Comments on "Video Killed the Faculty Star"

I decided to respond to Inside Higher Ed's "Video Killer the Faculty Star", not because it was shorter and easier to comprehend than "Recombitant Comedy" (though it undoubtedly was), but because I reacted most to this one. The article was a defensive one, for sure: it asked, at its base, "What will happen to academia?"  What will happen to academia when students bring their technology into the classroom? When they record lectures? When they hold their professors accountable for problematic opinions?

The American Association of University Professors is quoted in the article as stating that the classroom should be a closed community as early as 1915. The article makes a good point in stating that in this era of technology such a privacy is not exactly a reality anymore- every student has on their person an audio and video recorder that they can, at any point in the lesson, activate. Which I don't really see as a bad thing: what's wrong with giving people the power to, if they please to, record things they deem important?

I find it interesting that one example that they use that includes a testimony from the recording side involves a video that had been selectively edited to produce its effects. Since it's the first example given any instance they show of recording faculty after this will have a tinge of dishonesty- has this video been tampered with, too? It's important to include this possibility in an article concerning the topic of recording, but to present it as your first argument can not be coincidence.

The writer's word choice shows a lot about his feelings on the issue, too- in the opening sentence, he uses phrases like "gotcha moments" and "The TMZ-ification of higher education" provide a very negative connotation to any who record. The TMZ-ification of higher education in particular is a telling metaphor: it brings to mind an image of an entire lecture hall staring down at the professor, two hundred cameras in hand, waiting for him or her to stumble. Which isn't what's happening at all- in fact, one of the defining conventions of the "gotcha" professor video genre is that the video usually starts in the middle of the conversation, as the student didn't think to record until the professor started doing something worthy of documentation.

Comments on "The Filter Bubble"

When I read this article, the first thing I did was delete my cookies.

Not that it will particularly  help me- Facebook and Google are all-knowing, all-seeing. Facebook is installed on my phone, and my Internet browser of choice is Chrome, so if its anonymity I want, I'm going about it all wrong. 

But it is anonymity that I want. "The Filter Bubble" introduced no surprising news to me- I've known for a while that Google tracks your searches and clicks to give you what it thinks you want to see, and that Facebook uses your information to improve ad services. I get it, too- personalization of the web is extremely profitable, and that's what matters. 

Its just so weird to me. 

The first time I encountered personalization was on Facebook- it was around 2009 that I had noticed the ads on the social media site were becoming strangely tailored. Adverts for new flutes and concert tickets started replacing those insufferable bar-ads that incorporated a simple game into their ploy to get you to click. A social media service using the data you inputed to their website to sell adspace seemed cheap and kind of exploitative to me, but it wasn't too much for me to stop using Facebook. It was just an improved method of  turning users into buyers. 

It was when I found out that this personalization was also happening to my news that I grew concerned. I appreciated the internet as a news source because it has a limitless amount of information from an equally limitless amount of sources- you can easily find seven different stories on the same event. This information was difficult to get through, however, so I employed the use of Google news to get through it for me. The fact that Google decides what news articles to show you based on past history just seems fundamentally wrong- reading news from sources that you are given because it is known that you agree with these sources will result in recursive, unproductive thinking. There is no growth in reading what you know you like.