i’ve made a point to stay updated with internet developments in vietnam my family is originally from there. back in 2004 the vietnamese government approved a open source software program initiative, which was originally slated to finish in 2008 but has since been extended to 2010. i do think think it’s coincidental that during this time there has been increasing awareness of the problem of jailing of cyberdissidents. studies from amnesty international
and opennet document problems of internet filtering and censorship that i find rather upsetting. this kind of clampdown on political speech and expression predates the internet, obviously. however, with the computer technologies, mobile phones, and internet service become more available, growing VC (that’s venture capital, not viet cong) interest for web 2.0 start-ups in the region, i can’t help but wonder if the government’s attempts to reap the benefits of economic productivity while divorcing it from a foundation of political openness runs contrary to a lot of the political-economic architecture of western society today.
in the united states and in western society more broadly, i would argue, there was an intrinsic relationship between economic prosperity and political free. as based on the the notion of a rational man, acting in his own self interest, individuals were guaranteed the right act freely as a political and economic agent. now i don’t want to get into a discussion about how that promise hasn’t been entirely fulfilled or criticize it fully here (which i completely do on my own), however the point i’m trying to make regardless is that this separation between economic prosperity and political openness is a very distinct case for vietnam. china certainly is in a similar situation and given the predicted continual growth for these countries it seems like these two represent rather distinct cases that might pose some real problems for the exportation of web 2.0.
through my own internet travels, it’s been really funny and interesting to see the vietnamese music sharing sites, or their equivalent of youtube (interestingly enough, the sites byline says “sharing happy moments”). it’s endearing to me to be able to peek into this world that was always such a mystery for me, having grown up in california. seeing clips of kids lip synching and crooning into their webcam makes me giggle. seeing clips of vietnam idol leaves me intrigued and horrified at the same time. while at the surface it looks like the good ol’ hypodermic needle theories of cultural transmission, videos like this of ho chi minh, featured at the top of very page, puts everything back in context.
i won’t make any attempts to try and predict what will happen exactly, but as social networking sites, media sharing sites, tagging, and become pushed more heavily and as individuals become more accustomed to engaging with their media in a meaningful fashion, i can only hope that the kind of political climate we see in vietnam today will evolve somehow. as web 2.0 carves out spaces for leisure, fun, and play, i can only hope that this translates into some kind of aesthetics of subversion at a more deep rooted level. i don’t know though…a total shot in the dark?
i have been doggedly reading through such a myriad of texts these days. there’s something to be said about waking up at 10:30am, making a cup of tea, and slowly plodding through a big stack of books without imminent pressure on time. it’s all quite luxurious. UCLA is on a quarter system and a 11 week term is ridiculously hectic. it feels like mental and logistical sprinting for 9 months straight and so i’m more than happy to take things quietly right now before i fully ramp up again in september. i’ve been going out (gasp) and hanging with family and friends more than my workaholic usualness. oh yeah, i also pimped out my bike and have been seriously tooling around LA on my bike which has been so mega-awesome. LA isn’t the most bike friendly place and so find myself duking it out with pedestrians for sidewalk real estate, but needless to say, i can understand now why dogs stick their heads out of car windows. i also learned that i still know how to pop a wheelie and bike with no hands. so ha.
a lot of my reading so far have meandered quite a bit. i started out thinking i was going to bone up on all the po-mo lit, but that has since evolved into information theory, literary criticism, and STS work in classification. the main point of all this has been to try and think about various metaphors to describe tagging systems. understanding my own information flux i was really intrigued with notions of noise to describe the ongoing and circuitous flow of information in my daily life and weirdly enough i just came across a posting from alice marwick that expresses those same sentiments. when looking at tagging more specifically, i was always struck by just how noisy these systems were. i mean, it’s like a big “miscellaneous” heap as David Weinberger would say. alice takes on this is a rather optimistic spin on the medium is the message, or rather that flux and noise are the message.
i’m a bit more ambivalent about this. i don’t think it’s necessarily about being a good or bad thing. instead, i think that this is a shift in how we look out and into the world, which in turn shapes how we sense and construct ourselves. when i think about tagging in relation to information infrastructures, tagging systems (including the ways in which we opt to describe ourselves social networking sites because they are essentially discrete terms in some simplistic “this is who i am” schema”) seem to operate like some kind of informational exoskeleton that braces our digital selves. and so rather than supporting from within, much like a brace, these systems awkwardly and uncomfortably hold things together from the outside. the inherent chaos that comes from flux-driven noise lends itself to this kind of awkward piecing together.
i certainly believe that there is an inherent beauty to chaos and noise, after all most innovation, creativity, and imagination have their origins in the previously unknown and unconnected. however i think there are some serious implications for how we manage the noise and thus the meaning of the noise. if noise and flux are meaningful purely within their own terms, this kind of self-referentiality is kind of depressing.
anyhow, an update for fall: i will be presenting at 4S in Montreal and then schlepping off to Vanouver for AOIR. all this is gonna happen within a week of each other. yipes! i’m hosting a panel, with my friend katie shilton at 4S titled “Technologies of Forgetting and Exclusion: Case Studies in the Social Benefits of Forgetting” where i’ll be talking more specifically about the information tracking of sexual offenders, which if you haven’t been following, is a rather egregious example of the problems of this whole “right to know” attitude in our age of digital data capture and surveillance.
okay. need to go to bed. smell ya later.
i haven’t posted in ages as i have hermetically sealed myself off for awhile as i took some time off and started working on some writing pieces. one thing that has struck me over the past week or so as i’ve started delving more deeply into the rhetoric of web 2.0 is the lack of understanding of how individuals actually use many of these applications. i know there has been a significant interst in social networking sites as one avenue of research in this area, however if we understand web 2.0 as a series of applications that serve as inclusive platforms that facilitate participation and engagement, one thing that has struck me is how little we actually know about how the ways which people participate and engage. a lot of the cursory research operates on an ideological level that criticizes the potentially exploitative nature of these applications as ownership of this information does not necessarily rest in the hands of those who create it. i think this is most apparent in discussions of “collective intelligence” and metaphors of “hive” mind since in a hive colony there are only two status ranks: the queen and the workers.
having just read david weinberger’s “everything is miscellenous,” i was struck by how a lot of his argumentation is predicated on an *ideal* scenario of free flowing information that allows everyone’s voice to be represented; that allows for all informational needs to be fulfilled and shared. and as someone who subscribes to these ideals, i couldn’t help but react by asking myself “so is this really what’s happening? are websites like myspace, wikipedia, facebook, flickr, twitter, blogs et al creating embedded structural shifts in the traditional social and political hierarchies?” in a lot of ways, the rhetoric that surrounds the current state of social software echoes similar notions in the belief in free-market capitalism and so borrowing from economic discourse, one particular indicator of a healthy democracy is the existence of a stable and middle class…so what would a digital middle class look like? i recall a wired article a while back on some work in myspace and the music industry that put forward the idea that myspace allowed for the growth in a kind of musical middle class that destabilized the previous hierarchies in the industry that concentrated profits in the major record labels.
so from a broader web 2.0 information perspective, what would a middle class user look like? how would we know it if we saw it? would there even be much difference between the digital middle class and “non-digital” middle class? it’s still unclear what exactly this kind of groups looks and would look like as it seems as if most research has focused on heavy users as we try to understand the potential boundaries of what these technologies can do. a recent pew report providing a typology of information users had some really interesting findings about “middle of the road users” and those with few technological assets, in contrast to elite users. what i think i most interesting is the varying attitudes towards of technology across the range of users as they reflect uneven perceptions of benefits and interest. given this, i think it would be really helpful to get some kind of deep-rooted understanding of where these kinds of cleavages occurs.
