Blog 4/9/13

Bruce Sterling’s “Meet the Spime” article seriously blows my mind. I was super confused when I was first reading, but it totally makes sense towards the end. It’s something I truly never even thought about. This section out of that whole article was the one that fascinated me the most because my friends and I are avid wine drinkers; and I never would have even thought about this.

“For instance, when I described that “bottle of wine” a while ago, everybody presumably knew that I meant a particular, coherent object. Yet that “bottle of wine” was a momentary congelation of material and energy flows. It has now become nameless, but it remains a process, still pre-bottle and post-bottle underway and mostly unknowable to me. That “bottle of wine” was once sunlight on Italian earth, lakes of grape juice, yeast in fermentation tanks, wood pulp for the label, colored inks, cork from Spain or maybe Portugal, plus a Californian grocery chain reacting to consumer trends and stocking a brand with some shelf appeal. Then I found it, bought it and consumed it. It continued as a dissociated flow of recyclable glass, consumed paper, hydrating fluids and a narcotic in my bloodstream, long since metabolized. When I bought that “bottle of wine” I was also financing a situation that names and defines those complex flows as a “bottle of wine”—a technosocial set-up that allows me to interact with that object as a consumer item first and only, blindly uninvolved with its extensive history as pre-bottle and post-bottle. Buying and drinking it was my own business, and the rest of it is none of my business. How much of that business ought to be mine?”

I especially didn’t realize this was barcoding. I know barcodes exist because that’s how we scan products to inventory and for pricing. That’s also how we keep track of our inventory and how we ring up products for customers to buy, but while I was reading the passage about wine the word barcode didn’t even pop into my head. I definitely didn’t think of autonomy. I’m not even sure I 100% know what autonomy is or how it relates to barcoding. Here are a couple of links describing autonomy and barcoding:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6aR1k-ympo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O36nETf0ems

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/autonomy?s=t

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/barcoding?s=t

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Universal%20Product%20Code

4/2 blog

Johnson’s article about social media relates to both Baker and Schneier’s articles. A section of Baker’s article states: Information Operations are activities undertaken by military and nonmilitary organizations to shape the essential narrative of a conflict or situation and thus affect the attitudes and behaviors of the targeted audience. As you can see information operations relate to social media because they do the exact same thing that social media does: influence. Social media is a huge influence on today’s society. My DTC 475 Professor Susan Ross helped write a book about social media and it’s affects. The book had stories about the impacts of peoples lives by social media.

Social media is the way to change lives, create opinions in people, and inform people. Social media does however have negative effects just like Information Operations may have. These operations to change attitudes of a direct audience may affect a different audience in a different way. The whole point of Information Operations promote the dissemination of information to create counterinsurgency, but these operations are directed to certain audiences just like all other social media is. However, the directed audience isn’t the only audience seeing or hearing this social media or information operations.

This is a video talking about the military and social media. It also relates to the information operations and the different audiences that are affected by this social media:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4mGX8csLds

A prevention method so that only the directed audiences are reached could be censoring. Schneier talks about how other countries censor the internet so that the people of their country can’t see some of the things posted by other countries. This would be a great thing for the military to do when they do their information operations so that the targeted audiences are  the only audiences that they affect.