Blog 8: Politics and the Internet

In the last phase of Johnny Ryan’s book I think he covered some of the most relevant issues facing our current generation of Internet users. One of the most interesting chapters to me was the one on the effect of the internet of politics. As a double major in Technical Writing and Communication and Political Science I am very passionate about politics. This chapter brought my two majors together and displayed the overlap between them. Ryan talks about the “digital soapbox” and how the Internet has given people a platform to say their ideas and their feelings about politics. This digital soapbox really made me reflect on the past election and how many Facebook posts I saw during the entire campaign season. Yes, we did give these people the ability to share and write about these issues. However, it is important that with this power we contain great responsibility to provide true facts, which can be difficult over the Internet. There were countless times where i would read a post that was factually incorrect, unfortunately those types of incidents are extremely common and lead to a rumor mill effect across the entire web.

But, politics and the Internet are still developing together. One of the benefits Ryan talks about is the ability for politicians to be in constant and direct communication with their constituents. They are able to maintain more constant communication and deliver platforms and policy information with the click of a button. Another positive impact the internet has made regarding politics is it increased participations. The Internet puts facts and news at our fingertips, so it is almost impossible to completely ignore it. A major key in a successful democracy is participation from the citizens and the Internet brings in more of a crowd that may have not participated in the past.

With all of this being said politicians have always had to be careful of the image they portray to the general public. The Internet gives even more immediate and intimate details about these people to us right in the comfort of our own homes. My questions for Ryan after reading these chapters are:

1. Will there ever be a time when voting will be online and how do we go about that without the threat of fraud or hacking?
2. Should we have access to these private facts and details about these politicians lives? AKA is it fair to know things about people you wouldn't want people to know about you?

Picture: https://helloonetwofive.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/9-internet-and-politics/

Ryan, J. (2010). A history of the internet and the digital future. London, UK: Reaktion Books. [Phase 3: 11, 12, & 13]

Blog 7: How Do We Trust the Internet

At the end of Phase 2 Ryan talks about security and developing the rules of when you can cross the lines of security and it turns into pirating. Ryan talks a lot about the development of security systems regarding numerous websites and how they chose to regulate who can see, use, and distribute their content. One of the most interesting concepts was created by Google and is called PageRank. PageRank ranks all sites that are linked to a webpage and assigns them a value based on the sites linking to them. Through using this website Google is able to determine which sites have been "voted" a best source for information.

At the end of Phase 2 and chapter 9 Ryan talks about how the Internet effects our economy through the introduction of online shopping. I thought a really interesting part of this chapter was when Ryan talked about how grocery stores already make very little in the margin after they buy and sell the food. but, now with the use of online grocery shopping and the fact that we can have food directly delivered to us it brings that margin to practically nothing. This is an example of the benefits that the Internet gives us, negatively impacting others while benefiting us directly.

After reading these three chapters I have a couple questions:

1. Wikipedia has always had a bad reputation through academics for being untrustworthy. What must a website do to make us trust it? From what you can read about Wikipedia today it is pretty locked down and trustworthy. However, if you sight it in a paper a teacher may question it or even downgrade you.

2. What is another way we can attack finding a valuable website? Google developed PageRank? What is next? What is better? What is smarter?

Ryan, J. (2010). A history of the internet and the digital future. London, UK: Reaktion Books. [Phase 2: 8, 9, & Phase 3: 10]

Picture: http://www.codemakit.com/2013/02/pagerank-and-serp.html

Blog 6: Are Social Networks Intimate?

After reading the first part of Phase 2 in "A History of the Internet and the Digital Future" I was most interested in chapter 6 where Ryan talked about the relationships we develop through the internet and the "intimacy" of them. One part that really stood out to me was when he talked about the telephone and that without that connection at the other end of the phone it is more useless than a child's toy. What makes the phone useful is the connections you can make with it and the millions of other options for connections you can make as well (Ryan, p. 84). These networks allows us to make connections with each other and help develop the internet through every connection we make. Ryan also talks about the predictions that were made about how technology will affect the way we communicate and if you ask me he was correct. The way we communicate through technology is very different than face to face. There is no way to introduce tone or inflections into the words that you type on the screen. I think it is interesting that my generation feels so comfortable communicating through these technologies where my parents generation does not. It almost feels like there is unspoken rules and etiquette that my friends and people I talk to know and sometimes my parents won't know those unwritten rules. I'm sure you can write about these rules all you want, but it's through practice and experience that you really gain this knowledge.

Some more interesting topics that Ryan covered in Phase II talked about the difficulties that businesses and cooperations had with incorporating new technologies and transferring everything over to a digital age. Also, in Phase II Ryan talked about the impact that the Internet had on our spending and the way that we shop. If you agree with Ryan that the Internet affected our social behaviors, than this will really drive this point home. Shopping and going to markets used to be considered like a social putting and now for all practical purposes you never have to leave your house because everything could be delivered to you.

After reading these Phase II my questions for class discussion are:

1. Would Ryan consider it a bad thing about how we communicate now through the Internet. The data is out there that our communication has changed, but is that a bad thing or just different?

2. My topic for the upcoming project is Social Networks. What is the most important Social Network? How was it developed and what makes it better than the rest?

Ryan, J. (2010). A history of the internet and the digital future. London, UK: Reaktion Books. [Phase 2: 5, 6, & 7]

Picture: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-ways-improve-your-online-etiquette-dandan-zhu

Blog 5: Phase 1 of the Internet

In the preface of "A History of the Internet and the Digital Future" by Johnny Ryan, Ryan discuss what he plans on covering in the upcoming chapters and the power that an individual can possess when harassing the Internet properly. He also talks about the impact that the Internet will and has had on many different aspects of everyday life (ex: businesses, politics, and society).

Phase 1 talks a lot about the struggle for innovation and wanting to push boundaries through governmental experiments, but the constant fear of failure or not being complete secure. In chapter 1 Ryan talks about World War II and the development of RAND (Research and Development Corporation) which focused on the nation's need for development in technology and allowed researchers freedom to pursue projects that would strive to further the country.

In chapter two Ryan talks about the space race and the major developments to technically that came along with it. This was a very competitive time for the united States as we competed with the Soviet Union to get to the moon first, develop our computers, and ultimately be the greater nation. Ryan introduces J.C.R. Licklider who was hired by the ARPA to work on command and control program as he saw fit (Ryan, p. 25). Licklider worked on developing computer networking and seeing the big picture of computing and strived to develop it. While these developments were groundbreaking they didn't quite add up to the internet we know now.

Finally, chapter 4 talked about the relationship between human and computer. Many people never thought that we would have the technology we do today right at our fingertips that was affordable and, for lack of a better word, "casual" for day to day use. Computers allow us to advance our lives and the way we interact with the world. These kinds of computers were once thought of as magic, but we know them today as expected resources for our everyday functions.

The questions I have after reading this is:

1. My project focuses on social networking. How has the definition of social networking and social media changed from when Licklider started working on it? Is this what he imagined it would come to?

2. People from my generation don't know a world without technology. What would happen if it was hypothetically all taken away from us? In Ryan's opinion what would happen if we lost this relationship we have developed with our machines?

Ryan, J. (2010). A history of the internet and the digital future. London, UK: Reaktion Books. [Phase 1: 1, 2, 3, 4]

Picture: http://www.cgpublishing.com/Books/ColdWar.html

Blog 4: We are Live on the Internet

In the last chapter of "Tubes", Blum visits The Dalles which he describes as the choke point in the path of western migration and still remains as significant. The Dalles is home to one of the Internet's most important repositories of data. A data center is the store house of the digital soul (229). I found it interesting how, in this chapter, Blum talks about data centers as what is on the other side of the "tubes" because for the majority of the book he has talked about the "tubes" being connected to us and not some place else. However, the miracle of the Internet today is that it can be stored almost anywhere and when we look for that knowledge and ask for it to be sent to us through these tubes they find their way back to us wherever we are. But Blum does go into a lot of detail about the importance of data centers and how they are the closest thing that the Internet has to vaults. These data centers can keep secrets and codes for hug companies, often companies will buy their own data centers in order to have maximum protection. In today's internet use a lot of companies and regular users rely on the cloud to keep their data safe and accessible. What is different about the cloud is that instead of thinking about the cloud as a physical thing or place like a data center it is an abstraction and not physical reality.

In the epilogue Blum really drives home the fact that he is a very deep emotional writer. After this long journey to find the Internet he ends by saying that the Internet is everywhere and that we are all the Internet. Which I understand because we produced most the content, but I feel like they could have been more of a conclusion.

My last questions for this books are:

1. What is next for the Internet? Blum took so much time to find out about the history and contact of the Internet, but what is his predictions for what is next?

2. So many people have had issues with the cloud and the security that it actually provides. Movies have been made about it, companies hacks, and more. How can we put our trust and essentially all of our information to these "clouds" that could cause major backfires? 

Blum, A. (2012). Tubes: A journey to the center of the internet. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers. [chapter 7 & Epilogue]

Picture:
http://itechify.com/2015/09/07/how-to-recover-permanently-deleted-data-from-icloud/