Keep your friends close, but your collaborators closer.

In the age of Facebook and social media the method of friendship has been digitized. Gone are the days of stumbling through cities looking for new friends, and the so called, "three hour conversation" as Deresiewicz puts it. We live in an age where friends, partners and even love interests can all be reached from the comfort of your computer. Deresiewicz sees this as the end of the classical ideal of friendship, however Rheingold and Shirky see this technological advance as the harbinger of  a new economic and social wave of collaboration and communication. Are we paying too dear a price for the wonders brought by social media? Or have we evolved to the point that "IRL" friendships and collaborations play a close second to our digital boardrooms and play grounds?


Like so many opponents of the digital age, Deresiewicz sees the detachment of the computer screen as a detriment, asking the question, "are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction?". Perhaps they are. I for one agree that the internet has changed the way we view other people, but like any change, we give and we take. What we may have lost in lasting, meaningful bonds between other human beings, we have gained in our ability to collaborate and communicate with the world around us. Shirky and Rheingold both make strong arguments, giving us examples of how the internet and social media are helping us solve problems, make money, and create discourse, in ways we have barely begun to understand. Rheingold goes as far to say that this new mindset could possibly be the beginnings of a new system of economy, where companies are willing to share in order to access a more efficient market place.


But again we must ask ourselves, is this worth the loss of the, "rare, precious, and hard-won" style of friendship felt between the our ancestors? Do we want to live in a world of tedious status updates and inane tweets? Are we taking true friendship for granted?


The answers depend on how much you are willing to feed the machine. Some of us are ready and willing to enter the blogosphere and create a presence on the internet, and for them their loss is minimal. Deresiewicz's "three hour conversation" can just as easily happen anywhere on the internet as it could in our homes, and for the internet savvy generation of ours we know how to communicate through the internet as well as in person. However I personally believe in the importance of the distinction between friends, and "Facebook friends". 


The use of Bittorrent is commonly brought up when discussing the collaborative power of the internet, but how many of us know to whom we are seeding or downloading from? These collaborations may be increasing, but our interactions surely aren't. While social media has created great things in our world, it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. We cannot abandon the ability to communicate and collaborate in person, as much as we cannot condemn the advancement of the internet's ability to do the same.


In the end there is neither a right or wrong answer. The internet has opened many doors that shouldn't be closed, but we cannot allow it to close ones we have already gone through, lest we be trapped.

Creativity + Copyright Laws = Pirate

As college students, most of us have used peer to peer applications to illegally download everything from course materials to pornography. This practice is inherently illegal and unfair to the producers and distributors who make their livings off sales. However the term "piracy" not only applies to people who are illegally downloading music and software, but also people who use copyrighted materials to create unique works of art.

In Larry Lessig's presentation  he sates that due to current copyright laws, kids are growing up in a society where common forms of expression (such as creating an AMV) are against the law. This means that the idea of breaking the law has become commonplace, and Lessig thinks this disregard for the law will only lead to worse things, and possibly greater infractions. The conclusion he comes to is that the laws need to be changed to accommodate the ever increasing presence of technology in our world today. Changing laws to make it things easier for people to post videos lip syncing to copyrighted music seems a tad bit ridiculous though.

Copyright laws are meant to protect intellectual properties from being passed off as someone else's work, or from being used for commercial purposes without permission. These laws are necessary for musicians, writers, and almost anybody who creates a unique intellectual product. Yet as Mark Helprin  mentions, copyright laws are not without flaws; namely the time limit on how long something can remain under copy right. The law was made to be ambiguous with the changing times, however, and efforts have been made to redefine the interpretation of the law to adjust.

Maybe then the whole of copyright law should be viewed in the same manner. While some Youtube-ers have found financial success, it has been with unique works, and just because someone uses other people's work to create this unique product does not mean either product would be the same independently. This is a slippery slope however due to the fact that illegal downloads have steadily increased. This culture where posting a uniquely made video on Youtube is seen as a criminal offence has only fed a community of online pirates. The two problems go hand in hand, so changing the laws will be easier said then done. The laws will eventually have to change, but the problem of living as a pirate may not go away.