Assignment 6: Amateurs and the Web

This blog entry is for assignment 6 for the Web and New Media Studies class at Missouri S&T. The assignment deal with the impact of amateurs on the Internet and the impact to society.

The first video I watched was an interview with Andrew Keen the author of "The Culture of the Amateur" from The News Hour on PBS. The interview can be found here:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/91639/august-16-2007/andrew-keen
Mr Keen's primary opinion is that the amatueurization of the Internet is replacing reliable information from professional organizations with unreliable information created by amateurs. I agree with some of Keen's points but disagree with others. Keen's point that amateur's are creating unreliable and sometimes corrupt information is sometimes true but not always. We learned that Wikipedia is as reliable as Encyclopedia Britannica earlier in the semester. I do agree that the key to the creation of reliable is information is consumption, but if a person consumes enough amateur content, why isn't that a viable source of information? I also agree that the Internet might be a better place if individuals couldn't hide behind the Internet's anonymity, but on the flip side this anonymity might empower people to share there thoughts and ideas when they might not otherwise do so. I disagree with Keen that individuals only interact with like minded individuals on the Internet. Take a look at almost any message board, and you will quickly realize that although individuals posting on the message board might share a common interest, their arguments show they aren't necessarily like-minded.

Next I read a blog entry from Lawrence Lessig entitled Keen's "The Culture of the Amateur" : BRILLIANT. It can be found here.
http://www.lessig.org/blog/2007/05/keens_the_cult_of_the_amateur.html
Lessig pokes fun at Keen's book calling it a parody of itself. Lessig points out that the book published by a trusted institution (Doubleday) is full of errors and ignorance which is what the book is saying is the problem with amateur content. Lessig pulls out a number of quotes from the book and disputes or disproves them. I think I agree with almost every point Lessig makes. I can't imagine that the democratization of the Internet is a bad thing, especially when compared to the alternative.

The next video I watched was from the Show with Zefrank comparing and commenting on "ugly" Myspace pages. It can be found here: http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/071406.html
At first I though the lesson to be learned was "Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder," but I think it is more than that. I think the point of the video is that our current views of what is ugly is based from a set of standards created by a few because in the past the tools used to create media were too expensive for the majority. Now, the cost is low and there are many more individuals creating media and setting new standards. Because of this, what is and will be considered ugly is changing.

The next video I watched was Dr. Hall's A Brief History of the Video Blog. Here is the link:
http://richardshow.org/show/2007/11/06/a-brief-history-of-the-video-blog-final-video-for-aoir-presentation/

In the video, Dr. Hall seemed to emphasize connections and a global community as two of the important society impacts of the video blog. In addition, the video seemed to show the importance of the freedom of expression afforded by the ability to create these video blogs. To me, this type of media serves both of these purposes well. It allows creators and consumers to connect globally and create relationships that were previously impossible. In addition, it allows the creators to express themselves in ways that weren't available before. I would like to thank Dr. Hall for blurring the buttcrack shots on the video.

I next watched the video Mario 4 Dead located here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Midnight0000#p/a/u/0/gXY03hyGu44
This was enjoyable for me because it is a combination of two games Left 4 Dead and Mario 64, both of which I have played before.

Outside of this class, the majority of user-generated content I use comes from message boards. At my job i research problems on java message boards such as http://www.javaranch.com/. I also use many open source products which I guess can be considered user-generated such as Eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/ and Hibernate https://www.hibernate.org/. At home I use message board sites such as http://www.xda-developers.com/ and http://www.sprintusers.com/ to improve and troubleshoot problems with my smartphone. If I have a problem with my car, my first stop is www.cadillacforums.com to see if anyone else has posted a way to address the problem.