The seminar will take place in room 5.6a of Bosworth House on Wednesday 6 May 2009 from 12.30 to 1.45pm. As in previous years, a buffet lunch is provided and all staff and postgraduate students are welcome to attend.
To book a place on this seminar, please contact Suzanne Walker sswalker@dmu.ac.uk or telephone Ext 7780."This analysis of how the ability to participate in society online affects political and economic opportunity and finds that technology use matters in wages and income and civic participation and voting.Just as education has promoted democracy and economic growth, the Internet has the potential to benefit society as a whole. Digital citizenship, or the ability to participate in society online, promotes social inclusion. But statistics show that significant segments of the population are still excluded from digital citizenship.The authors of this book define digital citizens as those who are online daily. By focusing on frequent use, they reconceptualize debates about the digital divide to include both the means and the skills to participate online. They offer new evidence (drawn from recent national opinion surveys and Current Population Surveys) that technology use matters for wages and income, and for civic engagement and voting."Digital Citizenship" examines three aspects of participation in society online: economic opportunity, democratic participation, and inclusion in prevailing forms of communication. The authors find that Internet use at work increases wages, with less-educated and minority workers receiving the greatest benefit, and that Internet use is significantly related to political participation, especially among the young. The authors examine in detail the gaps in technological access among minorities and the poor and predict that this digital inequality is not likely to disappear in the near future. Public policy, they argue, must address educational and technological disparities if we are to achieve full participation and citizenship in the twenty-first century."
I often research things online before I buy it at a store, if it is something easily available. More obscure items (such as art-deco ceramics) I buy online from Ebay etc. If I do buy something online I like to see it first before I buy.
My purchasing identity is currently governed by my spending power - or rather lack of it. I buy very little other than what I consider essential items (e.g. groceries - which I buy from Morrisons because its local and cheap - although this takes up most of my weekly budget!) Consequently, I buy clothes from local charity shops (e.g. Oxfam), books from second-hand book shops (some local and some online) and other consumer goods off ebay (e.g. I just bought a tent to go camping). I research my holiday destinations online (currently UK based due to cost) and then generally book online or by phone. This research consists of using google - by entering location name and type of holiday required (e.g. self-catering), then searching through the results. I prefer to have a good indication of what the place looks like, so only book accommodation that has good range of images - particularly the interiors.
"In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void, a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again.Random House rushed out a new edition to keep up with demand. Booksellers began to promote it next to their Into Thin Air displays, and sales rose further. A revised paperback edition, which came out in January, spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. That same month, IFC Films released a docudrama of the story to critical acclaim. Now Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air more than two to one.
What happened? In short, Amazon.com recommendations. The online bookseller's software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, wrote rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueled recommendations, and the positive feedback loop kicked in.
Particularly notable is that when Krakauer's book hit shelves, Simpson's was nearly out of print. A few years ago, readers of Krakauer would never even have learned about Simpson's book - and if they had, they wouldn't have been able to find it. Amazon changed that. It created the Touching the Void phenomenon by combining infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book."
This all leads to what Chris Anderson (a.k.a The Long Tail) terms as "people power":
First, steam power replaced muscle power and launched the Industrial Revolution. Then Henry Ford’s assembly line, along with advances in steel and plastic, ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution. Next came silicon and the Information Age. Each era was fueled by a faster, cheaper, and more widely available method of production that kicked efficiency to the next level and transformed the world.
Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.
Class Work: Blog Post
Lecture 12: "I am the Long Tail", Name
In your blog post note your own long tail - tell us where you buy your books, dvds, music, groceries, travel, clothing and where do you get your information?
Include an image or screen capture of one of your online retailers and a link to a place where you access information.
(Apologies: I refered to the New Internationalist as an American publication - it's head office is actually in the UK)
Marshall McLuhan - Explorations - 05-18-1960 - The World is a Global Village
For Next Week:
Blog post with audio:
"Is there a tendency to see the west as the origin/centre of globalization and the east as the *victim* that has been globalised (colonised)?"
Notes on Student Presentations:
Andy P
For Next Week:
