Privacy

We didn’t get to the privacy question, but take it as a given that the distinctions between public and private are being dramatically changed. Internet combined with mobile telephony is the push there. 

In relation to privacy we have these two gems from Betty:

The Internet’s Original Sin – The Atlantic

The Internet's Original Sin – The Atlantic.

This is an article about advertising and the web. From it you will learn a lot about how advertising works online, but it is much more interesting for seeing how the original vision of people like Nelson and the early Internet is present. When I first started, which was at the beginning of the web, there were no .com sites, and advertising didn’t exist online, and it prospered perfectly well. Indeed, *all* the protocols and tools we used then were made and shared for free, as was our content.

Content marketing is ruining the web. Its decline will be poetic justice | JR Hennessy | Comment is free | theguardian.com

Content marketing is ruining the web. Its decline will be poetic justice | JR Hennessy | Comment is free | theguardian.com.

From The Guardian a little riposte on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which got mentioned last week. It is a tad bitter, but in general it is a good article in that it shows how the Web (remember Nelson’s enthusiasm) gets made odd by efforts to commercially exploit it. In this case the only thing being exploited is trying to make Google treat your stuff as more important than it is…

More Literacies

Lisha finds a definition of network literacy (which I find sort of uncanny as to the best of my knowledge Jill Walker and I were the first to coin the term when we wrote an abstract for a conference at RMIT in the early 2000s, the paper never got written unfortunately, a couldabeen moment).

Seonaid I think nails things pretty well about network literacy, and I think the Japanese example at the end is spot on. This is what we call critical thinking, not because it criticises but because it thinks through and with (for you newbie coders, that was the emphasis, aka em tag back there) the terms and implications of an idea.

More Post Symposium Chatter

Rachel has another one about why numbers (quantity) versus who/what (quality) is probably a better measure of authority. Once upon a time one person said the sun was the centre of the solar system. Once upon a time one person said there was a general theory of relativity. Once upon a time many people said Jews, gypsies and homosexuals could be executed on an industrial scale. Extreme examples sure, but in each case if you looked around to see what everyone else was saying, you would have been wrong. Louisa with a tale about vitality and news, which is also why lots of people saying the same thing doesn’t equal it’s true. Mia with another story of how it is not hard to trick people if you address them the right way (and it isn’t). Evan on common sense (it goes a surprisingly long way, and is also so easily dissolved), and finally Kelsey has an excellent list of things to pay attention to.

Thickness of Ideas

A lot going on here in Monique’s post. The intriguing thing becomes the new distribution of expertise, with two consequences. How do we now determine expertise, and what do the old experts (who relied on place, not necessarily knowledge) now do about expertise? One answer is that you can find a blog, by an expert, on any topic, and the information and knowledge is extraordinary. The other answer is that the old institutions that safe guarded expertise will often insist (more and more loudly) that they are the ones who have this expertise, or knowledge, or know how, and the others are frauds. The one’s that make the loudest noise are probably the ones with the most to lose, most quickly right now (movie studies and ‘piracy’, Rupert Murdoch and any public media, those insisting books will survive as sales of paper bound books continue to decline).

Après Symposium

George on validity of things. For me this is ‘validity of things’ and not ‘validity of things online’. The rules we use off line apply online too. Laura makes the well made point that literacies are a continuum, and Natalie wonders is we really need worry too much and is the internet quite, well I guess have the impact we’re saying. My own view is obvious, that horse has bolted. Not just the internet, most of the apps on your phone rely on the internet (for example). Just make a list of what you do, each day, that involves the internet, and be surprised. (And some of these things don’t involve you.) Alexandra found the discussion of validity interesting, I don’t think popularity is a good judge at all, but will talk about that next week (as Kony2012 demonstrates well, thank you Sophie). Amy also picks up the quantity mode of validity, I’m going to need to have some things about this next week I see. Louis thinks the metaphor of book versus code is broken. It isn’t a metaphor though, it is literally the case. You can write a book, with simple basic ingredients (pen, paper), I work with people who build entire complex websites and databases with dynamic scripts with a text editor, that’s it. Luke on wikipedia and validity, some good points.

(Note to me and readers. This is one of those moments where the blogs are interesting. Personally, as someone who has been very online since about 1992 – before visual Web browser if you can imagine such a time – the validity of online stuff is just, for me, a no brainer. Trivial. So the number of posts where you have said that was really interesting and valuable and useful just leaves me sort of gobsmacked. I just assumed this was a trivial question and problem for people who pretty much have only known a world with an internet. How wrong I was. And even more worried about what the heck you get taught in high school. This is why I’m not a fan on gatekeeping so much, you can’t learn how to test validity if the only things you’re ever allowed to see have already been vetted. It really matters, simply because the world does now run online.)