Seongbae's questions

1. Henry Jenkins argue that fan works and amateur works serve as catalyst for mainstream media. I agree with him. The user-generated contents are what shape the online space and I believe it heavily affects mainstream media these days. Jenkins, however, did not talk about drawbacks of this. What possible negative effects can this participatory culture have on the original works or to mainstream media?

2.As a continuous question from the previous one, I personally think the most negative effects of participatory culture is too much good information! As Gavino’s recent research showed, even a great number of college students can’t distinguish news articles from blog postings! Based on this, what is our next move? Will media invent some ways to prevent this so their ‘major’ works can be distinguished from amateurs? Or will media take advantage of this by adopting more user-generated contents?

3. Mark Poster predicts a future information era as dangerous when he explain Lyotard’s article (1984) in a detail. He warns of the dangers of a generalized computerization of society, in which the availability of knowledge is politically dangerous. I believe this is just the case today. Too much information is available online that people can barely distinguish trustworthy information from those that are not. Then I wonder, why did he just say “the availability of [too many] knowledge is politically dangerous? Maybe he didn’t see that the overload of information would extend to this degree. What other areas are becoming dangerous by the too much information other than just politics?

4. On page 546 of the Poster’s article, he briefly talks about hyperreality. Although he predicted that there would be a boom of virtual reality in future, I am sure he did not predict it to be this popular as it is today. According to him, groups of individuals are able to interact in the same fantasy space, which makes the possibilities even more difficult to conceive. I am somewhat scared by this notion. It is already creating too many online addicts.

5. A Welcome for Blogs by Cohen made me recall the conversation we had in our last class. Will the blogs keep existing as it is today in future? Like Dr. Harp said, I also believe many bloggers will want to get paid for their contents as time goes on. Will this eventually blur the boundary between decent bloggers and professional journalists? They will be both getting paid for the contents they are producing, and some bloggers can write better than reporters.