China's War Against the Internet Rages On

In browsing the archives of the same scholarly periodical I referenced before (they have whole Communications tab, it's pretty sweet), I found an article about how the Chinese version of Skype, an application called TOM Skype (that link will only be useful to you if you read Chinese, so I'm not sure why I posted it), was found to contain some of the same wordfilters imposed by the Chinese Government upon ISPs in China. These Skype filters, however, didn't block the use of these words- instead, it took a packet of information from the sender's computer and ISP, sometimes including highly sensitive information like real names, passwords, CC numbers, and bank account numbers, and sent this packet to a server full of similar information. This server full of valuable information was not even secured, although shortly after the study this article was based on was published, it got locked up in a hurry.

Now, this could be two things, to my eyes. Either someone hacked TOM Skype real good for the purpose of stealing identities, which the rather slapdash nature of the entire operation suggests; or, the Chinese government is finding new and even more intrusive/damaging ways to quash their citizens' ability to communicate with the world outside the Chinese borders. I find the second much more compelling for a number of reasons, and I'm going to run with it for the rest of this post.

First, I should probably say that I'm no expert on China, Chinese history/culture, or Chinese/American/International relations, so I may be underestimating the effect of Chinese culture and heritage upon their citizens' mindsets, but all of my experience and acculturation from the United States says that censoring the Internet is like trying to censor the entire rest of the world: it can't be done. People- smart, free-thinking, rebellious people- will know how to get around whatever restrictions you put in fromt of them; hackers have been proving this again and again in the recent history of the United States and Europe.

On the other hand, since the entire remainder of China's media outlets seem to be pretty Authoritarian (or perhaps Not-So-Soviet Totalitarian), and Chinese history has dictated that the masses will think what the leader(s) thinks, at least until a suitably charismatic revolutionary alternative to the previous revolution, now a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy, appears, perhaps this will all blow over. Regardless, the topic of censorship is an intriguing one, and I think there may be some serious potential for work in this area of the field, especially with the advent of the Internet and its many pornographic... er, commercial uses.

No, It Isn't Porn This Time Either...

I didn't actually post any porn, but I wanted to share this before I went to bed: (you are duly forewarned, there is one effer and censored nudity (Which is kind of the point, really. It's actually perfectly clean)).



Music videos are still a kind of mass media, right? This is for the song "Toe Jam," by the Brighton Port Authority, featuring the talents of David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal.
There are a couple of aspects of this video that really intrigue me, but I leave it to you to discuss them. I'm hitting the sack.

Google Plans to Revolutionize TV Ads, Too.

I was digging around some of the nerdier news sources when I caught wind of this tidbit of news about Google Corp., which is both interesting and quite disturbing. Google's highly successful AdWords technology has, arguably, revolutionized advertising on the Internet, allowing Google to tailor the ads it exposes to you based on some of the keywords in the pages you view most often (unsurprisingly, I see a lot of ads for Magic cards.) Now they want to do the same with television ads, albeit with a few key changes.

Currently, Google is teamed up with Nielsen to let advertisers place their ads based on viewership info such as age and gender. The next generation of this technology, however, involves partnerships with both Equifax, a credit reporting service, and Echostar (the corporation behind the Dish Network satellite TV brand) in order to allow advertisers to target their ads by these factors as well as by credit history, income, and buying habits. That sounds particularly suspicious to me, as a filthy liberal-hippie-pinko-commie-terrorist-guy, because the ability of several multi-national corporations to access my personal info in an attempt to sell me stuff means that there are that many more places where the security of my information could be compromised.

I guess the real thing about this technology that gives me pause is whether or not this changes the entire nature of television advertising. I wonder about what the fact that advertisers can have a tighter and tighter control over the targets of their messages will mean to our definition of advertisement. This is certainly the newest paradigm in mass media ad campaigns, and it is one that probably, barring total infrastructural failure, will continue- it is the next step in making advertising effective and economical, the next rung on the evolutionary ladder of ad-making, starting with the Victorian practice of wallpapering stretches of fence and building with copies of the same poster, to bulletin boards, to broadcast media, and now to digital media. Each step has gotten more accurate as time has gone on, this step just seems a little creepy.

One part of the article that caught my eye, however, was when the project manager for the TV Ads unit mentioned that the television audience is becoming more and more like the Internet audience- increasingly broken into smaller fragments that have divergent interests, a change fueled by the proliferation of television channels available for consumption. What this means to the manager and to me is that television is, rather than dying out, adapting to the new environment, catering to our society's new expectations for its entertainment and informational consumption.

Technological Determinism is affecting the ways that we think, and the way that we think is affecting the ways we consume- the question in my mind now is "what do yesterday's technologies do when they are preempted by newer media?" We've asked this before, I know, and today, looking at the way that newspapers are going, it would appear that old technologies can survive for another two or three generations of technology, but I heard the other day that the Star Tribune is going to discontinue home delivery this coming year, sending paper copies only to businesses, and moving mostly online. Apparently, some of the old ways may pass, but the institutions, one way or the other, will continue.