The Internet Is Freedom

I had no idea that so few companies were responsible for the television I watch and the news I read. It’s more than a little daunting to realize that Disney’s moratorium of ABC talking bad about the parent company could extend to every conglomerate giant and its media offspring.

However, it’s more pressing to read about ‘net neutrality’. Throughout history, large technological advances have been crippled shortly after their advent by control freaks. The radio is no longer free, but runs on an advertising business model – it interrupts the perfect segue into the next song; the announcer’s voice telling me about his morning traffic jam atop the intro is not what I want to wake up to! Television, the other big monument of the last seventy-five years, is incredibly commercialized nowadays. Take a look at the pie chart below that shows how much is spent per year on advertising:


image taken from bridgeratings.com

The article snippet writes that the large corporations who control Internet access (i.e. the phone and cable folk) want to become gatekeepers for the public. Who has made it their responsibility to decide what we cannot view for ourselves in the privacy of our own home? We pay to get the connection; I reckon we should be allowed to use the Internet as we see fit. (without of course, delving into the miscreants of the human cesspool, because they are obviously outliers of the population.)

The Internet should remain free, as it has been since its’ conception. If it isn’t, it ceases to be what it has become. The information highway represents free speech among other things – it would be disastrous for that to be snatched away by greedy executives.

Spiral Of Silence.. no more

The spiral of silence is a mass media/communication theory by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann that “asserts that a person is less likely to voice an opinion on a topic if one feels that one is in the minority for fear of reprisal or isolation from the majority.” ( Wikipedia)
I feel that’s a lot like peer pressure in social groups.
Because of this fear of isolation, people only hold conversations with like-minded people or don’t speak their mind at all. However, with the advent of the Internet and its anonymity, this theory has dissolved. People form chat groups and forum threads for a variety of topics; it has made it easier to find people with common interests that one might otherwise be shunned for.
The Internet grants equality within cyberspace. The person on the other end of the chatting session has no idea if you’re black, white, rich or poor. Conversation exists and happens for the sake of conversation, for a chance of being listened to. People bond over having someone to talk to, someone to pour their heart out to. It’s a fundamental human desire, to have someone listen to your ideas, hopes, dreams and fears. The Internet has broken down the barrier of rejection and granted the wish that nerds and princesses can exist in the same space. (much like The Breakfast Club, I feel!)


photo found through Google Images

The iPod as a tool

There are many reasons to use the media. D. McQuail has classified the most common uses:
1. information
2. personal identity
3. integration & social interaction
4. entertainment
The iPod fits all of these qualifications. It can be used to store an address book, calendar, music, CD booklets, games and documents. This means it fits criteria number one. The iPod has become a social status symbol in recent years, probably because there are so many different models and corresponding price tags. For number three, the iPod helps form connections – maybe the man sitting across from you on the bus or next to you on the airplane has his music blasting & you like the snippets of song that reach your ears. It becomes easy to strike up a conversation if you have something in common. Ultimately, the iPod is an entertainment tool however. It is incredibly simple to plug in & watch the landscape pass you by from the train window, or keep you head down and ignore the catcalls from the car driving by as you walk home. The iPod serves many purposes, but it is foremost a tool for its audience.


photo of three iPod models - sindhtoday.net

The Public Sphere

The 'public sphere', according to Jürgen Habermas is "made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state".

My first mental image of this is a slightly re-imagined scene from Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451: mindless carbon-copy drones sitting in front of the television wall, taking surveys about their favourite news stories that played that night. (I have no idea where that came from.) I designed a poll to show my mental example; news stories taken from the NY Times, BBC News and MSN.

Which news story affected you the most tonight?
	AIG repays bonus money?
	world's cheapest car comes onto the market?
	the death of Sylvia Plath's son?
	that blacks and Latinos are losing their jobs faster?
pollcode.com free polls

The original conception of this public sphere was that it was constrained by the three following elements and was strictly 'bourgeois'. (from the second reading)
1. The sphere is formed by public discussion, often mediated.
2. It represents a new space of discussion for many who had been previously excluded.
3. Ideas presents were considered based on their merits, and not on the social standing of the speaker.

The 'public sphere' nowadays is moving online, with the close of so many printed news and the advent of technology making face-to-face conversation in coffee houses outdated. However, the latter two elements still survive in the Age of the Internet: ideas are taken as words on a screen with little thought as to the person sitting behind the monitor (as in a forum board) and if you have access to the Web, it's fairly easy to make your ideas known to the masses. I think the Internet and technology in general will continue to change the 'public sphere' subtly, but it's basic elements will retain what it once stood for.

“There is no non-commercial part of MTV.” the Frontline video “The MTV Machine” states. While that may have held true for the MTV in the beginning and its’ past, the face of the world famous music channel has changed. There are now a set number of hours devoted to music videos, usually in the early hours of the morning. The rest of the time reality television programs capture the audience, with many of them being a spin-off of the original that started it! Maybe the iconic channel has changed its image to better fit the socially defined perception of ‘cool’. I wonder where they will go, now that TRL has called it quits. Personally, I was a bit upset to hear that TRL was finished – I rushed home from middle school on the days my favorite bands would be performing. I made sure to stand in front of the window when I visited Times Square; it was a part of my pop-culture childhood. I have a feeling that once reality television has run its course and the next big idea for the cable-based audience appears (because hopefully we as a public will get sick of peeping into other peoples’ lives and invading their privacy, though that shall surely be far far into the future), MTV will shift itself to incorporate that new dynamic. Why? Because ultimately they are a business, seeking profit however they can make it.



Russian duo t.A.T.u. performing on TRL/March 3, 2003.
(taken from JAMD via Google Image search)
I clearly remember screaming on the phone to my friend that they were on TRL & performing live.

Women + Media

Sex sells. As sad a fact as that it is, you cannot deny the truth. Why else would you have the perky blonde selling Orbit gum? Or the bikini-clad girl perched on a souped-up car? The media tells women to think of themselves as objects, to push themselves to reach a level of perfection that may well kill them. Why doesn’t the media focus more on what women can do, instead of where they aren’t?


“Someone I Once Knew” by Dead Celebrity Status

The feminist media has heightened our awareness as a public to how much women are capable of in the journalistic world. Some feel they should stop driving home their point, but I agree with the author of the second article. What would we do without them to remind us to look back at how far we’ve come? Without the likes of Barbara Walters or Connie Chung, we’d still be looking at the grizzled visage of Tom Brokaw and Walter Cronkite. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that! They were both fabulous.)

As I haven’t lived through the ‘burning of the bras’ or ‘broken the glass ceiling’, never mind finished a year of college yet, I realize my position on this topic is coming from an odd angle. I will never know how hard it was for those first women to break into the newsroom, but I am thankful they’ve made my journey easier.

Knowledge is Power

"Those who control knowledge have the power to define reality"- Harold Innis

That line just about struck me speechless. It's a beautiful phrase.

Moving on, Innis also 'sees of a dialectical relationship between society and technology'. (directly lifted from the first article) In today's world, this is evident by people using video chat to perform university interviews.

He also writes of what he calls a 'time-based medium'. Using the example of a carved stone or the pyramids of Giza, he elaborates that they are not called such because of their weight, but because they have withstood the test of time & weathered the elements to survive to present day. I feel this is much like the Internet now - we can shut down a website, delete history and cookies from a computer, but it is never really gone. We can tape television programmes or newscast, but if we lack the devices to play them back in the future, what good will they do?

To turn to the second article which states that teens are texting more than they are speaking, let me relate this is the sad truth from nothing less than personal experience: My father's house is large. All of us children have bedrooms upstairs, with the kitchen & main television being below. To call us all to supper, he will send a text to the wayward girl who has her head buried in a textbook or music pounding through her ears. He is guaranteed a response more by that method that if he had stood at the foot of the stairs and shouted. I find it sad and a but pathetic we are reduced to communication through an electronic device that plugs into the wall rather than a face-to-face conversation. I would prefer he yell to attract attention, but I understand at least one wouldn't hear it. (and I realise one other may become hostile and demand to know why he was shouting.) I suppose this is just a way that we have adapted technology's form of communication to fit our needs.


photo (c) Alfred Molon