Brave New World

Imagine sitting on your computer, uncovering personal photos, videos, and secrets of other people… tempting?

Well, spokeo.com promotes itself by guaranteeing exactly this.

The Web does not only let emerge new words, as it seems it also gives people ideas for new businesses.
Through a comment of one of my former posts (Does Facebook reflect my reputation?) I became aware of a webpage that offers a detailed “research” on your friends, nearly in real time. It provides the possibility to follow your friends on all of their Internet activities. The user of spokeo.com is asked to provide his Email password, which is used by the server to compare the address book of this particular email address. Those addresses again are used to check out the Internet activities of the friends. The friends, however, will never find out that they were spied on – if friends is still the right expression here.

To learn more about spokeo.com watch this.

To be honest, I find this idea quiet mental and I kind of see some ethical problems here.

First of all, why would someone need to spy on his friends? That would show that this person would have lost any real social contact and the ability to communicate. Besides the fact that status updates and photos in several kinds of social media already reveal a lot about someone. But these updates are made conciously and with the purpose to be seen rather than being spied out secretly.

Additional, wouldn’t this undermine the open and democratic character of Web 2.0?

I guess it just shows again: despite the tempting freedom Web 2.0 seems to offer, it has to be taken with caution. Because the less you expose about yourself, the less can be found.

And when someone really wants to know more about you – there is still something called face-to-face communication…

“A.J. Liebling once said, ‘Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.’ Now, millions do.” Bowman and Willis (2003) summarise in this quote the new press landscape.

No wonder then that print media are threatened with extinction and seem to have no chance against new media. The internet is literally taking over old media: earlier this year Google bought a paper mill in south-eastern Finland from a local paper company, which had to close down as a consequence to the decline in print media. Google plans to set up another data centre on site to expand its server capacity. That is just a picture for the consequences web 2.0 has for print media.

Andrew Keen asks in his ‘Cult of the Amateur’ where the online news sites should get their content from if not from valuable newspapers? Will citizen journalists replace it? If so, he claims, our culture will die. And if it is true that online sources are becoming the main sources for the press, than his view is quiet alarming.

However, before declaring the culture as dead through these developments, lets have a look at the positive outcomes:

People still seem to go for the ‘qualitative, reliable’ journalism. The leading newspapers’ online sites in the UK all list increasing numbers of web traffic to their pages.

I guess online newspapers are more attractive to many readers than are the traditional ones, due to their interactivity: the articles are accompanied by corresponding Youtube clips and the reader has the opportunity to comment on the article immediately.

The interactive opportunities even seem to increase the interest of young people, which were (or are still) perceived as political inactive and disinterested: the 18-year-old American student Alexander Heffner proves this perception wrong. During the 2008 elections he set up scoop08, an online magazine where young people are given the opportunity to contribute their opinions in blogs to the elections and politics. The site is still running, now called scoop44. This online magazine is considered to gain a permanent place in the blogosphere. And Alexander Heffner is no amateur in this field.

The bad thing: how long will the online newspapers be able to provide their content for free? Times online amongst others are already considering setting up a paywall. I think one of the main attractions of web 2.0 is the fact that it is free. If people had to pay for online news the traffic will be directed to free sites – and they might include the unprofessional ones.

In this case Andrew Keens fears could become true. Whereas I still wouldn’t say the culture dies. I’d rather say it changes. The question is, if we’ll like it… 

A friend of mine made me aware of this Youtube video a few days ago, starring little David who is on his way home from a tooth surgery. He is still under the influence of drugs from the surgery and filmed in this condition by his father. 

I guess it is supposed to be funny and many people actually find it funny as can be seen on the 31,536 comments the video got – it even has helped some people to get through a bad day or tough times, as Davids father happily mentions on his “David after dentist” blog.

Thats just another example on how easy and quickly people can turn into ’someone’ in the web. I guess David and his family were just a normal family before his tooth surgery. 

Some people might recognise themselves somehow in the video, when your good friends post some party videos or pics on Facebook, showing you making a fool of yourself. The difference to David – we’re all adults and have (hopefully) chosen consciously to join Facebook and, well, getting in the condition on the pics.

That leads me to another point that catched my attention (obviously not just mine) in the last week: the briefly considered change of Facebook’s terms of use. Mark Zuckerberg and his friends refrained from activating these terms after many Facebook users commented against it. The basic change would have been that Facebook had the right to keep copies of user messages online, although the user has already signed off. 

But how do we know what really happens with all the information we publish in the web? And to what extend can real restrictions exist in the web? Another friend of mine called the web ‘lawless’ the other day – somehow I agree with him. I think the web is developing too fast to regulate it and it already circulates too much information to control theire use.

And what will little David think when he is old enough to realise the consequences of his tooth surgery? Probably he will not care, because he is born into a ‘culture’ where sharing of every moment in life is quiet common and also very transient. It might be considered as his past. The same with our data in several parts of the web – they’re part of our past – our web-past.

When I was asked to set up a blog for my New Media course in the MA Public Relations, I felt some doubts against it.

When reading other Blogs or simply information in the Web, I always asked myself the question, who is the person behind the author? How reliable are they and the information they give? How can I know if it is true what they’re saying? And do we really need to know everybody’s opinion and experiences on every possible topic? I came to the conclusion that we don’t necessarily need to know all these opinions and experiences, but that it is a form of democracy to enable everybody to express their opinions and thoughts. Well, actually it is democracy.

Andrew Keen calls the web therefore in his book ‘The Cult of the Amateur’‘democratized media’. But he has an extremely critical view on this democratization through Web 2.0, as it opens unlimited channels for manipulation and blurring of the truth. Peter Mandelson seems to confirm that when he stated in his first post on LabourList, the Labour website which was launched last month, that ‘the days of command and control are over’ with the use of New Media.

Audience and authors become nearly indistinguishable in the web and consequently becomes the border between truth, manipulation and simply untruth. Blogs ‘blurring with the mass media’, as it could be read under the definition of the term Blog on Wikipedia.Therefore it is in fact hard to distinguish between real journalism – and therefore trustable information – and information written by non-professional journalism, which is appropriately enough also called democratic journalism.

As many possibilities Web 2.0 offers – and they seem nearly unlimited – as many dangers it holds. After my initial doubts regarding blogging, I’m now really looking forward to explore and describe my experiences and thoughts about Web 2.0 as ‘democratized media’ and its unlimited facets in this blog.