Final Presentation Topic

Over the past several days I have been racking my brain trying to come up with a final presentation. While I'm, even at this point, still not sure what I want to report on I think I have an idea. I know that there have been several studies done on diversity in media. I will look specifically at the media of Television. Some of the questions I plan to answer are how often are minorities shown? What role do the minorities play? What is the comparisson between minorities displayed on TV and minorities in population? Should this, if found to be disproportionate, be changed to better match the population of the nation? I plan to keep it within the context of the United States and maybe a little of Canada. If I should be looking at this from another angle, I'm more than happy to add that in. As I said, I know studies exist that will back up this type of presentation. Thank you very much.

Cyber Types

This weeks reading is taken from Lisa Nakamura and her book Cybertypes, which is a word invented by this author. The problem with this weeks reading, however, is that there is very little on the topic in way of current events. Much of Chapter 3, which I must say I did enjoy immensly, talks about the cyberpunk era of time from the first generation in the mid 1980's to the second generation in the 1990's. The problem is there is just no news right now about race, ethnicity and identity on the internet. Of the few internet related stories I could find all were about programs or companies warring against each other. Yahoo Instant Messenger is spreading a worm attack around the web, something that is indiscriminant because it's a program. My Space is coming under competitive fire as AOL plans to release it's own version of the very same thing and a phisher was sentenced to 21 months in jail for attempting to dupe MSN customers. All of these stories have little or nothing to do with race or ethnicity.

There is however, one more story that I would like to look at called Web inventor says brainchild is ready for big leap. Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented and gave away the World Wide Web says that it is poised to take off but he cautions users to be careful and fight internet crime. He also talks about premium content and the fact that the United States wants to charge money for faster connections. While he agrees in principle with the theory and the right of the country he says, "I tried then to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral platform." He thinks that all the internet is created equal and should be shared by all.

This is an interesting take on Nakamura, who does not address this data control much at all, she is more concerned with the human aspect instead of the technological aspect. This is likely a function of the books age and not intentional, but I thought it was a very interesting look at the internet through the eyes of it's creator.