Big Data

I'll be honest, before this I have never heard of the term "big data". But now it surprises me that such a term can have such a big impact on the way the internet operates. It has impacts on targeted marketing, taking nonsensical data from all over the web, from all kinds of people  and putting them to use for businesses. But it doesn't have to do with the internet, because "over the course of the past four years, we’ve seen big data move from its birthplace in the consumer Internet to more traditional enterprises. Banks are doing a better job identifying fraud and watching for money laundering. Retailers have better models of their customers’ tastes and preferences. Telecommunications vendors are analyzing traffic patterns and content in more detail than ever before, and are building and running more efficient networks as a result. Doctors have more accurate pictures of the genetic and environmental causes of disease, and are discovering more effective
treatments as a result" (Cloudera).

But this "big data" is just that, all kinds of data, almost randomized. This is why companies like the Apache Hadoop tries to analyze, and even more importantly, organizes  it. This open-source project is helping a lot of organizations organize all their data that they acquire. But all that it does today, all the problems its can solve today, is nothing that can compare to what it can do in the future. And that is what interests me, because even now it can detect fraud, create targeted marketing, and even help doctors detect cause of diseases. Think of the potential it will have in the future, and because of the growing data in the foreseeable future, it will be even more useful than it is today.

Tom Slee

Before reading Tom Slee's blog I always thought that the Egypt - Facebook phenomenon was incredible, and that I couldn't think of any other way that these people could be able to get together and accomplish something without this social network. But as Tom Slee stated, it is just the medium in which the people were able to use to accomplish this task, and if this were to occur in any other era without the aspect of social networking, it would use whatever was available. What we did was only take advantage of the capabilities of Facebook, but the fact is that Facebook is not a supporter of either parties, rather it only provides a method. 

As Tom Slee stated, "If Facebook is a technology that delivers democracy, then we can trust it: more of it can only lead to more democracy. But if Facebook is a cultural phenomenon, then its meaning and role will change...". His point of the fact that Facebook does not exclusively align itself with any parties involved, it is merely a means to an end. In this sense, it cannot be trusted as anyone can make accounts, even fake accounts with aliases, to use it to do whatever they wished. Its effect on this event happened  but was only because the mainstream crowd deemed its uses, and this role changes depending on a specific situation, which makes Facebook actually playing for both teams. 

Of course this does not detract from the fact that it did play an extremely large role in deciding the outcome of the overall situation, but it is only that, and no more. It could have been done with any other method if Facebook was not available, but of course it was great that it does exist. 

Knowledge Map of the Information Economy

"Humanity now seems bent on creating a world economy primarily based on goods that take no material
form. In doing so, we may be eliminating any predictable connection between creators and a fair reward
for the utility or pleasure others may find in their works" (Barlow 4). This economy is what we are striving for in many different digital industries. Have User created and generated content that can directly arrive at the consumers' "hands" without a middle man, or someone who profits from providing the resources. In the material world there is manufacturing, production, and transportation, which makes it so that the average creator will have extremely limited access to this type of market, the is very difficult to penetrate into that type of market. The need for existing wealth and connections makes it difficult.

But with digital user created content distribution, the goal is to get rid of the middle man. "The user-created virtual goods segment consists of activities for producing and selling user-generated virtual items, textures and other artificially scarce virtual objects for virtual environments such as Second Life and Instant Messaging Virtual Universe (IMVU)" (Infodev). This type of digital economy allows those without existing wealth or connections to be able to share their products within a system or online game in order to hopefully make a profit. Of course at this time there is always the middle man, those that provide the service, will take a percentage of the money earned .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAoDsOV_a3Y

Some of the games that support this type of economy at this moment are the Dota 2 (Valve) that can be made for a profit. If one were to make a desirable virtual item, it will be picked by the company to be put up for sale, and Valve will take a portion of the profit. Games such as Little Bit Planet or Infamous 2 also support user created content, but are all offered for free, and creators will not make any profit. Something more different but also ties into the idea of a virtual user created economy is from Diablo 3, where the in-game auction house can be used for in-game currency or real-world money. This creates people who are called "'gold farmers' refers to a game laborer who plays an online game in order to produce virtual currency that can be sold for real money. The first “gold farms”, offices where multiple farmers sit at rows of computers and earn wages by producing virtual currency, probably evolved from gaming cafés" (Infordev). This essentially creates entire teams of people who do nothing, not even really play the game but just try to collect money in game so they can sell that for real money. There are many other types of virtual economy that is bound to surface in the foreseeable future, but what this means is that this is what companies should focus on because its potential is massive, in many industries, not just gaming.

Information Rules

"Nowadays the problem is not information access but information overload. The real value produced by an information provider comes in locating, filtering and communicating what is useful to the consumer" (Varian 6). This quote is interesting because it brings out the fact that we have to wade through tons of useless information to get to what we need. But there is so much information out there that this is very difficult to do. Sure Google has made it much easier to filter content in order to get to our information, but what if net neutrality, the concept that every webpage gets to have equal bandwidth, doesn't play a role anymore. What if someone can just pay money to have their information show up the quickest, or at the forefront of all other information, does this beat out competition in a negative way?

This obviously creates problems since anyone with enough wealth can pay to have their information seen, which may not be the best or even the most relevant information available, but because they shelled out money, they get the attention. Is fair when you might be able to make a website with the "best" information but isn't able to get any views at all because you don't have the funding to pay your way to the top. This stifles innovation, creativity and even quality of content because all you need is money. The Google and Verizon deal is the perfect example of this loss of net neutrality, in which they both agreed that total and complete net neutrality will negatively affect the system. Of course there can be many positives that can come from this , but so much negative can also come from it. It is the doorway for others to jump on this, and bigger corporations will demand more and more that they have higher bandwidth. This basically allows those that are already on top stay ahead of the game while making it extremely difficult for newcomers to penetrate the industry.

Privacy

Privacy is a curious subject, and an extremely interesting one. In this day and age of the digital technologies, we are more and more concerned about privacy and how technology is beginning to strip that away from us. But is it really? Sure technology has advanced to the point where it can do that, but it is still our choice to use that technology to do that. In the first article by Samuelson it talks about how we are using technology to turn ourselves into exhibitionists. We enjoy being in the limelight, to attract attention from anyone and everyone because we seek it. Admit it, we log onto Facebook to see what others are up to. And how do we know what they are up to? Because they choose to post their personal lives and feelings on the internet where almost anyone can go on and see where they are at, what they are doing, and how they are feeling. People talk about their problems, post embarrassing pictures of themselves for others to come to pay attention to them. We shop online, some knowing while some don't, the fact that advertising companies know where we are and even what we like based on search and shopping histories. This is all written in the end user agreement, and sure most of us don't read it, or even pay attention to it and just click agree without a second thought. And yet in the end we blame others for our "loss" of privacy when it's really ourselves who are to blame. Because we are willingly ignoring to choosing to expose ourselves to others using these technologies in which we are putting the blame on. I'm definitively not saying that privacy doesn't matter, all I'm saying is that we are subjecting our own exposure to ourselves and we have to take responsibility, and not blaming others for our ignorance.

The Knowledge Cartel

It's interesting to see David Parry's perspective on the situation that he calls the Knowledge Cartel. He believes that certain big corporations are trying to own everything that they possibly can and make profit off of that. His example of how educations companies and journal publishers such as Elsevier is taking hold of most of the licences on these academic journals, and then in turn making everyone pay for that service, whether it be a subscription or buying an article. He states that this is completely wrong and even though David Parry had more of an extremist view and idea on this situation, i cannot help but agree with him under these circumstances. 

By holding these licences and copyrights to these articles when no one else can have them, they are creating what David Parry is calling an artificial scarcity. But because some people have no other option but buy it from them at a high price, they can create a monopoly in this industry because they can set the price. And if you don't pay them, then you can't get the job done, whether that's for a class or work. Other companies hold these similar rights for textbooks where they can put it at extremely high prices here in the US just because average statistics show that we could afford them at that cost. When in reality students are eating chips and salsa for every meal just to afford a $300 textbook. 

How else are we going to gain this knowledge? These corporations are stifling innovation and further progression because it is limiting only those with enough wealth to buy these books. David Parry's solution of pirating and stealing these articles are a bit extreme. But one can't help but agree with him under these circumstances where there is really no other alternative.

IP and Its Inconveniences

First of all it is never ok to take someone else's information or product as your own. That said there are some laws regarding intellectual property (IP) that is much too strict and restrict the uses even in academic studies. This is especially true in a university setting where the only way students can learn about something is to learn from the past, and that sometimes has to be copying great works that comes before him/her. Fields such as music, literature, and other creative fields of study require the knowledge of those that came before, and to learn from them. Since this is for educational and academic purposes, there is no reason not to let us use these information because we are not receiving any kind of monetary gain from this whatsoever. The sole purpose of this is to learn so that we may better whatever industry we decide to go into. There is almost no downside other than giving credit to the originator of that information. And since plagiarism or not citing the originator is the only crime, there is no reason. Incorrectly citing or forgetting to cite a resources can potentially cost an "innocent" college student millions of dollars in copyright infringement fines. This has happened many times in the past from multinational companies who probably lost little to no profit at all from that student's actions. And since it is only for educational reasons and that student is receiving no monetary profit at all, there should be no problem letting them access to that information.

A great example of this is students of law schools are provided and encouraged to use several databases from large companies who keeps these databases for real lawyers for free in the student's studying years in hopes that once they graduate that they are so used to the service that they will rely on it, and therefore pay for the actual service. This type of action where the service or information is so good that there is no need to be so strict on its policies because people wil be enticed to pay for it. Same can be applied to downloading music. In this remix generation there are so many remakes. A student in the music production and creation fields of study should be able to download music for free in order to learn the intricacies of that soundtrack and how to remix or even just to understand how to create good music.

There are also other laws that state and can be argued that works such as this blog post or even anything that we produce in a college classroom is technically the property of the university in which it was created at. Even though this sounds ridiculous there are many agreements to which we sign that actually state this. Everything that we create in physical form and now, some can be even in virtual form and they are automatically copyrighted under whomever its creator might be. But the university law overwrites that ruling and makes our works into their property. A great example of this is that say you write an amazing essay for a class in an english class for fall semester. Then you take another class for spring semester but another essay requires you to so the same research that you already did the previous semester and have already written a paper on that subject. Now you may think that there is no harm in using the part or most of the original paper because you are the creator and writer of that essay, when in reality that original paper now belongs to the university. And because of this even if you copy your own creation, you will still be punished for plagiarism for using the property of the university. That's right, you can't use your own paper from one class to the next because it technically doesn't belong to you.

It is these areas of academic research and overall strict procedures in which we can use outside and copyrighted material that limits our own learning and creativity. Back in the day Shakespeare used many of his predecessors' works to make his own. So today we should be albe to "stand on the shoulders of giants" in order to progress our own intellect because if we can't learn what has already come before us how can we produce anything that tries to improve upon what we already have? In this respect our work should belong to us and we should also be allowed more freedom in the intellectual property and copyrighted works, because we are only using it for educational means and not for any profitable gain.