The topic of privacy is facing a new challenge in the digital era according to Belad et al (2011). While the conventional definition of privacy can be simply defined as being left along, the concept of privacy is much more complex in the online environment. While the meaning of absolute control of your privacy in the online is nearly impossible, online users’ awareness of such inherent risk can cause negative effects against companies and users. Companies and third parties must continue to collect user information to learn about their constituencies and provide more relevant services of products for them. However, once users become too afraid of offering information, companies will likely lose the ability to craft better offerings while customers will lose the chance of finding more relevant products and services. Hence, companies must demonstrate the ability to protect users’ personal information from external intrusions and its motivation and intention to product and respect information. Overall, users will doddle between information privacy protection behavior and information-seeking behavior. People will always want to protect their privacy. Nevertheless, companies can ease such concern of users by offering worthy offerings and embedded trust.

In the same sense, Bodle (2011) also elaborate the concern of online privacy using Google’s privacy practices as an example. Given the popularities of Google’s lines of cloud base software, the user base is growing in a massive scale. However, the author argued that Google relies on loosely defined self-regulations placing the responsibility of managing privacy protection on the user with vaguely written privacy policies. Some examples suggested the overly excessive personal data collections by Google without clear indications of the intended purposes.  While the author’s criticism against Google and muddy definition of privacy in the era of mobile technology is completely understandable, I must say that Google is not solely existing public enemy, and it happens to be that the firm is doing superb job than other privacy-destroyer wannabes. It surely imposes critical challenges against online privacy in the mobile technology era, but I still believe that self-regulation and user responsibilities are the way to improve unfinished mobile technologies and gain more social acceptance of such technologies.

According to Ford (2011), once clearly separated, the boundary between public and private is becoming blurry and intermingled private and public domains than ever before in the age of internet and mobile technologies. Especially, the advent of social media and blog brought even fierce tensions between public and private domains because individual users’ narratives of personal lives are aired to public and such stream of personal data can be collected and used without consent of the users. On the other hand, it is interesting that the author pointed out such online mediums are where we start to see the less obscure boundary between private and public because users have the option to classify the audience of the messages. The author suggested that the divide between private and public was never really a clear-cut line. Rather, the special and personal the public/private distinction is best described as a continuum anchored with the private on end and the public on the other.

Nevertheless, Ford’s continuum model is not without criticism. According to Jurgenson and Rey (2012), her concept is still limited to dichotomous nature of private and public divide, so that it would be better off to understand the concept as dialectic, meaning that each concept implies the other. Besides, as the example of danah boyd’s example of social steganography, a public message in social media setting is not necessarily a public message. With consideration of audience group, it can be consider either public or private for certain groups with shared values. Their proposed dialectic framework was reputed by Ford, stating that the steganography was an example of meaning-management, rather than the demonstration of dialectic nature of the private and public divide.

The private and public divide is a complex issue. As the boundary becomes blurry and such process is accelerated by internet and mobile technologies, we will likely experience emergences of new norm and value systems in the context of new technology infused environment. Apparently, many people is still learning the consequences of broadcasting supposedly private message in public channels, such as social media, and they are shaping relevant manners and etiquettes. Users of this new domain are self-regulating and self-purifying the new system. Although some may not like it and believe that new bundles of legal regulations must be injected, I still believe that wisdom of crowd will dominate our new channel, and the conventional definition of privacy, being left alone, will be applicable with little bit of twist in social media styles.

The arguments regarding open-source as   culture were surely intriguing. While one side argues that innovation is hard to appear without strong incentives for the effort of creators, the other side of argument is that strong intellectual property right can potentially hinder the flow of information and prevent continuous group efforts of improving creations. By using the examples of software and other media contexts, the article somewhat lean onto the advantages of open-source.

While I strongly agree that better creations are always coming from collaborations of brilliant minds, proprietary knowledge should be protected for economic incentives and from the risk of being open to anyone.

As mentioned before, social media network is consisted of individual users and contents, and accumulation of such contents creates significant value for the network. While users’ content sharing and collaborated works are the primary mean for content creation, the definition of collaboration is rather complex and often the source of debate for content ownership. Hyde and colleagues explained that the act of content sharing alone cannot be constituted as collaboration while many online contents are shared, and the works often stand alone. Hence, ranging from weak to strong, collaboration can occur when the criteria for assessing the strength of a collaboration is met—intention, goals, self-governance, coordination mechanisms, property, knowledge transfer, identity, scale, network topology, accessibility, and equality. On the other hand, in reality, I think that as long as the collaborators’ contributions are acknowledged, it should be fine.

Who would think that giving away brilliant ideas for free was that hard? One may think that any business with a functioning brain will be profited from free idea, but apparently it can only work when there is no extensive infrastructural investment and minimal risk of facing armies of competitors who want to benefit from the first market mover’s hard work. In fact, the series of copyright laws and businesses’ action of protecting their proprietary knowledge can indeed hinder active improvement and flux of creativity. However, when there is no protection for business ideas and investment, it is extremely difficult for businesses to actively use any extraordinary, but free idea. In that sense, I have to say, an excellent business idea is the one that is profitable, marketable, sustainable, and protectable.

The implication of digital open-source in an academic field was particularly intriguing since I am a scholar wannabe. Given the declining funding for publications and library resources, scholarly publishing is becoming increasingly demanding and competitive. Hence, it is natural for scholars to lean toward open-access movement. However, the issue is that there is little or even no sense to give away hard-won research to publishers free of charge in an exchange for gaining glorified status of being a scholar. Proponents of open-access movement argue that, since scholars want publicity, open-source publications satisfy both publishers and scholars. I entirely agree with open-access movement, and I believe that ongoing collaboration in theoretical and empirical level among scholars can truly advance any academic discipline. Nevertheless,  the reality is that junior scholars are under tremendous pressure to publish quantitatively and qualitatively for their successful career paths. Besides, many scholarly publications are not considered equal because any academic discipline often has a ranking system for academic publications, and the quality of scholarly works are often evaluated based on the ranking of the journals that scholars’ works were published.

Overall, such movement of open-access will surely govern the future of information exchanges and education. Educators will be forced to revamp their mind set for academic advancement along with their career paths. The definition of academic institution will undergo certain changes because the establishment is no longer the sole source of knowledge. We may be in the turbulent transitional period where the clashes of values are yet to be settled down. One thing for sure is that I will certainly have a career path, which will be slightly different from my professors’.

As Marshall pointed out, there are linkages between constant presence of digital technology and how we behave in the world. Although the example was the influence of movie on society, the analogy can be applied to current world where new technology, namely web 2.0, is radically changing the norms of communication, behavior in the digital and daily lives, and even socially accepted value system, especially in terms of social media networks.

Just like the casual chitchat between you and your neighbor become a piece of information about your neighborhood, the social media technology now enables the world to see the stream of your thoughts and others use them as their basis for knowledge and secondary experience for daily lives.  As Boyd pointed out, even a stream of mundane conversations and opinions can function as social grooming that allows network participants to grow their social knowledge of others.

People with similar interests can be connected easier than ever without the limitation of geographical location. Such new level of connectivity facilitates the formation of collectivity.  For example, as of September of 2011, one of online social networking sites, Facebook alone had over 800 million active worldwide users (Olivarex-Giles 2011), exceeding 2011 US populations of 312 million (US Census Bureau). Such massive user base creates a new domain, namely networked public according to Boyd. Just like human interaction, networked public are created by people with similar interest, purpose, backgrounds, and cause. Based on the infrastructure of a public or semi-public virtual profile given their selection of social media channel, users interact, view, and traverse with others.  As their mass and streams of conversation expand, social media channels will create more densely populated networked public, although it is undergoing unintended issues, such as a violation of virtual privacy (or, should I say the blurring boundaries between private and public virtual contents), ethical issues from advertising and minor’ use of social media networks, and the diluted concept of authenticity (since no one know about the original creator of virtual contents due to cycles of recreations and modifications). Nevertheless, the technology merely opened a new door for us because the new ideas sprung from the new technology can be only limited by our creativity.

References

Marshall, P. D. (2004). New Media Cultures. London: Hodder Arnold.

Olivarex-Giles, N. (2011), “Facebook F8: Redesigning and hitting 800 million users, Los Angeles Times,” [http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/09/facebook-f8-media-features.html]

Papacharissi, Z. (Ed.). (2010). A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. New York: Routledge.

Stalder, F. (2006). The logic of networks. In Manuel Castells and the theory of the network society (pp. 167-198). Cambridge: Polity Press. [ch. 6]

US Census Bureau (2011). Population Clock. [www.census.gov/]

My name is Hyeong-Gyu Choi (It’s pronounced as “He-young-Giu-Cho-e”). I am originally from South Korea, and I have been around in the US for some times. Given the complexity of pronouncing my full name, I go by my last name, Choi.

Before I came to Memphis, I had lived in Miami FL for some time while I learned the hard lesson that Miami was pretty much for tourists only. Later, I moved to the state of Ohio and got my Bachelor degree from the Ohio State University and Master degree from the Cleveland State University.

I married a beautiful violinist plus violist who was gracious enough to teach me that classic music could be truly enjoyable. Hanging around with a musician lends me a valuable life lesson. Musicians often spend months or even over a year to learn one piece of music, and they still say that they require study deeper to understand the piece. I have seen my wife practicing one musical passage lasts few seconds and trying to express the music in countless ways. Compared to her, I have not done anything in my life by doing my BEST and achieving what I am good at.

Also, while I am having more fun to hang around with my wife, I am living with two awesome dogs. Who knew that raising two puppies took that much of works and dedications? I am still learning life lessons about how sacred any living and breathing life.

Formerly a news+radio junkie and a fan of spy/sci-fi/detective novels, I am a scholar wannabe now, meaning that I am now struggling to keep up with reading and I would be happy as a chipmunk if I go through a week reading. Given my profound interest in consumer behavior, my research interest is computer-mediated digital communication in the form of social media. As general means of communication technology evolves, I believe that all the good old knowledge of psychology, communication, sociology, and even sense of humour and sharp tongue of Shakespeer will see another bright day in the context of social media.

Overall, I am a scholar wannabe, a cultural lost child who is still stuck at an awkward cultural crisis between South Korean and America, a dreamer who is still searching to find my life calling.