Public vs. Private

     Publicness: Is it a good or bad thing?  We have been studying Jeff Jarvis, author of Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live, and he says that our newer, public world is improving many things.  Some of those include collaboration, organization, and protection.  Those are very important ideals in any society, and Jarvis is saying that publicness, mostly through social media, is enhancing our society.
     On the other hand, a man by the name of Alessandro Acquisti has different thoughts on private information now becoming public.  He spoke at TED back in June of 2013.  His video - entitled Why Privacy Matters - is full of doomy studies that show some chilling ways our private information can quickly become not-so-private with modern technology.  There is some overlap between Jarvis and Acquisti, but they mostly disagree with each other.
     One of Jarvis’ main points in his chapter “The Benefits of Publicness” is all about how publicness protects us.  The very first line of his first paragraph he states, “The more public society is, the safer it is” (“Private Parts” 60).  It’s a crazy concept to think about – how could less privacy protect us?  We figured out in class that he is thinking that members of a public community can all be watchdogs to keep the community safe if they are more transparent with the information they share with each other.
     Acquisti has an immediate, alarming response as if he’s directly refuting Jarvis on the issue of publicness protecting us.  At about the 2:35 mark of the video he starts to explain two studies he conducted on students of Carnegie Mellon University.  I won’t explain the whole experiment because it does that in the video and I think it is very important and useful to watch the whole video in order to understand things I will be referring to later in this post.  Anyway, back to this point, he found ways to predict Social Security Numbers using facial recognition software combined with “Big Data” from social media.  All of which is available legally and for free online.  In Jarvis’ quote from page 218 he says, “We have the tools to do it,” meaning we’re able to share things.  However, Jarvis is looking at sharing/publicness through a positive lense, whereas Acquisti looks through a much darker lense.
     Another major point of Jarvis is found in the beginning of his chapter entitled “By the People.”  He takes up about six pages trying to convince us that the government and major corporations need to kill secrecy because transparency is the key to collaboration.  Now he of course is talking about preventing leaks in government organizations rather than preventing personal details from becoming public, but they are both major issues nonetheless.  Jarvis talks about how transparency is power and the truth will eventually come out.  He wants publicness to rule, but that is exactly what Acquisti is warning us about.
     He says that we’re headed for a “future without secrets” (5:00 Mark).  Meaning everything is going to be public.  His caveat to us is strong.  Just think if we were a completely public society – think about the stuff that would be accessible to everyone: Bank account numbers, all personal data, etc.  He brought an idea to light at the 5 minute mark of his video (I can’t link it because it’s not a YouTube video).  He says, “Imagine a future in which strangers around you will look at you through their 'Google Glasses'.... and use seven or eight data points about you to infer anything else which may be known about you.  What will this future without secrets look like?"  It’s an extreme, and even Acquisti acknowledges this, but it’s something that might not be far off.  And boy will it be weird when technology reaches that type of advancement.
     There is one thing that both authors seem to agree on, and that has to do with trade-offs.  Jarvis talk’s trade-offs back in his “Benefits of Publicness” chapter.  He says, “Trade-off is the word that often punctuates this discussion” (“Private Parts” 60).  Meaning that there are trade-offs when talking about privacy vs. security or private vs. public things.  Acquisti also accentuates this point.  He says, “Privacy is both the means and the price to pay for freedom” (12:45 Mark).  So, we have trade-offs by wanting more privacy and we have trade-offs if we want more publicness.  It absolutely works both ways.
     We spent a lot of time on Jeff Jarvis, a positive but potentially naïve author, and we got used to looking at publicness as the only way to advance society.  I found an excellent Ted Talk by Alessandro Acquisti that told the other side of the private vs. publicness story.  I learned that there is a slightly dark, unappealing side.  Publicness sounds great for collaboration, but Acquisti showed me through his experiments that publicness is not the answer for protection.

Facebook Advertising History

Advertising is an ever evolving industry for one main reason.  Marketers want to advertise their product on the most popular mediums right?  Well that most popular medium has been constantly changing.  It used to be radio, then it went to TV, and most recently it has become the Internet - specifically Facebook.  It may seem that everyone knows Facebook's history because of the movie The Social Network or just simply from common knowledge, I certainly thought I did.  However, that is only scratching the surface of it.  When I looked deeper into the way they've single handedly changed advertising, I found that there were obviously some things I didn't know.

I found this amazing slide show that chronicles Facebook's advertising history on a HubSpot Blog.  I will be using that as a reference, but I wasn't able to link to specific slides, so I'll just be directing you to the appropriate slides as we progress through their history.  Anyway, let’s start at the beginning.  Facebook was launched in 2004 and was actually named Thefacebook.com.  It started collecting ad revenue right away - but not the way we would think of now.  Back then it was ads called flyers that were displayed along the side of the site.  They were simple in design and cheap.  Local businesses and student organizations would buy them for $10-40 per day (Slide 14).  They aren't much different from the ads we see down the right side of the page today, but the main difference is the price.  After flyers came flyers pro.  This was advanced in a way that advertisers could target based on demographics.

From there it meddles with ad groups and other small revenue generating endeavors, but then in 2010 it started something big: their mobile app.  This really sling-shot them past other social media sites in terms of users and ad revenue.  Throughout the slide show you can see how their users, ad revenue, and mobile users continue to increase.  Another big thing they did was enable more advanced targeting options for advertisers (Slides 60-61).  This in turn created more of a "want" from marketers.  In other words, advertisers wanted to use Facebook to market their product or service because 1) there were so many users and 2) there were such advanced targeting options.  These concepts were relatively new so advertisers flocked to Facebook.

After that, Facebook started advertising on their mobile app (Slides 74-78).  They inserted them into our news feeds so as to not interrupt our experience.  They also started Social Graph, which was all about providing information to advertisers.  Social Graph recorded data such as the pages users "liked," who we were friends with, and what music we listened too.  This included cookie-based advertising.  Cookies are proof of different webpages we've visited.  So, marketers were provided with more information than ever; therefore, increasing their targeting ability exponentially.  There are some good ad stats on slides 90-94 that are worth a look too.

Zuckerberg's most recent endeavor to make Facebook more appealing to marketers has to do with what users are buying in stores.  Forbes has an article that came out in February of this year explaining that they are now able to sell information from what users have purchased online and in-stores based off of loyalty programs.  This is just the newest way advertising has evolved in our society.

As for Curran, he has outlined a very different history for advertising in chapter 10 of his book Media and Democracy.  He discussed advertising in the mid-Victorian era and how marketers went about it.  For one, he gave an example of two newspapers.  The first was a paper read by 100,000 lower class people, and the second was a paper read by only 1,000 upper class people.  He said that advertisers would choose to run ads with the upper class paper because they had the purchasing power even though there were 10x more people reading the other paper.  This was marketers’ mentality back then because they didn't know any better.  As you can see with my Facebook example, that is not the mentality now.  Like I stated in the third paragraph, advertisers choose Facebook for two reasons and one of them is because of the sheer number of users.  Advertisers get a wide reach into a huge group of diverse people.

A second thing I got from reading Curran's chapter ten was that advertisers had no idea what journals/papers to advertise with based on audience interests.  There was a great quote that seems absolutely ridiculous in today’s day and age, but Curran states, "The advertiser had no means of accurately determining which journal might be best adapted to his views, and most likely to forward his interests" (153).  This literally seems impossible because of all the ways we have to find target audiences in terms of marketing and advertising, but that is how it was back then.  Now, we come to the second part of what I stated earlier in the third paragraph: Advertisers have very advanced ways to target specific audiences.  Here's the bottom line, not long ago, advertisers had to pay to show ads to everyone even if some of them were people who may not have any interest in their product or service, thus getting a low return on investment (ROI).  There was a great quote from the blog post where I found the slide show.  It states, “The improvements in Facebook’s advertising platform are helping marketers to reach their audience in ways that often aren’t possible through other channels” (HubSpot Blog).  Meaning, by advertising on social media such as Facebook, marketers have the choice where to place their ads in order to get a higher ROI.  They target us based on what we have "liked" and what pages we've visited, as well as our demographic information such as age, gender, location, etc. 

Advertising is a unique industry to study because it is always changing.  Marketers used to not have a clue who they targeting and how to choose the appropriate medium.  Over time it has evolved into a complex idea of nailing the correct medium and getting through to your target market.  Facebook has done this throughout its ten year history and that is why it is such a successful company.

Fahrenheit 9/11 - The Iraq War

          This was an interesting prompt, and I actually loved getting into the research.  I decided to look at one of Eric Louw’s concepts: The Iraq War section of chapter eight.  The Iraq War section discusses the ways that President Bush and the government planned the war in accordance with their PR-ized warfare model and revised model. I will relate all these points made by Louw, to the Michael Moore documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.  This is an extremely informative documentary that uncovers many issues about George W. Bush and the US war on Iraq. 

          First off, The Iraq War was the majority of Moore’s focus for the first half of the documentary; it was also a pretty large focus of chapter ten from Louw.  Both Moore and Louw agree that there was a PR-ized warfare model that President Bush followed.  The first point Louw makes simply states, “Saddam Hussein was demonized in the lead-up to the war” (156).  This is expressed in Moore’s film many times.  He actually makes fun of Bush several times for his stupidity and decision making.  He also puts a fantastic interview into his film from a man named Richard Clarke.  You should listen for at least a minute and a half because the content is extremely insightful.  Clarke actually gets a quote from Donald Rumsfeld saying, “There are no good targets in Afghanistan; let’s bomb Iraq.”  What a ridiculous thing to say right?  This administration, beginning with Bush, had an agenda and they demonized Saddam in order to spin it in the direction they wanted.

          Louw mentions, in his second point, that Bush and other privileged higher-ups assisted in getting twenty-four members of Bin Laden’s family out of the country even though the airlines were completely shut down in the days after the attacks.  Moore dives into this further telling us that there were private as well as commercial jets deployed to take these Saudi’s out of the country.  Moore talks about how in any type of criminal situation the police always look to the suspect’s family for questioning.  This situation was treated differently because, again, Bush had an agenda.

            The third point of Louw’s PR-ized warfare model states that war was justified by creating victims.  The US – and I remember this from living through it – did this by talking about how oppressed the Iraqi people were because of Saddam.  Bush and the government made it seem as if they were going to war to save a group of oppressed and helpless people.  That was never the intention of Bush; he had different ideas.

This original warfare model was then revised.  Louw suggests that it was revised to address more specific issues that arose in Iraq.  Some of his points include, “Ensuring that the Pentagon stories were always much more exciting,” and, “Making sure that the opposition’s stories were simply drowned out and smothered” (157).  Moore illustrates this to perfection in his film.  He finds tons of prominent news networks introducing all kinds of scare-stories in an attempt to keep American’s minds on what they wanted them to hear and off what they didn’t.  The media was directed by Bush and the Feds to put out these outrageous stories and then contradicted them with mixed messages in order to confuse the publics.  This tactic worked to perfection; pertinent information was kept from the public, while they were fed outlandish stories by the media.

This documentary is honestly very eye-opening.  Moore brings all these important facts to light that are echoed by Louw in chapter eight.  The Iraq War was controlled by Bush and his administration, and they were able to take it in whatever direction benefited them and their allies the most.  They used Saddam as a scape-goat.  They demonized him through the American media in order to gain public support.  Louw also states that in order to gain the war some support, you have to create victims.  The government did just that by showing oppressed citizens of Iraq and saying it was all because of there horrible dictator Saddam Hussein.  He was made into the villain, and that combination got us into a war with Iraq for no real reason.

Norms in The Office

          I have one all-time favorite show that I've faithfully watched since it started.  That would be The Office, so there was no way I was picking any other show to use as my example for this assignment.  However, I thought to myself, the office isn't a political show, so how am I going to find some examples within the show to go along with James Curran's points in Media & Democracy?  Well, I found that relating some moments and characters from The Office to public norms (not necessarily political norms) as they were discussed in chapter four would not be so hard after all.  Curran states that, "Public norms generate shared understandings about what actions are appropriate and inappropriate" (72).  This is exactly what The Office does in the clips that I've found online.  That is actually a big part of what makes the show so funny is the way it plays on particular public norms; whether it be mockingly following them or crashing over the norm-line at one-hundred miles an hour.
          The book had some examples that it focused on, so I decided to run with those.  The first thing Curran talks about in relation to public norms is the way gays were portrayed in the first half of the twentieth century.  There was strong social disapproval of gays, and this was reinforced with negative portrayals in films.  This worked out perfectly with my example of The Office because Oscar Martinez plays a gay man on the show.  The show decided to 'out him' as gay in the second season and I found a clip from that episode.  In this clip you see Michael, the boss, being extremely insensitive to Oscar because he is gay.  This would be a similar way people would have acted back in the early twentieth century.  However, in today's society, gays are becoming more and more accepted.  This change was majorly seen around the 1980s.  The book states, "For the first time, there were also screen portrayals of gays and lesbians as 'ordinary'" (72).  This is how The Office also went; however, I could not find a clip depicting that.  With the exception of a few episodes, the characters on The Office treat Oscar with respect because he is just a regular human being.  This reflects the way we (the majority) as a society see gays now.
          The second big thing that Curran talks about regarding norms is gender differences.  These gender norms have been in existence since the beginning of time.  The ones I'm talking about would the ideas that women belong in the house and men are to be the breadwinners of the family.  This was true for the longest time, and is still the way things go to an extent.  The Office uses this norm to create humor in several cases.  I found one clip of Dwight talking in which he highlights several stereotypes about women during a sales presentation.  They use Jim's character for disapproval (his wide eyes and shaking of his head) of the things that Dwight is saying throughout that entire part of his presentation.  I also found another clip from Dwight as well, talking about the NBA vs. WNBA.  For some context, since the clip barely gives enough, all the people of The Office are having an open discussion about how men are being given opportunities that the women aren't.  This was true for this particular instance on the show because Deangelo Vickers (Will Ferrell's character) becomes boss and is outwardly sexist.  This is an extreme example playing on our social norms, but it still happens.
          Gender norms and sexism are certainly still an issue in the workplace; however, it is not nearly as prevalent of a problem as it was years ago.  You can actually sue for unequal opportunities in the workplace between men and women.  According to Curran, it has generally become accepted across our society today that men and women are equal in the workplace.  The Office also portrays this ideology in another clip.  Basically I just want you to ignore most things in the clip except for the fact that Nellie (Catherine Tate) is the boss of the whole office.  She is a woman and she is the boss.  This would have never been accepted a while back, but now it isn't even questioned.  It's crazy how social norms that have existed for hundreds of years can be broken down in such a short amount of time.
          The Office is a very unique show, and the more I was forced to think about it, it actually uses public norms to create humor.  The show is constantly either crossing the line and challenging norms or it's mocking them in a way.  I've found some clips that perfectly portray the way gays were viewed, and the way they are mostly viewed in todays society.  Another big part of the norms section of chapter four discussed gender norms.  This is all about the opportunities that are afforded to men and not women.  Curran stated that it used to be unequal, but it the gender gap has actually gotten significantly smaller; almost to the point of there being no gap at all.  The Office also had many examples of existing and non-existant gender gaps which went along with what Curran has stated.  The Office is my favorite show and I'm glad it worked so well with Curran's points about public norms.

Is the US Media Really Factual & Unbiased?

          I found myself slightly lost when I sat down to write this blog, so I looked through my notes to find something I remembered to be interesting.  I ended up stopping on notes from chapter two.  I remembered that the Political Involvement spectrum that was up on the board actually made perfect sense to me.  It involved the three media models as stated by Hallin and Mancini: Liberal Model, Democratic Corporatist Model, and Polarized Pluralist Model.  The spectrum started with the Liberal Model as having the least amount of political involvement and spanned all the way to the Polarized Pluralist Model as having the most.  Curran makes sure to say, “Their [Hallin and Mancini] scholarly mission is to deteremine not whether a media system is good or bad, but to describe what it is and how it is” (Curran 28).  I chose the Liberal Model because that is the category that the US fell into, among three other countries.  There are a couple points that Hallin and Mancini stress.  They talk about the US, as well as Canada, Ireland, and Britain, as having “market-dominated, fact-centered journalism” and “professionally orientated journalists” (Curran 29).
            To start off, Curran, through Hallin and Mancini, makes one of his main points to say that the US media is journalism centered on facts.  That is what our media system is built upon but there are definitely times where that isn’t the case.  I wanted to find examples to disprove the all-powerful James Curran simply because I think it makes for a more compelling paper.  So, I found a video from CNN about the recent Navy Yard Shooting.  This video discusses how several news sources reported on the name of the suspect as Rollie Chance.  [Granted, this mistake was not purposely devised by any politician or political group, but it was still incorrect information that got put out there because the news media was in a hurry to be the first to name the killer.  The decision to release an unverified name is brought on by money because the first news station to get the name out there will have the most views and therefore make more money.  It is political in the sense that the station that breaks the most news first will be on top of all the other news stations.]  The real shooter was in fact discovered to be Aaron Alexis, but more importantly than that, it shows that there are certainly exceptions to Curran's classification of the Liberal Model and the United States’ inclusion in that model.
            The need for quick, breaking-news reporting in this scenario got me thinking what other things the media got wrong.  I found another news video, this one from Fox News, talking about the bias of left-wing liberals in the media.  He was saying that they used this very raw, very recent incident (as they seem to do with every mass shooting incident) to call for more gun control laws.  Bill O’Reilly also talks about how every media outlet was incorrectly reporting that Alexis had used an AR-15 assault rifle, which goes along with my previous point against Curran.  This other idea brought forward by O’Reilly also directly conflicts with Curran’s point about professional journalists.  Curran states that the US, being a part of the Liberal Model of media, has professional, un-biased journalists.  O’Reilly is directly refuting that statement.  He calls out left-wingers, saying they used the recent fatalities as proof that the gun laws need amended.  He’s saying that news stations used these left-winger’s statements even though they are extremely biased.
            I feel mistakes by the media make the citizens’ less informed in the immediate short term, but ultimately they become more careful about what to believe.  Thus, they look up information on their own to be more informed, so as to not be “duped” by the hastiness of the American media again.  This makes citizens more engaged with online and social media news sources.

            Basically, Curran’s points were valid, but I found two instances where his Liberal Model was not a catch-all for everything in the US media and that there is definitely some overlap into the other two categories.  First, CNN showed that the news stations don’t always report factual journalism.  There are instances where facts aren’t confirmed but are reported anyways.  Secondly, Bill O’Reilly of Fox News reported on the bias of left-wing news stations broadcasting footage of liberal politicians using this Navy Yard Shooting as proof that we need more gun control laws.  These both go against Hallin and Mancini’s points, presented by Curran, that the US media is centered on facts and reported by un-biased professionals.