My Wikileaks Perspective

For years, Americans have hypothesized what they think might have happened on 911 and other events. We’ve all had our doubts about the government and we’ve all had the idea that the secrets they’ve been holding from us are important. Julian Assange is a hero to many American people and a threat to the government. Assange has illegally obtained many classified documents and published them to the web available free for any individual to access. Though how many of us are actually reading them? Wikileaks has exposed thousands of classified documents all of them easily accessible to the public, on Twitter.com the following is only 698,122 people, that’s only 0.23% of the 300 million people in the U.S. And of these Twitter followers, I wonder how many people are actually reading these documents.  

Many media broadcasts and news articles about Wikileaks express the governments deepest fears about Wikileaks, but why is it such big news? We all suspected that the government was up to these conspiracies before Wikileaks confirmed it.

Wikileaks is similar to music and movie piracy in the respect that digital assets are being downloaded illegally. People started downloading music and movies off the Internet illegally about 14 years ago when Napster was released. The program Napster allowed users to share their music collections with others and pick and choose what they wanted from other people’s music collections. The music wasn’t hosted online but was downloaded directly from one person’s computer to another. The programs used to transfer the files weren't illegally doing any crime any more than a knife can be used for cooking but you can also kill someone with it, similarly peer to peer programs can offer services that aren't legal. Other websites such as Piratebay offer users torrent files that contain information on where the peer to peer programs look to download the files. These websites can’t be shutdown because the servers don’t exist in the U.S and the country their servers are in are choosing not to shut them down.

Like Pirate Bay, Wikileaks has it’s servers in other locations outside of the U.S and so the U.S is powerless to stop them, these countries hosting Wikileaks servers will not shut them down because they like to read the U.S secret documents. Though the difference between Wikileaks and illegal music and video downloading is that music is desirable and Wikileaks documents are more or less useless to most of us.

Not only do most of us suspect the information that Assange confirms, such as the U.S military uses torture to extract information in Iraq and the U.S military shot at Journalists. The information doesn’t help us in many ways. Many of us are so politically inactive that we are eligible to become voters yet we are too lazy to register.

Though on the flip-side for those of us who are voters this information can be very useful when researching candidates. Wikileaks offers glimpses into the life of some politicians that we would never see. For example, some of Sarah Palin’s emails are available for the public to view.

Julian Assange’s initial idea was to post the illegal documents online in a long and random list and hope that people would jump on and read it, similar to Wikipedia. Julian’s philosophy is very similar to Buckminster Fuller’s idea of the whole earth Catalog, that given information, people will take an action and use the information for good. People have a song in mind and they search for it with a peer to peer download program, people don’t have an idea of what to look for on wikileaks because many are simply not interested because in reality what can having the information do to benefit them? People simply don’t know how they can make a change to better their country based on the Wikileaks information and I believe that is the flaw of Wikileaks.

The internet is also evolving to a point where articles are much shorter than they once were and many internet users prefer to watch videos instead of read. The internet has become a place to go hunting for instant information. eHow.com offers possibly thousands of How To articles and videos explaining how to do everything from how to change a flat tire to how to impress a girl on a first date. About.com can give us a general overview of any subject we want to delve into, yahoo answers has thousands of answers to questions asked, and you can even send a text to ChaCha (242-242) and get a human to respond to you after they research your question online. Because the web is filled with instant answers, if a person has no objective and has the typical attention span of most web users, they are most likely not going to get far with Wikileaks and if they did have an objective, I think they may still find the documents intimidating.

William Macomber

William Macomber was a philosopher that taught at the University of Santa Barbara for a few years in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies. Macomber as a strong advocate of having fun while you are learning. Macomber strongly recommended creatively finding ways to make a piece of information you are struggling with interesting if you find it unappealing. Macomber suggests strategies such as falling in love with someone who lives far away if you want to improve your writing and falling in love with someone who lives nearby if you want to improve you speaking. It's very good advice.


In grade school I had the problem of failing classes because I simply found the material uninteresting. I was running track at the time and I was really doing well though I was told I couldn't run anymore until I brought my grades up. I was going through a depression as well during the time which made it harder to read the material for school. I eventually found that small things, such as walking faster made me happier and pretending that the material was interesting made it interesting for me. I would read an uninteresting fact and say to myself "wow, this is incredible" and eventually I really did find many things from my reading material in grade school very interesting. 


I couldn't keep it going forever. I don't suppose I was as keen or smart as Macomber was and I think that there is definitely a lot to learn from him. 

WikiLeaks

Last week I saw the old film Tron. If Tron has anything to do with Wikileaks it is the fact that the characters in the film saw that a problem was at hand and they went out to fix it, despite the fact that they had to go through illegal measures to achieve it. The Tron story is very similar because the main character Flynn had destroyed the MCP digitally and all of this happened without it have being possible for Dillinger, the bad guy, to know anything.

This past week I have been learning about Wikileaks, a website that hosts illegal documents that belong to the U.S government and military. The website is very new, and it was just recently in November 2010 that several thousands of documents were leaked. Though for the most part the website stays under wraps from the mass media, probably soon it will catch on with more media exposure.

A striking realization about these documents is that they are public and yet few people are reading them. We live in an era in which information is so quick to access that many of us have developed shorter attention spans and thus the internet has evolved to have more videos and shorter articles. Thus many people of our time will not read these articles for this reason and also because they are not interested in these types of politics. Many people are eligible to vote, and yet they don't. I think that many of us see some things as impossible to change, thus having information to classified U.S documents seems like it might be useful information but at the same time, it seems worthless, because what can any of us really do with this information?

So for these two reasons I feel that Wikileaks, as successful as it has been in obtaining documents, fails in this respect. But this is nothing that they had any control over.

I think that Wikileaks confirms to us that there is no such thing as confidential data if it is digital or can be digitized. Years ago recording studios were outraged because music sharing programs offered anyone with the internet the ability to download their favorite songs for free, and they are still free and we still have this ability. Now this is the next step.

Gathering

Normally when gathering information online, I go straight to google and type in exactly what I am looking for. Sometimes I even type a very specific question into google and sometimes I will find that this question has already been answered and is posted on yahoo answers and all the research that I have to do is to read what has been posted on yahoo answers. eHow.com is similar, if I ever need to find out the process of how to do something, all I need to do is check out eHow.com and most likely they will have a video or article explaining the process. If my how to question isn't clearly defined on eHow, I can probably search youtube for a good explanation as well. If I didn't ask a question or a how to directly into the search bar, I would type in a broad concept and then refine it with other words relevant to what I am looking for.

After doing some more research I learned that it is a good idea to use a number of different spellings for words that have more than one way of writing such as millennium, millennia, or millennial. It is also a good idea to write in several different names if the subject is known by alternate names, such as Peter Parker aka Spiderman. This is easy by using the boolean feature of most search engines, you can instruct the search engine to look for Peter Parker OR Spiderman and use other words too such as NOT to single out what you don't want for example Spiderman NOT movie.

I also learned that a good place to look other than a search engine is a subject directory, such as about.com. Subject directories are better when you don't have an extremely specific piece of information you are trying to find, but for example: ADD, if you want to find how to treat ADD, you can go to about.com and find a good answer, but if you want to know the statistics of how many chinese people are currently living with ADD, you would want to use a search engine.

Framing

Framing and Re-framing is important especially for an artist because as an artist you have to look at things from another perspective or else your work will not be interesting to other people.

I like the example: "If you look around and find that no one is doing what you are doing, then you know you are doing okay (that's a re-framing of 'extreme')."


When you think of a bell curve, those points off to the far right or far left are 'extremes'. As an artist I think that that is the most important thing, because you want to stand out in some way. 

The diagram shows the Challenge cycle; a re-framing of problem solving. This process, though labeled in step 1-5 is not a linear process and the order can be chosen in a non-linear fashion, similar to how the brain networks with other brain regions for problem solving. Therefore I consider the challenge cycle to be a re-framing of problem solving.