A Defense of Crowdfunding

A Defense of Crowdfunding

Experimental html Page, RLST 245

Oops, I created a website!

Facebook's Limitations, RLST 245

Zadie Smith is a Human 1.0, as she says in her article "Generation Why?". And she feels surrounded by Human 2.0s as they scamper to utilize the social network of Facebook while she feels antiquated and behind the times and trends. But for all her curmudgeonly attitude towards Facebook, she makes a valid point in highlighting a major flaw in Facebook itself.

To begin with, she makes a statement remarkably similar to McLuhan's "The medium is the message". She says "Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible" (Smith, 8). Here she makes it clear that software such as Facebook are coded in such a way that it carries with it the biases and shortcomings of its human programmers. Naturally, she looks straight to Mark Zuckerberg to find these biases. She points out that during Facebook's turbulent inception, Zuckerberg was a college student, with preoccupations of success, popularity, power, sex, and so on. Thus she concludes that these preoccupations likely influenced the coding of the functions of Facebook. And even with a simple glance, it's easy to see what she's talking about. Facebook loves to post activities as if they are triumphs of the poster, the "like" button, creating and moderating groups, gender identity, sexual orientation, relationship status, all these these frame Facebook as a site that often limits itself to those concepts.

So here we arrive at the crux of the issue Smith has with Facebook, not that online social networking is inherently inferior or even dysfunctional for human interaction, but just that Facebook is limited and biased in its scope of how it's structured. And here I find myself agreeing with Smith. For example, is it appropriate that Facebook has only a "like" button without a "dislike" button or "sympathy" button? Why does Facebook have ways for us to announce our triumphs, but lacks good ways to allow us to communicate troubled times without seeming to disrupt the constant feed of positive or funny posts? Why isn't it easier to choose who sees our relationships status, our gender identity, or our sexual orientation?

In this way, Smith highlights the issues of Facebook, but in so doing only reinforces the ways it needs to excel and innovate and improve in order to better network people on the internet. Because regardless of the preferences of Human 1.0s, even the Human 2.0s are ready for an upgrade.

Google Magnifies the Self, RLST 245

Google states that its mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This mission statement is rather generic at a first glance. This is the intention of libraries, the intention of schools, the basic intention of every intellectual, since it is their hope to obtain knowledge and then be able to make that knowledge available to others. However, while libraries, schools, and scholars all have similar intentions, they are different from Google in a very important respect, they are self-oriented. When a library obtains a book, it is kept in its store. When a school hires a new instructor, they are paid to teach at that specific school. When an intellectual learns something new, they first affirm their own self-esteem. Where Google is different is that it seeks to collect and organize information without making any claim to it. Its purpose is a conduit, rather than a focus, meaning that it does not seek to synthesize, but only to collect and relay.

However, while Google makes no claims about its own individuality or sovereignty, it recognizes that the most effective means of gathering information is by borrowing the knowledge of the individuals it networks. Google’s genius, then is that instead of seeking to extract information from these individuals, it plays on the psychology of individuals in that they are naturally driven to socialize, chronicle their experiences, and provide meaningful content to others.

Is it any wonder that most of Google’s apps and services are free? For every YouTube video, every blog someone posts, every photo uploaded, every website created, every business started, it adds to Google’s networked data, making it stronger and closer to an ultimate and literal fulfillment of its missions statement.

In addition to fulfilling its goal, though, it does something inadvertently. By providing free ways for individuals to express themselves, it gives something back. Each individual that has something they feel needs to be said, they have an easy, free, and effective medium which allows them to communicate to the world at large. While Google try hard to be an unbiased conduit for data, it allows itself to become a way to amplify individuality by allowing millions of people the opportunity to transmit their identity across the globe, to people who would never know them otherwise. In this way, Google provides a lens that allows not just the world’s information, but the world’s personality to become universally accessible.

Google Hive Mind, RLST 245

In Douglas Edward's book I'm Feeling Lucky, he makes an interesting analogy of Google's server data center. He says "Where other cages were right-angled and inorganic, Google's swarmed with life, a giant termite mound dense with frenetic activity and intersecting curves" (21). Naturally, this is an amusing characterization of Google's personality and practices. But it a sound comparison if one actually compares Google to insect societies, and provides insight as to Google's success overall.

First, Google's use of their data center reflects their philosophy that making more of less reliable things is better than fewer of more reliable things, because it can be easily replaced and gradually improved upon. Similarly, insect colonies are designed to provide for high volumes of individuals. While each individual insect is on her own fragile and inefficient, by producing more of them, they can easily replace individuals that die or are injured.

Second, Google's headquarters, the Googleplex, is a low and sprawling campus that optimizes employees access to important services. Likewise, the Googleplex provides exercise rooms, cafes, and all sorts of fun and creative areas, making it so that work is fun, easy, and employees are always within close proximity of things that will help their creativity and productivity while keeping them relaxed and at home. In a similar way, insect societies organize their colonies into an intricate but efficient network of rooms organized by purpose. Additionally, ants hold nutrients in a second stomach that they volunteer to any sister that is hungry or weary.

Third, the political structure of Google is relatively flat. With each employee dynamically focusing on things that they believe need to be done instead of seeking direction from upper management, means that employees are expected to have more initiative, be more competent, and have a greater variety of talents. Insect societies are very similar. A common misconception is that the queen of an ant colony is a leader. In fact, the queen makes no decisions after starting a colony, and each worker and soldier reacts to situations based on the reactions of her sisters. If an ant finds food, she alerts other workers and together they retrieve it without seeking direction. Everything is achieved through personal initiative that results in a cascade of cooperation from other available workers.

So this comparison to termites only serves to highlight how Google has achieved its success through strength in numbers, replaceability, social optimization, and personal initiative.

The Internet's Message to Us, RLST 245

McLuhan states that "The medium is the message". This statement, which was profound at the time in which he stated it, was simply a suggestion that the capacity of a form of communication influenced the form of the message it communicated. Telephones at the time were influencing the way and types of things that were communicate from person to person through a variety of factors such as privacy, speed, and being exclusively audio.

But in the 21st century, "the medium is the message" becomes a baffling statement when applied to the internet, a means of communication that is nearly ubiquitous. The internet offers services that no other medium can. It allows us to have news, interpersonal communication, games, videos, shopping, storage, jobs, even crime, and so much more. But with a form of communication that is theoretically infinite in its capacity, how can it organize itself into a meaningful way?

The answer, of course, is Google.com. Google is chiefly a search engine, and a very good one with algorithms that customize itself to cater to each individual user, and even algorithms that often take into account error on the account of the user when attempting to find what the user wants. And if that were all Google were, it could be easy to see how McLuhan was right, since all information seems to be funneled through this efficient machine.

But at our present time, Google has expanded to become a platform for social networking, blogging, video sharing, file sharing, word processing, translating, academic journal database, smart phones, and the list goes on. It's tempting to say that Google has a monopoly on the internet, if such a thing were possible, but it continually drives forward true innovation that subtly changes and improves the way that we use the internet. And therein lies the challenge to McLuhan's statement. If the medium is infinite, then what's it's message to us? What limitations can it possibly present that can't be attributed to whatever service we use to access it? Here we can only assume that McLuhan would say that Google is the medium, because it literally shapes the way we search things and feeds us the results it thinks we want.

Even though the interface with the internet is the only thing finite, Google's taking a crack at changing that too. Google Glass is pushing us closer and closer to a cybernetic interface, which would free us from the limitations of computer screens and keyboards, computer mice, and touchscreens.

Perhaps the only message that the internet as a medium can tell us, besides that of infinity, is one of fragility. The most chilling example of this is in the video game Left 4 Dead. You play as a group of survivors during a zombie apocalypse. On the walls of safe-houses throughout the game, you find graffiti scrawled on the walls by other survivors, not unlike a news feed on Facebook. But on one of the walls, there is what I consider to be the most profound statement of all, one which struck me deeply and with a discomfort that that has stuck with me ever since.

The internet is a medium is powered by computers, but it's maintained by people and relies on those people to create and organize the content. We often think of the internet as an autonomous entity, something that is all knowing, all powerful, and not entirely filled with porn, but the truth is that the internet is people, and if society as we know it were ever to collapse, the internet would go with it.

Powerpoint Presentation for "Is Steam a Community or a Lifestyle Enclave?" RLST 245