Partner Q&A #2

Engineering a New Order:

1. What is the difference between the "art of war" and the "science of war"?

The science of war is the principles, analyses, and rules of military science.  It includes collecting and ordering records of past experiments to determine the best principles and concepts to be used. The art of war is the application of these principles and rules. The art of war seeks to produce certain effects while science is meant to investigate the causes of the effects (Hacker). The art of war uses the records and data collected in the science of war to produce more effective results in future operations.  

3. What is the definition of the "military-industrial complex"?

The military-industrial complex is the connection between the policies that are created and the members of Congress from districts that are dependent on military industries.  Military spending directly influences the industries that produce the equipment needed by our armed forces. The connections deal with the relationships between members of Congress, bureaucracies, and interest groups as well.  There are a variety of different political tactics used to influence one another to get funding and desirable policies passed.  The end result influences the amount of funding and oversight of different programs and industries. A fear of the military-industrial complex was that if the military industries gained too much power, policies might be passed that are not in the best interest of the country as whole.

The Internet Revolution:

2. What would Bush think of a smart phone in relation to his "memex"?

A memex was considered to be a type of information management system.  It was thought of as something that was able to extend memory.  I think Bush would be amazed by the smartphone and the capacity of information storage it is capable of and at such a quick rate.  Bush also thought that the memex could serve as a private file library, where all your personal files would be available, creating the concept of memory which is vital to receive feedback.  This concept was key for the persistence of information, which along with many other advancements, I believe contributed to the overall existence of the smartphones that are available today. 

Week 5 Questions

The Ethics of Digital Direct Action (Coleman):

1) How have they caught the 14 people that were in the connection to the Mastercard and Paypal attacks?  Why were they able to catch them and not the participants in other attacks?  What type of surveillance can the FBI use to monitor actions, and can all of it be used in court?

 2) Is there anyway a website can protect it self from being a victim to these types of online server attacks? 

3) Since there are no prior legal rules or penalties in place for this type of crime, will this result in a more harsh punishment?  How will this influence the activities of other group members? 

4) How has the group gained so much support if they don’t have an identity?  Do they work together to do these hacks or do they all just label themselves under the ‘Anonymous’ title?

Our Weirdness is Free (Coleman):

1) In what ways does the group anonymous ‘constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities’? 

2) What is ‘a Cartesian attitude’?

3) How do people get this “personal” information from peoples hard drives that they use to perform these lulz-oriented actions?  If this information is on the Internet, what are the laws concerning privacy rights for these sorts of hacks?

Cyberdeterence and Cyberwar (Libicki)

1) If cyberattacks expose vulnerabilities that need attention and if these vulnerabilities can be fixed, do organizations share this information so they can all use this to decrease the vulnerability of their systems?

2)How and where are cyberattack tools widely available?

3) Do infrastructure owners or owners of the servers have a liability to protect the private information consumers provide to them, even if their site is hacked and the information is no longer private?  

Week 4 Questions

Chapter 6- The Internet Revolution: (O'Regan)
1) How did packet switching work in the time befor the internet, wouldn't there need to be some sort of communication channel in place for that to be possible?
2) How do Internet Protocols (IP) address and route packets? And why is a session not established before the data is exchanged, wouldn't it be the other way around?
3) When Canada and the few European countries got connected/access to the Internet did they have to pay for it, and if so who did they pay?
4) Did Berners-Lee inventor of the World Wide Web make money for his discovery? The article says that no one entity owns the internet, then why do people have to pay to host their webpages?
5) Did browser companies like Netscape and Explorer have access to the information that people placed on the user interface? And has this changed at all from then to current day?

Tools for Thought: Chapter 4, 5, 6  (Rheingold)

1) Why are there only two values in the logical calculation system that Boole proposed for logic calculations, couldn't something in human reasoning fall somewhere inbetween? 

2) What does Rheingold mean when he says that logical operations can be seen as physical devices that emit an output pulse? 

3) Since the Sun is the reason we live in a not closed system, if the sun exploded one day and was gone, would our system become a closed system where we would feel the effects instantaneously?

Engineering a New Order: (Hacker)
1) Do most other countries provided their military officers with higher education and put as much as an emphasis on military science as the US does?
2) It is said that higher authority comes from the military, but haven't most societies always had different forms of authority and control?
3) How did the process of industrialization draw on military models? What is an example of this direct connection?

Partner Q&A Week 3

Partner: Caroline Kennedy

1) The Political Power of Social Media

Why should the government be worried about technological progress?

As technology progresses citizens have a new way to voice their opinions and discuss issues.  If they are upset about how something is being dealt with, it also provides a means to quickly get the word out and ban together to protest for a cause.  I think this scares some governments because of the power it gives to the people to gain momentum and within hours have a mass assembly or protest.  Like the impeachment trial of the Philippine President discussed earlier in the article, which stated that a protest with over a million people was arranged through text messaging. 

I think governments that are trying to hide information from their citizens fear social media the most.  Information is power.  Technology provides citizens with information and the truth about what is happening, which some governments want to keep hidden from their people.  Technology is also a tool their citizens can use to ban together to create change.  This is why some governments filter the content that their citizens can view with their technological devices.

If governments have nothing to hide, and are open to free speech, then I don’t think they are worried about technological progress.  If anything, I think it has made government officials more aware of the consequences of their action.  I think this because we have seen how with technological advances, information is now widely available to all, and when one bad action is discovered it can be revealed to millions within a number of hours.

           

2) Resisting Technology

Can we really resist technology?  It is everywhere in everything we do…how can we avoid it?

I agree that in the society we live in now, it would be very difficult to resist all technology.  It is needed for educational, social, and informative purposes.  I don’t think we can avoid it all together, especially people in our age group living in this kind of society.  I think Agaewal wants people to think about how we got the technology we have today, and who was affected in the process.  It is not a right; it is a privilege that people in our society are lucky enough to have.  It is important to think of it in this way, so we do not become completely sufficient on it.  If something was to happen and we lost all our technological devices, it is necessary that we would still be able to survive and carry on without them.

  As each generation gains technology at younger and younger ages, they lose appreciation for it, and also become more and more dependent on it.  For example, young elementary students will be much more dependent on technology than our generation because they have grown up with it and it is something they have always had.  It is important to consider how we can use technology to help others, instead of always using technology for personal convenience and satisfaction.  So in conclusion, I don’t think in our society we can completely avoid technology, but we can think about it in a new light and about the good that it can be used for.

3) Some Tentative Axioms of Communication:

If it is impossible to not communicate, then what is it when someone is not responding to a question?  They are being communicated to, but are not communicating back.  How is this communicating?

Communication can be either verbal or nonverbal.  Just because someone is not saying anything or responding to a question does not mean that they are not communicating.  One can communicate using their body language, facial expression, behavior and even through the way they present themselves.  As the article explained, communication can be viewed as a series of interchanges.

For communication to take place, there needs to be a sender and a receiver of information.  Sometimes the sender is unaware of the message they are giving off to the receiver, or the receiver may misinterpret the message the sender is trying to get across.  There are various types of noise that can cause problems in the communication channel between the sender and the receiver.  By using technology has a medium for communication; an extra barrier to effective communication is created.  I think this because while using technology to communicate, the receiver usually can’t physically see the sender of the message, so they are not able to use non-verbal cues to help interpret the message.  Often times the receiver only sees what is written in text, which can lead to miscommunications.  So if you ask someone a question and they don’t respond, you are still perceiving something and receiving some sort of message from this interaction.

Week 3 Questions

Some Tentative Axioms of Communication (Watzlawick) 

1) When Watzlacwick says that to live effectively is to live with adequate information, what does he mean by adequate? And does can we explain the fact that many people would just rather live in ignorance of a lot of information?

2) What is the negative of a messages entropy and how can we use it to interpret information? 

3) How has technology better helped us 'punctuate the series of events' as Watzlawich calls it?  Or is there any way to change these patterns of interaction to better communication and understanding can take place? 

Cybernetics in History (Wiener)
1) What is the probabilistic theory?
2) How has the ambiguity associated with communication changed as a result of technology?
3) What makes a message entropic?

Effectiveness of Social Media for Socio-Political Change

Using social media for socio-political change is only effective if a public sphere, where people can freely discuss their problems, already exists.  If this public sphere does not exist, social media will not help much with gaining any political change.  If the government monitors and has the power to punish individuals for what they post on their social media, people will not feel comfortable posting their true thoughts and beliefs.  In these places, the government also has the ability to censor the information put on the web so people will have a hard time communicating with each other on social media to make any progress towards political change.  For social media to be effective, people need to have the ability to freely communicate about their problems and concerns with the government without censorship or fear. 

Blog about Twitterland Article (Meanland: the radical terrain of social media)

Twitter and most forms of social media are creating new ways of immediately spreading information, and voicing one’s opinion.  I think with this there comes many advantages but also some disadvantages.  Like the article said it can be used to spread information faster than ever before.  Twitter just provides listeners to people who have something to say, but I think problems may arise as we get more and more information available how can we determine what is the truth.  It is much easier to make a statement using a false identity.  People now have the ability to create a whole new virtual persona, or say exactly what they’re thinking at any time.  I think it makes people think twice about their actions, knowing that  they may eventually be posted for everyone to see, judge, and discuss.

In the past, the media has had the control over what issues are discussed and what is given importance.  After Twitter and other forms of social media have been created, the internet can now be used as a tool to spread information, discuss it and to organize events to take action.  Does Twitter monitor what is said by their users, and how does this affect or right to freedom of speech?

I find it interesting that there are still grey areas with Twitter and the law.  Can the information someone posts of Twitter, if it could be tracked back to the original author, could it be used against the person in court?  Couldn’t the person argue the posts were all just for entertainment purposes?  Especially since one can take up any identity on Twitter, or change their username or real name at anytime.  I think its good that Twitter works to protect the user’s personal information, but if the government decided that it wanted this information would Twitter have to comply? 

Week 2 Questions

Week 2:

Resisting Technology: Regaining a Personal Ecology (Agarwal)

1) What does Agarwal mean when he says that technology was designed for a greater common market?

2) What can people do to keep technologies focused more on human needs, and to channel this power for creating good?

3) Since the people who have the control over technology also have the power, will this isolation of technology only continue to get worse?

Architectures of Participation (Hopkins)

1) What does Hopkins mean when he says isolation applies at last a patina of madness to one's presence in the world? 

2) What is needed to have an open and bi-directional flow between two individuals to gain this excess of energy?

3) Is participation in the social system a choice, or something that just naturally happens? 

The Political Power of Social Media (Shirky)

1) Why was the Phillippine President Joseph Estrada being impeached? 

2) What does Shirky mean when he says in 1989 the states were behind the iron curtain?

3) What was the anti-Aznar Protest in Spain and what happened as a result of this gained momentum?