YouTube videos of the pepper spray incident shed light on campus police taking extreme measures to clear away non-violent protesters.

Education is very important to the citizens of the State of California. For a long time, tuition had been free or very inexpensive to residents of the state who were accepted at the University of California (UC) System. It is part of the California culture that low-cost higher education is a right and not a privilege. Within the past years due to a major budget crisis, the state has significantly increased tuition for its UC schools. A significant increase in tuition was one of the main reasons students have recently protested as part of the Occupy UC Davis movement.

While tuition increases have been protested in the past, the Occupy UC Davis movement has gained special attention due to social media. On November 18, campus police used pepper spray as self-defense on non-violent student demonstrators. The pepper spray incident was caught on video and uploaded to YouTube. The video went viral, and it gained national and international attention as the campus community and nation scrutinizes what went wrong. The incident even caught the attention of Jon Stewart, satirist and host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central who mocked the event on his show, stating there were better ways than pepper spray to get the attention of college students, like free tacos or Green Day in the quad.

College students are heavy social media users. Student protesters are heavily utilizing social media, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, creating wikis, and blogging. Social media gave them power to communicate what happened, and because of its viral nature, news of the event spread quickly to many people, including people across the country and across the globe. This is a paradigm shift in power from few distributing information to many, to many creating and distributing information. 

Campus administration and others with high authority roles on campus, including Chancellor Linda Katehi, do not implement social media the same way the students do. People like the chancellor have less time available to interface with social media and tend to rely on more traditional communication devices, including email, press releases, and websites. The chancellor’s staff assists her with communication duties, including sending and answering emails, facilitating her blog, and writing speeches. While Chancellor Katehi emailed the campus community after the pepper spray incident occurred, several hours had passed while her email statement made its way through the appropriate channels before it could be sent to all students, faculty and staff. While her email had an air of authority, the lag in time opened the opportunity for information from other sources to fill in the gaps of what happened. Timeliness of a message is important. Breaking the story first, whether completely accurate or not, is worth more now than it ever use to be due to social media.

There are positive and negative consequences of social media, including the speed and accuracy of the message. This includes accuracy of the message context. Other important issues include an increased participation and awareness, increased two-way interaction between sender and receiver, and an increased authority given to messages that appear online. By examining these issues, I hope to better understand social media’s role in the events that unfolded surrounding the Occupy UC Davis pepper spray incident.

Emerging Media Topic

Because these are my first final papers as a Graduate Student, I am a bit anxious.  Luckily, I have been able to nail down a good paper topic that I feel comfortable researching and presenting.  I will be doing my paper about:

Are iPads Suitable Substitutes for Manuals, Textbooks and Other Paper Documents in the Business and Educational World?

This topic will allow me to present information relating to how people in education and business have fared in the past utilizing paper documentation as well as present how iPads can make life easier.

I know people who like to redecorate. One of the ways they find inspiration is to use one picture, pillow, rug or piece of furniture and then design the room around this piece.  A similar opportunity afforded itself to me.  As I was researching a similar topic for another course, I came across an article by the Air Force:

While working on this one project is important, the process overall has been enlightening in many ways. The past two weeks have been spent in contemplation of what my (3) final projects will be about.  What started out as separate thought processes has coalesced into a realization that all that I do while here at UW Stout is of value farther down the line. 

As I was perusing topics on graduate studies on the internet, I stumbled across an article at the Dartmouth Writing Program website relating to Writing a Thesis. The information presented, though quite simple, is also very powerful. It de-mystified the process for me and urged me to begin “thinking” about how I want to finish.

To this end, I am designing a data base to house information relating to my time at UW Stout – more particularly to organize and add notations to articles, books, chapters, magazines and other print media (both on the internet and hard copy).  I really think that by doing a lot of reading, making a few notes here and there and being able to search and re-read, I can save an enormous amount of wasted time later on and have a much better understanding of my choices when the time comes.

Once I have a workable version, I would be happy to share it with anyone else that would like to use this as a tool.

I wanted to check in quick to mention my topic for the final paper. I plan to explore companies that sell technolgy-based products or services and their use of social media and related technologies within their business. Specifically, I’d like to look at blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.

Interesting! My thought is: if they’re still using other tools to communicate internally, will it really save time or is it just shifting that time to other communication methods?

I chose to research the question, “Has the advancement in communication technologies i.e. texting, social networking, email, skype, etc. made an overall positive or negative impact on our society?” There is so much information to sort through on this topic, which is great, but I’m finding myself sifting through a lot of opinion based articles rather than factual information. I think in some ways I may be able to utilize bits and pieces of the opinion based articles for supporting details, since the opinions are from members of our society. I will be interested to see what ends up to be my final product!

Good luck to everyone on their final papers, only a few weeks left of the semester! Break is almost here!

Chapter 9

“As an ethnical frame of being in this world, it is not only natural to us, but also transparent and invisible.”

At the beginning of the chapter, Katz and Rhodes talk about whether or not it’s hypocritical to refers to their clients in a different way in internal or external communication. When I worked for Target as an assistant manager, they referred to their employees as “team members” and the customers as “guests.” Early on in the training process, I was actually corrected by an intern from corporate for using the incorrect terms. ha! My point is, Target used these terms internally and externally, which I appreciated for consistency, even if it did seem a little (okay, a LOT) like corporate fluff.

“…the virtual reality of media has become as real as, or more real to us than the tangible world” (p. 238). That’s a pretty bold statement that would be interesting to research. For me, I don’t think that’s the case at all. Granted, I don’t participate in too many forms of social networking and I’m far from being plugged in all the time (except for at work, when I stare at a computer screen for the majority of the day…blah!) and it would be interesting to know how many people do feel that way.

Katz and Rhodes talk about how the words and structure we use in email reveal our relationship with the person we’re sending the email to. For me, in the work place, this is very true. There are some co-workers I can write an email to in 10 seconds and not give it a second thought, while there are others, I have really think about how I structure sentences and word things, not to mention re-reading it over and over before I hit send, because of the nature of the subject and who it’s being sent to. Another factor that causes me to pause is the fact that emails are permanent to some degree, so what you type can be forwarded, printed and passed on, so if there’s something really sensitive, it’s sometimes best to pick up the phone or talk to someone face-to-face.

Technology is not new. For instance, a fountain pen is technology, and it has been around for over a thousand years. Fountain pens replaced writing with quills. Fountain pens were replaced by typewriters, and typewriters were replaced by computers. A person cannot call a computer ethical or not ethical, just as they would not call a hammer ethical or unethical. Technology is not advancing itself. It is people behind it that are driving it. People who make a website may try to achieve certain results, like increase visitor traffic. A computer isn’t the means to this end, but the people behind it are.

The Katz and Rhodes article also misses the point of technology, which is to improve the quality life for humans. The introduction of digital technology has not changed ethics. Ethics is fundamentally the same. I agree with the authors that technology’s impact is greater than it was in the past (p. 231), but this does not necessarily change how we determine what is ethical. For example, if a student decides to cheat on an exam, is it any more or less ethical if the student cheats on the exam with a smartphone than with notes written on the palm of his hand? Both are ethically wrong. The only difference is one involves digital technology.

I have an example from work that might fit into this category. A week or so ago my Vice President/Chief Information Officer decided she did not want to do her weekly e-newsletter that was sent to all of our staff anymore. Instead, she decided to start blogging and sharing information on Google+. By blogging and using Google+, my VP/CIO is saving time, but it she is hurting the rest of the organization because people are now responsible for actively seeking her announcements. In the past, they would have her announcements delivered right to them.

In addition, her newsletter always contained staff updates (e.g, who’s leaving now). Now, she wants us to post staff updates on Google+. I can see this as an ethical issue because staff updates should be private and Google+ by nature is not private because people can share posts with others.

I think the most important aspect when using e-mail is to remember that the person(s) you sent the e-mail to can also send that e-mail message to other people. I think this is why it is very important to be ethical and professional in all e-mail communications. The important thing that I’ve learned is that just because I authored and e-mail, it doesn’t mean that I own it and have control over who views it.

Privacy, Trust, and Disclosure—I thought this was a great article. I pretty much shop online whenever I can and if I don’t trust the company that I’m buying from, I will not purchase anything. I trust Ebay because they’ve always refunded my money when something has gone wrong with a different company that sold me an item through their Web site.

Trust

In August, I ordered some seat covers for my golf cart. The company that I bought them from through Ebay sent me the wrong items. I e-mailed the company to get my money back. The company wanted me to pay for the return shipping and then they would refund my money. I told the person that I was e-mailing that I didn’t trust them so I wasn’t going to pay for shipping with the hope that I would get all my money back. The company told me that I can trust them but I didn’t because trust takes a long time to develop in a relationship.

If you’re a company and selling things online, you need to make sure that people get what they expect. If customers are receiving what they expect then they will trust your company and buy more items from you in the future.

I found this reading to be both interesting and frustrating. I disagree with many of their ideas about the ethical frames of technical relations.

I do not believe in the false frame. The Platonic belief that technology only an “imitation of Knowledge” (p. 233), is not entirely accurate. Technology is the result of knowledge. As such, I do believe that technology fits in the tool frame, “as mechanisms and systems to help their users meet their work goals” (p.234). I can even buy into the means-end frame because it makes sense that technology can be used for “production and profits” and “meeting technical requirements of the technology” (p. 234).

As for the autonomous frame: just no. Their questions, “Have you ever noticed how some systems…are more adapted to themselves, more focused on their own efficiency than on the human being who is the ostensible…user?” (p.234). That argument completely dismisses the role of agency and volition. It’s not the computers that are focused on their own efficiency: it is the people who programmed the computers. Taking agency out of the question renders the argument invalid.

Thought frame is less ridiculous. We do use machines as external extensions of our memories, like phones and PDAs. People, admittedly, even have machines within themselves (pacemakers, hearing aids). However, at my work at least, we do not “…refer to people, things, and actions with words like information, function, connection, transmission, input, output, processing, short-term and long-term memory, and noise in the system…” (p. 236). These terms aren’t exclusive to digital technology. Every one of them existed before the advent of computers. Applying them to a new paradigm is fine, but their logic doesn’t work.

The being frame is a result of the preceding frames. Since many of those are fallacious, the being frame doesn’t hold a lot of water for me. I do believe that people are depersonalized and are often treated as “standing reserve,” but that concept is not acknowledged, nor is it easily proven.

One of the parts that was most interesting to me, and not entirely preposterous, is their proposal that our relationships with machines may go from an “I-It” relationship to an “I-You” relationship, which means that at some point we may refer to machines as other sentient, self-aware beings. I can see that happening if machines become more autonomous and are programmed with beliefs. I do not see this happening in our lifetime. The technology might be there, but acceptance of it is doubtful.

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Now for the fun part.

Background information: In my study of memes, I came across a team of folks (Autotune the News) who take daily news, autotune the speakers in the news clips, and set the fabricated “singing” to music.

They might be best known for setting to music the rant of Antoine Dodson, a citizen of Huntsville, Alabama, who was interviewed for a news story about someone breaking into his family’s apartment and attempting to assault his sister.

Autotune the news “songified” the incident:

The folks at Autotune the News have an app that lets you “songify” yourself. This week’s readings talked about how “humans and technology (often merged)” would have relationships with one another.

I decided to preempt this merging and created a song from a paragraph in our text. I read it into an iPad and here is the result. Yes, this is me “singing.” Lyrics are included if you want to sing along. Machine Me