Week 9 - PEBKAC

Civic hacktivism, Wikileaks, online protests; they’re all founded in the same principle of freedom of speech, which has been around for decades. It’s just teaching an old dog new tricks. Or rather, new dogs, learning the old dogs tricks and reinventing them.

“ʻThe Internetʼ is the new trick. This amazing device – full of youth, verve, and energy” – Anonymous, 2003.

Asking whether sites like Wikileaks is wrong, is not a new debate. It’s an old debate, reinvigorated. Speaking out against Governments or revealing the truth behind what the mass media tells us has been going on for years, the digital age and the Internet have just given news means of doing so, and effectively made it easier to reach the “uninformed masses”. Therefore I believe the debate lies in the effectiveness of it.

There is a big difference between one lone user calling himself a civic hacktivist by having a rant on his blog, and a site like Wikileaks.

About 7 years ago a group emerged known as “Anonymous”. They were a group of people, essentially functioning as single entity, focused on hacktivism. The group is primarily composed of members from forums and image boards, however they have no single location or base. There is no leader, anyone can join and work towards the same collective goal as the rest of the group.  They became famous however, through “Project Chanology”; their protest against Scientology.

Week 8 – And now we go to 12 year old Timmy Smith, reporting from his bedroom. Timmy are you there?

Most of what we see these days from online blogs, is the modern day equivalent of the tabloid rag magazines. People just making stuff up based on random facts and/or images they’ve seen. Couple the uninformative, rumour-based blogs of your aver Joe, with the overload of “information” being Tweeted, who knows where true journalism has gone.

Richard Wilkins fell for “citizen journalism” a couple of years back. Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett died on the same day. That morning, someone blogged, a single sentence, saying that Jeff Goldblum had died in New Zealand falling off a cliff. This was a baseless, unverified blog by someone, which the “real” news decided to jump on.

Even today I watch the news and see how opinionated and biased the news has become. I’ve always seen morning shows and current affairs programs as opinionated, financially-fueled nonsense. But the actual news programs on mainstream channels is riddled with sarcasm and political influence.

So if citizen journalism is rubbish, and media journalism is biased, where do we hear the truth from? I think through our own discourse, we discover the truth for ourselves. With the abundance of news media outlets out there, most people can discover the truth for themselves, filtering out the political bias, unverified information and nonsense for themselves.

Week 7 - They were cool before everyone knew about them

Chris Anderson’s reading, “The Long Tail”, discusses the smaller niche markets, which are gaining in popularity due to the ease of digital distribution. Thanks to the digital age, media can be rapidly transmitted and redistributed in the blink of an eye. This got me thinking about transmedia, and the way content can be distributed to newer markets.

I’d like to talk about a slightly different take on transmedia. Typically, transmedia is a new medium for an existing story. Like making a movie out of a book, or a video game based on a movie. But it does come in other forms. As I write this, I’m listening to the dubstep remix of Lost Woods from the Legend of Zelda game, Ocarina of Time. The message tone on my phone is the exclamation noise from the Metal Gear Solid series, and my ringtone is either the 24 ringtone or the Metal Gear Solid codec. Every time my phone goes off, someone nearby chuckles to themselves because they know what it is. To me, this is a new take on transmedia. And in regards to the dubstep remix, an expansion on the long tail reaching a new market.

But getting back to Anderson’s discussion of the long tail, digital media has been the hero of this. We can now redistribute and discuss content at the click of a button. Anderson states that “popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability”. What I think he means by this, is that getting your content into the mass media scope is no longer the only way to “get your product out there”. Thanks to digital media, word-of-mouth is now global.