As for my contributions to the wiki, I worked on many of the pages by editing content and text throughout the wiki. I was responsible for correcting grammatical errors and adding in more content when it was necessary.
Lax: I edited the entire page, along with adding in the key terms section and the picture that goes along with the key terms
Collective Intelligence: I added in examples.
Distributed Contribution: I added in content and video
Transmedia Navigation: I taught myself how to embed the video in html.
I am most proud of my ability to understand the readings and content from reading my classmates’ blog posts and being able to contribute these ideas into the wiki. I wish I had time to expand more on Jenkins. I find the other aspects, besides the ones that I was assigned, and would have loved to put more thought into it. I also wish I had been able to revise the design of the wiki itself. I got stuck on being able to add in more examples than the ones that were already given to us in the readings. Some concepts seem more difficult to understand with the examples that were provided so coming up with new ones posed a problems. As a collaborative writer, I learned that I’m very critical of others work when I don’t necessarily need to be. I also learned that I’m good a problem solving when I had to teach myself how to embed the html video codes into the wiki. I want to work on looking deeper into the content to create a better understanding of things and being able to relay that content to others.
For the wiki, I contributed to the Collective Intelligence and the Distributed Cognition pages.
Collective Intelligence:
Another example of collective intelligence in this wiki assignment. As a class, we are all pooling our knowledge and our abilities to use research and the materials provided to us in this class to make this assignment successful. The key to this project is us working together. As individuals, we don’t know everything, so by collectively coming together, we are all adding more information that another classmate might have missed. We are also adding perspectives that other classmates might not have thought about.
Distributed Cognition:
Augmented Reality Video Games allow users to create a new reality every time they interact with the program. Software has been improved in such a way that a gamer can be looking through the screen of a gaming device (PSP, PS3, etc), see their own reality, but have extras added into it. AR games create fictional realities within the games themselves. People who create games like these are challenging the world around them and using the tools that they have to create new forms of intelligence.
Copyrighting has been something that’s been ingrained into my mind since high school. My teachers always stressed the importance of giving credit when credit is due. If someone works hard at something, they deserve to not have other people try to write it off as their own. I was surprised at the length that copyright laws last, but I do feel like it’s fair. I’ve known about the websites Flickr and Soundcloud, but I didn’t know they were called Creative Commons. I use sites like these on a regular basis to view the work of others or to find new musical artists that I may like. I love photography so on Flickr especially, I like to view the works of other artists. Although copyright laws, fair use policies, and creative commons can be annoying and frustrating at times because it limits access to certain media, they’re important to have so that the work of others is respected.
Poverty and Inequality: Poverty can absolute or relative. How thresholds of poverty are defined is contentious – what are basic minimum living standards? Relative poverty is defined in terms of inequalities: the poor in a wealthy country are likely to be better off than poor in a developing country.
Information society: a society where access to and manipulation of information becomes the key determinant of one’s place in society
Industrial society: a society where position depends on social relations under capitalism
Agrarian Society: a society where position depends on feudal relations such as land ownership
Meritocracy: a social order in which each individual acquires social status on the basis on merit: skill, ability and effort, rather than gender or class. Superficially a fairer society, the notion is in reality hypothetical due to complexities of defining merit and tends to cement social position, cosigning ‘non-elite’ members of society to unfulfilling manual labor.
Technological determinism: a belief that technology develops independently of society and in so doing is the central cause of consequent social ‘impacts’. Widely challenged, nevertheless the idea is found in many historical account of social change and lies behind countless predictions of future social trends.
Brief Summary
In this article, the author focuses on the inequality that exists among nations when it comes to access to new media. Equality of outcome tries to break the divide between the rich and the poor so that both have a greater chance of having access to digital technologies. Equality of opportunity is concerned with helping the poorest people and using policy to help them rise on the social ladder. This approach would have no effect on those that already have that access. One big problem with policy is that the more they venture into the digital world, the more they are widening the gap between those who have access to the technology and those who do not.
Ex: Accessing tax returns via internet, commercial transactions, etc.
Access to technology isn’t the only thing that will help break the divide. People have to have the willingness to want to be in the digital world and have the knowledge to use the technology. If you have access, but do not know how to use it, then there is no point in having it all.
Questions w/ Discussion:
Is this use and access of digital media that important to the society that we live in?
In my opinion, yes. We do live in a meritocratic society because we do perceive value as being able to access digital media and the way that we use it throughout our everyday lives. Those who use it more are seen as being higher up in society’s standards and those who don’t use it as over are seen as being out of the loop. In this generation, I’m not sure if poverty is a main factor in why the divide is so large. Many people just have no desire to engage in digital technology for various reasons.
Can access to new media technology create a more equal society?
I think that it would only create a more equal society if people were more open to using it. Those who grew up before the technology have very little interest in entering the digital world and see no reason to step outside of their comfort zone.
Works Cited
Lax, Stephen. Access Denied in the Information Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,, 2011.
