The Digital Divide

Jan van Dijk in his book "The Deepening Divide" discusses his thoughts on the digital divide. In his first two chapters he spends a lot fo time discussing the premise of this argument but his third chapter gets down to business and discusses why there might be a percieved digital divide and how motivational access plays a part in that. Van Dijk thinks that there is a reason that some people are not online and it has nothing to do with access to a computer or the internet. He also notes that of those people who don't have access to the net, they know people who are online and can help them out. Motivated access is only one part of the Van Dijk theory on the digital divide.

According to Save the Internet.com there is a much bigger problem. It is true that there are people who do not have access to the internet, but according to this site the bigger problem is that "big companies" are trying to take over the internet (and having some success). "Save the Internet" is, I believe, another way of looking at van Dijk's ideas. Van Dijk says that with there are users out there who try the internet but get frustrated and leave. Imagine if the Big 5 media companies decide to get rid of Net Neutrality (more info on net neutrality found at the Save the Internet website) and give a bigger pipe other compaines that pay for it. While it is a stretch I think that van Dijk might be a proponent of net neutrality and that the only way to narrow and shallow the digital divide is to keep everything as simple as possible (which it is already not but we can pretend).

While this is only my first look at van Dijk and his thoery and the Save the Internet website I can see some parallels between the two, a little more research should show how these two sites compare.

Gender Identity

This weeks reading deals with gender and identifying gender. This weeks author John Edward Campbell, a self proclaimed gay male, talks about gay males in IRC chat rooms (IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, which has decreased in popularity over the past few years, however, it does still exist the most commonly known program used for IRC is mIRC ). While it has decreased in popularity a /list command on one of the servers shows nearly 25000 chat rooms availible to join (although many of them only had one user). To be honest, I found some of what Campbell was talking about to be very confusing. I guess I didn't realize that there were people of a specific gender who had difficulty identifying themselves a specific way. Apparently I don't follow the news closely enough some days, way back on May 3rd the Boston Globe reported that the Vermont Senate had approved a bill that "would prohibit discrimination based on someone's gender identity or expression". The story can be found here and may also contain a reference to this author. I just don't see this as a problem worth government intervention. I found many of John's arguments to be very intersting but, I just don't get where he is going. I also see an inherient problem with IRC and how chats work in general.

Chats can be very ambigious. Typing something to someone can contain many different meanings, you have to really, truely know the person you are talking to, to be able to have a "real" conversation with a person. Let me use a personal example, my girlfriend and I met at my church, but she was only home for a short period of time before heading back up to school in Seattle. We decided to chat over AOL Instant Messanger. The first few times we talked it was rather difficult to determine mood and tone of comments but after we began to get to know each other personally the moods and tones began to show and come through clearly. I wonder if John was careful with this fact, he admits he only personally knows 2 of the subjects. I think he might want to look at this a little more closely. That's all I have for now. Thanks

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.

Class Post for Tuesday May 16, 2006

Perception is everything in this world. Vincent Parillo talks about this in his book "Understanding Race and Ethnic Relations". This directly applies to a major news story that came out last night and early this morning that is the President's new suggestion for illegal immigration. Since November, when Congress (the house side) passed a bill that made it a crime to be an illegal immigrant or help an illegal immigrant, there have been thousands of "immigrants’ rights" protests. The Los Angeles Times has reported on some of the biggest protests because of its interest in the problem, being that it is a Southern California paper. The President is now saying that he will tighten border security by placing members of the United States National Guard on the border. Something that is definitely, to quote one headline, "throwing the hawks a bone". The problem, however, still remains, what do you do with all the illegals already in the country. Last nights speech from the President did not specifically address, but in the past he has said that he would rather let them remain then make them leave.
Personally, I do not have a problem with immigrants in any way shape or form. My great-grandfather immigrated from Russia to Canada (before that they immigrated from Holland to Germany to Russia, although this took place over several generations) and was accepted with open arms. Immigration is not the issue to me in this case. The issue is breaking the law. The United States has laws that are pretty clear as to what you need to do to get into this country, yet we have an estimated 12-20 million illegal immigrants, many of Mexican or Hispanic descent. I’m all for trying to get a better life but I think you should have to do it legally. The problem then becomes the governments of various states want to deal with the problem differently. In Oregon, for example, the Governor has state funded illegal immigration help seminars and police are not allowed to ask the official status of a person when they are pulled over for a police stop. Other states have stricter laws but Oregon seems to be more the norm than the exception. How do we stop the inflow? Follow the president’s ideas, it’s the best one I’ve heard. How do we stop the problem? We never will, the United States is a place many people want to go, for the economic benefit and quality of life increase. Until the appeal leaves illegal immigration is here to stay.
Info gathered from Parillo's book and LA Times news story found here.

Mixed Content Warning

Ok, so, I know I haven't posted in a while but I hope to get some stuff in over the summer. On another note the class I am taking at WSU-V is going to require me to post some stuff about class material. I did consider setting up another page but decided to continue to use this one. If anyone has any questions about the class posts, feel free to email me or post to tagboard and I'll respond asap. Thanks and talk to you all soon.

Several Updates

First, I was just looking through some of my past posts and noticed a couple of changes. Blackberry is here to stay they have solved their suit with NTP (such as it was) for 612 million dollars (give or take a couple hundred thousand). That is just a side note compared to what I have today however. This story also comes from Canada (Blackberry is owned by Research in Motion a Canadian company for those who don't know).
A Canadian senator, which is not elected but appointed for life (till age 75 at least) by the prime minister has shot back a rather rude article to a family in Minnesota. According to the article from CBC.ca a family living in Minnesota wrote to all the Canadian senators decrying the Atlantic Seal hunt (for more info on the Seal hunt from CBC click here. Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette, who claims to be the only senator to respond says (quoting from the article) in her letter back to the family, that they have no right as Americans to decry the seal hunt when there is "the daily massacre of innocent people in Iraq, the execution of prisoners – mainly blacks – in American prisons, the massive sale of handguns to Americans, the destabilization of the entire world by the American government's aggressive foreign policy, etc."
This brings up two points. One, what the hell is a senator doing saying things she obviously knows nothing about. I live in the United States but I was born and raised in Canada. I've been here long enough to know that there aren't any massacres of innocent people in Iraq (I'm not saying the war is right, I'm just saying that many of the deaths are not civilian but military). I know that the death penalty is applied to whites as well as blacks (the good Senator might want to look a prison stats and find out what percentage of the prison population is black and compare those numbers instead). I know that there are a lot of gun sales in the US but come on Senator, it's written in the constitution. The United States doesn't go around telling Canada that it should allow certain things it bans. And what the hell is she saying about destabilization of the entire world. Ummm...excuse me but if there is any destabilization it is in the middle east. I think, while the US government isn't perfect, that it has actually kept the world together, with things like taking the war out of the west and keeping where it belongs with the people who started this whole thing. You want someone to blame Senator, blame the exteremist muslims who think that it's their way or no way. Blame the extremeists who are raising a fuss over a cartoon because it shows their "holy" prophet (that's another subject for another time, someone remind me to write on that). Destabilization of the world, I don't think it has anything to do with American foreign policy but hey, that's just my opinion. Thanks.

Payola Strikes Again

ABC News is reporting that the United States Federal Communications Commision (FCC) is investigating "100's of radio stations" for something called payola. As defined by the ABC website payola is "pay for play". This means that every time a station plays a song they get paid for it, it's an incentive for stations to give more playes to a particular artist than others. This may or may not be serious, however, the FCC seems to be taking it very seriously. The FCC rules say that payola puts station licenses in jeoprady. You can read more at ABCNews.com. This could get interesting.

Follow Up to Superbowl XL

Wow, someone actually read my blog and posted a comment, I'm amazed. Ok, so I want to just clear the air about a few things. Jim (my one reader and commenter) raised some points that I won't dispute but I'm not in entire agreement with. I have a question as a referee, do you believe it is possible to see the football cross the plane of the goal line by 1/4 of an inch? Heck, you think you can tell from a full inch? This is why we have goal reveiw, and again I agree with the call after the review, I just don't think the ref on the field should have made the touchdown call at all. With regards to the offensive pass interferece, my thanks to Jim for explaining the rule more clearly to me. I still do not believe that the Steelers performance was impeded upon however, I don't have a DVR or TiVo so I can't go back and look at the play for the 25th time. I won't go into the holding again because I already have said that Al Michaels and John Madden said there was no hold, I think I'll differ to their call. In my opinion every call that could have been made against Seattle was made, the Steelers did not play a perfect game, in fact they played terrible, they got lucky, with the help of the officials and one interecption, check out Sports Illustrated's report card on the game if you don't believe me. You can't tell me there wasn't a time when the Steelers had a penatly and they didn't get called for it. The offensive pass interference play could have easily been forward pass interference as the defender was grabbing at the reciever the whole entire time (ok, granted this is part of the game but if your going to make stupid calls please make them all stupid). Ok, that's it, I've said my piece two times now, and Jim, I do thank you very much for posting a comment to the blog and I hope that even though you and I do not agree on this particular thing that you continue to vist my blog and post about issues that you find relavent. To the rest of you, ttfn.

Seahawks Lose Superbowl

Ok, I know my blog is like the 4 millionth time you've read about Superbowl XL. I have two words to say and then I will justify them. BAD OFFICIATING! Now, in the interest of fairness, I am, for the purposes of this article, a Seahawks fan (normally, I cheer for Green Bay but I live in the Northwest so I cheer for the Hawks if they do better). I can name 3 major calls that either stole potential points from the Seahawks or were just bad calls. I'll start with the biggest.
Rothinsberger touchdown - I agree with the call that the referee made upon reviewing the tape. However, I don't believe he should have had to review a call at all. The call on the field was incorrect. Steeler gain of 7 points (Seattle loss of 7).
Seattle Offensive Pass Interference - What interference? Oh, I'm turning away from you, I need to turn and your the convient way to do it, but I'm going to get a penalty. Oh, and did I mention that the Steeler player campaigned for the call. I'm sorry, you don't ever, I MEAN EVER do something because a player asks, you're the ref not the players. I've been a ref before (in soccer, but it's the same deal) no matter how many players badger you stick to your guns (Loss of 7 points no matter how you look at it).
Seattle Holding after making it to the 2 yd line - Again, What hold? Heck, even John Madden didn't think there was a hold on that play. (Net loss of 7 potential yards).
Some more minor calls like the Hasselback block after his interception throw (not a penalty). I'm sorry, maybe it's because I'm a fan but this was the absolute worst officiating I have ever seen in the NFL, heck in any sport (ok, maybe not any sport, figure skating and some soccer). But I'm not bitter, ask me in about 3 weeks after the Olympics, I might be bitter then, it will depend on how many medals Team Canada can pull off. Later.