Author: Juan Monroy

Net Smarts: Crap Detection and Community in the Digital Age

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Review Questions

  1. What is “crap detection”?
  2. How has the Internet led to the proliferation of “crap”?
  3. How does the Internet aid us in the “detection” of “crap”?
  4. Why is community fundamental to our use of digital media?
  5. How is community different with the advent of new media?
  6. Is there such a thing as anti-social media?
  7. Where do we draw the line between contributing as a community building exercise and a way to exploit free/cheap labor?
  8. Why would someone contribute to a crowdsourced or open-sourced project without any financial benefit?
  9. How do digital networks respond according to the needs of the “external environmental”?

The Telegraph and What It Wrought

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I apologize for not screening the video The Transatlantic Cable last night. If you want a concise summary of the struggle to link North America with Europe via telegraph, read this unillustrated article from History magazine. It overlaps with the story of the American Experience documentary.

Speaking of the transatlantic cable, I misstated the number of attempts it took to finally successfully connect North America with Europe via cable in 1866. It took three attempts, not four.

Remember how the first cable largely failed because Wildman Whitehouse had sent too much voltage through the wire, which caused the insulation to break and ultimately fail? The solution that ultimately worked was proposed by William Thompson, later known as Lord Kelvin. He employed a mirror galvanometer to magnify the weak signal. It was also used to diagnose the cable when it was being laid to sea.

The boat that was ultimately used to law the third and ultimately successful transatlantic cable was the Great Eastern. I misspoke when I said that it was designed to go from the US to Australia. Actually, it was built to go from England to its penal colony in Oceania (or Australia).

For those wondering what it was like to send a telegram, I updated the slides to show a basic flow:

  1. Crafting a message
  2. Dictating at a local telegraph office
  3. Transcribing message to Morse Code
  4. Relay from one telegraph office to another
  5. Production of a telegram
  6. Dispatch of a delivery boy
  7. Final delivery of a message

You can also get a sense of this by watching certain movies made before World War II.

Finally, if you’re interested in see how your computer relays traffic from one computer to another, do a traceroute.

Presentation Tips

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As we pass the midpoint of the semester, I wanted to provide a few pointers for your presentation, which you will all be doing by the end of the term.

Research Your Authors

The authors who we are reading have public personas and are active online. Follow them on Twitter. Read articles they’ve published on their blogs or other websites. Watch presentations or media interviews they may have given.

Aim for 20 Minutes

Your presentation should last 20 minutes. That might seem like a lot, but it’s really not. Practice ahead of time so that you can properly “scale” your presentation to this length.

Analyze, Don’t Summarize

There’s no need to summarize the chapter you’re presenting: we’ve all read it. Instead, prepare an analysis of the argument. You might consider isolating two or three main points that you want us to consider. Tell us about those three points at the beginning of the presentation.[1] For each abstract point, present an original concrete example. Consider asking us to analyze this example with you. It will for a more interactive session.

Don’t Read Your Slides

Slides are useful because they allow your audience to visualize what you’re discussing. For example, if you want to discuss the breakdown of New York City neighborhoods, it’s helpful for everyone to see a map. Similarly, if you want us to look at how advertisements follow you on the web, then show us a few webpages to illustrate that point. Charts and tables are really useful, too.

Avoid, as much as possible, having text on your slides. People will want to read the text and will stop paying attention to you. But if you’re going to use text, use only bullet points that build one-at-a-time, never complete sentences. Your slides should be presentation tools, not the presentations.

Whatever you do, don’t use your slides as notes.

Keep Us Engaged

Consider that we’re sitting in the audience waiting for your pearls of wisdom but our attention spans are small. A student in a previous semester had the class perform an exercise during the presentation by asking us to put a search term into Google and compare everyone’s results. We got to see one of her points in real-time. We all dug it.

Do something like that to break up your presentation. “Research” shows that hard as we try, we can only concentrate for ten minutes at a time. Change things up to reset our attention clocks.

Get More Pointers

Gabe Zicherman offers some suggestions on how to give a great keynote. He writes, “being a good speaker at conferences and events is not unlike being a great performer. You need to know your material, intuitively understand your audience, bring something new to the table, and keep yourself in great physical and mental shape to do your best.” One of the more compelling points I took from his article was to learn from standup comedians to keep your audience engaged and to appear excited about your material.

Zach Holman has an entire website on public speaking. Some of it is not relevant for our class, but some it is, such planning your talk and getting your slides together.

Richard Forno dispels the notion that Powerpoint is the point of your presentation. It’s not. He emphatically writes, “Technology – if used – should enhance the quality of a presentation, not become the sole reason for its existience.”

Prefer to listen to something? Respected Apple blogger John Gruber and productivity guru Merlin Mann have an extended conversation about several topics, but the most relevant for us is the discussion on Powerpoint and on public speaking.

  1. One the best presentations I’ve ever seen is the keynote presentation Steve Jobs gave at MacWorld 2007 to introduce the iPhone. He immediately tells everyone that he’s going to introduce three revolutionary products: a new touchscreen iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. The twist is that it was one device and then explains each part: the iPod part, the phone part, and the Internet communicator part.  ↩

Closing the Book on Our Missed Class

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Because we cancelled last week’s class due to snow, here’s what we would have covered had we met.

Stage Innovation Form
Development Symbols and Paper Scrolls and Manuscripts
Entrepreneurial Printing Presses Early Books and Codices
Mass Market Industrialization Paperback Books
Convergence Electronic and Digital Media Publishing Conglomerates and Ebooks

Be sure to review the readings to get better understanding of the history of the book industry. Also, review our coverage of other print media, specifically as newspapers and magazines, as that material overlaps a great deal with the book industry.

Technology Presentations Tomorrow

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Your presentations on an Internet Technology are due tomorrow. You can find the list of topics on the course website.

Your presentation should be short, aim for five to ten minutes. Define your technology and explain what it is, how it works, and why it is important. You may also want to provide an example or two to make the topic more concrete for your audience.

The written part of this assignment should also explain the what, how and why of your topic, but it should take into account that is a written summary not a live, oral presentation. Be sure to maintain appropriate standards for writing and to cite your sources.

To submit your assignment, please share your written assignment with me using the Fordham Google Docs/Drive platform.

I look forward to hearing everyone’s presentations tomorrow.

Class Cancelled, February 13

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A snowflake captured by the Beltsville Electron Microscopy Unit, part of the USDA.

A snowflake captured by the Beltsville Electron Microscopy Unit, part of the USDA.

Due to the snowstorm, our class has been cancelled.

Next week, we will discuss the book industry material and then quickly move on to the recorded music industry.

Do the assignment by next Thursday’s class, and also read the material. Although we usually don’t discuss the reading, the material could still be on the exam.

Stay vertical, everyone.

Unfit for Our Print Class

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Admittedly, we scratched the surface of many events and concepts that require some deeper examination, but as we were focused on the technology of print, we didn’t get to explore them in much depth. Here’s a few things you might like to research to get a sense of what we were discussing last night.

  • Chinese block printing predates the Gutenberg press by about 1,000 years, and by about 1000 AD, the Chinese had already developed a movable type printing press. However, Gutenberg’s press would be more efficient because his language used a small alphabet as opposed to the logograms used by the Chinese.
  • Speaking of which, the Latin alphabet derives from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets from the 7th century BC.
  • Gutenberg’s Movable Type reduced the cost, in terms of time and money, necessary to produce a bible: “In 1455, Gutenberg demonstrated the power of the printing press by selling copies of a two-volume Bible (Biblia Sacra) for 300 florins each. This was the equivalent of approximately three years’ wages for an average clerk, but it was significantly cheaper than a handwritten Bible that could take a single monk 20 years to transcribe.”[1]
  • Don’t forget to visit one of the Gutenberg Bibles at the Morgan Library (they have three copies) or the New York Public Library (theirs is printed on vellum).
  • With his Ninety-Five Theses, Martin Luther begat the Protestant Reformation of the Catholic Church.
  • Here’s a great BBC radio program from 2006 on Diderot’s Encyclopedie. If you have a chance, read the Preliminary Discourse by Jean Le Rond d’Alembert.
  • Stanford University has digitized dime novels, which were the epitome of mass-produced print in the nineteenth century.

See you in two weeks.

  1. http://www.citrinitas.com/history_of_viscom/press.html  ↩

Magazines and Digital Convergence

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In case you didn’t get to watch it before class, do watch the following video. It is a roundtable discussion on magazine with four editors from the Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, The New Republic and XO Jane.

Skip past the opening remarks and forgive the poor quality of the audio. They have a keen understanding of the challenges they face in the digital age. And they’re really excited about them.

If you’re wondering about the magazines I demonstrated in class, here they are:

  • The Magazine. This was initially designed as an iPad app first then migrated to iPhone and the web as a set of curated stories that would be published every two weeks. It speaks to nerds like me (and maybe you!) It has no advertising and subsists entirely on subscribers.
  • Medium. This is an open publishing platform where anyone can publish a story or article. As far as I know, it has no revenue but attracts a pretty literate audience.
  • Quartz. This is a storytelling magazine, frequently updated, but its coverage is loosely focused on the economy. They have some high-end advertisers and sponsored content, what is colloquially known as “native advertising”.

After class, Neil pointed out Google Currents, which is a social magazine, that runs on Android and iOS. That reminded me of Flipboard, which aggregates news from your social networks into a single magazine-like experience.

And what exactly is Facebook Paper?