Welcome back, not only to you fellow readers, but also to myself! It’s been a long time between drinks in terms of activity regarding my learning with Curtin University, but I’m happy to be slowly getting my head back into gear and typing down some (hopefully) interesting things for you to sit and chew on.
If I raise a reaction from you, please share it! No one like talking to themselves out in cyberspace.
When I began this course, Net11 Internet Communications, my “internet footprint” was basically non-existent. Well at least when I conducted a google search of my name, it appeared that way. Aside from my Facebook url, the only other Siimon with two ‘i’s in his name was that hoax, Siimon Reynolds (Hoax: because a fortune-teller told him to spell Siimon that way. Ha! Lot of good that did…). But an interesting osmosis occurred in me. I still can’t say if it was ego driven or just answering the demands of this course practically, that demanded I must see more of my name on the internet by the end of this topic. I have to assimilate with the people I aspire to be!
But before doing this, there were/are things do consider. Important things. It is true that what we say online stays online. I know this first hand as an old girlfriend found a random message I had sent to a person of interest years before on a google search of my name. It wasn’t a personal email, but a message I had sent to a journalist via her employers website which showed up as a public message on any search of my name. Lesson learnt. That message has since disappeared unbeknownst to me as to how.
So the topic of netiquette is something that resonates with me already. The way we behave online can be conveyed by the words we write and how they are written as well as photos and video of ourselves that others may see. Even links to and away from our identities online, no matter where they are, can have a positive and negative effect on us. But more often than not, these examples can be out of our control as other people have the ability to post these images and write comments about us without our knowing. For the control we do retain, much thought needs to be given to everything we send out into cyberspace.
In terms of the image we cultivate for ourselves via our presence online, the representation of the self, the example I can immediately give was my experience with MySpace. I was greatly frustrated and felt understated by the fact I couldn’t get the html code to do what I wanted and show what I wanted to show. So when Facebook appeared with a standardised format that put everyone on a level playing field, I gave a sigh of relief. If I couldn’t stand out the way I wanted to, then at least no one else could either. THAT is ego talking. However, this level playing field relied on everyone either joining Facebook who weren’t on MySpace already, or going over to Facebook away from MySpace, which wasn’t necessarily the case either.
With joining Facebook however, I was weary of how much information I was prepared to give to this site. They seemed to ask a lot of question. Fortunately (and to their benefit) this information isn’t compulsory, though the basics such as names are. There was a LOT of debate between my NET11 colleagues as to what should be put online and whether or not they should even be required to join a host of SNS sites for the purposes of this course. It was all valid discussion no matter which way you looked at it. Some wanted to keep their anonymity and not have to sign up to SNS, others felt it ok to begin the ‘flowering’ of their online identity whether they already had an identity or not. Some argued the point that if we were online at all in whatever form, were we really representing our true selves anyway.
Some further reading of my own revealed an example of what full exposure of ourselves to the world might grant us in the future. It was from the book “The New Normal” by Artists Space who held an exhibition about this topic. In it, the exhibitions curator Michael Connor gave an example of ‘aggressive compliance’ – where people offer up all the information they can online to “Survive a suspicious regime by revealing all, hiding nothing, and keeping your nose clean.” A form of “…self-regulation driven by the fear of attracting attention.”
Could it be by leaving as large a footprint as we can, we hope to blend in with all the other footprints in an attempt to become part of the mess and therefore anonymous again? – the louder we all scream, the less we are heard individually. If this IS true or becomes the case, the irony on this point cannot be lost. As Flacco the comedian once used say, “It’s a cruel world”.
Content sharing is in principle as it suggests – it’s taking content whether it’s someone elses or your own (that is owned by someone else), and sharing it with others. This includes whether you share it as you originally found it, or whether you alter it and re-distribute it as a new form of contribution.
In some cases, content sharing is the internet version of Russian Rulet. Stick some content in your gun, add some description, spin it round till it comes out as something else and hope it doesn’t kill you by sending you broke from having your arse sued off. Well, that’s a simplified, hysterical way of looking at it. Regardless of this, people are still taking other peoples content and using it or adding to it, demonstrating a different and unstoppable way of creativity.
There are several ways people can contribute to existing content, even if they are un-aware of it. The most obvious example of this would have to be ‘folksonomies‘ – a process of ‘tagging’ existing data with additional data. ‘Folk’, because it’s created by the ‘common folk’, or a large amount of people. The opposite of folksonomie being ‘taxonomie‘ where one person or authority is the creator of content. The best example of a folksonomie would be delicious.com, where when someone bookmarks a site they have visited on the internet and adds a description to it to help identify that site to themselves, they add a descriptive tag (or meta data). By adding this descriptive tag, they are joining a greater group of people who have applied the same information, therefore creating a database of information – a folksonomy.
Other examples of folksonomies are Flickr, Photobucket or Shutterfly, where photos can be up-loaded to these sites and the information is tagged and shared with other people or categorised and added to similar groupings. For example, if I went to the beach and took photos of surfers, I might up-load these photos to Flickr and place them in a communal pool of photos entitled ‘Surfing Photos’. However, there lies one possible problem with the folksonomie – it relies on similar meta data to be given. If everyone had the same picture but gave a different description of it, then a folksonomie would not emerge and therefore become useless.
Other forms of content sharing are:
By far the biggest issue involving content sharing is copyright.
Copyright was – not is – the ideal that the creator (of anything) should always profit from their creation, or at least for ‘x’ amount of years after its actual creation. I wonder if “god” has a copyright on us? And how the hell could anyone profit from the human race?? Anyway, copyright law has morphed over the years to suit big business in its quest to own everything. Disney tries to buy the rights to everything creative, and Monsanto wants the rights to the DNA of every modified seed ever created. It’s a “seedy” business – boom boom – and a bit of a boar (you’ll get that later on…).
So what of making something from something? After all, it seems that the human race is running of ideas to create original content. Will creativity be stifled if old material can’t be recycled into something new? Or will it push new and original ideas to be created?
One answer to this problem may be the further developement of the ‘Creative Commons’ – a place where people can contribute by placing their own content online, and allow other people to use that content freely, or with limited ‘some rights reserved’ controls. It costs nothing other than the expectation that everyone should contribute, not just take. It’s a very communal approach to a topic that traditionally hasn’t been very communal. It may allow new content to be created from old, but as for original content, that may continue to slow down.
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