Participation and You!

So according to Time Magazine, You are the 2006 person of the year. But how did we all do it, how did we get there?

Of course Time Magazine was calling attention to the increase of user-generated content online. Sites like Youtube, Myspace, Wikipedia, Forums, Blogs, all revolve around user-generated content.

An issue that van Dijck points out in the Users Like You? article is that these sites are all mediators of content. Sure, I can upload a video to Youtube, but will anyone watch it? It depends on what Youtube decides to do with it. Will it be a featured video, or will Miley Cyrus be featured instead? Will it be 'recommended' to certain users? Well, that depends on "high-tech algorithms".

What van Dijck is suggesting here, is that user-generated content is still at the mercy of the commercialised leanings of these sites (well, perhaps not Wikipedia). Youtube, Myspace, Blogs, and much other site hosting is for-profit, either through advertising or data-mining. Even now, as I use InternetExplorer (because Firefox was having issues with Blogger), my default search engine is Bing; even the interface through which the internet is accessed is influenced by commercial, parent company, interests.

I guess what I'm getting at here is the myth of the democracy of the internet. Sure, everyone can have their say, can generate a video, or post a comment, maybe even contribute to a blog. But who is reading? What determines redirections from (default) search engines, to access the site? And once on a site (such as Youtube) how is the user-generated content orgainsed and advertised? We can all contribute online, that is not the problem. The problem is in how the viewers access; who determines how the viewers get linked through the masses of user-generated content.

Online then, where free-speech and user-generated content is widespread, (to the point of 'over-filling' online environments,) power comes not from controlling who says what, but from controlling who hears what.

So according to the Time Magazine cover, we "control the information age". Well, maybe. But if so, it's a control mediated through Google search algorithms, data-mining, user-specific advertising, and economically orientated content promotion.

(But hey, we still made the cover of Time Magazine!)

Pornography : Prosumer in our era

Well, who hasn't visited a pornographic websites before?

Recently, there's bunch of news about hollywood celebrities' home-made porno is leaking outwards onto the internet. This is nothing new for us. It seems that internet become the biggest 'exporter' for pornographic materials. Through new media platforms such as the Internet, we get exposed to millions of sexual materials that challenge our sense of morality and the discourse of identity.

As mentioned in class before, pornography is the leading economic driver for internet growth. I am arguing here that how pornographic changes our identity, perspectives and our society today. Sex has always seen as a taboo, and pornography has always been identify as a taboo because it is sex that is divorced from its original emotions, which is 'love' (Geoffrey Gorer). The society before our era treated pornography as something that is shameful, guilty and filthy. But with the invention of internet and its ability to reach billion of people, the discourse of pornography seems to be going through a drastic change. Our world is bombarded with informations, images, topics and conversations about sex. This is due to the change of media platform through out the years; pornography were originally circulated within the public through traditional printing medias, such as books, papers and et cetera. But when it switch to operates on internet, it floods the world and reach out more widely than it was on printed medium.

This widespread effect has an impact on us in a macro and a micro ways: such as our society on a macro level; as well as our identity on a micro level. Pornography are no longer exclusive to be produce only by big film companies, but at this stage, the notion of 'prosumer' emerged and more and more normal, ordinary people in the society started to produce their own pornography materials, and they actually become products that other people can buy online. That links to my second point, where our identity and relationship with online pornography has been re-constructed. The traditional notion of intimacy no longer have the same meaning, as more and more individuals started to share their intimacy relationship online with billions of other people; and individuals in the society are most likely to get their sexual impressions, educations and stereotypes from online pornographies. Thus, online pornography structured our relationship as well as our attitude with and towards sex.

What really struck me was the increasing amount of homemade pornography materials nowadays. Internet can easily circulate products, informations and so on easily. Therefore, individuals in the society get exposed to different materials that they have never encounter before. Internet re-shape our sense of intimacy, and construct sex as something that does not comes with any consequences, and it can be derived from emotions. In the end, sex becomes a product on the internet, and everyone can just buy it without much thinking. The frightening side of this is that, sex no longer seen as something that is just between two person or a private matter; new media platform offered us a way to commodify even our sexual intimacy.

Online pornography have shifted our perspectives and identity in a subtle but drastic way. We no longer view sex as a taboo, and sex can become a commodity to be buy and sell. The anonymity features of internet also contribute to the fact that anyone can buy or sell anything obscene without worrying one's identity getting exposed.

An advise for people that decided or going to publish your intimate moment of you and your partner : once your material get online, it will never go offline...FOR LIFE.