Thoughts on Class 3/31/11

Coming from the victorious side of the open source debate, I am a believer in Wikiality! Peer to peer learning is the way to go. I liked how we had a debate today and divided the class. I had an education class two years ago where we had to debate once a week on history and ethics so this was quite engaging. Well done.

Network Drones?

After thumbing through the Movements.org site, I began to think what exactly are they trying to do. Identify, Connect, Support. It seems to me that people are being swayed by networks these days, which I think is a clever idea. When you hear the word network, most people think that there are thousands, maybe millions of people connected. Maybe or maybe not in the case of movements.org, but I think people are being swayed by key words without fully looking into what the organization or company is about. Let's think about the keywords on Facebook: Connect, Share, Life, this is a more realistic network because you are connecting with people that you actually know. My question is: if something sounds right, are people more likely to join an organization because they are throwing products at them that are associated with their demographic, or is it because they have read into what they are about and want to get on board?

No professor,no problem/Class discussion

Class today was mainly full of discussion about Ispy. We formed a circle like usual, one or two people started the conversation and people chimed in their thoughts at their leisure.
What I got out of chapters 6 and 7 of Ispy is that the government is trying to look more into our private lives in order to persuade our beliefs as a consumer. One example of this is when President Bush was in office, the government was encouraging civilians to buy war products as a way to support the war. I think the government is trying to have a say in what we buy in order to control us. We think we are in control because we are the ones who buy and do things based on our own beliefs, but these beliefs are actually influenced by others.
Chapter 7 talks more about the internet and surveillance. I think government monitoring or any kind of monitoring is a way of getting control. My problem is, it has not been made that big of a deal. I will never forget the scene in the movie Men In Black where the guy is spying on a past love through video surveillance on a computer. Thinking about it now, that is quite disturbing, because our government does have that kind of technology and we would be naive to think that they wouldn't use it on their own people.
In class today everyone chimed in, in the half an hour discussion we had, and then people blogged and left. I feel like having a professorless class was good in the fact that we able to discuss things amongst one another in a pace that was comfortable with everyone.