Blog 13 smartmobs

What Reingold predicts is and has been rapidly coming true. I spend a good deal of time on the internet interacting with people that I barely or don't know, and about half of that I do from my phone. My first experience with a "smartmob" was in highschool when a group of friends and friends of friends played a massive game that spanned my hometown. We called the game commando, and it involved small groups, usually pairs, that try to get from point A to B. They have no rules except to not get caught. After they start going, people in cars search for them and try to catch them. Every person got the number of one person in each group and everyone communicated with text messages and calls. There were about 50 runners and I knew about 1/3 of them. By communicating when we saw searchers, we could move more efficiently.

But what Reingold mentions about knowing who to trust is another really important factor. With the increased communicative abilities, you can communicate with anyone at any time. I frequent several forums in which everyone is anonymous, and under those circumstances, how do you know someone is telling the truth? To fix this, people have come up with elaborate ways of proving their points and very skilled at arguing/quickly getting evidence. But they also spend a good deal of time trying to trick people just for fun. I quickly gained my "internet legs" after spending several hours on wild goose chases.

Smart Mobs

As we do live in the ever growing world of technology I feel that in some aspects I was a little slow. When it came to computers I did not obtain my own computer until I was a senior in high school and I had to purchase it on my own. Although I did not have my own computer until my senior year I was very efficient in navigating through any computer as well as many different programs. My mom loved technology so she taught me lots of things with computers as well as my interested in the computer science class offered at my high school. During the class i remember being overwhelmed by the projects that our teacher would ask of us and I was in such awe that I now knew how to create some programs that run on computers everywhere. I purchased my IMac my senior year of college and when I graduated I purchased a MacBook. Several months after I left for college Apple released its newest MacBooks. I had to laugh to myself for being so excited when I got my laptop because knowing today and its ever rapid change within technology I should of known that my computer would have been outdated within a few months. Technology is improving and changing so fast that it is very difficult to keep up sometimes.

As for the cell phone phase I was a kid that always wanted a cell phone. I remember when I received my first cellphone I felt like i had to wait forever. Although I had tons of minutes on my phone my mother was very strict about when I could talk on it. Since I was either in practice or studying it left very little time for talking on the phone. I didn't start using my cellphone a lot until I became a junior in high school and moved away from my old town. My mom was more lenient since I was older and did not have a way to verbally talk to them expect for a phone. Until I entered college I did not have texting. Although I am a firm believer that phone calls are more personal and sometimes better I find texting is simple and fast. Texting allows me to send a quick message when I am in an area where it is not convenient to talk on the phone or reply to someone when I am not able to answer the phone letting them know that I am just busy and not ignoring them. Texting also eliminates having to hold conversations when one does not want to talk. With texts you can respond with one word answers or not respond at all. Texts are also faster at receiving quick information (like if I am on my way to order some food it is easier to read a text than memorize or take the time to write down an order). So although I was a little slow in the phone era I feel that I caught up pretty quickly. Many people are going to need to know how to adapt and learn technology pretty quickly to keep up with our vast knowledge.

Who owns the media?

I feel that this article is very much related to me and my generation on a more personal level because we've all grown up with a lot of the technology mentioned in the article, and will be introduced to a lot of the more abstract stuff in the near future. I can say, with both security and shame, that two of the most habit-changing experiences in my life were the addition of unlimited texting to my cellphone plan and my recent purchase of a BlackBerry. I was heavily resistant to the cellphone craze, putting off getting one of my own until Junior year, and continued my trend of telecom resistance by protesting against the texting craze until college. However, now that I've become integrated into the text based social network, I realize how much less effective communication is without it, and find it hard to live on a day to day basis without such a connection to the world.

Strangely, I almost feel more human while texting people than talking to them on the phone at times, and this phenomenon has implications that I find scary, and eerily similar to the idea of space no longer mattering that the article presents. While the topics aren't similar on a surface level, they both indicate the severe digitalization of society, and really the entire environment, to an extent that I would never have conceived of even in Middle School, when the mobile Net craze was beginning.

I've become less resistant to new mobile tech since college, and in fact consider myself an amateur enthusiast in the area, consistently checking cnet.com for the latest and greatest news concerning cloud computing, devices you wouldn't think to have internet, and even just the newest smartphones. In time, I hope to become a master of the new smart mob dynamic and be one of the amateurs that manages to find good and marketable uses for these technologies.

Smartmobs

When we take a look at these technological changes being made, i cant help but say i was a big part in the cultural shift. I texted from middle school on. I have Had a social networking site for as long as i remember. I started with Xanga, then myspace, ultimately leading up to Facebook. The other mediums of social communities i was involved in were websites like I use my iphone every day for the past two years. It is quite remarkable the amount of change that has occurred technologically.

Some of the middle school and high school intimiate relationships i had were based mostly on the conversations via phone and instant messaging. Relationships that probably wouldn't have lasted longer otherwise. As time went on, online submission and the online availability of grades became more common place in the school setting. When i was in high school, keyboarding was a class, but now i imagine that proficient typing is achieved at an earlier grade. In college more online homework helps cut down the grading teachers and TA's usually have to do.

The changes are abundant all around us, and we dont realize until we stop to think, how could all of this be done without computers, social networking and other things.

Smartmobs response

Reingold’s article struck a particular chord with me, as I am what some might call a stick in the mud, despite being from what it generally considered a technological generation. In particular, I’ve only begun to use texting as a communication method this past year, and frankly speaking I still prefer a phone call. One impetus to the change was that my mother had begun sending texts to me and my siblings, and frankly speaking it seems weird for her to be more up on technological trends than I am. Even more than that though is the fact that for some reason most of the people I try to communicate with respond better to texts than phone calls, an oddity I’m still at a complete loss to explain. To tie it back into the article, I needed to change the way I do things so as not to be swept away by the current of new technologies. Sticking to my old ways was no longer able to cut the mustard of the future.

The second thing to take away is the discussion of technology being lauded for the sake of being new. I can’t for the life of me remember which device in particular it is, but roughly half a year ago there was an announcement for a new technology tool to allow people to read downloaded books in a surprisingly book-like manner, even having an easy page turn option and all. This leads to the question: what’s wrong with using a book? Essentially this device was a new way to do something that people have been able to do for some time now. It ties in to the critique of “The Machine is Us/ing Us” video that posited that these new technologies were simply seeking to emulate traditional speech. In this case, rather than accomplishing something new the device was trying to emulate the way we read books, which isn’t really that helpful since we still have books.

Wiki-versation

I chose to edit The Buzz, a page on Daviswiki concerning the event held by Campus Recreation, Campus Unions and Student Affairs for UC Davis Students.

I work for the Campus Recreation marketing department, and one of our goals was to get involved with the wiki community because many students use Daviswiki for information about campus programs.

I edited the page under the username CampusRec, which was the username our department decided to edit with.

Here's a link to the page edit info.

http://daviswiki.org/The_Buzz?action=info

The first edit I did was just to remove some of the implication on the event being tailored to freshmen and a somewhat ironic comment about the event being called "The Buzz" when it was alcohol free.

The edit received almost immediate negative feedback, both for removal of content and that I was editing under a user name. But the things I removed were either inaccurate (targeting freshmen) and opinion based (the alcohol content) so they should have been removed or at least changed. So I changed it back and left a comment on the other editors page.

During this time I also received a comment on my user page saying that I probably meant to edit the content page Campus Recreation, but that I had accidentally created a user page. I responded that I hadn't and this was the profile for Campus Recreation.

Both of these discussions caused considerable argument. My boss got involved with The Buzz page edits and the whole situation quickly escalated into a revert-war with a few personal attacks involved. There was very little to no productive discussion. Finally a few other editors got involved and a solution was reached with the final result removing the alcohol comment and referencing an old event that targeted freshmen that The Buzz replaced. I added one more edit under the CampusRec user name which was received with sarcasm: "THAT LAST EDIT WAS **OFFICIAL**!! (With a tin badge and all!)".

I finally created a personal user name MattSmidebush, which I then used to edit the page. This edit stuck and one of the major Daviswiki members left a comment on my page thanking me for creating an account. In the comment he mentioned the 'problem' of 'role accounts' (aka what I created for Campus Recreation), so I'm fairly sure no one was fooled with my account.

However, the content I added is still there (with minor changes) so I guess I did do something right.

Final conclusions:

The Talk pages are really helpful with keeping unproductive discussion out of edits, and reducing edit wars.

"Wikipedia is written largely by amateurs. Those with expert credentials are given no additional weight. Some experts contend that expert credentials are given less weight than contributions by amateurs. Wikipedia is also not subject to any peer review for scientific or medical or engineering articles. One advantage to having amateurs write in Wikipedia is that they have more free time on their hands so that they can make rapid changes in response to current events. The wider the general public interest in a topic, the more likely it is to attract contributions from non-specialists." -Wikipedia About page

This is very true. The edit made by my personal account was given more weight than the "official" edit.

While I think that this was a really interesting wiki-versation, it shows an interesting issue that people haven't really begun discussing yet: corporate interest in the wiki platform. Many people rely on wikis for local and encyclopedic information, and this is an excellent opportunity for companies to get a leg up on each other.

Response to Who Owns the Media

In Who Owns the Media, the author discusses how when he first saw a cell phone a sense of awe came upon the author as they realized that this was our future. For me that experience involved an iPod. I first got one when the generation one version came out and my dad thought it would be a cool idea to get all the kids iPod's so we would not have to deal with scratched CD's anymore. I remember thinking that now, thanks to the iPod, I was a member of the technologically advanced society. I would take it to school and show all my friends how I did not need a CD, I could just play music with no trouble. I loved the idea that all my music could just sit in this bulky item and I would never have to carry a CD case around ever again.
My second experience involved when my family first got my brother a Nintendo 64. We got it for Christmas and I had never been more excited to play video games in my life. The idea of having our own device in which we could play mario kart on for hours thrilled me beyond belief. I remember thinking that we were cool kids now because we had the ability to play video games whenever we wanted and never had to go over to the neighbors ever again (of course we did though.) At the time I thought nothing better could come out, until the year my brother got an Xbox and I was fascinated all over again.

BLOG 13 Who Owns the Media

I never thought about the future in relation to technological advances until reading this article. I remember when I got a Playstation for my birthday as a kid. I always had video games that used plastic cartridges until I got that. Now, the video game cartridge has become obsolete since discs are popular and dominant now. I remember as a little kid that the graphics in the video games used to seem so cool. One time I was playing a video game called Final Fantasy X on my Playstation2, and I will never forget how in awe I was during the cinematic parts of the game. The graphics look incredibility real. The playable part of the game did not use the same graphics, but the fact that video games have advanced so much is amazing. Now the Playstation that was once a big, console can now fit in one’s pocket since there is a portable version these days. I never thought as a kid that my PlayStation could fit in my pocket one day.

I also remember when I saw my best friend’s Iphone for the first time in high school three years ago. They weren’t that popular yet, and they were pretty expensive because they were new. I had never seen a phone with a touch screen. I’ve never really been into cell phones because I always break or lose them so I knew buying an Iphone was out of the question for me. But now it seems like everyone has a touch screen phone, and even companies like ATT and Verizon are producing them now. I hate using touch screen phones, but the idea of them is really cool. Now there is even the Ipad, another portable touch screen device that will probably become a new market.