Social Networking Sites: Safety First

The rise of social networking sites makes people put a lot of personal information on the internet. The idea behind this is simple. How more complete and updated your profile is, the more easier you are to find on the web and the more friends you get.

I always found it interesting to see how Hyves has generated a function in it's program that points out other people you would like to be friends with because you could possibly know them. Nine out of then times they indeed selected persons you like or at least know. Sometimes this can be quite surprising because there are often persons included that aren't related to your other friends and can't be linked to anyone. I often question myself how this is posible. How did they find out? Do they secretly use other information that is found on other devices such as your userlist on MSN or?

The urge to put your personal facts on the internet also has a downside. How more you fill in, the more people know about you and this can be annoying or even dangerous. A while ago there was a warning advertisement that all the members of Hyves received that was adjusted to the information you have on your profile. It showed a couple of criminals that were looking for a human target. They could tell a lot about you by checking out your profile, such as: where you live, where you go to school, your name and a picture of you. This showed how people could easily abuse this information to get to you.

Next to this possibility to gather information about certain people from these profiles, the networking sites are also sellling certain information to compagnies. They state that the information that is given is anonymous but this is not the case. So even when you are really careful with the online publication of your information this doesn't mean that you are anonymous and 'safe' as is stated in the article 'Social networks make it easy for 3^rd parties to identify you' that is written by Jacqui Chen this month.

It is a fact that a lot of websites share some data about it's users to advertising partners, but when this comes to social network sites this information is not anonymized. This sharing happens trough 'leakages' whereby the advertising compagnies can link the information they receive from social networks to your personal information as your name and where you live when they make a bit of an efford. This is possible because your profile has an unique identifier. They can also track your Web browsing activities. As is stated in the above mentioned article this could have unknown consequences because this information could be revealed to future employers that for example could find out that you often visit sites about burnouts. This could be because you think you have one or maybe you only know someone who has one and you want to help him. This could effect your chance on getting a job. The only thing you can do to avoid such situations is to lock down as much information as possible. Here is a guide that describes what is the best way to do so.

By reading this article a lot of questions came to mind. How do they exactly gather information? Is it used for other purposes than advertising? Is it legal to do so? Shouldn't there be regulations? How will this develop in the future? Will everybody know everything about everyone or will there be more rules about this to prevent the abuse of personal information.

Wikipedia: On the Value of Information and the Concept of Censorship

It's a fact that people more and more gather information from the internet and other digital sources instead of learning -to master- that information. What will be the long term effects of this development? Does the posibility to search and read about almost everything that exists increases our knowledge and understanding of the world or will it lead to people who can't function without it and don't know anything anymore by themself? A well known example of this are the instructions for all kind of activities you can find nowadays on the internet such as how to make mashed potatoes. This way people won't bother to memorise anymore how this is done because they can easily find a tutorial for this on the internet.


Another consequence of this development is that they learn and gather information from websites such as Wikipedia. What are the possible effects of this encyclopedia on the general knowledge of people? Hereby we foremost have to study how the information on this so called online encyclopedia is gathered. How is the value of the written information determined? When is certain information valid and when not? Who decides what's true and whats not?


To show the importance for a critical look I would like to refer to the case of the Wikipedia page of the Scientology Church. There was a lot of fuzz about it because it was used by the members of that church as a medium of propaganda. Wikipedia has even banned members of the church to contribute to their page. There is an article about it written on Wired. This raises the question were the boundaries lie on the use of Wikipedia and who exactly decides what's reasonable and whats not. This topic though is already discussed by a lot other members on the blog. Where I want to concentrate on is that when I searched for information about the Scientology event, I bumped into another article on Wired which tells us that a lot of compagnies adjust their pages on Wikipedia for their own good. They even pay specialists to engage in astro-turfing to remove critical opinions as is stated by the Centre for Internet and Society. This means that the information on those pages is certainly not objective or legitimate. However the Society Church case was the first case that the site has taken such drastic actions to block those edits.


The above article reveals that although it seems that the information that is published is well chosen and selected, there is a lot inaccurare information to find. It's interesting how this will develop in the future. Will it be possible to make all the information on Wikipedia objective and neutral or will there always be a certain sense of subjectivity and what could be the consequences of that when people more and more rely on it?

Review of Re-Inventing Radio – Aspects of Radio as Art

The conference '100 years of radio' in 2006 which was an collaboration between the Ludwig Botzmann Institute Media.Art.Research, Linz, Austria and Kunstradio became a key point of departure for the realization of the book where media theory, art history and the practice of international artists interlink. This book can thereby be seen as a catalogue.

There is no unified history of radio art. The main reason for this is that a common future of many technological discourses lack historical consciousness. This book explores a radio art “whose roots outside an institutionalized ars acoustica were somewhat obscured in the sixties and seventies by the modernist division of communications art into seperate and seperately discussed specific entities”.

The book contains 45 articles which are all related to radio art. Some of them are written of a historical point of view, some of them are quite technical and other articles are written by radio artists or describe radio art projects (like kunstradio). I enjoyed reading the book although I didn't had enough time to read it throrougly. Because the goal of the book is to inform the readers about the phenomenom of radio art in various ways it is not easy to write a summary. Therefore I collected statements and sentences of the articles which I use to give you all a general idea of the topics discusses in the book and the phenomenom radio art itself.

There are different definitions mentioned in the book about the content of the concept of re-invention. Three of them are mentioned below. These definitions give you a little more information about the topics that are used in radio art.

• “To rethink, reconceptualise, and revive the radio medium as an archive, thinking and engaged medium.” (Gilfillan)

• “Revisiting and reimagining trailing edge or 'residual' technologies such as terestial radio.” (Fritz)

• “Deconstructing 'casting' in both broad- and narrowcasting by reminding us that radio is 'not' only a mediaform but also a phenomenom of radiation and resonance.” (Kogawa)

Radio is often only seen as a medium to transmit music and information to people. The goal of radio artists described by Iges is that they “try to interfere with the standardized and therefore nearly always too predictable broadcast schedule by endowing the content of their projects with greater capacity to alienate. The whole of radio art constitutes an interference in that medium.” (Iges)

Gilfillan reacts further on this matter by saying that “radio art not only interferes with the broadcast schedule, but also creates a temporary autonomous zone of performance and dialogue”. This is interesting because a lot of the authors in the book discuss the topics of censorship and politics in relation to communication by internet and radio:

“Demonstrate the power of networked radio space in opening up lines of communication and collaboration between artists to circumvent traditional modes of radio broadcasting and bypass regulations seeking to limit access to networks within the global teleconnumications infrastructure. The freedom to move information within these networks, but not to move or create knowledge, maintains them solely for the economic structures of globalisation. The projects opens these channels as a temporary autonomous zone of performance and dialogue.” (Gilfillan)

Although the book is about radio art, the internet is a lot discussed topic. The internet is hereby often discussed in relation to the concept of communication and how this can be related to radio art itself and the creation of groups who make it. Nevertheless they have a lot critique on the use of the Internet and on the passive nature of humans. A lot of artists like to make interactive projects, but people don't want to do anything but getting entertained:

“Many artists realised that the Internet is not so much being used as the medium of exchange and communication as it is explored as a medium of distribution. The utopian idea of using the internet as a dynamic continious social environment hasn't been realised.” (Couy)

“I would claim that the (linked) comuter is not so much a machine that seves to establish dialogue with others as an apparatus that facilitates autistic monologues. The problem is that people don't want to be active, they want to be entertained passively” (Auer)

The last couple of articles of the book handle about the nature of radio and radiation. Artists try to reveal the underlying forces that make the transmission of radio possible. They describe natural phenomenoms such as the aurora and how they can make it into art. They also try to make people listen to the interference that is all around us but nobody ever hears:

“What the work of radio art reveals is the struggle to reveal what is already there.” (Milutis)

So it is clear that the book contains all sorts of different approaches. I especially liked to read about the projects because I found it at first hard to imagine how the ideas that are mentioned in the book would come to expression. Because I'm not really into the real experimental artforms I found it sometimes hard to understand why people would do certain things. A good example of this is the registration of the route that Bechtold followed during the opening hours of the Austrian Exhibition at the Demarco Gallery in Edingburgh in 1973. He communicated his location to a person with a map by using a walkietalkie. I understand that it is radio art because it involves a radio, but I find it very difficult to see this as an interesting project and that people could like this and I also don't really understand why it is art. Nevertheless I liked the idea of using radio to make art and I found the different approaches to use this medium to do so very interesting. Before I read the book I didn't knew anything about radio art so it was very interesting to explore all the characteristics of it. The book gives a clear and variated glance on the phenomenom radio art and I advise everyone to read it.

My bachelorthesis about the influence of the society on media and imago

Hereby I want to give you a link to my bachelor thesis about the economic, sociological and theoretical influence on the image of car commercials of Ford in the twenties and eighties. I think it is interesting to read because it gives a understanding in the influence of factors to the design of media trough the years. Because it only attends to the twenties and eighties there is nothing written about the influence on and of the internet, but the television has also played an important role in shaping the society as is written in the article of Williams we have to read this week. Because I only had a week to make this blog I didn't have time to translate my thesis so it is in Dutch.

Link to my bachelor thesis

Debates around the development of digital technologies with respect to the music industry

At my previous study I was asked to describe some of the debates surrounding the development of digital technologies with respect to the music industry while introducing at least three of the articles we had discussed during the art sociology classes about pop music. I think the outcome of this request is interesting to post on my blog because it connects new media with pop music in which I'm both interested. Because it's not a very long article I decided to copy-paste it instead of only giving a link. It was written in Dutch in 2006 but I translated it intro English:

In this article I will attend three matters that have played a role or a still ambulatory in the music industry. These are the rights of the major record companies, the rights of the users and the internationalizing of the music industry.

The rights of the major media companies (the suppliers)
In the article 'Infrastructure for the Celestial Jukebox' that is written by Burkart and McCourt in 2004 is stated that trough the rise of the MP3 and the internet people are listening more and more to illegal music. The four big record companies (Warner, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI) saw their incomes decline and decided to act against it. This resulted in the development of the 'Celestial Jukebox' that protects and traces files in order to prevent them being used illegal. Strauss refers to this as 'the digital fort Knox'.
A lot of users are against this because it only stimulates the further isolation and individualization of users. A second argument is that smaller companies don't get a chance anymore because they don't own enough money to purchase the needed equipment. Besides that the bigger companies own such a big part of the internet that they can manage to establish an obligatory toll collection. Until 1991 this was forbidden to do for commercial purposes, but trough the introduction of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 this became legal.
There are a lot of people who think that MP3's should be free. They consider the day that Napster lost their trial for the disperse of free music as the day that the music died.
Hesmondhalgh states in his article 'Digitalisation, Copyright and the Music Industries' in 2006 that the statements of the four big companies are exaggerated. There is a slight decline in record sales, but it's insignificant. Moreover they will never succeed to make everybody use their systems. There will always be people that will get round their rules. The internet is an important medium for the sale of music, but they have to stay focused on the sale of real CD's. Hesmondhalgh predicts that CD collections will proceed to exist and will form a blend of bought and burned copies.

The rights of the users
To be able to protect and trace files the 'Celestial Jukebox' needs information from his users. These are gathered trough registrationforms and end-user license agreements as is mentioned in the article of Burkart and McCourt. Because this information is very detailed it must be handled very carefully. The companies could get sued for the discretion of privacy, incorrect use of intellectual propery, freedom of speech and the freedom to choose your own programs to work with.
The companies don't only use their gathered information for protection, but also to investigate the preferences and profile of users so they can adjust to the demand of to the users. Companies try this way to bind users to come back and use their service. The problem is that a lot of users are against those services. They think they are shallow, forcing and artificial. Above all the preferences of the users never connect because the behavior of users changes all the time.
Because of the Intellectual Property Act users should get more participation and influence on the debate on this matters, but trough the introduction of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in 1998 listening to illegal MP3's became actionable while the users were against this because they always did so.

Internationalism
This phenomenon is described in the article 'De toekomst van de verbeeldingsmachine' that is written by Rutten in 2000. He writes that there are a number or international operation conglomerates established that are in major part under American supervision. Conglomerates are joined companies wich contain companies of all the sectors of the culture industry. They do this to raise their income. When you for instance produce a movie you don't only earn money by showing it at the theaters, but also at the soundtrack that is published. The success of the one enhances the success of the other. Moreover the marketing of the products costs less money when they are promoted together at once.
The problem is that they suffocate the smaller companies. They can't compete with the big companies because they don't have enough money to promote their products as much as they do. In the Netherlands Wegener has tried to gather some branches of industry, but that has failed because the Netherlands are too small. An European conglomeration though might be a possibility.
So there is pressure from two sides on the government: the local market wants to be promoted, but on the other side there is the suffocating influence of the American market that wants their products promoted and played.
Malm and Wallis wrote in 1992 in their article 'Media Policy and Music Industry' that the stay behind of the local market has to do with technological developments. In a land as Kenia the cassette still is the most important sound carrier while it already is replaced long ago in the West by the CD. At last has the rise of the music video has increased the stay behind of the local market because they often don't have enough money to produce a video.

Articles that are used:
Burkart and McCourt - The Infrastructure of the Celestial Jukeboc (2004)
Hesmondhalgh - Digitalisation, Copyright and the Music Industry (2006)
Malm and Wallis - Media Policy and Music Industry (1992)
Rutten - De toekomst van de verbeeldingsmachine (2000)

Introduction

Hi!

My name is Charlotte van Brakel. I'm a 23 year old student at the University of Amsterdam where I currently participate the master of New Media studies. Before that I studied 'Kunsten, cultuur en Media' (translated: Arts, culture and media) at the 'Rijksuniversiteit Groningen' where I learned interesting things about movies, pop music, plastic arts, new media, art management, art marketing, art philosophy and art sociology. In short: everything about the art world. This often resulted in papers about weird and odd topics such as hidden messages in music and wii'j-ing (make music with wii-controllers) because I don't like to write about boring stuff. I think my bachelor thesis out shined all my previous subjects because it was about the economic, sociological and theoretical influence on the image of car commercials of Ford in the twenties and eighties -though my supervisor was in large part responsible for the selection of time periods-.

It took me 5 years to get my bachelors degree because I attended a lot of extra activities next to my classes. I was a member of the board at a students' corps and at the board of the cultural studentorganisation of the university in Groningen which is similar to CREA here in Amsterdam. I also attended a lot committees to organize parties and other festivities. Last but nog least I also founded and organized the music festival 'Preipop' for three years.
In my spare time I like to visit concerts, watch movies, listen to music, read and eat :) I hope to meet a lot of interesting people this year and to make myself at home in this new city!