Final Exam Preparations

Please do not forget to return your reading packet at the final exam!

• When: Friday 6 July, 10:30 to 11:15
• Where: 221 Valikhanov
• Format: fill-in, matching, and short answer
• Coverage: all course material for the entire term

Recommended strategies for review:

• Review the mid-term answer key (available on the L-drive)
• Review all material from the course weblog, focusing particularly on the “Terms and Concepts” category
• Be sure you have read the assigned readings; check these by following the “Required Reading” category

Final Project Presentations

This week, Wednesday and Thursday, final project groups will do brief presentations on their project sites. These presentations should be relatively informal. For individual projects, plan to take about 10 minutes to present. For groups, about 15 minutes. Presentations should address the following:

• How did you decide on your project idea(s)?
• What were your sources of information? How did you choose sources or find new sources?
• How did you build your community (of sources, readers, etc.)?
• What successes did you have? What challenges did you face?
• What did you learn?
• Discussion…

We will discuss and schedule presentations in class today (Monday). All group members must actively participate in the presentation.

The presentation schedule is as follows:

Wednesday:

1. Team of Four
2. Arts of Five
3. Free Nature
4. Dauren

Thursday:

1. Sagydnyk
2. Aizhana
3. Vadim
4. Kazmus

Surveillance and Surveillance Society

 

Looking for someone? Here is a handy GPS service to help you find them. Just punch in their phone number at this satellite tracking site.

The idea that we are living in a surveillance society is not new. George Orwell’s 1984, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 are just a few examples of novels that have addressed the theme. And since the discipline began, sociologists have been interested in how societies use surveillance as a means of social control.

Today we will discuss the idea of surveillance and the surveillance society.

Surveillance is:

“Purposeful, routine, systematic and focused attention paid to personal details, for the sake of control, entitlement, management, influence or protection.” (UK Information Commissioner’s Office, A Report on the Surveillance Society, p. 4)

• Purposeful: there is a reason that can be used to justify the surveillance
• Routine: it isn’t unusual, it happens as part of our normal lives
• Systematic: it is planned and scheduled, not random
• Focused: it examines details that can be linked to individuals rather than just aggregating community information

We often associate surveillance primarily with (authoritarian) governments and with technology. But although governments of all types frequently engage in surveillance, businesses and individuals do as well. And although technology is often used to carry out surveillance, it is not a requirement. In a surveillance society, however, the (often widely accepted) use of technologies to help generate and process surveillance information has the potential to fundamentally change social relationships.

“The surveillance society is a society which is organised and structured using surveillance-based techniques. To be under surveillance means having information about one’s movements and activities recorded by technologies, on behalf of the organisations and governments that structure our society. This information is then sorted, sifted and categorised, and used as a basis for decisions which affect our life chances.” (A Report on the Surveillance Society: Summary Report, p. 3)

Surveillance is not always a negative thing, and the purposes for surveillance are often widely shared in societies:

• Law enforcement and protection of order
• Maintaining public health
• Ensuring efficiency management of public and private concerns

Surveillance can refer to physical observation of people or places, but it also (and increasingly) refers to gathering, sorting, and interpreting data about them. Surveillance is a pervasive part of modern life. In the United Kingdom, it is estimated that residents of major cities are photographed by surveillance cameras every five minutes on average. Many of our interactions with governments and businesses require us to provide personal data, whether with ID cards, bank teller cards, or in other forms, and this data is stored and available for a variety of uses, whether legitimate or not.

Discussion: What are some examples of surveillance you can think of? What purposes might they be meant to achieve?

Even when the purposes of surveillance may be widely shared, the surveillance can raise issues such as:

• Violation of privacy
• Discrimination
• Misuse of information/abuse of authority

But the features of NITs can also easily be used to:

• Record and monitor what we do with our computers or in any communications we engage in that travel through computers
• Gather, collate, process and share data about us
• Efficiently manage physical surveillance systems
  • Data Brokering: Computerized databases are used to store large amounts of information about people. Markets have emerged in which companies buy information in order to collate it and provide complex profiles of individuals.
  • RFID: Radio Frequency Identification Devices are used to store and deliver information that can be retrieved over distance (through radio signals).
  • Keystroke Monitoring Software: Special software can be used to record every keystroke on a computer keyboard.
  • Online Video Surveillance Networks: Online networks allow for easy monitoring and management of video, audio, and other surveillance systems.

Useful Links:

• UK Information Commissioner’s Office, A Report on the Surveillance Society (links to full report and supporting material)
• CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering)
• The Surveillance Camera Players (New York)
• Urban Eye Project (UK)

Required Reading for Monday 2 July

For Monday 2 July, please read the Wired magazine article, The Surveillance Society.

Cyberspace

Remember: Theories, terms and concepts are ideas that we use to make sense of the world around us, to understand and predict how the world works, and to help us decide how we can and should act in the world. They are socially constructed but they often have a real effect on how we perceive and define our world.

Yesterday we talked about how the concepts of participatory journalism and crowdsourcing can be applied to similar, or even identical phenomena and yet each may encourage us to understand those phenomena in different ways. The example I used in class: If we think of OhMyNews using participatory journalism as a primary concept for understanding, we may tend to focus on its potential to enhance democracy by creating opportunities for non-professionals to engage in journalism as a civic act. However, if we look at the same site using crowdsourcing as our primary concept, we may focus more on the attempt of a business to gain profits in the business of journalism by using individual contributors as free or cheap sources of labor.

Cyberspace is another concept that is frequently applied to new information technologies. As Rob Shields writes (“Cyberspace”, Unspun) cyberspace is, “A metaphor that conjures up an image or an idea of the potential of information and telecommunication networks.” (66)

Consider some of the imagery Shields raises: Cyberspace:

• “is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” (67)
• “is a bioelectric environment… inhabited by knowledge… existing in electronic form.” (67)
• “is a new universe… entered equally from a basement in Vancouver, a garage in Texas City, an apartment in Rome…” (67)
• “is a consensual hallucination” (from William Gibson, Neuromancer)(69)
• “(is) socially created sense of space… a social construction” (70)
• “both a material product of human imagination and labor and a medium of social actions, because they structure and define the limits for subsequent activities.” (70)
• “appears for the most part to be a space not of assembly but of assemblage, whereby individuals are interrelated (in global, mega-audiences) without ever forming a mass.” (71)
• “if cyberspace is the new equivalent of a city, it has its urban elite, as well as its homeless and poor. Cyberspace remains accessible only to the most wealthy and connected, most of whom live in the developed countries of the world.” (72)

Consider each of the statements above. Shields’ point in this article is not just to introduce us to the concept of cyberspace, but to show us how the concept of cyberspace (like other concepts) is both a product of social engagement within the real world, and how it structures our understanding of that world.

For discussion and an individual weblog entry (due Monday 2 July) do you think of any of your experiences online in terms of ’space’? If so, describe that experience. If not, how do you experience your participation online?

Crowdsourcing

There has increasing discussion in recent years, in academia, in business, and in popular discourse, about the importance of social and technological networks for producing, evaluating, and disseminating information. Crowdsourcing is one example of a term that draws on network theory to describe (and also to advocate) new ways of producing information using social and technological networks (or perhaps socio-technical networks).

At the Crowdsourcing weblog, Jeff Howe defines the term as follows:

“Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”

The term draws on the idea of outsourcing: an organization turning to sources outside the organization in order to carry out essential organizational tasks. For example, a car manufacturer might outsource some (or all) of the production tasks involved in constructing a particular car to factories owned by someone else, often located in a foreign country where production costs are lower.

Crowdsourcing is closely connected to the ideas of open source and collaborative production. It also relies on research into social networks (recently given the popular term The Wisdom of Crowds) that suggests that the collective judgment of diverse groups of people acting independently often produces better decisions than any single individuals in the group, including experts.

New information technologies are not required for taking advantage of “the wisdom of crowds” or for engaging in crowdsourcing, but the design of many NITs can help promote the independent collaboration these ideas rely on.

Today in class we will discuss the idea of crowdsourcing and look at a few examples of crowdsourcing in action:

• iStockPhoto
• Innocentive
• Mechanical Turk

Reminder: Class is coming to a close

We are fast approaching the end of the fifth week of class. This coming weekend is the last before individual weblogs and final project weblogs are due, and also the last before the final exam, which comes on Friday 6 July.

Use the remaining time wisely. Be sure you are up to date with the individual weblog assignments and that for the final project you have about three entries per group member per week over the length of the project. I will begin reviewing final projects on Wednesday 4 July, and you will have spent three-and-one-half weeks working on that project.

Please ask me if you have any questions.

Class for Wednesday 27 June and Weblog Assignment

In class Wednesday we will discuss the experience of working with the wikis and, if time allows, move on to discuss crowdsourcing. Feel free to play with the wikis in the meantime. For your second individual weblog entry this week (due Thursday 28 June) please write a brief reflection on the experience you had with this collaborative project.

Also for Wednesday, please remember to read The Rise of Crowdsourcing.

Wikipedia Project, Part Two

By now you have posted an entry at your personal weblog presenting evidence to support your position on whether Wikipedia is a reliable resource. Your instructions were to do this collaboratively, discussing with others in class while you worked. But your entry on the topic is ultimately individual.

The next step in this process is to work collaboratively online using a wiki set up for the purpose. Your instructions for this class period are as follows:

1. Visit http://wikipediawiki.wetpaint.com/ (aigerim, victoria, sagydnyk, dauren, akina, anastassiya) , http://wikipediawiki2.wetpaint.com/ (nataliya m, zarina, murager, natalya s), or http://wikipediawiki3.wetpaint.com/ (kristina, yulia, yekaterina, sadyk, semyon, aliya) (depending upon your group). These are the wikis I set up for our collaborative writing. I will give a brief introduction to the Wetpaint wiki tools, but mostly you will learn to use them by using them.
2. Use the student entries (your own or other students’ entries) as a starting point for material you can submit on your wiki. (Use our course links to individual weblogs to find these.)
3. Working collaboratively online, try to develop a statement or discussion at your wiki related to the question, Is Wikipedia a reliable resource?
4. In addition to the entries already written, you may find other material or write something entirely new for your site. You may also post graphics or anything else the site allows.
5. Be creative. Don’t be afraid to disagree with your collaborators. Don’t be afraid to try something different or new. Have some fun with this…
6. The idea with this exercise if for you to get some experience working with a wiki tool and to see whether (and how) it affects your social interaction with your work group.

Wikipedia Project

Today we will work on a collaborative research project. Here is the assignment:

Wikipedia presents itself as an online encyclopedia–a factual resource which we expect will provide us with reliable information. Using all the resources available to you, spend this class period looking for evidence that will help you take a position on the question, “Is Wikipedia a reliable resource (and why or why not)?”

This is not an easy question to answer. Your evidence may come from things such as things others have written online, from your own examination of Wikipedia itself, or from your understanding of Wikipedia’s collaborative production process. Discuss with your colleagues in class how to discover and evaluate evidence.

By class time Tuesday, everyone should post an entry on his or her individual weblog (a couple of paragraphs is fine) offering some evidence to support your individual answer to the question.