Virtual Communities

For the sake of this blog post, I'd like to suggest that there are ostensibly two types of virtual communities, open and closed.  Closed communities are those that require an invitation of some sort to be able to participate as an active member. Open communities are those that allow everyone to participate (at least on some level) provided they act accordingly within the scope of the community's standards.

I'm a member of many closed virtual communities, such as Facebook (recent privacy issues notwithstanding), and various Instant Messaging services (both public and private).  The barriers to entry into these communities by and large are the simple fact that you must be invited or given permission to enter the community.  For example, within my company's internal Jabber IM service, everyone who wishes to participate must request authorization to first use the service (gain initial admission into the community). Subsequently, once given permission to join the community, you must ask individuals within the community for permission to establish a direct relationship (add someone to your buddy list).

Similarly, Facebook, email, and even text messaging all require, to some extent, permission from others to be allowed into the community.  Sure, you can text or email anyone you want if you know their address or phone number, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll answer you, or allow you to join their community.  You must be given express permission, usually in the form of a return "like" communication, for membership to be activated.  We can generally assume that if someone lets you "friend" them in Facebook, you have been invited into their community (and likewise).  Subsequently, if you text someone and they reply back, engaging in conversation, then you have effectively been invited into their community.

Open communities don't necessarily require permission to join. Instead, these communities are largely established for the purposes of getting like-minded individuals to share information about various subject matter. In these open communities, there are generally two categories of membership.  Those who actively engage and participate within the community (established members) and those that wish to simply observe and occasionally engage in conversation (such as ask a question).  Membership within these communities typically only requires that individuals agree to and abide by the rules of the community.  Non members, who can still participate within the community are usually restricted in their level of participation.  For example, members of a community are allowed to post comments, files, and images to the community, while non-members are allowed to lurk and post limited information.

One open virtual community that I've been associated with for a long time (10+ years), is Slashdot.  The Slashdot community is devoted to all types of technology discussions.  Article submissions are posted by established members, moderated, and then, if deemed "worthy" of appropriateness are posted to the community pages.  Fellow members of the community are allowed to post comments, participate in moderating, and even rank fellow member posts for relativeness (distinguishing useful comments from others).   Individuals who aren't members of the community are allowed to read articles and post comments in an anonymous fashion.  That is, all community members can distinguish with ease, who is an active participant and who isn't. In the case of Slashdot, all non-member contributions to subject matter are relegated to the status of "anonymous coward".

In a nutshell, closed communities require direct invitations or allowance from peers to be invited into their virtual community.  Open communities generally allow access to everyone to read and comment in limited fashions.  Within these open communities, there are typically two types of members, those who actively participate and those that don't.  Active participants are given usernames and allowed higher levels of interaction within the community, such as post moderation, file submission, and in some cases, community management responsibilities.  Non-active participants, are given limited membership in the sense that they are usually allowed to read comments and ask questions only.

Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about the extreme.  Within any of these virtual communities, open or closed, it's possible and even likely that there are a subset of members who, for whatever reason, exist and participate within these communities in a manner very different from how they'd interact in real space.  Others simply can't relate their virtual communities to their real communities and have a hard time understanding the difference.  They live in two different worlds.

Is this good or bad?  Who knows...  I suppose that if it allows you to express yourself and interact with others on some level, that it might actually be beneficial.  If, however, you find yourself constantly sitting in front of a computer (phones included), haven't showered and slept in days, and live and breathe by the discussion board's next posting or Justin Timberlake's tweet, you might need professional help.

Written vs Oral Language - Part 2

I'd like to start out by saying this is definitely on the "heavy" reading side of things.  After sifting through the extremely long sentence-paragraphs, it's clear that Ong is able to draw a (clear?) picture of what writing has done for humanity. It made language "personal" and intimate.

While the world owes a huge debt to the semitic languages that first invented writing, it was the Greeks who kicked it up a notch by adding vowels, making reading and writing much more phonetic.  This invention or adaptation of writing paved the way for everything since. Although I disagree with his concept of democratizing language (just ask the peasants in the middle ages), it did indeed take us, as a world, to the next level.

Ong discusses how written language has allowed us to privatize language and make it our own.  Over time, we shifted from reading aloud to reading alone.  What was once a communal language shifted to an individual language that was shared through writing.

Fast forward to modern society today.  Ong writes about the benefits, which are many, including this blog post.  However, I believe that writing might actually have a few downsides.  If the saying, "ignorance is bliss" has any truthful connotations, is it possible that we're actually moving towards information overload?  What about how, as a society, people feel more distanced and isolated than ever before?  Let me explain.

First, with our constant technological advances, we find ourselves (at least those with the means to do so) barraged with information.  Newspapers, text messages, chatrooms, web pages, television, radio... it goes on and on.  It is almost impossible in today's technologically oriented world to not be fully inundated from morning until night.   Is it possible to get too much?  Is it possible that in our constant struggle to improve our efficiency in communication, that we've overexposed ourselves?

Second, if, information and communications are at an all-time high (and they are), then how can people, with technology that allows anyone to connect to anyone else in at least 5 different ways instantly, feel so isolated and lonely?

I don't have the answers, and in fact, the more I think about it, the more questions I have.  Perhaps we'll delve into this in class at some point.

Written vs. Oral Language

So far, this reading has blown my mind to an extent.  That is to say that I hadn't given a single CPU cycle to the concept of what it is to recall information in an oral society versus what we take for granted in a written language society.

This gives me quite a bit of food for thought and has actually raised more questions (to be answered later in class?) than I have answers for.  For example, if oral tradition relies on patterns of stories and memorization to recontruct history, and we learned that they often never tell the same story the same way twice, how is it even remotely possibly for their history to be true?

This is troubling to me in many ways because we tend to have an idea of ancient history which comes from these primarily oral societies.  Since we know that they often change the story or omit details that no longer suit their audience, are we to understand that what we currently know (or think we know) is merely the story that best fit the circumstances of their telling at the time written language was first introduced?

Cyberspace

I had originally posted a blog entry prior to the class which amounted to what now seems to be complete gibberish.  So... away it went.  With that said, I think today's class gave me a bit more ammunition for being able to succinctly sum up what I think of Cyberspace.

Having been around long enough to witness the (r)evolution of Cyberspace and computer technology in general, I would have say that Benedikt was right on target in every description he provided.  Cyberspace is a constantly evolving set of technologies that mash themselves together in order to facilitate human communication in all of its various forms. 

To that end, Cyberspace is a metaphorical digital highway made up of coaxial, fiber, and wireless communications networks upon which all modern communication technologies strive to hitch a ride on.  It is Cyberspace that allows individual communications "vehicles" such as email, instant messaging, and even cellular phones to deliver their content payloads.

As our technology improves, we strive to increase the amount of information we can deliver in various vehicles (email, IM, etc) requiring larger and larger network infrastructure to support the amount of traffic from these "vehicles" riding on it.

What Benedikt was saying (at least I think so), is that humans have always had an idea of Cyberspace, although it wasn't always digital or even thought of the same way it is today.  The invention of writing, arguably the first component of Cyberspace, gave rise to the need to transmit that information.  Since digital technology didn't exist at that time, the original information highway was on the feet of men and the backs of animals. Over time, collections of written documents gave rise to the necessity of storing these documents, leading to the creation of libraries.

As technology evolved, humans have simply continued their quest to communicate and store information in faster ways.  Digital technology has facilitated this in an amazing array of ways, but the concept has remained the same.  Instead of building libraries to store documents, we use databases.  Instead of using hand written documents to deliver messages, we use phones, email, and IM.

The only real difference in Cyberspace since the dawn of written language is what we humans invent to speed up and increase our capacity for communicating and storing information.

This is what Cyberspace is.

DTC 475 Introduction

Hello all, I'm Maurice Smiley. 


With 9 classes left to own my DTC degree, I guess I'm somewhere between a Junior and Senior here as WSU.   I own a small business in Richland, have a wonderful wife and 3 awesome kids. My oldest is enrolled at CBC and we have contests to see who has the highest GPA. I haven't been beat yet ;-)

As a veteran of Julie's ENG373 class, I'm excited to take DTC475 and have little doubt I'll learn a ton of information.  Last semester, I started this blog with the intent of keeping track of various readings, and of course, posting blog assignments from ENG373.  I didn't make as much use of it as I could have and hope to improve upon that this semester.  

I look forward to blogging with you throughout the semester.

Cheers!

Thoughts on "The Diamond Age"

As I first started reading "The Diamond Age", I had a hard time getting through the techno-babble.  Stephenson goes to great lengths early in the story to provide technical detail to various technologies that are talked about throughout the book.  However, after trudging through, I realized that it was a necessary ingredient to the story and made further reading easier to understand.

The underlying theme of the story, world globalization, was a good place to end our reading of colonialism and gave me a lot to think about.  In fact, what's still rumbling around in my pea-brain is the idea of philes / tribes replacing governments in the future.  This led to me start thinking (yes critically) about how we're already well on our way towards that reality.

If you buy into the idea that companies have HUGE influence on the world's economy, and that companies have a HUGE influence on politics and government, is it really that much of stretch to think that they don't already control the world?  While there might not be a country called "IBM" or "Oracle", how far are we from seeing such a reality?

This led to me imagining a time in the near future, when some huge conglomerate (let's say Futuretech, Inc.) buys out a large chunk of it's competitors and now becomes the leading manufacturer of nano technology.  Futuretech, Inc. then decides that it would be in its best interests to buy up a large section of land in Africa (the size of a small country) by buying off leaders and making them ceremonial high ranking company officials, and place its headquarters and all manufacturing there.  They relocate all of their research and manufacturing to this new Futuretech, Inc capital and begin terraforming the landscape to meet their agricultural and biotechnology needs.  In doing so, towns are built for employees and other companies are allowed to setup shop to meet the service industry needs (Wal-Mart and KFC anyone?).

After this happens, it doesn't take Futuretech, Inc. long to realize that there needs to be laws in put into place (codes of conduct) with some kind of justice system.  Police and judges are hired to enforce these codes of conduct and anyone wishing to live or work in Futuretech, Inc. will have to agree and abide by the codes of conduct.  Protecting their interests and ensuring that warlords from other areas of Africa don't try and get any ideas, Futuretech, Inc. hires the French Foreign Legion as its military force.  Futuretech, Inc. decides that it likes the idea so much, that it BUYS the French Foreign Legion and spawns a new division of the company called FutureTech Defense, Inc. with the goals of protecting themselves and contracting out these services to other similar companies or governments.

Currency would be an issue and so to make things easier, Futuretech, Inc. decides that it should conduct business using an already established monetary system called the EU.  This would provide compatibility with the rest of world's markets and allow Futuretech, Inc. the ability to regulate its own economic environment.

I could go on and on, but I think that this may have been what Stephenson had envisioned as the prehistory of "The Diamond Age".  Companies becoming so powerful that they in and of themselves take on their own global identity and adopt their own unique corporate culture.  The citizens themselves, would be working for the common goal of protecting the interests of the company instead of a country.

Far fetched?  Maybe not.

Abstract: Root Cause of Colonialism

There is little doubt that colonialism has changed the face of the planet and continues to affect postcolonial societies in a number of different ways.  Fusing of cultures, religion, economics, and language are but of few of the results of postcolonialism.  Some societies have adapted markedly well while others have fallen into abject poverty, civil war, social unrest, and in extreme cases extinction.  Regardless of the outcomes, this essay examines the texts we have read throughout the semester in an effort to determine the underlying reason ,or the "why", for colonialism in the first place.  The answer is undoubtedly capitalism.

In examining colonial Europe, the common thread found in examining the question of why colonialism happened can be seen clearly in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness",  Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart", and V.S. Naipaul's "The Mimic Men".   These novels show how the Europeans used various pretexts for rationalizing the colonization of other countries, in order to pave the way for private enterprise to make money.

Looking into more recent history, Ha Jin's story, "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town" shows how America, a postcolonial society itself, uses capitalism as a means of spreading culture and values to other countries. Future evidence of capitalism's role in colonialism can be examined in the Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age".  In "The Diamond Age", we see a future "globalized" world that is controlled by tribes instead of countries.   In examining the relationship between the tribes and globalization, we see evidence that the most successful tribes are really technology corporations who's citizens are members of the corporate culture.

Pundits may argue that there were other reasons for colonialism, such as religion, and that capitalism played a secondary role.  Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies", Diamond provides evidence through historical facts that the driving force behind colonialism was completely based on capitalism.  Further evidence can be found in Juan Gonzalez's "Harvest Empire" where he explores the history behind Spanish colonialism and provides compelling evidence that colonialism is rooted in capitalism.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Norton, 2009.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Norton, 2009.

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.

Gonzalez, Juan. Harvest of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Naipal, V.S. The Mimic Men. New York: Vintage, 1967.

Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age. New York: Bantam, 2008.
Jin, Ha. "After Cowboy Chickin Came To Town." Jin, Ha. The Bridegroom. New York: Vintage, 2000. 184-225.