Final Blog Post: Presentation Reaction

Online Harassment and Threats of Violence: Olivia Purnell Olivia spoke about the degree to which a great majority of women experience in the realm of online harassment. I had mostly known about online harassment toward groups and individuals but did not fully understand the lengths that some internet users will go to shame women in particular. She spoke about the ubiquity of revenge porn perpetrated on an incredible amount of women. The creation or distribution of this material seems to be attributed to spurned ex-lovers, internet trolls and stalkers, and other deeply disturbed individuals who needed to shame these women to prop up their own egos. Sometimes these women find this material on their own or have someone find it and bring it to their attention, and sometimes it just floats around the internet unbeknownst to the victims. She even spoke of how in a few cases a woman would have to take nude photos of themselves and send them to a site to prove that their bodies pictured were, in fact, theirs and had to claim illegal use of the image, in an attempt to have the image removed. Women experience harassment, threats of violence and rape, cyber-stalking and a host of other despicable acts just because they are women with opinions and stances. I sat there and listened to Olivia talk with my mouth agape from the realities of the vile abuse of their person and violation of their rights to privacy. I felt as if she did a tremendous job in portraying a very real, and very dangerous side of the internet. A+ in my book.

What makes a community and does tech provide those things

Online communities: fact or farse We must ask ourselves one major question in the conversation about online vs/and In Real Life communities. The first thing is that we must decide whether or not we would define a community as a group of individuals that are working to together in an effort to achieve a common goal or just a passing association of individuals. Both exist but personally, I do not consider people trolling one another in an effort to be counter-productive a community. So a lot of spaces on sites like Reddit or 4chan that exist primarily as a source of online griefing would be realized in reality as just a room of people facing their respective walls, screaming as loud as they can in an effort to only out-scream the other people in the room. But that being said, places like crowd funding websites and even forums that exist to create a better understanding of other's opinions, despite whether or no not they share your viewpoint, are what I would consider a community. Now I know that sounds like I'm saying that the only way a community can exist is by creating a "kum ba yah" circle, holding hands and swaying while someone else almost know how to play the song on the guitar, but discourse is only productive if all parties are willing to at least listen. I have had hundreds of perfectly constructive conversations and heated debates with people who would otherwise be diametrically opposed to me, but we were able to interact with civility because we mutually respected each other's opinions and, more importantly, their humanity. A community can come in many shapes and sizes, but what is true is that when we recognize each other's personal soveriegnty over themselves we, as humans, can create communities virtually anywhere.

Dot Com to Dot Bomb

The collapse of the internet's first wave of companies Investing money into companies that inherently are not designed to make money seems like a risky strategy at best. I can understand that when technology is advancing not all of the bodies causing forward momentum are going to exist when the dust settles but in a purely economic sense, it seems foolish. I'm all for pumping money into advancing technology in almost all cases, but for it to cause mass economic damage like layoffs and bankrupting companies is counter intuitive. I think greed plays an important role in the inflation of the intangible goods market and, much like the gold rush, leads to a mad dash of people scrambling to claim their stakes in the mysterious and magical world of wealth creation. After it's all said and done it is good at least to see the market better managing the invisible goods marketplace. Companies like Google and Yahoo have even branched out significantly into other marketplaces to help create wealth, advance technology, and stabilize the market. Google has begun to create an Internet Service Provider called Google Fiber, a cell phone service provider named Project Phi, and has also created cell phones, tablets, and an operating system. Yahoo has even begun to get into producing online television series much like Netflix. The internet may be completely different from its inception and fall, but what died made way for a better managed and much more stable, albeit very difficult at times, internet marketplace and experience.

Joel Larson Visit

Joel Larson presented to the class his explanation on databases It was interesting to have described for us how the disintermediation of technology and data entry was merged together. He talked about how before technology was implemented in grocery stores, a grocer would not have an accurate understanding of their stock on hand or how much they needed to order to keep well-selling items in stock and minimize the amount they purchased of low-selling items. With the advent and implementation of Universal Purchase Code (UPC) Barcoding, it gave all retailers, not just grocery stores, and accurate representation of their stock in an editable electronic database. He further showed us how databases were structured and how databases were also collaborative to be able to create specific search criteria to access and interact data. Joel also talked about the "information continuum" and how it has the capacity to predict based on trends of that data. I thought this was pretty interesting because it's like "technological clairvoyance." Joel surmised that the use of large bodies of information to categorically identify trends in buying, selling, occurrences of use, and other patterns can lead to a more efficient and streamlined approach to the systems we encounter every day. I found this guest speaker very interesting. I didn't really think it was going to be especially useful but was presently surprised at how learning how internal databases are important to our everyday lives, from our student information on our ID cards, all the way to buying groceries.