current communication media. In this light, it is very difficult to imagine how we communicate with each other in 50 years later. Today, Nano and Internet technologies make communication devices smaller and smaller day by day and add new creative functions to the existing applications.

To my best knowledge, I think that communication devices will become as small as a tiny chip. It can be attached to clothes or inside of ear. People can communicate anywhere and face-by-face by using a hologram. Flexible or hologram screens will be used as user interface for personal computer and communications devices. In addition, we won’t need to type characters through user interface but speech recognition system will translate our speech into words. Or Neurotechnologies may make possible revolutionary communication devices that understand the human mind.

 8. Whatever

Is the Internet destroying language? The author argues that its effects on traditional language are highly tenuous. Internet technologies, such as spell-check, auto complete, and electronically-mediated language, such as abbreviations or acronyms, make people to have careless writing habits, but the culprit is not the technology. For example, some abbreviations appearing in electronic language are really representations of spoken abbreviations and not unique to online or mobile communication.  The author maintains that fault lies either in ourselves or in the widespread ‘whatever’ attitude regarding regularity in language. This ‘whatever’ attitude goes along with changing educational policies and shifts in social agendas to some extent. With respect to speech language, the author also argues that the potential effects of the Internet are negligible at best.

However, the author maintains that the Internet and electronic language may have a profound effect on the ‘volume’ control aspect of interpersonal communication. That is, we can block incoming IMs, package ourselves on Facebook, write vigilante blogs, and use ring tones or caller ID to screen incoming call on our mobile phones. These are subtle effects, but definitely these are influencing on the ways we communicate with one another.

 9. Gresham’s Ghost

Gresham’s law means that bad money drives good money out of circulation. That is, ‘good ‘coins, which contains less silver, were hoarded, while bad coins, which contains more silver, were left for doing commerce at home. Similar phenomenon is occurring in the context of modern writing culture. The growth of online and mobile technologies has fostered a steady increase in the amount of writing. We distribute our thoughts and knowledge in blogs, on Facebook, and on Wikipedia. We outpour text fostered by information communication technology and this phenomenon redefines our standards for the written word.

When considering the above phenomenon, what will be the future of written culture? The author argues that whatever eventually becomes of modern written culture, it seems unlikely that its material manifestations will disappear soon. People will still read and write and paper mills will continue to do a brisk business. Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble continue to do land-office business in marketing the printed word. However, there are many questions whose answers remain uncertain. For example, how much reading will be done online versus in hardcopy? How much writing will be done manually?  There might be many possible scenarios, but the future of written culture will be a product not only of education and technology but also of the individual and social choices we make about harnessing reading or writing materials.

How we will communicate 50 years from now

It is very difficult to imagine how we communicate with each other in 50 years. Let’s think about 50 years ago. How many people could have imagined a mobile phone as a communication medium?  Only some scientific fiction writers could dream current communication media.

We designed a NLP system to capture a lie in the text using a neural network methodology. This system consists of various NLP components, such as Tokenizer, sentence splitter, and Part-Of-Speech tagger, and gazetteer, and sentence analyzer, which identifies whether a sentence is lie or not.

To explain how this system works, we need to collect as many example sentences as possible and also need to be able to identify whether those sentences are lie or not. Then we need to extract characteristics from the sentence, such as the number of swear words, the number of negation words, and so on. Using this information, the sentence analyzer will run a neural network algorithm and learn how to verify if an input sentence is a lie.

Therefore, when users upload a document, our system will, by using NLP components, process the document, split into sentences, extract characteristics from a sentence using gazetteer, and insert these information to the sentence analyzer. The sentence analyzer will decide that the inserted document is a lie or not.

To summarize Chapter 3 of “The Cult of The Amateur”, the author argues that Web 2.0, such blogs and YouTube, can allow amateur to generate and upload fast and easily useless information (e.g., thousands of amateur remixes and mash-ups of a music piece) in the web and make us lost as to how to focus our attention and spend our limited time.  Web 2.0 also can enable some nasty people to generate and spread fast, easily, and massively deceptive, misleading, manipulative, or out-of-context information by doing few mouse clicks and may harm innocent people.  

There are many examples of this problem.  One is about a German video clip about the election result of the neo-Nazi NPD party. This YouTube video falsely alarmed many German viewers. Only few people could know that that YouTube video was not from the real news source. The other one happened during the 2006 congressional elections in the United States. A YouTube campaign advertisement video for the Republican candidate includes a distasteful attack on the Democratic opponent. When criticized, the Republican candidate claimed that he did not approve that video for distribution and someone uploaded it to YouTube.

Two books, "The cult of the amateur" and "Always on", provided me with a kind of balanced view point of current Internet technologies, such as Web 2.0.

The Cult of the Amateur (Ch 2.  The Noble Amateur)

In this book, the author talks as to how modern Internet technologies, such as Web 2.0, YouTube.com, MySpace.com, Wikipedia, etc., are fragmenting our society and culture. These technologies are making us lost as to how to focus our attention and spend our limited time. Today, hundreds of thousands of Internet users are using their PCs to produce and post their blogs and video clips. Moreover, they can do so in a couple of mouse clicks. They often spread fault or exaggerated information and throw our society into confusion and disorder. For example, the “viral, editor-free nature” of YouTube allows anyone to anonymously post deceptive, misleading, manipulative, or out-of-context video clips.

Always On (Ch 6. Having your Say)

On the other hand, the author of “Always On” argues that the Internet and modern technologies play important roles, as if radio talk shows have done so far, to interconnect disconnected peoples in the modern society. Through the radio, “talk-show devotees” enjoy the opportunity to say what they have in mind or to hear same-minded callers’ say. Today, Web 2.0 technologies do the same thing rapidly and easily. In addition, they are always connected and can do so anywhere and anytime. The author says that there are a lot of reasons for people to write blogs. Some of them are to express themselves creatively, to memorize their personal experiences or share them with others, to stay in touch with friends and family, and to share practical knowledge with others.

Positive aspects of Web 2.0 techniques

Web 2.0 techniques provide a lot of advantages to our life. First, it allows us the freedom of expression. Previously, we didn’t have many ways to write or express our opinions publicly. For example, in the past time, we could only read news and articles passively from web sites and have limited ways of writing our stories. But now we can write and post our thinking and experience almost everywhere. Thousands of blogs and Web 2.0 sites are waiting for us to post blogs. Second, we can share our experience and cooperate with others to build up knowledge using Web 2.0 technologies. For example, even though someone has different idea, Wikipedia is a good example to show how Web 2.0 help build up our knowledge base. In the business side, blogs are playing a key role for knowledge management. Companies are running wikis to share business knowledge and these online wikis are getting rid of unnecessary phone calls and conferences.

Negative aspects of Web 2.0 techniques

Even though Web 2.0 technologies have many advantages, they also bring us many disadvantages. First of all, bloggers may post fault information and mislead other peoples. For example, in an Asian country, a famous actress committed a suicide because of inhuman comments of malicious bloggers about her life. One misleading blog caused other bloggers to post thousands of cursing comments about her. The anonymous nature of the Internet allows vicious bloggers to post unscreened comments everywhere. In addition, in the business side, companies use blogs and video clips for advertising and propagation and sometimes they falsify the information purposely. For example, companies themselves are posting good reviews about their products.

Conclusion

Everything has pros and cons or Yin (dark side) and Yang (white side). We have developed new technologies for our convenience. What a wonderful technology! Hundreds of people can communicate one another simultaneously and almost real time by writing their opinions. But everything changes so fast and both good and bad things spread so fast through the Internet. Our culture and society could not catch up with the speed of the technology development. The Internet mob psychology could even kill people, but there is no way of stopping that by now. Nevertheless, we cannot abandon the Internet technologies and cannot go back to the past where there was no Internet. I believe we can handle the problem somehow and fine ways to overcome those shortcomings.   

Two books, "The cult of the amateur" and "Always on", provided me with a kind of balanced view point of current Internet technologies, such as Web 2.0.

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