Privacy
Balancing sociality and privacy (Papacharrissi) explains how sociality has always required some sort of (voluntary) abandonment of privacy. But now, everything is being archived and stored under every individual profile/person’s personal database. This concept turns privacy into a commodity. Now there are services offered to individuals for their information. This system is turning information into a currency for new uses on the Internet. She goes on to describe how those who are internet-literate are causing a divide between those internet savvy and those who are not.
Facebook privacy settings do not offer any ‘opt-out’ option for it’s users. So, anything shared with ‘friends’ on the site, Facebook uses to it’s own disposal. On the surface, this wouldn’t seem so bad, however, people share a lot of information with others without knowing it. For example, facebook chats are archived and saved, gmail uses it’s client’s emails to calculate demographics and other information about it’s users. Suddenly with all of these ‘privacy’ regulations, people are not being protected very much. One way businesses are trying to get around the issues many people have with these settings is to be very public with their policies, and hope that many people will not take the time to read through these long agreements. I know that I have never read the 10 page policies before agreeing to them so I could go on the site.
Google also saves other information about the user while the individual is still signed into their gmail account. Anything searched for through google or any navigation from google to another site is saved and analyzed by Google workers. I would like to see my ‘file’ from Google. I wonder if I fit any ‘normal’ demographics or if I am in my own category.
Copyright
Is there anything that is truly original anymore? Or is everything a ‘remix’ of something else? Copyright laws are very confusing. There a million caveats that could make something an original work, and even more that make it a violation of copyright law. The US Copyright Office demands that materials must meet some criteria: it must be original, or an new adaptation of the work, it must be fixed, or stored in some way; and it only need minimal creativity- pieces that fall under these criteria are protected by copyright. With Fair Use, the author’s control is limited and allows people to use a portion of the created work. This does not need any permission from the author of the work. There are four factors that are taken into consideration with fair use: the purpose, the nature of the work, the amount used, and the market effect of the use. Legally you only need permission for commercial use, more than one time use, and use of a large part of the material. So does technology change culture? In general, yes.
Creative Commons allows for people to put a license on their work to be recreated or used in other ways with minimal recognition. The main licenses used with creative commons (in any combination) are attribution: users must give the original author credit for the work they created; No Derivative works: no one can take the piece and change it in any way; Noncommercial works: no one can use the piece for anything commercial; and finally share-alike: those who use the piece must share it under the same creative commons licenses. These licenses allow people to create and share material in a way that allows other people to feed off of their creativity and originality.
Social Media in Businesses
The imagined audience, who a business believes they are talking to is an interesting phenomenon. Marwick and Boyd claim that businesses that consciously speak to an audience are usually perceived as inauthentic. When accounting for the audience, because of the various ways people can consume and spread tweets, it is virtually impossible for users to account for their potential viewers. So, the participants must imagine their audiences, in many cases they are not always correct. Many of those who produce the content of tweets, blogs, posts, etc are navigating through these imagined audiences and concealing subjects to maintain a specific authenticity. Bloggers work from cognitively constructed audiences- readers may or may not be reading the posts. Because Twitter is able to retweet posts, the audience can be ever changing, making audiences always imaginary.
