Summary - The age of information overload.

Title of article: The age of information overload
Author: Alex Hudson
Publisher: BBC
Date published: August 2012

Theme: Online life
Consumption

Summary of text:

The article draws a concern on people spending a considerable amount of time on the Internet and the information they are receiving. It focuses on the amount of information that people can soon and whether or not it is overloadings society and that there is a disjointed effect between digital self and the real physical life.

The article points out that as we sleep for seven hours a day one third of the time that we are awake is spent consuming information the majority of that is digital. Article also illustrates that because there are multiple devices at all freezers information you can receive an concerned more than 24 hours of information day with multiple devices.

Where the concerns of this overload of information is that people are becoming addicted to the online environment and forgetting their place within the real physical world and rather spending time online socialising. Company and app creators are not helping the situation because applications and devices to reinforce and develop the online environment that one lives in.

The article concludes by saying that the Internet is only 23 years old and Tim Berners-Lee describes the Internet as being as important to human rights as water.

Key Quote 2-3:

"Take for example, the tweets passing through Twitter at a rate of around 100,000 a minute. Research commissioned by The Harvard Business Review says that only 36% of tweets from a user’s feeds are worth reading."

"By 2016 there may be the data equivalent of every movie ever made hurtling across the internet every three minutes."

"An academic study by the University of California, San Diego, suggests that current data levels are the equivalent of each US citizen consuming 12 hours of information - or media - each day."


“Things are designed to really grab your attention. When you get a text message, your phone vibrates, it dings, you have to respond to it. It’s like if I wanted to have a conversation with you and I zapped you with a taser and held a stop sign in front of your face." Nick Bilton a New York Times journalist.

Summary - Hacking book: the difference between telling the truth and telling a story.

Title of article: Hacking book: the difference between telling the truth and telling a story.
Posted by: Roy Greenslade
Author: Richard Peppiatt
Publisher: Guardian News and Media Limited
Date published: March 2012

Theme: Truth
Fiction
Newspapers

Summary of text:

Richard Peppiatt comments on his time as a journalist and the behaviour and reception of the audience as well as the journalists themselves. He states that he wrote articles that were concerned more about the emotional fracture on the audience and actually having any substantial information or real contents of the relevant to their lives.

He states that as soon as an individual and the story that companies them enters the media they leave their assumptions of being an individual behind and automatically become a caricature of themselves. This caricature is emphasised and exacerbated by more and more median notice and attention being drawn onto the subject.

He argues that journalists think themselves of a higher credibility than the rest of society, knowing and seeing all. Yet by the very nature of this the journalists lie and then create their own reality that then themselves become the spectacle of. He argues that this sensibility and disregard for social and moral issues is disregarded for the newspapers a gender to be fulfilled.

He draws light upon society and the journalistic behaviour by saying and concluding that "But until a distinction between the two is recognised I fear the truth-seeking impulse of journalism proper will always be tainted by the excesses of its entertainment-driven cousin, and in doing so public trust will remain in the gutter."

Key points of the text:

• Journalism favours entertainment over truth seeking and informing.
• Once people enter into the newspapers and the journalistic stories they become caricatures.
• Journalists leave moral and social issues and beliefs when writing for a newspaper and adopt the newspapers agenda.

Key Quote 2-3:

"Everything I wrote was designed to appeal to the emotional over the rational, the knee-jerk over the considered, assumptions reinforced rather than challenged and all presented in an easily digestible style that celebrated its own triviality…"

"Entertainment has to some degree always formed part of a newspaper’s output. Crudely, news informed, comment entertained. But today the prerogative to entertain has superseded that to inform, with comment indistinguishable from news, fact indistinguishable from conjecture."

"‘Celebrities are fair game. They make millions off their image, so they can’t just turn it off and claim privacy when it suits them.’ This argument is constructed around the premise that the simulacra and the real are one and the same. The underlying assumption is that the celebrity of the red carpets and chat shows exists beyond a media construct."

Introduction

I have just written my first draft to my introduction (see below). I think I need to refine and improve the structure of the introduction, however I feel that this will develop as I write the chapters for the dissertation.

Here is the first draft of my introduction:

The idea that humanity lives in a state of hyperreality, or state of flux between the real and fictional - where the foundations of society; morals, ethics, opinions and choices are based on (mis)representations and simulacra - is a heated and controversial debate that came to prominence through the writings of Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson. Whereas in George Orwell's "1984", the fictional society has reached the pinnacle of hyperreal, where everything is seemed to be the reality of the time - where nothing is questioned but taken as the verity of the moment, however, aids only the dictatorship of the totalitarian state; controlling and manipulating the proletariat.

It is this two folded argument that I am interested in investigating and understanding - are we, as 21st century society, living in a postmodern state, where we have become so insouciant to the information that we receive from the media that we cannot distinguish between truth and fiction - "holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them" (1984 - part 1, chapter 3). This idea was presented in George Orwell's "1984" as the term "doublethink". Furthermore, is information that is believed wholeheartedly by citizens, a creation by the people in power to dissimulate, falsify and misdirect society to persuade, control and manipulate them - present today similar to that which was expressed in “1984”?

I am interested in how individuals and groups of people act upon and consume media. This is one of my rationales for the investigation - another one is to what extent is the information distributed by the media systematized and exploited. However, the aspect that I want to critically scrutinise is, has society reached a point where it has become so indoctrinated and acquiescent to hyperreality that it cannot escape the cycle?

Summary - The Dark Sides of Our Digital Self.

Title of article: The Dark Sides of Our Digital Self
Author: Steven Handel
Publisher: The Emotion Machine
Date published: September 2011

Theme: Digital Self
Stages of online life.

Key points of the text:


The author identifies several negative personality traits that tend to manifest in our e-personality or digital self:
- Delusions of Grandeur - To many, the internet holds great promises of freedom, wealth, power, and opportunity.
- Narcissism - Narcissism is a kind of excessive self-love, and another common byproduct of developing our e-personality or digital self.
- Aggression - This formation of a “digital self” often doesn’t just harm our own self-perception, but also the people we choose to treat while inhabiting this self.
- Impulsivity - The ease of accessibility – and “instant gratification”.
- Infantile Regression and the Tyranny of the Emoticon
- Love and Sex Recalibrated
- Illusion of Knowledge
- Internet Addiction



Key Quote 2-3:


“In fact, it can cause a kind of “digital divide” between our digital self, how we often think and behave online, and our offline self, how we often think and behave in face-to-face, “real world” interactions.”

“Aboujaoude shares a lot of compelling research inpsychology, neuroscience, economics, and sociology that seems to indicate that in many ways the internet is a unique kind of environment that creates a very different kind of self-perception (one which can affect both our online and offline behavior).”

“Why be old, short, fat, and bald when you can create a young, tall, dark, handsome version of yourself in a virtual world, like in Second Life? And instead of having to find a real girlfriend, you can just create an avatar of your ideal girlfriend? Many people are becoming increasingly infatuated with the freedom and customization of virtual worlds, and they are willing to neglect their offline lives in order to dedicate more and more time to their fantasies.”

Summary - "Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life"

Title of article: "Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life"
Author: Danah Boyd
Publisher: O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
Date published: March 2007

Theme: Social Media
Interaction
Mediation

Key points of the text:
There are muggles who dont engage with their technology and wizards that do.
There are four different states that in life that we chage how we use social media:
1) Identity formation and role-seeking (aka youth)
2) Integration and coupling (aka 20somethings)
3) Societal contribution (aka "adults")
4) Reflection and storytelling (aka retirees)

We use Social Media to engage with:

• Family
• Friends
• Religion
• Play/leisure
• Health
• Property
• Education
• Politics
• Labor
• Hobbies
• Money
• Power
• Attention
• Sex
• Consumption

Mediated publics have four properties that are not present in unmediated publics:
- Persistence - What you say sticks around. 
- Searchability -  If you hang out in networked publics, you're searchable.
- Replicability - You can copy and paste a conversation from one space to the other but can you tell what is the copy and what is the original?
- Invisible Audiences - In mediated public spaces, there's no way to accurately gauge who is present or who will be present as the conversation spirals along.

Key Quote 2-3:

“As we Twitter our way to friendship, scoring ourselves based on the numbers of 'friends' we can convince to subscribe to our existence, perhaps we lose track of what friendship and connection mean.” 

“Perhaps our technologies are nothing more than pitiful efforts to replicate the magic that we do not fully understand.”

“Technologies become ubiquitous when people stop thinking them as a technology and simply use them as a regular part of everyday life.”

Summary - Drones backed by Hampshire chief constable.

Title of article: Drones backed by Hampshire chief constable.
Author: -
Publisher: BBC News (Online)
Date published: October 2012

Theme: Big Brother
Surveillance
Drones
Control

Summary of text:

Chief Constable Alex Marshall of Hampshire Constabulary, wants to create a debate on whether Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or Drones, should given extra support of the police. His reason for using the drones are because they can stay in air longer and are cheaper than conventional aircraft.

Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said: “Nothing will be approved unless safe mechanisms are in place to avoid mid-air collisions.” However Marshall's concern is that the "public need to have a debate and the police need to make sure we understand peoples’ concerns about security and about privacy".

A member of the Home Office (Damian Green) said "Drones are like any other piece of kit - where it’s appropriate or proportionate to use them then we will look at using them."

Key points of the text:

• Chief Constable wants drones because they are cheeper and stay in the air for longer.
• Police want to make should they understand people's concern about security and about privacy.

Key Quote 2-3:

"…the police need to make sure we understand peoples’ concerns about security and about privacy…"

"The use of UAVs in UK airspace has increased with the CAA approving applications from five police forces since 2010."

"Chief Constable Alex Marshall of Hampshire Constabulary said drones stay in the air longer and are cheaper than conventional aircraft."

My Response:

I don't understand why the Chief Constable of the Hampshire Constabulary wants to roll out this idea of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, when the United Kingdom is already one of the most surveyed and watched countrie and society, in the world. In some parts of the UK (borough of Wandsworth) there are four cameras per 1,000 people. Its total number of cameras - 1,113 - is more than the police departments of Boston [USA], Johannesburg and Dublin City Council combined. [1] So when we already have this incredibly high rate of the state monitoring it's citizens, I don't understand why there is a need for drones to be patrolling the air when all they can do is monitor the citizens, they won't be able to arrest or punish them but observe and monitor.

To me this is just another way for the state to control and survey their citizens, and has an ominous presence of the state depicted in 1984.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8159141.stm