The Memory Hole
When others do a search for your online information, what do they find? What do you want them to find? What information exists about you online that you'd like to remove? What would happen, ideally, with electronic research about you?
Apropos of the movie (which, if you haven't seen it, is very very good) trailer: we can't wipe people from our memories, but what happens if we try to wipe traces of ourselves from the internet, or from Facebook? What remains? What's the shelf life of information?
We'll also look at the evolution of privacy settings on Facebook.
"We Can Remember it for you Wholesale" - book that Total Recall was based on
Facebook creeping... there is a lot of information about you that is, by default settings, accessible to the public -- not even just the Facebook community
Is the Internet in "the cloud"? They are in physical space, and a lot of electrical production.
The only thing that can overturn the Citizens United supreme court decision is a constitutional amendment. Ohmygawd.
Homework:
Information ownership vs. information anarchy
We will meet in AML105 on Thursday.
Read John Perry Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas," keeping in mind that it's by (1) a member of the Grateful Dead and (2) a co-founder and member of the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (He didn't invent the term cyberspace -- William Gibson did -- but he was the first to apply it to what it currently describes.)
Read, also, Shapiro and Varian, "The Information Economy," keeping in mind that Hal Varian is currently chief economist at Google.
Write a blog entry.
If you prefer the stock option for the blog entry, compare the perspectives of Barlow with those of Shapiro and Varian. Barlow seems to be more about principles, and has economic ideologies very different from Shapiro and Varian. Shapiro and Varian say that they're about models, not trends. Note that their book, like Barlow's article, was published in the middle of the dot-com bubble that (when it burst) contributed to the recession of the early 2000s: Time Warner and AOL produced the "worst merger ever," WorldCom and Global Crossing went public and cheated on their accounting and went bankrupt, the stock market lost $5 trillion in value, and tens of thousands of people with new degrees in technology-related fields went unemployed. So: in retrospect, what do these authors get wrong, and what do they get right? Whose predictions have come more true, and who would you ideologically align yourself with? Give examples.
No comments:
Post a Comment