Virtual human development game

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The future of telephony…

I can see it. We’re not quite ready for it, but I have a good idea where it’s headed. Landlines will be what VCRs are. Defunct (mostly). I don’t own a landline now, and only owned one previously as much as any child owns their parent’s landline. I communicate via cellphone and the internet. I already see the two merging, with the most obvious example being the Apple iPhone. I don’t think telephony is going to stop there though. VoIP is coming up ( I’m coming out, I want the world to know, Got to let it show… la la la) and is already being integrated with WiFi to rival cellphones. Obviously for this to work we would need some sort of global wifi service, but it seems that we are headed in that direction anyway. This just seems like the logical next step. Why spend money trying to build bigger and better cell towers when we can spend money on building a more expansive wifi network. The benefits are more than just cheaper telephony, but more internet access for everyone. This seems a bit utopian-one-world-language-lets-all-make-peace, but I’m hopeful, for now.

A cellphone has the same disadvantages as a wifi VoIP phone… no gps, limited coverage and limited power without recharging. All of these can be resolved. Is it easier to lay a fiber optic cable and wire a copper line in to a house or extend the range of wifi? Is it really that difficult to put a gps processor into cell/VoIP phones to eliminate the 911 issue – and is it really as much of an issue as people make it out to be? How often are we in situations where we have to call 911 and are near a landline, yet don’t know where we are? And come on now… with all this talk on global warming, why hasn’t anyone added some solar power utilizers to these things?

How will VoIP affect cable and telephone systems? Most obviously telephone systems will lose customers. Cable will probably gain customers for internet access until we get better wifi coverage. What of the package deals that come with telephone? Wifi. Just do it. Anything cables can do wifi can do better. Or at least more efficiently.

Questions to ponder:

• What would it take for you to give up a landline for good?
• Do you think telephones will become obsolete in the not-too-distant-future?
• While there are both for-cost and free VoIP services, do you think VoIP should be free since you already pay for the internet access it uses?

The Internet: a Helper and a Harmer

Internet technology’s first obvious benefit to politics is the lower cost-per-body of getting someone’s attention and getting them to vote. The internet has created a two-way system in politics. No longer is it a one-way street where we get inundated with advertisements and form letters. We can now fight back (against the good and evil of politics – though really… aren’t they all evil?) by contacting politicians online, discussing politics en masse, and gathering information that isn’t simply propaganda. The internet is an honest politician’s best friend. The internet and those of us who compose it, will bring to blazing light any blemishes a politician has.

Often times before I visit or purchase from a business, I will check out their website. A poorly done website speaks volumes about them, and chances are I won’t take my business there, unless it is something very unusual and they have no competition. The same thing goes for politics. If you can’t make your way around a politician’s website, then how can you trust them? A poorly done website in this day and age means you don’t care enough about informing your clients or voters. A business or politician that doesn’t care enough about the people it’s trying to attract is doomed.

I do agree with the premises of the two articles. Joe Trippi is a shrewdly intelligent man who has the experience to recognize when something will work in a big way. Campaigns, businesses, products, anything marketed to people will ultimately succeed far better WITH some sort of customer/client feedback tool. When people feel like they are being heard and appreciated, they will give their support. Interactivity is the key to internet success.

Discussion Questions:

1. Are there any businesses or products you have not given your patronage to because their website is ugly, hard to navigate and/or one-sided (ie. no clear way to get help or provide feedback)?
2. Do you think a political candidate with a myspace profile adds or detracts from their credibility or attraction in any way?
3. Do you think bloggers have, overall, helped or harmed politicians and their campaigns?

Podcast Search Proposal

The topic I have chosen for my podcast is Online Social Networking-Past, Present and Future. I’m interested in this because it is a growing phenomenon that has a lot of potential. It is related to communication and digital media through the sharing of music/videos and the ability to connect people.

 

Two songs I might use:

 

Talk To Me (Aupheus Remix)    Instrumental, downbeat     Creative Commons – Attribution-Non Commercial (3.0) http://ccmixter.org/freesound/files/AUPHEUS82/9882
Love Lost (instrumental mix)     Instrumental, soft, downtempo     Creative Commons – Attribution-Non Commercial (2.5) http://ccmixter.org/freesound/files/cdk/9390

 

 Scholarly articles:

 Boyd, D. (2007). Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. Berkeley: MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning. Retrieved May 1, 2007, from http://www.danah.org/papers/WhyYouthHeart.pdf

 

This document delves into why social networks are successful – in reality, youth are big sustainers of online technology. Boyd talks about who is participating, who isn’t, the important features of social networking sites and what leads a site to mass adoption.

 

I think this article will be helpful to my podcast because it examines what makes a social networking site popular. The key features and popular sites of today are going to shape the key features and popular sites years from now.

 

 

Kossinets, G., & Watts, D. J. (2006). Science: Empirical Analysis of an Evolving Social Network (Vol. 31, 6th ed.). USA: Alan Leshner. Retrieved May 1, 2007, from http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/311/5757/88

 

This article shows the results of a research done on 43,553 students, faculty and staff at a large university at the basic level of social networking – email.

 

Manifestos and Tails

In reading the Cluetrain Manifesto, this particular thesis stuck out to me:

1. “People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.”

This is so true especially when it comes to technical support. Many times I have taken to searching online communities for fixes to problems. With the exception of niche software products (such as a database created specifically for one company), all other software technical support seems to simply read from a database of problems that their QA people have discovered rather than problems that real customers have encountered (they/we are able to break things more than any quality assurance tech, I assure you). Often times when I call a tech support person, they will ask redundant questions and not be able to give me any help that I couldn’t find or figure out on my own. It is almost always quicker and less frustrating to search for the problem online.

1. “Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.”

Good lord, yes… such as a certain telephone/dsl/satellite tv company in the Seattle area whose motto is something related to “spirit” and “service”. They outsource their tech support (which is not entirely bad) and I know more than them about a service I have little experience setting up (dsl). It is both sad and funny.

I think Dell is making a good effort (or at least better than other computer companies) to interact with and listen to its consumers with its new forum “Dell IdeaStorm”. Imagine that… a company that listens to and acts on what their customers want.

While reading Wired’s article The Long Tail, I recognized something regarding the pricing of online music that the author, Chris Anderson, failed to mention, and that is quality. When you buy music online it often comes with DRM protection and at a lower quality than that which you can extract off of a CD. I think that when coming up with a fair price for online music, manufacturing, distribution, retail overheads AND quality should be factored in. I’m certainly not going to pay as much for a tape as I would for a CD or DVD, so why should I pay as much for a lower quality digital file that I would for a higher-quality CD? For now, the main reason why I refuse to purchase online music is because of the DRM attached. If I’m going to pay for a song, then I’m going to own it just like I would own a CD.

Discussion Questions

1. How do companies go about maintaining professionalism while adding human voice?
2. Where do you see the future of online music going?
3. What do you think are some companies that are more successful at manifesting the concepts of the cluetrain?

Independant Fact-Checkers!

xkcd.com – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

Man vs. Machine and the History of the Internet

Something that has been going through my mind while reading “Being Analog” by Don Norman is that this is an intelligent person who seems to be fighting for all he’s worth for how things used to be.

“Why do accuracy and precision matter? In our natural world, they don’t. We are approximate beings: we get at the meanings of things, and for this, the details don’t much matter. Accurate times and dates matter only because we have created a culture in which these things are important. Accurate and precise measurements matter because the machines and procedures we have created are rigid, inflexible, and fixed in their ways, so if a measurement is off by some tiny fraction, the result can be a failure to operate. Worse yet, it can cause a tragic accident.”

This is all well and good – but we do not live in a natural world. We live in a world that is constantly being modified by human beings and machines. Yes, accuracy only matters because we have created an environment in which it matters, but why is this such a bad thing? The way I see it is we either deal with the margin of human error that is created when dealing with machine/human interaction or we deal with a life of no machines at all. I’m going to lean towards the machine/human combination. As a child of the 80’s I can’t say I don’t have a bit (maybe more than a bit) of a prejudice on technology. I don’t see technology/machines as things that are supposed to be like us, rather as things that make us better and more efficient. In reference to the difference between machines and humans, Norman says:

“No wonder that we have constructed a set of artificial devices that are very much not in our own image… All the things we are bad at matter, all the things we are good at are ignored.”

No wonder? Is it something that should be wondered about? We create machines to take care of what we are not good at, but which is essential for certain functions – we don’t need them to also do what we are good at. That would be redundant. Though that is also why some people are being replaced by machines… because machines are certainly capable of doing some things that humans are good at.

At the end of this article, Norman discusses human-centered design and how the only correct way to deal with human/computer interaction is to design computers around human nature. I think this is ideal to a point, and that point is where we lose the greater characteristics of computers/machines to make them more accessible to humans. For example – Linux is not an operating system that anybody who is a novice computer user would use because it requires more knowledge than even the average computer user has. The great thing about Linux is how easily it can be modified and customized. If designers and programmers were to design Linux for a novice computer user, it’s greatest characteristics would not be how easily it can be modified or customized. It’s greatest characteristic would be its ease of use when doing simple tasks like checking email or searching the internet. All well and good but it doesn’t come close to fully utilizing the capacity and ability of such an operating system.

In this next article, “Short History of the Internet” by Bruce Sterling, I can’t help but post this bit:

“The Internet’s “anarchy” may seem strange or even unnatural, but it makes a certain deep and basic sense. It’s rather like the “anarchy” of the English language. Nobody rents English, and nobody owns English. As an English-speaking person, it’s up to you to learn how to speak English properly and make whatever use you please of it (though the government provides certain subsidies to help you learn to read and write a bit). Otherwise, everybody just sort of pitches in, and somehow the thing evolves on its own, and somehow turns out workable. And interesting. Fascinating, even. Though a lot of people earn their living from using and exploiting and teaching English, “English” as an institution is public property, a public good. Much the same goes for the Internet. Would English be improved if the “The English Language, Inc.” had a board of directors and a chief executive officer, or a President and a Congress? There’d probably be a lot fewer new words in English, and a lot fewer new ideas.”

I would like to reference this entire paragraph because I think it has a lot to do with what we have been talking about in class – about searching for information online, learning to speak the “language” to be able to use it however you please, and the idea of an entity/third party giving stamps of approval. This article as a whole also made me think of Al Gore. Sorry – you didn’t create the internet…

Discussion Questions:

1. What do you think should be done to computers to make them more “human-centered” or accessible?
2. Where is the line between humans conforming to computers and computers conforming to humans?
3. A bit off topic – but what are your thoughts on a “code of conduct” such as that which Tim O’Reilly started to draft for bloggers and blog comments?

Reading Reflection (Week Three)

I liked T. Matthew Ciolek’s analogy in the article “The Internet: Window to the World or Hall of Mirrors?”:

“It is a spectacular place indeed, with some mirrors being more luminous, more innovative or more sensitive to the reflected lights and imagery than others. The result is a breathless and ever-changing ‘information swamp’ of visionary solutions, pigheaded stupidity and blunders, dedication and amateurishness, naivety as well as professionalism and chaos.”

I personally tend to view the mass of websites claiming to give me knowledge as a bunch of good friends. All well meaning for sure, but to blindly accept what facts they put forth without any sort of research would be foolish. Of course some of the sites out there might simply appear to be good friends. You give them your attention and they betray you with misleading information for their own gain.

Other than that bit, I didn’t really find this article informative. It was written over ten years ago, so that can’t be too surprising. The information in it seems like more common sense nowadays. It may not have been and in fact probably wasn’t so in 1996. Part of this I know because of the research I’ve done to become a web designer – how to create an effective website, what information is needed, how to design for the user, how to make a site accessible, etc. The rest I know simply because I’ve been an avid internet user for nearly as long as it has existed in the public realm.

I found this sentence by Mark R. Nelson a bit funny:

“Information on the Internet is posted in a number of different formats located at thousands of sites”

It’s funny because if this article was written in the past couple years as opposed to in 1994, he would replace “thousands” with “millions”. Talk about information overload. Also in this article Nelson writes about users wanting to “maximize the number of items found that are highly relevant to their work.” Many people would benefit from simply reading Google’s explanation of how to search effectively. A good portion of internet searchers have likely never used a negative search term to refine their results.

What both of these articles come down to is knowing how to effectively use the internet for what you want/need. I don’t personally think there is too much information available compared to how many people search for any given topic. Just the other day I wanted to find out information on taking rust out of a cast iron pan. I came across several informative articles that could have been very helpful to someone whose pan wasn’t quite so rusty. I later came across a site suggesting the use of Comet/Ajax and a potato, which worked oddly like an eraser. It would have been nice to find that site first, but when I consider how much information I have at the tips of my fingers, I can’t hope that there would be less, because I may not have come across the site I needed to find. As an end note I’d like to add a link to a website I often like to browse and occasionally post on: Ask MetaFilter. The site’s slogan is “Querying the hive mind”. On the site people post questions, conundrums, situations, etc. and ask for the opinions and answers of other people in the community. I think it is quite effective – using other people’s minds and search abilities in combination with your own to provide a more thorough answer than you could come up with yourself.

A few questions worthy of discussion:

1. If you think there is too much information available, what would you get rid of and how do you think it would affect the internet as a whole?
2. If you wanted to make accurate information more readily available, what would you change about the way people access information online?
3. Should anything be done about websites/blogs that publish blatantly inaccurate information?

Podcast Proposal

I think my podcast project will be about the past, present and future of online social networking. Half of the podcast will reflect on the history of social networking, including the present and the other half will focus on my predictions for how it will evolve. The reason why I’d like to do my podcast on this topic is because human beings are naturally social creatures. Online social networking has literally supercharged our ability to connect to and communicate with one another on many levels. I haven’t completely hashed out my prediction for the future of it all however it is all coming together abstractly in my mind. I won’t have to do a ton of research on this as I started using the internet before it was all graphics and code. I remember meeting people over a dial-up connection on a BBS…

Reading Reflection (Week Two)

Vannevar Bush wrote:

“Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.”

In the same sense, we are so inundated with the mass of inconsequential (OMG Brittany shaved her head!) or even similar news (The continuing occupation in Iraq) that we often become desensitized to what is truly important, and may not even learn of an important event. The stretch of the internet can easily be linked to the expanse of information available to us – both consequential and inconsequential.

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin wrote:

“… web designers currently command higher salaries than technical writers and graphic designers for print; it is in their interest to promote the belief that digital media can not only replace printed documents, but vastly improve on them.”

I think an interesting thing has happened in the battle between print and web advertising. Web advertising is so abundant that it tends to fall into the background as a minor annoyance. People have perhaps become accustomed to ignoring anything online that is unnecessary for their current task. Print advertising on the other hand could likely be poised for a bit of a comeback or perhaps just prove to be as effective as web advertising.

Vannevar Bush’s idea for a “memex” can quite easily be compared almost directly to PCs today. Ten years ago we couldn’t get nearly the same speed Bush expects out of such a device however it is commonplace now to expect a document or file to pop up almost instantaneously. He writes about “microfilm ready for insertion” containing books, pictures, newspapers and the like – which is quite similar to what we do now, minus the microfilm. Many of us purchase or find free e-books and music which we then store on PCs.

In 40 years I envision the internet to be something that tantalizes more than just the eyes and ears. Eventually we’ll be able to feel and smell through the internet. I want to say taste… but I can’t envision quite yet how that could be sanitary. People are going to demand more out of the internet. More people will be able to create programs or command a distant object or perhaps even transport themselves (like in Star Trek!). I’ve always dreamed of a delivery system involving tubes that you could use to order something from your computer and have it be delivered immediately. I think it’s possible that in 40 years something like that could be invented…