Crowdsourcing Policy on Facebook?

Last week facebook tried to pull a fast one on it's users and changed the end license user agreement to include that once content is posted to the site, it belongs to facebook - even after one ends their relationship with the site and takes down their profile. As if facebook's licensing agreement wasn't already problematic enough - this added insult to injury and the public reacted in a fierce way. The site instantly "took it back" due to public pressure.

Today I logged on to facebook for a little socializing "light" and found this at the top:

Terms of Use Update

Today we announced new opportunities for users to play a meaningful role in determining the policies governing our site. We released the first proposals subject to these procedures – The Facebook Principles, a set of values that will guide the development of the service, and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that governs Facebook’s operations. Users will have the opportunity to review, comment and vote on these documents over the coming weeks and, if they are approved, other future policy changes. We’ve posted the documents in separate groups and invite you to offer comments and suggestions. For more information and links to the two groups, check out the Facebook Blog.

HMMMM.....

So, what I am trying to figure out is if this format fits Brabham's crowdsourcing model? Instead of forcing policy on the users, they are using their site as a medium to encourage public participation in their policy making. Awesome! The main difference I see between this and other crowdsourcing models such as Threadless is that facebook is posing the problem, yet they are also posing solutions as opposed to Threadless who asks for the T-shirt designs, then the crowd submits, critiques and votes on those designs. Of course, policy issues need to be more narrowly tailored, but I wonder if the policies they are proposing will disengage users from participating. In retrospect, I am pretty sure this isn't crowdsourcing, but it is transparency which is a new thing for profit making business. I wonder if this is the kind of transparency Obama is working toward?

What if it works? If this model for deciding facebook policy - where the company posts the policy then users are asked to critique and vote on the different policies works, how can it be translated to making government more transparent and public policy more fluid, equitable, and fair? Furthermore, I wonder who will actually participate in this facebook venture and who will just go along with whatever the majority decides. After looking at the actual blog, it is clear to me that this is more of a top-down controlled policy making move. Still though - asking the users to participate is a move in the right direction. I wonder who will actually participate.

If you were to submit your own proposal for their privacy policy what would it look like? Should we, as users, have a cut of the advertising profit? If that was proposed would it be posted by facebook as an option to vote on, or would they ignore the request. How much and how little control should Facebook exercise to empower users yet still maintain control over their site. If they ignore user requests will they get the same response as when they changed the agreement, or is the facade of transparency enough to keep people feeling good about the site?

Convergence Culture

This week is the beginning of the complexities of technological convergence on culture. As Jenkins notes, technological convergence is about more than just the technology. There are serious cultural, economic, political, and social implications to convergence and we are standing at the brink of how these elements will play out. Will the public continue to value capitalistic consolidation of cultural production and control, or is this an opportunity for individuals and communities to use technology as a means for empowerment? In keeping with my theme this semester, I have to ask how convergence divides and connects community. The main area that is most fascinating to me is how the "prosumer" can gain voice by subverting dominant cultural norms. More important, is understanding how policy and education are working toward and against this kind of empowerment.

It would be a huge mistake to treat converging technologies as another cycle of new media innovation. The advent of web 2.0 has enabled easier access to displaying identity, creating user generated content, and as Levy would note harnessing the "collective intelligence". Where before media innovation has served to distribute cultural content to the public - we are now in an era where we can seek out and find information that serves our individual interests, interact with, create and distribute our own opinions, thoughts and knowledge to the public. Where those in power were representing to us what "others" experiences were - now those "others" have the opportunity to represent themselves. Of course, the voices are not as loud or big as the massive media conglomerates - but is the sheer act of producing our own content empowering in and of itself - or does it need to be percieved by others to truly be empowering. Furthermore, what are some of the costs of this process of mediated individual expression?

Jenkins asks some of the most important questions about this time - by pointing to major tensions that exist in the way we have constructed our cultural producing economy and how convergence can rock those assumptions. Some of the more relevant questions he has asked for me include:

Re-negotiating relations between consumers and producers
*it is amazing how hard corporations will fight to allow people to buy their products/yet will equally discourage the appropriation of those products. We are now in a read-write culture, how will this be embraced or resisted and what is the most democratizing system?

Re-engaging citizens
Can consumption actually spur political activism? Interesting idea.....how are the lines between consumption and citizenship crossed and does consumption distract or focus our attention on relations of political power that can and do govern our lives.

and redefining intellectual property rights
What is the RIGHT kind of copyright. Should knowledge be made freely available for people to build upon, or should we be able to safeguard and prosper from our innovations? What motivates innovation?

These three questions raise issue with how we as a national and international entity will continue to understand and perpetuate the relationships between media, consumption, ownership and political power. I am underwhelmed by the apathetic responses to media and representation, but even more so as to how media confer political power. My hope is that as the process of convergence flattens the process of participation and allows entry into the political arena, that political power and marginalized voices are empowered, transformed and mobilized. Is this idealistic? Maybe. Could it be a reality? I have no idea. The promise of new technology has a way of blinding some of the realities. The democratizing rhetoric tends to override the inequities that web 2.0 can reproduce - and the removal of physical, visible labor has a way of rationalizing what some may call unequal labor distribution and exploitation.

Why are we so willing to trade ethics for profit?

Representation in New Media

Tomorrow will mark one of the most challenging and important days of the semester. We are discussing race, gender, values and representation in new media. One of the first reactions that tends to happen during this particular class is that the white men in the room feel personally attacked and silenced by the topic. Often this is because they individualize the concept of racism, instead of moving the problem of racism to a larger macro-level. In the same sense, non-white students can be harmed severely by the conversation, and asked to speak for their race, or experience (which I would never do). This is the symptom of a dominant culture not understanding the experiences of people who are not part of the dominating group.

Racism and sexism are systemic problems which are echoed and reinforced in a multitude of ways. In more concrete terms, the inequalities attached to race are clear in our justice system. According to Mauer & King, "African Americans are incarcerated (5.6) nearly 6 times the rate of whites, and hispanics are incarcerated at (1.6) double that rate" (2007) These numbers are grossly out of proportion with the demographics. Possible causes identified by The Innocence project are eyewitness misidentification, jury makeup, and unjust detective work. The higher rates of incarceration cannot be linked to just one individual instance - but rates of conviction, incarceration, and levels of punishment are systems within systems that continue to reinforce one another.

Mediated representations of race and gender create and sustain stereotypes which can and do have a vital role in how people are percieved and treated. Though the idea of each person being judged on their own merits sounds good - the reality is that there are far to many institutionalized inequalities at play to pin blame on individual actions. The act of doing so is derived from a privileged position - where systemic inequity serves those in power to continue to blame circumstances on individuals as opposed to looking at the systems that serve to disenfranchise and underscore achievement. Inequality manifests itself in many ways and representation reinforces what is acceptable and normal and what is not.

The idea of systemic racism can be more clearly understood and seen when boiled down to the unacknowledged privileges white skin enables. Peggy McIntosh's "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" looks to deconstruct the way white privilege reconstitutes and centers itself by making a list of privileges that she is endowed by her skin color. It is by understanding race in this way - as a system of privilege and oppression that it can be more clearly understood - and white guilt (hopefully) avoided.

Selections from McIntosh's list of invisible white privilege:
5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented
7. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race
14. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group
22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
26. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" cover and have them more or less match my skin.

My own addition: I can walk into any department store and get makeup in my skin tone

Tomorrow we will be discussing the ways race and gender are represented through video games. Gendered stratification means that not only women are portrayed in unequal ways - but the hyper-masculine male is another image that penetrates and centers what it means to be man. Representation victimizes everyone. There are several layers to this.

First, is understanding the argument in regard to colorblind vs. color-conscious ideology. This is directly related to whiteness - white is a color and often by not referring to white as a color, it is centered as normative, and people who are not white - Othered. Second - the idea that gender is problematized only by the way women are represented. Gender is not just about women!

Another layer to this article is the relevance and impact of video game representation vs. other mediated forms and those possible reprocussions. Video games are interactive virtual realities. As such, should we have a more or less heightened response to representation since it enables interaction, in a lot of circumstances - violent/gratuitous interaction? What is the difference between playing games and watching a movie? Who has the privilege to say that "it's just a game" and who gets hurt by these representations? How are systems of subordination and domination naturalized - and ultimately, the biggest question is "WHY ARE WE SO OK WITH THESE REPRESENTATIONS?"