On viewing "Untraceable"

I just saw the movie "Untraceable" tonight. Essentially, the plot revolves around an FBI agent who is hunting a killer who uses his website called killwithme.com to kill his victims. The idea behind his website is that the more people who log on to his website, the faster the victim dies. He uses tactics such as slowly leaking a poison into their systems. So, the more people who log on for this sick voyeurism, the faster the poison will seep into the victim's bloodstream and they will die. As the movie progresses (and the victims begin piling up), more and more people log on for each "show". People begin dying faster and faster and the FBI can do nothing to shut down his site.

Barring obvious Hollywoodizations, the message underlying the movie is worth contemplating. Essentially, it's a commentary on our virtual reality we've created on the internet, where people can go on the web and view and engage in behaviors that are reprehensible without any "real" repercussions. But there are repercussions -- a desensitized populace, the proliferation of sexual and commercial exploitation, the tearing at boundaries of good taste and reason that evolve from a person's diminished capacities to truly feel that there are standards of decency worth upholding. How many people have gone to those sites that show footage of violent acts or have engaged in online chats that they would never dare engage in face to face? Isn't it likely that all this exposure to virtual immorality somehow trickles into our very real day-to-day lives? We begin seeing each other differently, begin losing touch with the very real consequences of our bad behaviors in the actual world.

A startling commentary on this phenomenon was made thoroughly clear to me when I came home and, out of curiosity, went to the url killwithme.com. Often, production companies will put up websites that promote their movies and Sony pictures did, in fact, put up a killwithme.com website.

When I went to the website it looked just like the site in the movie. It asks you if you want to enter the site, just like in the movie. If you click 'enter' a popup window comes up that says: "Visting this site could cause harm to innocent people. Do you still want to enter?" You can either click 'yes' or 'no' at that point. Now, keep in mind that, in the movie, if people clicked 'yes', they would help speed up the death of the victim. Being affected by the underlying morality tale of the movie, I actually clicked 'no'. Naturally, I was still let in to the movie's promotional site. But, a statistic comes up that then tells you what percentage of people clicked 'yes' or 'no'. Can you believe that only 9% of people clicked 'no'? Doesn't that say something? People go see a movie, and they are entertained, and, for many of them, the experience has no bearing on their actual thinking. Did they not independently analyze the significance of this story? Were they either unwilling or unable to process that this movie asked them to do more than just be entertained? It was asking them to consider how their internet voyeurism affects their decision-making.

Now I know what you'll say: "Just relax. It was only a movie." But that's exactly the message we must be forced to consider. Is everything out there "just entertainment"? Is that all we're after in life? To be entertained? I hope not. It made me somewhat concerned and confused to begin considering how so much of what we do on the internet is purely out of a need to be distracted, disconnected from our very real everyday lives.

I wonder what you all think. Let's discuss this in class next week. I'd be interested to hear what you have to say. Remember: nothing we are exposed to is harmless and should be taken at face value. Everything should be exposed to critical thinking and questioning. What we choose to let in to our minds affects who we are as people in the end. And, if we choose to become mindless, entertainment-munching automatons, perhaps we deserve whatever Matrix/Brave New World future lies in store for us...

Guidelines for responses/comments

I really enjoyed our interacting through blogs today in class. You all took some of my pointers on posting responses to heart, and offered meaningful insights/suggestions/questions to your peers. Below is a copy of the handout I read in class regarding guidelines for posting/responses etc. Just posting it here so you don't have to go to the class website.

How to Respond to a Blog

Goals:

- To engage the blogger on the intellectual/logical/argumentative merits of their blog posting
- To analyze the blogger’s post based on current themes / lessons being presented in class
- To add meaning to the class conversation – always, always, look to add meaning
- To offer more questions / points of analysis when possible (these ideas may be useful for other
classmates as they read the blog responses)

Expectations:

- You will spend some quality time considering your response before writing it
- You will write no less than 50 words per response
- You will find opportunities to be creative, energizing:
- Perhaps you will point the blogger to another web resource (hyperlink, video, article)
etc., explaining why that resource might be valuable to their thinking / approaches as
well as linking the resource in the body of your post

- Perhaps you will connect this blogger’s ideas to those of another class blogger
and suggest they communicate if they are not already doing so

You may employ images in responses as a way of answering more than the verbal /
linguistic attributes of any conversation.

These are merely three suggestions; there are many other ways to make your blog response a
meaning-making, community-building exercise

Some possible questions you might ask yourself when composing your response:

- Have I read the material this blogger is referencing?

- Is the blogger speaking from a particular point of view? Can I offer other points of view and
defend their merits?

- Who did the blogger write this for?
Classmates are not the only audience; perhaps he/she wrote in a way that would appeal
to another audience; i.e. young men, Catholics, people with more than three children,
mechanics, ballet dancers – have they expressed an opinion/idea that translates beyond
the artificial borders of our class?

- In espousing a certain interpretation / argument, has the blogger conveniently or perhaps
unintentionally avoided bringing up certain obvious points that would undermine their
interpretation / argument? If so, what are they? How do you defend their need to be included
in the conversation?

- Are the blogger’s ideas / opinions similar to those you’ve read elsewhere? If so, point them in
the direction of this thinker/writer who seems to have a similar worldview to them.

- Did you find something the blogger said to be of particular use to you? How? Why? What will
you do with that new outlook?

There are many more questions you might respond to, and you will get a better sense of the questions you should be asking yourselves any time you read or view any constructed work as the semester progresses.

Technology requirements:

An understanding of how to embed video, audio, or text in a posted response ; also, how to name hyperlinks and employ them in a response.

Why We Blog, How We Blog

Below is a collection of informatics on blogging. Take a look at each piece of information. What mode of communication is most helpful? Why? Who is/are the author(s)? What are they trying to achieve? Do we find their info useful?



This piece focuses on corporate blogging, but maybe we can apply it to our setting, no?

• http://elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=opinion&article=81-1

The following excerpted from:

Chau, Michael and Jennifer Xu. "Mining communities and their relationships in blogs: A study of online hate groups." International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 65(1). January 2007. 57-70.

"2.1. Blogging
Blogs have become increasingly popular in the past few years. In the early days, blogs, a short form of weblogs, were used mainly for pages where links to other useful resources were periodically “logged” and posted. At that time blogs were mostly maintained by hand (Blood, 2004). After easy-to-use blogging software became widely available in the early 2000s, the nature of blogs has changed and many blogs are more like personal Web sites that contain various types of content (not limited to links) posted in reverse-chronological order. Bloggers often make a record of their lives and express their opinions, feelings, and emotions through writing blogs (Nardi et al., 2004). Many bloggers consider blogging as an outlet for their thoughts and emotions. Besides personal blogs, there are also blogs created by companies. For example, ice.com, an online jewelry seller, has launched three blogs and reported that thousands of people linked to their Web site from these blogs (Hof, 2005).
One of the most important features in blogs is the ability for any reader to write a comment on a blog entry. On most blog hosting sites, it is very easy to write a comment, in a way quite similar to replying to a previous message in traditional discussion forums. The ability to comment on blogs has facilitated the interaction between bloggers and their readers. On some controversial issues, like those related to racism, it is not uncommon to find a blog entry with thousands of comments where people dispute back and forth on the matter.
Cyber communities have also emerged in blogs. Communities in blogs can be categorized as explicit communities or implicit communities, like some other cyber communities on the Web (Kumar et al., 1999). Explicit communities in blogs are the groups, or blogrings, that bloggers have explicitly formed and joined. Most blog hosting sites allow bloggers to form a new group or join any existing groups. On the other hand, implicit communities can only be defined by the interactions among bloggers, such as subscription, linking, or commenting. For example, a blogger may subscribe to another blog, meaning that the subscriber can get updates when the subscribed blog has been updated. A blogger can also post a link or add a comment to another blog, which are perhaps the most traditional activities among bloggers. These interactions signify some kind of connection between two bloggers. Because of such interactions among bloggers, these communities are less similar to the cyber communities as discussed in Kumar et al. (1999) but more resembling to the virtual communities which involve the social interaction between members characterized by memberships, sense of belonging, relationships, shared values and practices, and self-regulation (Erickson, 1997; Roberts, 1998; Rheingold, 2000). Similar to the analysis of hyperlinks among Web pages to identify communities (Chau et al., 2005a and Chau et al., 2005b), analysis of the connections between bloggers could also identify these virtual communities, their characteristics, and their relationships...

[...]

2.3. Hate on the Internet
Hate crimes have been one of the long-standing problems in the United States because of various historical, cultural, and political reasons. Race, gender, religion, and disability often become the reason of hate. Over time, hate groups have been formed to unite individuals with similar beliefs as well as to spread such ideology. For example, White supremacist groups such as Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Neo-Nazis, and Racist Skinheads have been active in the United States for a long time (Burris et al., 2000).
Hate groups have been increasingly using the Internet to express their ideas, spread their beliefs, and recruit new members (Lee and Leets, 2002). It has been reported that 60% of hate criminals are youths (Levin and McDevitt, 1993), who are, perhaps unfortunately, also one of the largest groups of Internet users. Glaser et al. (2002) suggest that racists often express their views more freely on the Internet. The Hate Directory (Franklin, 2005) compiles a list of hundreds of Web sites, files archives, newsgroups, and other Internet resources related to hate and racism. Several studies have investigated Web sites that are related to racism or White supremacy. Douglas et al. (2005) studied 43 Web sites that were related to White supremacy. It was found that while these groups showed lower level of advocated violence due to legal constraints, they exhibited high levels of social conflict and social creativity. Lee and Leets (2002) found that storytelling-style, implicit messages often used by hate groups on the Internet were more persuasive to adolescents, who have become the target of new member recruitment of many hate groups. These adolescences might be easily influenced to conduct hate crimes. Gerstenfeld et al. (2003) conducted a manual analysis of 157 extremist Web sites. They found that some hate Web sites were associated with hate groups while others were maintained by individuals. Many of these sites had links to other extremist sites or hate group sites, showing that some of these groups are linked to each other. Burris et al. (2000) systematically analyzed the networks of Web sites maintained by white supremacist groups and found that this network had a decentralized structure with several centers of influence. In addition, communities were present in this network in which groups sharing similar interests and ideologies tended to be closely connected. Zhou et al. (2005) used software to automate the analysis of the content of hate group Web sites and the linkage among them. They found that one of the major objectives of these Web sites was to share ideology. Cyber communities such as White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis were identified among these sites. Recent years have seen the emergence of hate groups in blogs, where high-narrative messages are the norm. This has made blogs an ideal medium for spreading hatred. Blogs have also made it possible for individuals to find others with similar belief and ideology much more easily. As a result, hate groups have emerged in blogs.
To study these online hate groups in blogs, it is important to analyze the content of these blogs as well as the relationships among the bloggers. However, because of the large volume of data involved, it is often a mentally exhausting, if not infeasible, process to perform such kind of analysis manually."

The following are two vids from YouTube, part of a collection of short clips where "experts" are asked the simple question: "What is a Blog?"

http://youtube.com/watch?v=rx4NboDvXnw - Leonardo Chiariglione

http://youtube.com/watch?v=htP1NzSj1tY - Teemu Arina

S0: you've got some different materials up here. In a blog entry, write two to three hundred words of what you think a blog is, should, could be.

A collection of English 105 haikus

We meet at nine-ten
Lights low new paint smell Many words
All around us, but why?

On a new floor we
Discuss how why who said these
things we should think on.

If there were rules to
live by we wouldn't have to
analyze, discern.

Internet, webi-
sodes, ads, jingles, newfangled
everything -- drowning
yet?

Favorite authors:
ones who think on what we wish
we could -- ever-better.

Bonanza; demise;
tripped out phrase and self-shrift
--rightly so We write.

Why would you take on
ideas, beliefs, opinions
of someone unknown?

How do we know a
person we've never met? Well,
we investigate
...stupid.