SOPA & citizenship in a digital age - 1 views

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  #1 Bonnie Sutton on 20 Jan 12

   

  Kid-Tech News for Parents
  http://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=31155>
  
  You could call Internet users "citizen lobbyists." This week, in a post-Arab Spring sign of how participatory media - and its participants - are powerfully changing things, they successfully went head-to-head with some powerful forces and won. Christopher Dodd, the head of the film industry trade group that lobbied and failed to push through the Stop Online Piracy Act (along with the US Chamber of Commerce and the recording industry) said that "no Washington player can safely assume that a well-wired, heavily financed legislative program is safe from a sudden burst of Web-driven populism," according to the New York Times. "The startlingly speedy collapse of the antipiracy campaign by some of Washington's savviest players … signaled deep changes in antipiracy lobbying in the future."
  So it's an understatement to say that it feels like this year will be a watershed. But lawmakers won't be the only ones to feel the power of the people outfitted with social media. I think social media companies themselves will too. In six blog posts, journalist, author and professor John Batelle looks at a variety of indicators of that. The most interesting to me was No. 6: "'The corporation' becomes a central societal question mark," he writes. "Most of us are struggling with the role corporations play in our society," he writes. "From a balance sheet prospective, corporations are in far, far better shape than just about every country in the world. Even as our personal incomes shrink on a per capita basis, and the world dips in an out of what feels like an eternal recession, corporate profits are up and up again. This feels a bit out of whack."
  "Citizen regulators" next
  And author and professor Don Tapscott writes, in his "20 big ideas for 2012," that "the privacy community is in shambles. In the past the threat was Big Brother (governments) assembling detailed dossiers about us. Then came Little Brother (corporations) creating detailed customer profiles. Today the problem is the individuals themselves. Hundreds of millions are revealing detailed data about themselves, their activities, their likes/dislikes, etc. online every day." In "Here's my personal data, marketers. What do I get for it?" Ad Age points to a passel of startups aimed at giving users control over their data.
  What I see so much of still (maybe this will change now that SOPA-as-we-know-it is reported dead) is a sense of user powerlessness and potential victimization by corporations - like we're somehow living in a social media world while our heads are stuck back in the mass-media one of the past. Certainly that victimization is a theme of many discussions about consumer privacy and online safety. But what about our growing power? Increasingly, the "product" of these companies is the "content" of our lives. We create the product - through our searches, status updates, tweets, blog posts, photos, videos, avatars, etc. We are their bread and butter. This gives us considerable collective power, once there's a critical mass of users who get this. We don't know our own strength! Part of it is the need for a new media literacy, a mindfulness not just about what we upload and download but about our power and our collective place in social and media history. Tapscott's ninth "big idea" is "the citizen regulator," and I think that's next. Governments will be crowd-sourcing regulation, once we all begin to realize and exercise our collective bargaining power. Certainly the world's children are learning to! We can start figuring this out by watching our children - and talking with them about SOPA and how they want to participate. [Here's my own prediction, posted last month: "Anti-social media companies will be obsolete," including some characteristics of successful pro-social media corporations.

   

  <div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">Kid-Tech News for Parents <br /> <a href="http://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=31155" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=31155</a>> <br /> <br /> You could call Internet users "citizen lobbyists." This week, in a post-Arab Spring sign of how participatory media - and its participants - are powerfully changing things, they successfully went head-to-head with some powerful forces and won. Christopher Dodd, the head of the film industry trade group that lobbied and failed to push through the Stop Online Piracy Act (along with the US Chamber of Commerce and the recording industry) said that "no Washington player can safely assume that a well-wired, heavily financed legislative program is safe from a sudden burst of Web-driven populism," according to the New York Times. "The startlingly speedy collapse of the antipiracy campaign by some of Washington's savviest players … signaled deep changes in antipiracy lobbying in the future." <br /> So it's an understatement to say that it feels like this year will be a watershed. But lawmakers won't be the only ones to feel the power of the people outfitted with social media. I think social media companies themselves will too. In six blog posts, journalist, author and professor John Batelle looks at a variety of indicators of that. The most interesting to me was No. 6: "'The corporation' becomes a central societal question mark," he writes. "Most of us are struggling with the role corporations play in our society," he writes. "From a balance sheet prospective, corporations are in far, far better shape than just about every country in the world. Even as our personal incomes shrink on a per capita basis, and the world dips in an out of what feels like an eternal recession, corporate profits are up and up again. This feels a bit out of whack." <br /> "Citizen regulators" next <br /> And author and professor Don Tapscott writes, in his "20 big ideas for 2012," that "the privacy community is in shambles. In the past the threat was Big Brother (governments) assembling detailed dossiers about us. Then came Little Brother (corporations) creating detailed customer profiles. Today the problem is the individuals themselves. Hundreds of millions are revealing detailed data about themselves, their activities, their likes/dislikes, etc. online every day." In "Here's my personal data, marketers. What do I get for it?" Ad Age points to a passel of startups aimed at giving users control over their data. <br /> What I see so much of still (maybe this will change now that SOPA-as-we-know-it is reported dead) is a sense of user powerlessness and potential victimization by corporations - like we're somehow living in a social media world while our heads are stuck back in the mass-media one of the past. Certainly that victimization is a theme of many discussions about consumer privacy and online safety. But what about our growing power? Increasingly, the "product" of these companies is the "content" of our lives. We create the product - through our searches, status updates, tweets, blog posts, photos, videos, avatars, etc. We are their bread and butter. This gives us considerable collective power, once there's a critical mass of users who get this. We don't know our own strength! Part of it is the need for a new media literacy, a mindfulness not just about what we upload and download but about our power and our collective place in social and media history. Tapscott's ninth "big idea" is "the citizen regulator," and I think that's next. Governments will be crowd-sourcing regulation, once we all begin to realize and exercise our collective bargaining power. Certainly the world's children are learning to! We can start figuring this out by watching our children - and talking with them about SOPA and how they want to participate. [Here's my own prediction, posted last month: "Anti-social media companies will be obsolete," including some characteristics of successful pro-social media corporations.</div>

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