Google Knows Everything

         Google is one of the most recognizable brands let alone websites in the world.  The power of Google is unmatched in the world wide web and there is a reason for that.  Google became a public website in 2004, and since then it has made its was to being the most successful website to date.  On November 10, 2010, Google had an estimated net worth of $163.2 billion (ironically, I Googled that).  But what did Google do different than other search engines to gain the top spot?  Siva Vaidhyanathan states it best in his introduction to The Googlization of Everything by saying, “Google was clean. It was pure.... And it offered what seemed to be neutral, democratic rankings: if one site was referred more than another, it was deemed more relevant to users and would be listed above the rest.  And so the biggest, if not the best, search engine was created.”

With Google sitting in pole position of search engines, it has access to collect all website in the digital universe.  By creating a facebook or twitter account, we allow google to collect our personal information, ultimately creating a lack of privacy.  Vaidhyanathan uses an example of the “star wars kid” where a teen uses a school camera to record himself wielding a golf ball retriever as a light saber.  Other kids get a hold of the video and post it on the internet, allowing the video to be one of the most popular internet sensations of our time.  Many remakes were made like the one I posted.  Google made it impossible for the young teen to erase his harmless video and it allowed other websites to host the video.  The surveillance of Google makes it impractical for anyone to go completely invisible.  After class on thursday, I decided to google my name to see what was out there.  To my surprise, there was an old web page that my friend made about an old band that we made as a joke.  It’s weird to think about whenever anyone googles my name in the future, that website will be on the first page of the google search even though it was just a joke when we were in middle school.

Overall, Google makes searching the web much more efficient than it had been in the past.  But with the power that it has gained over the years, it grabs any information floating around in the world wide web.  I understand that It may be hard to focus on what information we are sharing with the world when we are updating our facebook profiles.  But the positive aspects that Google provides to our everyday life outweigh the lack of privacy it comes with.  With that said, we must be aware of what we share with the world wide web and consider power of Google when we do expose ourselves to the web.

Music Pirates

If I were to take a poll in class where everybody answered honestly, I would have to assume that almost every student, if not all students have illegally downloaded music at least one time in their lives.  Does this mean we are stamped with the title “pirates”?  In his book Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig defines the term piracy as “using the creative property of others without their permission”.  So technically, yes we are pirates.  But this seems to be a pretty broad definition of piracy and I would even argue that we (the people casually downloading free music online) aren’t necessarily the pirates in this situation.

Behind all of these innocent, poor, students who are downloading free music illegally are specific websites that encourage online piracy.  These peer-to-peer or P2P networks share a wide variety of media including music, movies, television shows, and even pornography.  These networks allow a free way to get what people would usually have to pay for.  Sounds pretty appealing to a college student paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, doesn’t it?  Some may argue that it is wrong to steal music from artists who are working hard to put out this music, that it is only fair to the musicians if we buy their music.  

Actually, free downloads online benefit the artists if anything.  Janis Ian, a successful recording artists who thrived in the 60s and 70s puts this argument in perspective by saying, “When Napster was running full-tilt, we recieved about 100 hits a month from people who’d downloaded Society’s Child or At seventeen for free, then decided they wanted more information.  Of those 100 people (and these are the only ones who let us know how they’d found the site), 15 bought CDs.  Not huge sales, right? No record company is interested in 180 extra sales a year.  But... that translates to $2700, which is a lot of money in my book.  And that doesn’t include the ones who bought the CDs in stores, or who came to my shows.”  We see this strategy being used more and more in today’s music industry.  Non mainstream hip-hop artists like Curren$y release numerous mixtapes online for free.  In doing this, it expands his fan base by word of mouth and easily accessed music.  Last year, Curren$y made $1,000,000 on his tour alone.  Coincidence? I think not.

On another note, I read an article a couple years back on USA TODAY about college students getting sued for having illegally downloaded music on their computers.  The RIAA was suing students up to $18,000 dollars.  Its not the artists that are concerned about their music getting distributed for free online, but the billion dollar record companies.  These bloodthirsty companies suing students of almost a years tuition.  That seems more harmful than downloading a couple songs a week to me. So ask yourself, who is the real “pirate” here?

The Fantastic World of Flickr

This weeks agenda allowed us to dip our toes into the Flickr community.  I was not sure what to expect during this project, but I was interested to see what Flickr had to offer and it seemed that my group felt the same way.  We had a lot of fun with this project and created a twisted story about a love gone wrong.  We tried to embellish some characteristics of the horror genre, considering halloween is coming up in a couple of weeks.

The story starts out with me and Max enjoying a beautiful day at the river.  A quick change of events takes place when I find out that Max has been cheating on me, and we experience a rough break up.  Shawn is there right away to console me through the tough times and we spark up a fiery relationship quickly.  While I am using Shawn to get over the tough break up, Max uses quite a different strategy.  Max can’t quite cope with the guilt and the happiness I have found, so he decides to buy a murder weapon off the black market from Ben.  Quickly after, Max catches me alone in a secluded area and brutally stabs me to my death.  Shawn then comes to surprise me with a bouquet of flowers to find me lying dead.  As Shawn stands there in shock, you can see Max in the background ready to take out Shawn as well.

This was my first experience with Flickr and I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be.  Uploading our photo stream was easy and quick and the photo tagging was easily accessible.  The tagging is nice because it has the potential to easily share your photos with many people.  We chose just to tag our names based on whether we were in that certain picture or not.  Although thats how we tagged, you can also tag keywords, places, ect.  This allows people to use Flickr as a way to share their photography through many photostreams.  Whether photography is just an interest, a hobby, or a profession, it is a useful tool to share your photos with others.

Thanks to Flickr, people with photography hobbies have the capability to use the website as a virtual art gallery.  Photographers such as Laretta Houston and Daniel Krieger were mentioned in our reading as “Joe Schmo to pro” photographers.  This meaning that they joined Flickr as amateurs and were able to develop the techniques to become talented professional photographers.  Flickr doesn’t only allow you to share your photos on the web, but it “facilitates and speeds up the learning process” of photography by users sharing their knowledge.  Today, we usually see social networking as a waste of time and a bad habit, but Flickr offers a more productive form of networking and that is why I think it will popular website for years to come.

Mutual Respect Piracy

When we first mentioned the term “piracy” in class, the first thing that came to my mind was downloading free music and file sharing.  Considering that the majority of our class has some sort of experience in downloading music online and file sharing, I thought it was an appropriate topic to discuss in this blog.  In Lawrence Lessig’s book, Free Culture, he defines piracy as “using the creative property of others without their permission”.  So necessarily, this term isn’t only directed at the illegal music downloaders, it is also directed at the artists themselves.  This includes industries of film, radio, cable TV, and probably the most prevalent industry of piracy we see today; recorded music.

In Lessig’s chapter titled “Pirates”, he argues that “The Beatles have less control over their creative work than Grisham does.”  Time and time again we can see this exampled in the music industry today.  While authors of books have almost exclusive rights of their work, recording artists face very limited rights to theirs.  For example, the hit hip-hip song of last year “Black and yellow” by Wiz Khalifa http://www.youtube.com/watchv=UePtoxDhJSw&ob=av3e. There were so many remakes of this song using the same beat and almost none of the artists remaking the songs got permission from Wiz Khalifa (the recording artist) or Stargate (the producer).  Although Wiz had virtually no control over this, the remakes were being made faster than you could watch them.    However, even though these artists were using the same beat as the original “Black and yellow, they weren’t breaking the law because they weren’t making any profit.

This is seen on a daily basis in the music industry, especially that of hip-hop.  This lack of control over your creative work in hip-hop can actually be viewed as a good thing.  It allows a gain of popularity of the specific song, artist, or producer.  I can guarantee if you ask Wiz Khalifa how he feels about all of the remakes of “Black and Yellow”, he would say it is a good thing.  “Black and Yellow” was his first big hit and now thanks to some of the remakes (including Lil Wanye’s Packer remix) helped him become one of the biggest stars in the music industry.  artists seem to make the “your song gets popular, my song gets popular” approach. In essence, the lack of control over your songs has turned into a mutual respect piracy.

YouTube: a Digital Billboard

In the past five years or so, YouTube has emerged as one of the most recognizable websites known today.  Not only is it used as an easy way to broadcast yourself, but it is also a giant media outlet.  It is another way for mainstream companies to advertise their products.  Amanda Lotz explains in her book Television will be revolutionized “By late 2006, it remained unclear whether the flurry of amateur video was merely a passing trend or likely to revolutionize television”.  She continued to state that amateur videos have become a part of our culture.

People today can essentially make a small living of posting videos on YouTube.  After talking to my friend who has been paid by YouTube, I realized just how much it was connected with the mainstream media.  He told me that he got a letter from Google offering him a small partnership in YouTube because he had over 200 subscribers and a lot of views on his videos.  This means that he allowed YouTube to post those little advertisements on his videos like you see on a lot of YouTube videos.  He then gets paid (very small amounts) from YouTube, who gets paid from the companies that are advertising their products on the videos.

Although my friend doesn’t make a lot of money off of YouTube, I was wondering how much is it possible to make.  How much to the really popular YouTubers make? After doing some research i found some interesting information.  Rebecca Black has over 43 million views on her “Friday” music video and she has made $30,000 dollars.  Also, out of the top 10 most viewed videos on YouTube, eight are posted by VEVO channels.  So how does VEVO make their money? You guessed it, ads.