The Cluetrain Manifesto-95 Theses November 25, 2008
10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.
17. Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.
32. Smart markets will find suppliers who speak their own language.
86. When we’re not busy being your “target market,” many of us are your people. We’d rather be talking to friends online than watching the clock. That would get your name around better than your entire million dollar web site. Cut you tell us speaking to the market is Marketing’s job.
The writers are expressing tension within corporate markets to stay ahead of the curve in technology. Corporations are more comfortable in top-down situations where they are able to control their message. But the market requires corporations to give up control and allow their message to get manipulated by their workers and the public. They have been left behind because they no longer understand the public. We have evolved and no longer will accept the same advertising strategy as TV ads. We require a company to have a human voice that allows us to relate. In these theses, they argue that in order for corporations to use the market effectively they must allow their workers to spread the message of the company by using the tools of the Internet. They need to be free to chat, email, network, and post in order to connect the corporation to people using their human voice.
Juicy Campus is sexist November 6, 2008
My main observation from spending a good amount of time researching juicycampus.com and bishopsear is that juicycampus.com is sexist. The main use is for guys to either talk about girls and rag on eachother. The few discussions that were geared to girls seemed like copy-cats of the mens’ discussions. Why would this be? Juicycampus.com was set without any rules about what kind of discussions could take place. A natural use for the HWS campus is to have it lead my men. As in oursocial lives, that are suppose to be geared towards frats. On juicycampus.com the men of HWS have chosen to talk about girls as sluts or how another man is a pussy (excuse my language). The discussions that are geared towards girls don’t take a personal, hurtful turn. Instead they tend to be more positive, although still degrading because there is a lot of discussion of physique, but very little discussion about there conversational skills. An interesting experiment would be to see if the HWS campus would even reply when triggered with discussion conversations such as “William Smith girl with the biggest brain” or “Hobart students that treat girls respectfully.” I don’t think HWS is ready to move past the surface and move into respectful conversations about the opposite sex.
Resources for Internet Stats November 4, 2008
http://www.internetworldstats.com/
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/main.htm
http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Global Online Populations – http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=stats/web_worldwide
Professor Dean’s Chapter October 28, 2008
I read this chapter a while back when I was intrigued as to why every reading was quoting Professor Dean. What I discovered was that Professor Dean laid out a lot of ideas that I agreed with and gave them snazzy names like Technology Fetishism and Fantasy of Abundance.
In the beginning of the Chapter, Den explains the concept of circulation of content. I remember going to a pro-choice rally in D.C. when I was in high school and realizing that nothing I did mattered. President Bush was never going to turn on the news that night to discover that millions were yelling right outside his front door. The circulation of content inevitably does not matter unless it is able to invoke change. No protest or march has made a difference in the last 8 years. But what about political outrage expressed on the Internet? This is where Professor Dean and I veer in 2 different directions. Professor Dean argues that the Internet has democratic potential because of the fantasy of the abundance. That is to say, “The only thing that is relevant is circulation, the addition to the pool” (Dean 107). Every message is a contribution, once they enter the stream of content, they lose their specificity. I agree that all messages blur together, but this does not cause democracy. In the example of Bush’s administration, a protest is no different than another anti-Bush website. The message will never be received. Even if the message is in abundance, if there is no way to get that information to the representative or even their aids. I believe one of the biggest factor of a democratic medium is that there is a clear connection and transperancy between the electorate and their representatives. Currently, the Internet is not at the level of a democratic medium.
I agree with Professor Dean’s concept of technology fetishism. As we discussed last class, more and more people are getting their data online. But are they adding to the conversation? The average person feels guilt free as long as they are in tune with America. But this means different things to different people. Some might feel content by reading the headlines, while others read online articles, follow blogs, and add to the conversation with their own ideas. With such varying activity, it is no surprise that we can be taken advantage of for communicative capitalism.
Movie
I really enjoying the process of making the film. It is an interesting task to figure out how to explain a theory in the least amount of words. This contrasts the way that most of us go about writing. We are told to puff up your writing to finally get to a certain page minimum. But in the real world, with the main form of communication through email, we will be expected to be able to write as clear and brief as possible. I was in the group that did the movie about game theory and moderating Obama. We spent a lot of time on the project. I would say as long as writing a paper. But we got to have the unique experience of trying to explain a complicated idea within 3 minutes. It required all of us to go through the argument a ton of times until everybody understood. We knew that if everybody in our group didn’t understand the concept, we would not be able to get the class to understand. With all of our brains working together we finally were able to simplify the argument and make an interesting film. The actual process of making the movie was difficult. I would consider myself above average in my understanding of editing software. But, the assignment to learn a new system in the short amount of time was hard. We each played around with iMovie on macs and with our new, collective knowledge slowly figured it out. Working in a group for the assignment was nice. Going this alone, I would have felt lost. Allowing our group members to lead the way and everybody contributing fostered a successful group assignment.
Assignment 7 October 7, 2008
According to a lot of the reading, what will reboot America is a better use of the Internet. People need to learn to be proactive about their political education. They must go online and explore all candidates, instead of expecting info to fall into our laps. The readings also argue that legislative need to learn to use the medium to connect directly with their constituents. With places like politico.com, Utah’s online town hall meeting, legislative would be able to poll and get direct opinions on current legislature.
For me, a place where I knew my representatives would hear my voice would be worth participating. When you join a Facebook group, you are not directly influencing the system. Therefore, we require a better system that allows us to talk directly to the people in D.C. I believe this would cause people to use the Internet’s resources intelligently and participate.
Assignment 6 October 2, 2008
Is optimism regarding the political potential of the Internet warranted?
We are just at the beginning stages of using the Internet politically and with some experimentation we will find where the process is limited. From the essays read from Rebooting Democracy, I would argue that the Internet is a useful tool for educating the citizenry. Julie Barko Germany argues that the people need to reach out to the information that is provided to us and use it for its political potential. The Internet allows for conversations. Although these conversations might not be with a person from the opposite side of the ideological spectrum, it is still essential for the process to work that everybody makes there political voice’s heard. Some of the essays warn against direct democracy. Direct democracy would be the ultimate use of the Internet for politics; for every decision you just have to fill in an online survey. A major issue Zack Exley points out with direct democracy is that the American people are capable of completing basic opinion polls and therefore could determine that a majority of them are against a current law, but would not know how to begin creating a new law. In my opinion, the Internet is beginning to allow online supporters to frame the issues through social networks and blogs. After we experiment with the limitations of these forms, we will move on to other forms of communication to better become involved in campaign and platform formation.
Teaching Class
I have just returned from celebrating the New Year at home. Sorry to miss class and the opportunity to teach, but I would like to contribute with this post.
My cell phone betrays me by letting my location and activity to be tracked, but it does protect our generation from one thing: soliciting phone calls. It is illegal to auto-dial a cell phone, this means that we can’t be bothered with pesky pollsters. “A new study from The Nielsen Company says that more than 20 million U.S. telephone households (17 percent) are wireless substitutors — homes without landlines that rely solely on a mobile phone for their home telecommunications” (Stephen’s Lighthouse). This has caused a huge issue with the validity of the polls in this election. Pollsters are using the Internet to adapt.
Reader’s Digest commissioned Della Volpe’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm, SocialSphere Strategies, to poll young voters using the Internet. Their strategy was to conduct the survey online. The purpose was to gauge the differences between the favorability of Obama, Clinton, and McCain among Millennials. The results show that the horse race is less close than polls would have you believe. Lately, the polls have had Obama and McCain basically in a tie, but according to the results, amongst Millennials, Obama led McCain in the on-line poll by 23 points! In the same poll, the results showed that “young voters trusted Obama over McCain on nine out of ten issue areas—from terrorism to Iraq to energy to immigration. The only area where McCain eclipsed Obama was the question about whom respondents trusted more to handle being commander-in-chief” (Graff). In popular polls, Millennials are not represented. There are two main issues that pollsters have ignored. Pollsters are assuming that Millennials will not turn out to vote, following the patterns of past generations. What they are not accounting for is the new trend since 2004 of an increase in the turn out of the youth. Also, pollsters do not have a accurate data from a valid cross section. “Are young people with old-fashioned phones more conservative (and, thus, more likely to vote for John McCain) than young people as a whole?” (Cannon). This is an interesting theory and would argue that polling youth over land line phones is not precise. Polling is a new use for the Internet and allows pollsters to tap into the minds of our generation.
Political Voice 