• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

Here I address these issues curtly and incompletely. Others have written at length on the topics here, but I wish to add my thoughts to the mix.

Although we often say this, we often forget it: life is all about balance. For everyone who takes advantage of the possibilities of the net, there is a constant dialectic: balancing time spent communication via the web with “real world” communication and activities, and also balancing participation and consumption.

It is so easy to use the Web to communicate with five, ten, even twenty people all at once, more or less comfortably–the web allows one-to-many and many-to-many communication easily and clearly. Email, especially as it is used in business, allows a person to dispense with the niceties of human interaction in favor of expedient, efficient communication.

In contrast, real world communication is much slower to handle gobs of people either all talking at once to each other, say in a meeting, or all communicating with one key person such as a CEO. It is also slower because the social niceties, in particular small talk, are more necessary for what our society defines as proper social behavior.

The same holds for teens, the group often both lauded and denounced for its embrace of the internet. Teens are lauded for their adaption to new tools, for embracing the modern paradigm shift in communications. Yet, they are denounced for the very social problems listed above: real world, vocal, physical interaction is reduced in favor of fairly impersonal means of communication. Certainly there is no doubt of the impersonality of text-based tools such as email and instant and text messaging, where emoticons are necessary to deliver the intonation of what is said.

Further balance is needed in mediating media consumption and active participation. I, for example, consume almost entirely through the web, watching below 5 hours of TV a week. Although these two types of consumption may seem different, both are generally passive–I simply consume and do not synthesize the information actively through utilizing it. Reading and discussing a newspaper around the kitchen table with parents or blogging about current events or your knowledge are, however, more active, participatory activities. In them, you are required to internalize, analyze, and reformulate the information for critical discussion. Doing only one or the other is not necessarily good–fully active participation implies a lack of relaxation in consumption while fully passive consumption implies a lack of critical thinking in consumption. Balance is necessary here as well.

Our modern communications tools are not leaving us anytime soon–heck, I would be miserable without the speed and efficiency of information consumption we have today. We can embrace all of these technologies, activities, and “traditional” practices and proceed to balance them for the best outcome for us.

Authors note: Shelly G. had me write this.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

My grandfather just reminded me of a great addition to my post on citizen journalism. As I was watching the TV news on Wednesday, the talking head was interviewing Hossam Hamdan and an ACLU lawyer (the preceding link is the transcript, search it for for “Hamdan”).

The issue was that Naji Hamdan, an American citizen from the UAE, had been imprisoned by proxy in the UAE for the U.S.A., and has not been charged with a crime by the United States. Complicating the issue is how the UAE has a record for torture, a record in clear conflict with U.S. policy.

I took issue with how the interviewer, Tony Harris, worked to shape the interview. He did a lot of presuming (Harris’s own word) and continually cut off Hossam Hamdan and the lawyer. He created his own story in the course of the interview instead of focusing on the who, what, when, where, why, and how that could be provided by the interviewees. Harris worked to promote a specific connection and push his own very specific conclusions and agenda, that of Hamdan to terrorist organizations, at the expense of neutrality.

Here’s a quote that churns my stomach whenever I read it:

[Harris speaking] …But Sam, one more question quickly for you. Your brother, it is my understanding, runs an auto parts store where he is shipping containers all over the world. He is a devout Muslim who travels overseas a lot. Now I am not drawing >any conclusions from that but I am wondering if in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks do you understand why the federal government would be interested in learning everything it can about your brother’s trips and business dealings?…

Citizen journalism combats this by promoting diversity in the news, long a goal of American media regulation. This is just one more reason citizen journalism rocks.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

I’ve been following the recent attacks in Mumbai. I first heard the news on CNN, but the best way to keep up has been online. What always amazes me is the dedicated cadre of Wikipedians who constantly update Wikipedia with the latest news (aside from Wikinews’s excellent coverage). Fifty minutes after the attacks started Wikipedia had a page on the attacks up and four hours after a page on the previously unknown Deccan Mujahideen.

As well, CNN throughout the day has shown MMS videos, witnesses via Skype videochat, and discussion of the Mumbai bloggers keeping connected during the Mumbai curfew over the net and via services such as Twitter.

I like this trend. I love our continually-developing participatory culture. I think that ultimately it is for better, as consumers’ competition with traditional content producers can only result in increased product quality. The MSM (mainstream media) is beginning to embrace citizen journalism. For example, readers on CNN.com can now submit stories through iReport (with a disclaimer about the news being unvetted).

Any discussion of citizen journalism requires a discusion of its legal implications. In the United States, journalists are protected from disclosing their sources in thirty states. There is no legal precedent yet for whether bloggers, who increasingly break major news before the MSM, can be classified is journalists and thus be under those same protections. Only time will tell, but I am hopeful.

EDIT: Additional info from CNN on the ongoing Twitter use during the Mumbai crisis. I agree with CNN’s assessment that the wisdom-of-the-crowds nature Twitter is both its greatest asset and handicap. From the article:

As blogger Tim Mallon put it, “I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.

“During the hour or so I followed on Twitter there were wildly differing estimates of the numbers killed and injured – ranging up to 1,000.”

What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted.

A quick trawl through the enormous numbers of tweets showed that most were sourced from mainstream media.

Someone tweets a news headline, their friends see it and retweet, prompting an endless circle of recycled information.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

I would like to return again to the issue of TANSTAAFL–There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. In the last post in the series, I discussed where money is needed. Now, I would like to give a simple overview of how that money is acquired. When I refer to companies here, I mean organizations whose primary role is to provide some service over the Internet.

Venture Capital

VC “is a type of private equity capital typically provided to immature, high-potential, growth companies in the interest of generating a return through an eventual realization event such as an IPO or trade sale of the company. Venture capital investments are generally made as cash in exchange for shares in the invested company” (Wikipedia). Besides the traditional banks providing VC, some organizations have sprung up from people who were successful in businesses who are now looking to do VC funding with the money they made. One of those, and one of my favorite companies, is Y Combinator. They are slightly different in that they provide seed funding, which is the initial infusion of cash for startups and traditionally the riskiest for the loaner. One of my favorite startup blogs is that of Paul Graham, who works with the company. A great website that focuses on tech startups and the ecosystem that funds them is TechCrunch.

Advertising

Much of the web is funded by text and other ads. HowStuffWorks has an excellent explanation of how web advertising works. Google’s revenue consists almost entirely of income from their ad programs. Google’s ads are particularly interesting because they revolve around textual analysis of your search queries and the content of webpages on which Google’s ads are shown. Site owners are most commonly paid by advertisers by the click-through rate–how many people click on the ad–although many other more complicated systems exist.
A potential issue for the web is the prevalence of tools such as the free Firefox plugin Adblock and other similar tools for other browsers that block ads from appearing in your webpages by blocking known ad servers.

Other Methods

• Many websites offer premium or subscription services. For example, Wordpress.com offers free blogs that are feature-limited and occasionally show advertisements. For a fee these limits and annoyances can be lifted (or you could also go to Wordpress.org and download the software they use free and install it on your web server and customize it to your hearts content like I did). Of course, the free accounts are useful for hooking users into the site and allowing them to become comfortable enough with or find enough of a need for the service so that they are more likely to pay for it.
• Donations often fund open-source projects and some topical personal sites.
• Some corporations will fund open-source projects through either infusions of cash or employee time if the projects are important to them. Notable here is Google and all of its open-source efforts.

Who Uses What

• Any company with another revenue stream obviously may fund their homepage or other web presence through those monies. Among others, companies and startups will use primarily three sources of funding: venture capital, advertisements, and paid services.
• Individuals or small groups funding sites primarily for pleasure and not profit will generally fund their costs through their own monies, donations, and advertisements.

Advertisements and Me

I could care less about advertisements on the web. Although I could probably increase my perceived browsing speed by using Adblock, I feel no compulsion to use Adblock or Saft to block advertisements from distracting me from my web browsing, because they don’t distract me whatsoever. Over the past ten years or so, I’ve learned to totally ignore and mentally filter out any advertisements and to easily and accurately discern content from advertising. I surmise that the fraternal ability to this is how well I am able to filter out noises around me when reading or otherwise concentrating on a task.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

I am so damn excited for the future. I look at where we are today with tech, and back into the past at where we came from, and then finally at the ideas incubating in academia and industry, and chills run down my spine at the thought of where we will be in 2, 5, 10, 20 years. My favorite anticipation is of ubiquitous (read: 99% coverage over the continental U.S.), speedy Internet access.

The coolest part of this pervasive access would be that every single device could have network access. Now, I do not envision any desk lamps, microwaves, or washing machines with direct access to this network, but they could (and should!) have access via mesh networking through a gateway of some sort in the home.

The effect of this network omnipresence on media will be massively profound. Yes, the dystopian future of Epic 2015 is a distinct possibility that must be managed, but I think that through proper regulation (by both the government and the people), the advantages of ever-present access far outweigh the horrors. My favorite exception beyond simple global Internet access is the combination of that access with other services such as location through GPS. The iPhone and the Android G1 come closest today to providing the kind of access and services envisioned. Applications beyond those already available on the Internet include those that would take advantage of the built in camera and the location awareness. Viewing media on these rich-content devices will be a pleasure, but producing geotagged media on-the-go through applications that share the information quickly with your contacts and friends for everyone’s furtherance are just awesome.

There are a number of technologies currently in development that could begin the process of truly universal wireless access, including WiMAX and LTE. Both standards are designed to be able to work over a range of frequencies. A particularly valuable piece of the spectrum that companies developing and planning to deploy these standards wish to use is the 700 MHz band (also know as the UHF band). This band is extremely valuable because according to some estimates it would possibly allow for network towers with a range twice that of current cell phone towers (although frequency availability would still be an issue, but still the number of towers needed would be vastly less than is needed with the frequencies currently apportioned to cell phone providers). One other not so new but currently mostly underutilized standard is IPv6, which is needed because otherwise there would not be enough Internet Protocol addresses for every device to have one.

Please also see this alternate viewpoint on why we should fear ubiquitous Web access.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

Hurricane Ike News Coverage Media Analysis. Completed following this assignment prompt for a class I am currently taking on media literacy and new mediums. 

For more analyses, see the Hurricane Ike blog series by Jonathan Coffman, a self-described “social media professional”.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.