Digital Profile: Draft

There is little furniture in Joshua Vera's small studio apartment. Clothes are thrown in a heap at the foot of his bed. A stack of dirty dishes in a sink which he proclaims as being, "Scary." From his cluttered desk, you can look out at the Paramount Theater and see what latest shows are currently playing. The only distinguishing decorations are four evenly spaced posters on adorning adjacent walls. Josh is a developer for Ubermind, a mobile application firm.

Needs to be Re-writen:
He works for a mobile application development firm, called Ubermind, as a coder.

After finding that he had surpassed the level of coding classes his school provided for him, he quickly started to self teach himself and dropped out of high school, he finished his degree at an alternative school and attended University of Washington for a short while but soon dropped out of that as well, when a business opportunity came his way. This tanked and now he works and learns coding under supervision at Ubermind.

Questions:

With the growth of technology within the work place, especial in a computer based industry such as yours, more and more people are working less in the the office and more through telecommuting and virtual meetings. I'm interested on, in this day an age, how digital media effects the workplace.

With your field of work you have the option of working outside of the office. Do you favor being able to work non-remotely? Does it improve your work habits? Are you able to focus more?

Is there any positives to working in the office? You've told me that some people like to come in early to work. I personally like to have a workplace that other people are working at so that it keeps me on track.

Are you able to relate to coworkers outside of the office when your separated by digital means? How is communication within the offices? Do you find that your interrupted more in the offices, then if say working in a cafe?

How does social media play a part in your work and how you communicate within the workplace?

Do you find when you use the internet that you try to represent yourself or your idealized self? Do you notice this amongst your peers?

Have you ever had problems or misinterpretations when communicating over the internet

Tell me about how you feel about meetings. Positives, negatives? Do you think that there would be a way to improve them through digital means?

Philip Rosedale wants to use technology, which has socially alienated us in the past, to bring us back together. He thinks that, when you enter a virtual world you interact and depend on each other more then you would with just texts or email. Do you think Tech such as the vertual worlds could reconnect the human aspect? How so?

Rosedale claims that, Second Life offers a totally new reality for humans
and IBM has in the past shifted its meetings to this virtual space. Do you see any validity in this? Why?

IBM's offices are mostly empty due to everyone telecommuting with each other. Do you notice a similar distinction within your own office?

Do you think the internet helps you multi-task more? Do you often find yourself multi-tasking when using the internet? Examples?

So you've said you're workplace is currently expanding. How is telecommuting effecting that? How is the communication between offices or across the pond?

You've mentioned a couple times that your firm sometimes does some smaller projects that are for the company & employees more then anyone else. Can you tell me about some of these and how they change the way that you interact with your office or company? Why you do them?

Any finally thoughts on the subject?

Digital Profile: Interview

With the growth of technology within the work place, especial in a computer based industry such as yours, more and more people are working less in the the office and more through telecommuting and virtual meetings. I'm interested on, in this day an age, how digital media effects the workplace.

Interview: Joshua Vera

Digital Profile: Brainstorming.

Who: Joshua Vera
Why: Application developer for Ubermind
What: Applications in digital medium and how they effect people's use of it.

Who: Raymond Dean
Why: A designer who is constantly in use of digital social networks.
What: How does the digital medium effect his life

Who: Grace Jenson
Why: Creating an online zine
What: Why produce such a zine and why digital?

Day 1.5: From Pencils to Pixels & Writing Culture

In the reading "From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies" Dennis Baron constructs the history of Writing Technologies and the developmental impacts on literacy that they had and the community that used them.

I found it sobering, that each change in the written medium over time had been met with opposition, just as the digital medium is being opposed by that of the old, and perhaps rightfully so. A constant theme with each of these changes is that there is something to be lost, but with each thing lost there is so much more to be gained. However, I also think that such opposition is healthy for the growth of any medium. In a way it keeps it in check, helping form the new rules and laws surround it so that it can best serve those who it was meant for. As with history, studying our past can inform our futures. If there is anything to be learned, by a popular quote often misattributed to, but inspired by, Socrates:

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

In another reading titled "Writing Culture," Jay Bolter talks about how these technologies of today are shaping or minds and our cultures. I agree with some of his assumptions, but I feel like he views the internet through a Read-Only cultural leans. That although he observes these changes and events in the technology, he views it in a way as just another passive medium.

First off, Bolter Claims that the internet is a medium that will only be available to those of the middle and upper class, which is jut not true. Spaces, such as schools, libraries, and Maker/Hacker Spaces that are open to the general public provide internet, and in most cases usually for free. It then comes down to how someone uses and are willing to search out the medium. Some NGOs have also contributed in making the internet available to third world countries through the installation of permanent and stationary, communal kiosks, which end up promoting an environment needed to innovate and learn new skills.

Secondly, he perceives that the internet is no longer trying to connect the world, but create specialized, focused subcultures. Where I'd agree with him that subcultures are being made, I'd argue that that is what makes it so easy to connect and access their information. If the internet has no structure, if everything was connected, then it would simply become a muddled mess of information. Yes, in general people are only going to be interested in accessing only the information that they are personally interested in. However, with the advent of websites such as tumblr and twitter which are built on an architecture that gives insights into other peoples interests/activities, it thus helps in passively broadening their user's horizons.

Lastly, Bolter submits his concern that such an open medium will eliminate high culture and the intimacy that comes from printed material. What I don't think he understands is that the digital medium is also a flexible one. Depending on what service you use, the content that a person puts out into the world can be made as intimate as one wants, even to the point of being able to forgo comments and detection by search engines. Same goes for it being high culture, written material can be as articulate and well researched as one choses to make it. The internet is not all just dick jokes, porn, and kittens, some people actually have something to say. Besides the internet is never going to kill print material, just give it another avenue from which one can access it.

Day 1: Clay Shirky & Larry Lessing

During the 2007 Ted Talks, Larry Lessig explains how John Philip Sousa predicted the fall of "artistic development" culture or as Lessig dubbed a "Read-Write(RW)" culture In favor of a "Read-Only(RO)" culture through the displacement of creativity by way of radio. Clay Shirky, a speaker at the '08 Web 2.0 Expo, talks about how this culture had been carried into the 20th century via Television. That, the RO culture had created free time, or what he calls a "Cognitive Surplus," that was being waisted on watching TV. Shirky noticed that things were starting to be designed to use this Cognitive Surplus as an asset. The mass use of this surplus, or "Architecture of Participation" as named by professor Vasco Furtado, consists of Consuming, Producing, and Sharing. That, if the general public was offered to Produce and Share content, they would do it. Larry Lessing agrees that digital technology, such as the internet, is helping create user produced content that is reviving RW culture. But, the big downside of this new movement is that it's teaching the next generations to go against the laws currently in place by using copy-written martial, which is corrosive to their interaction with the justice system.

As the Architecture of Participation grows, with companies like Youtube, Facebook, Flickr, DeviantArt, Tumbler, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, really any service that can support user generated content or the control or aggregation of content, has taken control of the digital realm. A realm, in which big corporate companies, have tried to take over with little success. What they don't seem to understand is that they can't put an extra price or limitation on an open source community such as the internet. It is it's limitless potential and availability to everyone that drives people to use it. Once you try to make money off of it, through old business models, it loses its worth. Today, with the advent of services such as Netflix and Hulu, it's starting to spill into the void that old media once fill, except now the content can all be viewed on demand. Sometimes this type of media can even be found on the same box and system as your user generated content.

Now the question is, what is going to happen once(if not already) these small companies become the top dogs of the media world? What choices would they have to make to keep up on making revenue and will it sacrifice certain parts of their user base? Also, what can be done to change the current laws on copyright that can work with innovating and reusing old media to create new media?