User talk:CITIZEN LUC

"What’s your experience of using various social media platforms or blogs, for instance, in aiding workflow or sharing ideas and, importantly, what are the qualitative differences you’ve noticed between social media engagement, and wiki engagement."

- Any contribution to a wiki project places only the burden of honest, intellectual assessment on the user and really this is no burden at all but instead a relief from the myriad scope of opinions fighting for position on social media where 'the commentary' reigns supreme over any notion of 'the content'. I say "relief" because an abundance of information does not clearly delineate a route to any relevant truth but rather, it disturbs the route with multiple dead-ends placed along the way. This is easily understood in the "choice anxiety" in the example of Netflix and the real feeling of achievement when after hours of sifting one arrives at the safe-haven of 1980's nostalgia. The audience is the enemy; the solution to choice anxiety resides in the problem itself but the audience must battle and suffer terrible loses along the way before salvation. Netflix is purgatory. Facebook is heaven where confronted with an insurmountable abundance one instead chooses to be perfectly blissful in ignorance; everything is true on facebook so none of it is - it's why we're spending so much time there. The comment section on the Daily Mail is the ninth circle of hell.

The commentary/content distinction is increasingly blurred as the words are used interchangeably; the most popular Youtube channels produce "content" that is nothing more than inane commentary and that becomes exactly what we come to mean when we say 'content'. This transpires to a university setting where seminars seem to feature more and more tales of the personal misadventures of students; stories which can be invaluable when harvested for their content and yet it's not only that that crucial dissection is absent but that the question never arises. Picture a crop that grows and grows, is revered for its terrible beauty but that casts a shadow over a town where nothing can survive and the people are plunged into starvation. A story is what it is and that's final. What it means is something we should never know and shame on you for asking!

--CITIZEN LUC (discuss • contribs) 11:37, 8 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

@CITIZEN LUC:

Posts and comments on other people’s work, of this standard, roughly corresponds to the following grade descriptor. Depending on where your actual mark is in relation to Understanding and Engagement elements, it should give you an idea of strengths and weaknesses within the achieved grade band overall.

Satisfactory. Among other things, satisfactory entries may try to relate an idea from the module to an original example, but might not be very convincing. They may waste space on synopsis or description, rather than making a point. They may have spelling or grammatical errors and typos. They might not demonstrate more than a single quick pass at the assignment, informed only by lecture and/or cursory reading. They may suggest reading but not thinking (or indeed the reverse). The wiki markup formatting will need some work.

This post is at the upper end of this grade band, so a little improvement will go a long way to attaining a higher mark. I think in order to engage with the wiki exercises a bit more, it might be useful for you to look at the Grade Descriptors and (especially for this, perhaps, the Understanding) criteria in the module handbook to get more of an idea of how to hit those targets. Less instrumentally, and more in relation to this particular post, your style is quite idiosyncratic - whilst this isn't necessarily a negative, nor a criticism in that regard, it nonetheless takes a bit of getting used to. One of the things that it tends to mask is the argument itself - the flow of your writing, which is a little stream-of-consciousness at times, could do with more concrete references to the reading (and indeed any reading that you think is relevant to what you wish to convey). This would enable you to really take advantage of the opportunities the platform has to offer.

The same goes, to an extent with your comments. These are lengthy, and really rather good, although could do with a little more structure to make things more punchy and concise. You are beginning to discuss in an open and critical way (that is to say, you've responded to what other people are saying and are contributing meaningfully to discussion - arguably the civic element of wiki that you ought to be thinking about, which you clearly are), and this is to be encouraged. Making more use of the wiki functionality and markup would go a long way to improving fluidity and functionality of posts. I suspect that, as you become more familiar and proficient with the platform, that this will make a considerable difference.

GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 17:59, 13 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

"People should be able to pick up the phone and call their family, people should be able to send text messages to their loved ones. People should be able to buy a book online, they should be able to travel by train, they should be able to buy an airline ticket without wondering how these events are going to look to an agent of the government years in the future; how they’re going to be misinterpreted and how they’re going to think what your intentions were."

- Edward Snowden at TED2014 elucidating on the extent of widespread surveillance gathering.

Indeed, Snowden made these comments in response to the oft repeated craven remark that ��if you’re doing nothing wrong, you therefore have nothing fear”. In its partnering, logical conjunction this might be expressed as “if you are afraid, you must’ve thereby done something wrong” or, “if you fear persecution, you must therefore be persecuted!”

"I say that anyone who trembles at this moment is guilty; for innocence never fears public scrutiny."

- Maximilien Robespierre

Robespierre's comment(s) here made in a speech to the Assmeblée nationale is possessed with a terrific, totalitarian energy. Whereas in Snowden's plea every effort is made to describe the purely routine and innocent nature of our internet transactions concerning travel, communication and so on, Robespierre - in the unconquerable spirit of revolution - relates to us how at the crucial moment innocence IS the highest treason. The deeply involved shopper, tracking their purchase from warehouse to doorstep or the persistent amorous text messenger is guilty of innocence in a time where unwarranted mass surveillance has become an accepted facet of our online and connected reality. Innocence, in this regard is fatal for, what is fundamental to the very notion of surveillance is that its primary concern is unambiguously: YOU. The question is realised as: How can you externalize the issue as something that doesn't concern yourself when you are expressly its entire focus? Innocence becomes as obsolete as the person who claims to be idle on a train now thundering forward in motion. The fear of being accused by the NSA or GCHQ speaks of guilt itself because you have isolated yourself from what profoundly concerns YOU where innocence is utterly intolerable.

This act of 'externalization' or 'out-of-bodiness' is immediately transferable in a broader sense to our online presence. Adrian Athique in particular notes "[S]imply, we must loosen our association with embodied presence in order to operate electronically as an icon." Perhaps this externalization explains why the great outrage brought on by Snowden's revelations never materialised. The long list of infringements committed by these government sponsored agencies translated to no physical, corporal damage - it was our online 'symbolic' presence that seemingly came under attack.

To great amusement and in his typical style, Slavoj Zizek replied to the worries surrounding surveillance with "I don't care about surveillance." Zizek's disdain was directed at the agencies which should be treated as lowly as the level of dumb beasts - "let them read my emails, maybe they can learn something and stop being so stupid."--CITIZEN LUC (discuss • contribs) 21:28, 3 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Carrying on the ideas of Athique, operating "electronically as an icon" or as a 'symbolic self' presents a challenge for our basic and unexamined relationship with Facebook. As a brief aside, it can be observed how even a space within a university environment can be supplanted; torn from its original character to be reformed again as a sophisticated imitation. The example of a university's central courtyard or atrium stands as a striking example as these spaces have observably been transformed from places for students into corporate spaces where only the customer is welcome. Students are bombarded with advertisements to such an extent that the 'student' as a construct becomes inseparable from their usefulness as consumers. This is easily demonstrated when a student commits the ultimate heresy of defacing an advert; the humiliation they must suffer before their fellow students is abject as they fall from consumer to something base and utterly worthless.

Facebook as playground for the 'symbolic self' presents itself as a university atrium where one can naively search for the free expression of ideas only to be crushed by the weight of expectation to act as prompted by the dominant forces which created this space for their own ends. Face-to-face interaction has traditionally been held aloft as the 'golden-rule' by which one must abide to engage in meaningful communication but, this rule again explored by Athique, is quite blatantly reliant on convention as opposed to some objectively verifiable truth. A rejection of the quality in purely online communication must stem from an earlier period where there existed some notion at least of a dichotomy between the 'embodied present' and the 'electronic icon'. I suggest that this imbalance is now so greatly tilted to the latter that the "reduced expectation of the individual" (Lanier) becomes moot as an analytical point when any earlier conception of the individual is absent. A generation might very well grow into existence which surpasses all Orwell's warnings of a dystopian future.

Facebook is a money making vehicle; if in this context we learn to express ourselves and communicate the danger that our conversation is stifled by the parameters of what is conducive to money making is a real issue. In the university atrium, the adverts are for you but you better not touch them. You are externalised to the processes fundamentally concerned with YOU but to which you have been absolved of responsibility; to which one must now retreat from - cowardly and innocent.--CITIZEN LUC (discuss • contribs) 21:28, 3 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Let us imagine two students invited to complete separately the same task and let's suppose that task purely for the sake of convenience concerns The Golden Age of Piracy. With 24 hours to research a wide-ranging topic with multiple points of interest, one student decides to use the internet and the regular modes of discovery offered by well-known search engines and online archives while the other student heads for the university library.

The question thus posed for the purpose of thought entertainment is:

To which student should we suppose to be the more successful in the completion of the task?

In researching a vast subject that might touch upon colonial history, maritime history, fading and emerging economic systems, pop-culture, geographical areas and whatever else... Where is the information to be found? Could a student conducting their study from one university building possibly compete against the rival student working with an infinite source of information at their fingertips?

Note: This isn't to suggest that both students don't use the internet in whatever way to aide their study. As students they are equally able to access a wealth of online resources authorized to them in their positions of privilege. Furthermore, this isn't a commentary on an individual's susceptibility to distraction; the scenario hinges on the notion that both students are of identical capacity. The same hypothetical could be offered wherein only one student completes the task and we query the potential outcomes should they endeavor on one course of study or the other. What is of primary concern is the quality of information we might associate with an accumulated and strictly evaluated library collection and the sheer abundance we find on the internet. --CITIZEN LUC (discuss • contribs) 21:29, 3 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

In the updated introduction to their essential work Manufacturing Consent (1988), Herman and Chomsky address these persistent anxieties surrounding the internet:

"Some argue that the internet and the new communications technologies are breaking the corporate stranglehold on journalism and opening an unprecedented era of interactive democratic media. And it is true and important that the internet has increased the efficiency and scope of individual and group networking. This has enabled people to escape the mainstream media's constraints in many diverse cases. [...] However, although the internet has been a valuable addition to the communications arsenal of dissidents and protesters, it has limitations as a critical tool. For one thing, those whose information needs are acute are not well served by the internet - many lack access, its databases are not designed to meet their needs, and the use of databases (and effective use of the internet in general) presupposes knowledge and organisation. The internet is not an instrument of mass communication for those lacking brand names, an already existing large audience, and/or large resources. [...] The privatization of the internet's hardware, the rapid commercialisation and concentration of internet portals and servers and their integration into non-interent conglomerates and the private and concentrated control of new broadband technology, together threaten to limit any future prospects of the internet as a democratic media vehicle." ^[1]

In a 2015 interview, Chomsky stated:

"It’s true that the internet does provide opportunities that were not easily available before, so instead of having to go to the library to do research, you can just open up your computer. You can certainly release information more easily and also distribute different information from many sources, and that offers opportunities and deficiencies. [...]It’s easier now to read the press from other countries than it was twenty years ago because of instead having to go to the library or the Harvard Square International Newsstand, I can look it up on the Internet. So you have multiple effects. As far as Silicon Valley is concerned, say Google, I’m sure they’re trying to manufacture consent. If you want to buy something, let’s say, you look it up on Google. We know how it works. The first things on the list are the ones that advertise. That doesn’t mean that they’re the most important ones.[...] I use Google all the time, I’m happy it’s there. But just as when I read The New York Times or the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal knowing that they have ways of selecting and shaping the material that reaches you, you have to compensate for it. With Google, and others of course, there is an immense amount of surveillance to try to obtain personal data about individuals and their habits and interactions and so on, to shape the way information is presented to them."

Returning to our Hypothetical Scenario - being attached to an institution like a university immediately provides the student with these "large resources" not accessible to the general public without the payment of a substantial fee. (For example, JSTOR demands a yearly fee of almost $200 for the privilege of information access).

If advertising and broadly the commercialistion of the internet has now become ubiquitous to our online experience, what pitfalls may lay hidden for the student casually browsing articles highlighted by the dominant search engines? With the example research project: The Golden Age of Piracy, we must anticipate that the results encountered in this way will be those conducive to money making and, if even only a glib statement, a search for Pirates might only return information on a movie series, theme parks and sports franchises. Far from the trite example, what this means for the internet as some great educational tool seems somewhat diminished. The academic journals we are exposed to as students are certainly not immune from the same infections; the university as a centre for higher learning is fertile ground to be exploited by the dominant interests seeking to impart ideology and critical frameworks.

In outlining the course of his discussion, Chomsky puts it in Necessary Illusions (1989) that:

"My personal feeling is that citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control[.]" ^[2]

This "intellectual self-defense" is the sharpened tool of our critical faculties without which one should not venture online or watch television. Or, rather these treacherous spaces are where we are to be trained in dismantling what is not acceptable to democracy. This is the tool we use to dissect and examine; to separate the manipulative and intrusive commentary from the formidable arena where content reigns supreme.--CITIZEN LUC (discuss • contribs) 21:30, 3 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hey Luke, nice job on tying in this student research example with the main questions. Your use of examples may have been a bit much for my tastes, but it ultimately helped drive home the point you were making about the clutter and exploitation present on the internet nowadays. I like how you analyzed each situation from multiple possible angles, even including JSTOR in your list of resources for the internet-using student, and I think that being a student does bring about certain opportunities that other people would have to work much harder to obtain. I also thought that including manipulation of data streams and information as an example of the downsides of using the internet was a great way to integrate the readings with the exercise. You should probably sign your posts so Greg knows when you made them, but for reference, this exercise has been up since last night. ZachIsWack (discuss • contribs) 12:37, 3 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

@ZachIsWack:

F*CK. I should've been signing my stuff. This might be explained easily enough to Greg: that I'm incapable of following clear and concise instructions. Big thanks to you for pointing it out!

None of the examples are great or particularly interesting but once you've battered through them at least you can feel a great release of tension! Although examples are always pretentious in some way, I want what I write above all to be underpinned by an honest, intellectual assessment and i'm glad that you found something worthwhile here. That said, everyone's comments take the form of either biography or adoration so I'm not sure what you found! Again, thanks and take care. I'll be posting in the Wikibook later tonight. --CITIZEN LUC (discuss • contribs) 22:05, 3 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

I am delighted to be building a wikibook page in a collaborative project with fellow comrades. Naturally perhaps, anxiety exists around a project in which we're invited to explore difficult ideas and demonstrate our understanding on a platform unfamiliar to us in a 'contributor' faculty.

My comment on how to proceed reads as follows:

This whole thing will undoubtedly be collaborative. As we start filling the book with content we'll see other people pursuing the same directions and ideas! If a topic takes your interest (one topic, multiple topics, all of them)from the suggested list above then start writing in the book. If that sounds messy (and it might be at first) it will gradually coalesce. The book is just as easily edited, the work is always subject to change. If we do similar research to someone else then that's a good thing because at this point the worry is not about having too much information but not enough! Similar work we do could potentially be amalgamated and some stuff chopped out, some headings might combine together and some might be better joined with others - the topics are quite similar and there is overlap. This strikes me more as a problem around formatting and presentation, we could operate a policy of generally 'cleaning-up' as we go but really, we'll only see the full effect of this at the end when our fantastic wikibook is finished so it could therefore be left to the end. =) Peace. --CITIZEN LUC (discuss • contribs) 22:15, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

This is a developing project. --CITIZEN LUC (discuss • contribs) 20:34, 1 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Browsing the chapters of the Living In a Connected World wikibook what becomes immediately obvious from the sheer bulk of the work in question is that a great deal of effort was involved in its creation. Acknowledging this, it might at first be tempting to praise the work as complete or 'whole' but, we should never presume this to be the case; the success or wholeness of work of this nature must be measured in its capacity to be incomplete. Indeed, an incompleteness is what we should be aiming for but this requires explanation.

When The Ball Goes in the Net; Keep Playing!

Using an example as illustration:

Arsenal football club play with a distinct style of passing football and their most frequent criticism is in fact that they over-play. With a clear goal or end-point in mind (that is to say, to put the ball in the net!) passing becomes subordinate to or even counterproductive to this one express desire which needless to say is the practical necessity to win a game of football. Passing is an Idea, football is an Event.

If in football there is such a thing as over-playing: passing but failing to achieve the goal, is there also such thing as over-thinking when we focus ourselves on a task that demands our contemplation? The motivation for this argument is that I, myself was accused of over-thinking (in the university no less) but how could this attack have been justified unless a clearly stated goal had already been established? What is that goal we’re trying to achieve in thinking which prompts such a severe denunciation of “over-thinking” as if one had overshot the mark or only sought to complicate the matter instead of just putting the ball in net? There is no net to aim for.

Let us consider the now finished wikibook project as a finality without end. Our work, as the cumulative effort of our thoughtful investigation must never be finished for it was the product of our analysis of others’ ideas which in turn encourages new investigations. Its success is that it is subject to change, to be re-examined, re-thought, destroyed even. Living In a Connected World is an Event, our work presents an Idea; to investigate critically.

@CITIZEN LUC:

The introductory remarks at the beginning of this chapter are quite visual and alert the reader to the image of a doubling – a theme which is implied throughout the chapter in terms of information flows and how they are regulated through both connectivity and user behaviour. Very interesting, and sets up the narrative of the chapter as a whole.

This narrativising work is extended into the accounts of Chomsky, Adorno and others – a well written and concise summary of each approach and some critical commentary included. I think that more could be made of making interwiki links to various relevant sections in this, and other, chapters (especially, perhaps, chapters on News, Evidence and Memory in Online Communications, the section on private sphere linking to Privacy in a Digital Age, or certainly there are whole sections in the Digital Labour chapter that are of immediate relevance here.) The narrativisation is excellent on the section involving the work of Pariser, and extending the Five Filters to Five Data Points.

Some really useful work on personalisation, and excellent coverage of information flows. These sections feature evidence of wider reading and research, as references to specific peer-reviewed materials to substantiate the argument. The discussion of data trails is good – however, it doesn’t attain the same level of criticality as these other examples (although some references to academic sources are used). This section is also an example where the text-heavy nature means that it’s fairly heavy going to read. Use of wiki commons images to illustrate the argument would help to not only break up the text, but to make more of the platform’s functionality.

Media is already a plural term.

Some more joined-up thinking could have extended and beefed up the arguments in relation to the section on “Control over what we see”. There’s a subsection on “filter bubbles” here which seems to repeat already-mentioned material. A wikilink to other parts of the chapter where this is already discussed would probably have done just as well as these few sentences, which sort of appear as an anomaly in this section.

The glossary is really useful – not quite exhaustive, but good for quick reference purposes. Use of interwiki links in here would have been useful. The references section again evidences research, reading and sharing of resources, although my feeling is that this could have been extended significantly, especially through looking at what other chapters were writing about, and making the connections between there and the arguments here more explicit. Some of the formatting seems to go awry in the middle, so a little more joined-up thinking and a little more effort in presentation there would have been useful.

Excellent. Your contribution to the book page gives an excellent brief overview of the subject under discussion in your chosen themed chapter. There is an excellent range of concepts associated with your subject, and the effort to deliver critical definitions, drawing from relevant literature and scholarship, and your own critical voice in the building of a robust argument is very much in evidence. The primary and secondary sources you found about the chapter’s themes cover an excellent range and depth of subject matter.

Posts and comments on other people’s work, of this standard, roughly corresponds to the following grade descriptor. Depending on where your actual mark is overall (and particularly in relation to Understanding and Engagement elements), that should give you an idea of strengths and weaknesses within the achieved grade band, relative to the descriptor

Satisfactory. Among other things, satisfactory entries may try to relate an idea from the module to an original example, but might not be very convincing. They may waste space on synopsis or description, rather than making a point. They may have spelling or grammatical errors and typos. They might not demonstrate more than a single quick pass at the assignment, informed only by lecture and/or cursory reading. They may suggest reading but not thinking (or indeed the reverse). The wiki markup formatting will need some work.

• Reading and research:
  • evidence of critical engagement with set materials, featuring command of a fair range of relevant materials and analyses
  • some evidence of independent reading of appropriate academic and peer-reviewed material
• Argument and analysis:
  • articulated and supported argument through judgement relating to key issues, concepts or procedures
  • some evidence of critical thinking (through taking a position in relation to key ideas from the module, and supporting this position);
  • some evidence of relational thinking (through making connections between key ideas from the module and wider literature, and supporting these connections);
  • some evidence of independent critical ability

• Evidence from contributions to both editing and discussion of content to a variable standard (i.e. volume and breadth of activity as evidenced through contribs)
• Satisfactory engagement with and learning from other Wikipedians about the task of writing/editing content for a Wikibook
• Reflexive, creative and fairly well-managed use of discussion pages using deployment of somewhat limited judgement relating to key issues, concepts or procedures

1. ↑ Chomsky, Herman (1988). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media - With a new introduction by the authors (Introduction, pp. xv - xvi)
2. ↑ Chomsky (1989). Necessary Illusions. (Preface, p.8)