1. What might you have done differently if you were in the position of artist Ken Zeran, mentioned in this chapter?

If I were in Ken Zeran's shoes and received so many false accusations and had my life turned upside down, I believe that I would have tried a little harder to find the culprit. I might have tried doing what the Chinese do and start a human flesh search for the individual. I do not think that it is right that AOL got off the hook so easily and they were uncooperative with Ken in providing the information about his assailant. I think I might have started a public outcry via the internet about how terrible and dishonest AOL is. While it may not have ended being very successful, it might have made AOL be a little more cooperative.


2. What might you do with access to UWB radio transmissions if you had a receiver in a car?

The first thing I would do would be to move my entire library of music into my car. I would turn my car into an entertainment system on wheels. Videos could stream with ease, I could video chat with people while driving (potentially quite dangerous), and have downloaded books read to me while driving. I think that there is so much that we could do, it is hard to think about where to start. I'm pretty sure that if I were to have UWB radio transmissions in my car, I would never have a moment of being "disconnected," which might not be the best thing.

Prisoners of eBay and FOAF

1. Considering the Prisoner’s Dilemma in this chapter, provide your own insight on how sites such as eBay “work” for most participants of this popular online auction site. Do they really work? Or is there too much risk?


I personally do not use eBay for a number of reasons and I suppose that many of them overlap with the idea of the prisoner's dilemma. When applied to a social setting, the prisoner's dilemma according to Shirky is, "whenever we interact with people we could take advantage of, or people who could take advantage of us, yet actually manage to trust one another often enough to accomplish things in groups. The shadow of the future makes it possible for me to act on your behalf today, even at some risk or cost to me, on the expectation that you will remember and reciprocate tomorrow." While eBay does not necessarily have a resounding effect on groups, it can have an effect on individuals. I do not use eBay because I am worried that someone would try to screw me over and not give me the product that they had advertised. While this most likely does not happen most of the time, it is not worth the risk for me to get a faulty product. Just after hearing about a few cases of eBay not working out for some, I was dissuaded from wanting to use it. A friend of mine bought a movie a few months ago from eBay and when it came in the mail the case was of the dvd she was hoping for, but inside was season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So she ended up losing about twenty bucks and getting a dvd that she did not want at all. Someone else got the reward for doing something wrong and she got the punishment.

Many people seem to trust the site and it works out quite well for them, but there are others, like myself, who do not like to take the small risk of not getting what they expected.



2. What professional benefits do you see by investing some time in a FOAF-style network?

The opportunities for networking are enormous and the great thing about FOAF networks are that you already have something in common with the people that you are networking with. Professionally, this could be very helpful because it allows you to have access to a whole different "category of people" that you otherwise might not be able to access. Say you are looking for trustworthy IT people to work on your businesses computers. Well your friend, Matt, who happens to be an IT guy probably knows a lot more IT people. If you trust Matt and you have access to all of his friends, well then, you just got yourself potentially a huge market of IT people to work on your company's computers.

1. Based on the quote from this chapter, ““revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies--it happens when society adopts new behaviors,” do you agree or disagree? Cite examples to support your position.

The birth of new technologies does not, itself, bring a revolution. When the movable type was created there was no revolution. When the telephone was created there was no revolution. When the computer, fax machine, internet and cell phones were created and adopted there were no revolutions. Revolutions are not a cause of adopting a new technology, rather they are a result of coordinated behavior changes. In chapter six of Shirky's book, Here Comes Everybody, the idea of forwarding is discussed. Before the internet it was difficult to pass a message in a newspaper on to others because one literally had to cut out a message, copy it, then pass it along. Now information can be passed along with the simple click of a button. When this information gets passed along it can have a resounding impact on what people are talking about, the emotions of people, and even steps of action that people take. All of this, just because of the ability share information quickly, cheaply, and effectively.



2. Look deeper into the concept of a “information cascade.” Can you cite an example of where following the actions of others was a sound idea? Where doing so ended up being a poor choice?

The cascade effect is described in wikipedia as being is a series of secondary extinctions that is triggered by the primary extinction of a key species in an ecosystem. While this definition describes what happens in an ecosystem, there are many similarities between it and an information cascade. When information starts off in one place and gets passed along it can spread and have an effect on many people and possibly organizations. In the case of the priest scandals, passing on information and following the actions of others exposed a very tragic and terrible event that took place in the Catholic Church. Without information cascade, the publicity and the positive action that the church took would never have happened. An example of information cascade being a poor choice was the example of the flash mob that ended up with many people being arrested in the Leipzig protests. While all they were doing was simply smiling at one another, the coordinated effort of all of the people coming together and passing on information to one another scared the government and caused them to act what seems to be very irrationally.

From the audio book chapter on Free:
1. Why is “zero” such a hot-button word?
Zero is such an interesting word because it has so many different implications. Although it does not always mean poor quality, there are many times when that is what people assume. Usually poor quality is linked with free when something used to cost something, but now costs the consumer nothing. For some reason people associate that with the product losing quality, even if that is not the case at all.
There are some things that are free and we do not expect them to have less quality. Google was an example of this. It is a free online service that no one expects to have to pay for and just because it is free does not mean that it has poor quality.



2. Explain and give an example of a mental transaction cost.

A mental transaction cost is a "cost" that consumers have to take into account when deciding whether or not to purchase something. Choosing the type of thing you want to buy, deciding where to buy it, and waiting in line to buy the item are all transaction costs.
An example of a mental transaction cost from the lecture is when someone offers a truffle at the price of $0.15 or a hershey kiss at a price of $.01. Most people will choose the truffle because the mental transaction cost is not more than what the truffle is worth. However, when you lower the price of each of the chocolates by one cent, the mental transaction cost becomes a lot greater for buying a truffle, and therefore more people will take one of the kisses because it is free. The mental transaction cost was more than the benefits of buying the truffle.

Scratch the Wikipedia

1. The “power law distribution” or “long tail” phenomenon, as seen in behavior online on the Wikipedia, suggests that the concept of an average user of wikipedia is meaningless. Support your answer: how do you think a local, “JMU only” version of the Wikipedia would compare to the worldwide version? Would it be very similar? Higher quality? Less quality? Why?

I think that a JMU only version of Wikipedia would be somewhat similar to wikipedia, but with far fewer results. While we do have many scholars that know a lot about diverse topics, I believe that there would still be far fewer posts onto JMU's wikipedia site for a number of reasons. First of all, the number of potential JMU wikipedia "posters" would be far fewer than if it were open to all people to post. For example, there may only be one or two professors at JMU who have a lot to comment about, say, Irish literature. If neither of these two professors have any desire or knowledge about a JMU wikipedia, the quantity and quality of the potential information on Irish Literature becomes limited to students who are not necessarily experts within that field. When wikipedia is open to all internet users, the liklihood of an expert user within the field of Irish Literature is much more likely to post something with much better quality than a student at JMU.
Basically, the quality of a worldwide wikipedia will be much better than one isolated to JMU just because of the number of potential experts and people willing to give input is much higher and the information would be much broader than if it was contained to a small sample of individuals.


2. After reading the article about Scratch and exploring the Scratch website, what are some observable benefits in creating a space to share student work?

In one word, remixing. Having the ability to take the work of someone else and expand upon it to make it even better is probably one of the biggest benefits that I see from creating a space for students to share work. It's like the epitome of creative learning. Younger students are no longer just learning things being taught to them, but with programs like Scratch, they now have the ability to create and expand on programs that they are interested in. Not only that, but it creates a sense of pride because after you create something on that site, other people have the ability to use it and the creator can feel a sense of accomplishment at being the one that provided it for other people to use and "remix." I believe that the ability to share and expand on others' work easily is revolutionizing the way that we learn and teach.

Wifi and Patriots

1. If your mother uses wifi at home to send you e-mail, and your home network is not protected by WEP or WPA, what reasons would you suggest to her for enabling one of these two protocols at home if the liability of reading those e-mails still exists once her message leaves your home, on it’s way to school?

Without protection it can be quite simple for someone jump onto your network and access your personal information, like your e-mails. The main reason that I would give to my mother is that records from TJX stated that even by using WEP protection, more than 45 million credit card and debit card records were stolen from them. That being said, I would tell my mother to at the very least get WPA protection. The last thing that I would want is for someone to access all of my mother's or my own personal data just because she doesn't have proper protection.

2. Some news reports have suggested that the Bush administration used the USA Patriot Act to look at the e-mails of American citizens without a warrant. What’s your position if this was indeed the case? Should citizens be willing to give up their privacy? Does it bother you to know that your online communications are very potentially semi-private instead of private?

I personally think that the Patriot Act was not a wise choice on behalf of our government. While I do believe that our safety is extremely important, I also believe that our freedom is. When you no longer can send an e-mail without the threat of the government reading it and deciding if it is OK, a question needs to be raised as to how free are we really? I see this going in a bad direction in the future. While it may seem like it is a good idea now to give our government the ability to invade our privacy because it is for our safety, I could see them being able to justify themselves and use these policies when it is not desperately needed in the future. I believe that privacy should be maintained to the fullest degree possible.

WIki Wiki

The concept of a Wiki is one that seems so simple and yet there are complexities that come along with using it.

A Wiki is essentially an editable website. The purpose of these websites is to show and share information with others that can be edited by yourself and others.

There are links within pages that allow you to travel from page to page with ease. A Wiki will create a page for you which allows you to put links into other pages that transfer you to a page that you can place information into. I like to think of it as an all-inclusive conversation.

According to Day 2 of the 21 days of Wikis, Wikis allow for collaboration by letting users or members within an organization view and edit material which stays in one place, rather than having it float around cyberspace. Google, took this idea with their "google docs" which allows essentially anyone access to your document to make changes.

Wikis are also capable of making your business or organization's meetings much more efficient and effective. Agendas can be put on a Wiki and shared with all collaborators so that action items can be labeled and changes can be made simulatenously and with instant changes occurring for all those participating.

There are sites that you can use to create wikis, some cost a little bit of money, but it depends on what you would like your wiki to do. wikispaces and pbworks are a couple of those websites that allow you to use wikis.