September 2009 Archives

I Have Seen the Future and It Is Free: Maybe?

Revised Rough Draft

New revised outline

*Introduction to topic

*How companies can give services/products away for free

-falling costs of technology

-three party systems

-new idea of scarcity

-free business models ("freenium", advertising, cross-subsidies)

*Marketing companies using our online personal data

            -we don't know we are being tracked

            -no restrictions

            -trade-off (free services for personal information)

*Conclusion- idea of a free lunch or a lunch with hidden costs???

New Revised Rough Draft 

In one of the worst economic times in recent history, some of the most financially successful corporations, online businesses, are still able to provide their customers with free services and products. Yet, how is it possible that they are able to give these things away for free? What are the hidden costs to these so called "free services"; and if there are costs, how do you feel about them? Is there such a thing as a "free lunch" or will you still be picking up the check?

So the first question that must be answered is...how can these multi-billion dollar companies make a profit when their entire business model revolves around give their services and products away for free?  Well there are a few explanations as to how this works. The first is that the price of technology is falling. According to Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine, technology is continuing to do "more and more for less and less". Processing power, storage, and bandwidth have become so close to zero that web companies no longer charge their patrons anything (Anderson). However, there is a third party involved who is footing the bill, advertisers. While buyers and sellers exchange in a free market, advertiser are paying big bucks just to participate (Anderson).  In today's fast paced world, money is not the only scarcity; companies are constantly competing for reputation and attention with consumers who only have time to look so much.

Online companies utilize many "free business models", but three main ones include freenium, advertising, and cross-subsidies (Anderson). Freenium is the concept of giving away a basic version of a service for free while selling a premium version.  Here approximately one percent of all users can support the rest, because the cost of servicing other ninety nine percent is close enough to zero it is considered to be at no loss to do so (Anderson).

Another "free business model" technique utilized is advertising. Many businesses are willing to pay lots of money to buy the rights to reach large, defined audiences. Knowing this fact all to well, online companies are more than willing to exploit their fan bases for the monetary benefits by selling ad space, sponsored sites, paid inclusion in search results, etc. (Anderson)

The final main "free business model" is the idea of cross-subsidies. Cross subsidies is easily explained by any product that leads you to pay for another product (Anderson). A good example of cross subsidies is the infamous free trial, which most of us have a personal knowledge of from prior experience. Online companies allow us to try and subscribe to something new just long enough to hook and reel us in for the sale.  

Now that we know how these companies can give there product and services away for free; do these "free services" come a cost? In Elliot Van Buskirk's article titled "Your Facebook Profile Makes Marketers' Dreams Come True", he talks about how our personal data, from social networking sites, is being tracked and utilized by marketing companies without our knowledge. The other slightly unsettling concept of this is that "there are no restrictions as to what marketers can do with the data once they've extracted it from social networks" (Qt. by Marc Rotenberg). It is said in Buskirk's article that there is a clear "trade-off" of free online services for marketable data, but is it a worth while the trade?

It seems clear that even in the 21^st century there is still no such thing as a free lunch. It would probably be better described as a lunch with hidden costs, and it's ultimately up to you to decide if you're willing to pay the price.

Sources

Anderson, Chris. "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
25 February 2009. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free

Van Buskirk, Eliot. "Your Facebook Profile Makes Marketers' Dreams Come True." 28 April 2009 [ http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/your-facebook-profile-makes-marketers-dreams-come-true/ 

Marc Rotenberg's Quote from "Your Facebook Profile Makes Marketers' Dreams Come True." by Eliot Van Buskirk

How is it possible that some online services are being given away for free? What are there hidden costs to these free services? What do you feel about the costs? Is there such a thing as a 'free lunch'?

1. Introduction: What sources are being given away for free?
2. How they can afford to give these away for free
Cross-subsidies--- company scale size Technology::falling prices/free services and products "two types of free business models"
3. Companies that feed off our free information
5. Possibility of our information being used against us? Other hidden costs?
6. Conclusion: things we rec as free we are paying... no free lunch  recognize cost worth. lunch with hidden cost???  

Works Cited
Source #1
Anderson, Chris. "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
25 February 2009. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free
Source #2
Van Buskirk, Eliot. "Your Facebook Profile Makes Marketers' Dreams Come True." 28 April 2009 [ http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/your-facebook-profile-makes-marketers-dreams-come-true/

Original

Is it possible that technology will drive the economy to give services and products away for free? Are we headed to a new type of economy?

Revised #1

How? Why? hidden cost?

How is it possible that some online services are being given away for free? Will this shift to free affect other aspect of our economy? Are there hidden costs to these free services? (Is there such a thing as a 'free lunch'?)

Revised #2.

How is it possible that some online services are being given away for free? What are there hidden costs to these free services? What do you feel about the costs? Is there such a thing as a "free lunch"?

The article I picked from the first section of additional readings was "Three Generations' View of Cell Phones". This article is really the transcript of an interview done with three generations of women in the same family, the Tokuda's. The topic of conversation is about cell phones and how they use them, their thoughts about them, etc.

In the transcript and sound bite (you can so conveniently listen to) the reporter, Chana Joffe-Walt, doesn't play the whole interview but just the answers, without her questions, and her comments after the snippets.  Chana starts with the youngest of the three, 14 year old Molly Tukuda. Molly seems to be a little airheaded and slightly dramatic throughout the interview. I guess for ace reporter of the KPLU news station it's not hard to make the youngest generation look bad while talking to a girl that is in middle school. Way to win that intellectual battle Chana. I understand that she was trying to show the younger generations depend on their phones, but she didn't have to make this little girl seem so ridiculous. Was this really an accurate describe of how all of the younger generations act. I'm twenty-one, still in school, and I have a mom and a grandma; is that how my generation acts?

Continuing with the interview, when Chana talked with the mother and grandmother I think she was again slightly ageist. Was it really necessary to put into the finished product, in which she aired on her small time radio station, that when the grandma didn't have a clue what text messages was, her little grand daughter treat her like she was dumb. On the sound bite clip I think the 14 year old girl even slowed her speech in a demeaning way towards her poor grandma. Really classy Chana.

If you'd ask me I think our good friend Chana is probably the same age as the mother, Ms. B. Tokuda, because she seems not to bash her as much as the other two. By the way Chana I think there is a thing called Mrs. which would be slightly more accurate for the two older woman, but good try at being formal and professional.

If you ask me I think this article was a good idea turned very unprofessional by a reporter that needs to get a grip

The article I chose was in section 2 (End of Books: Digital culture, reading, and the mind) and it was titled "Experimental Use of Blog-Based Peer Review Gives Mixed Results".

The article starts by giving a back drop of what's going on. In essence an assistant professor, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, wrote a book titled "Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies", which looked at software design and traditional media studies of video games. A regular Blogger himself, Noah thought that it would be beneficial for the members of a blog he was involved in, Grand Text Auto, to peer edit selections of his book through blogging. MIT press agreed to try the blog-based peer review but also had a traditional style review done as well.

So what was the verdict? Well, more feedback came from the blog, which got about 400 comments compared to the 3 traditional reviewers. Though he was not able to make the blog conversational as he had wanted due to the large amount of entries, many different varieties of people posted comments. Some even included the people who he wrote about in the book. Mr. Wardrip-Fruin was very please with the amount of comments and with the fact that he was getting feedback from experts that he couldn't find in the academy. However, one downside mentioned by another professor, was that everyone that blogged liked what was written, there were no naysayers or outside prospectives.

Still some of Mr. Wardrip-Fruin's closer friends from the blog gave good, critical advice about what they read. In addition compared to traditional reviewers, the bloggers gave advice on individual paragraphs instead of the book as a whole. Which could however, be contributed to the fact that the book online was done in sections and was harder to step back and look at as a whole.

Wardrip-Fruin ultimately felt he learn a lot, and got good feedback that would help him with the rewrite of his book. Still Mr. Sery of MIT press was not so convinced. His main concern was that when people only read portions of the book online they may not address major point in the books entirety. However, Mr. Sery did advise that he would be open to similar experiments in the future.

So is it good or bad to have two styles of peer editing?

Could we use these two together to create a better product or should they be used separately?

Would this new peer editing tandem hurt or help authors?

Closing about the book

In closing I felt that McLuhan's Medium is the Massage was a very interesting and thought provoking book. I believe he brought up several different but equally important topics. The only thing I didn't like was how he talks about technology and then writes a book. Kind of ironic but at least he presented it in a way that was different or unique. Still I think he could've used movie, TV, radio, cassette. Overall though really cool book.

"We now live in a global village...".

Ashley Dworek

One of the quotes that I found was interesting was "We now live in a global village...". I believe that it is an amazing concept to say that because of technology we have come full circle. It's almost contradictory of what we think technology will do. Technology is supposed to advance us in everyway, not revert us back to a more primitive time. However we know what is happening as soon as it happens on a global scale. We are just as close now as we were years before. Technology allows us to be hundreds of miles away but still communicate as if we are sitting next to one another in the same place.

Memory

"The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls because they will not use their memories..." and "Develop a Powerful Memory"

Ashley Dworek

Another part in the book I felt was interesting was the quote from Socrates which stated, "The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls because they will not use their memories..." Then the author goes as far as to put an article from a newspaper in the next page titled "Develop a Powerful Memory". It addresses the issue stated by Socrates. It shows that if we need a free book on memory, maybe Socrates was right. Or another perspective could be well maybe that was an issue, but we are handling it. Either way I was curious if you could still send in for the book (Just kidding).

The Invention of Print

"Authorship"

Ashley Dworek

Finally the last part of the book that I thought was interesting was the idea of "Authorship". I guess since I have never know it any other way, I never realized that until the invention of printing there were no authors, cost for books, etc. It would be crazy now to not have to pay for our school books. Imagine the business that creating and selling college books must bring. What are we paying hundreds of dollars for? Its mind boggling as a student to contemplate the profit that make off of us to learn. 

So I had to read this twice because I hate reading material off the computer, but I didn't want to use all my black ink to print it. Talk about being trapped by technology. 

Getting back on track however, I believe that the most relevant thing shared by Mc Luhan was in regards to "Your Job". As a senior in college I often worry about employment opportunities for not only myself but my family as well.

Will jobs be taken over by technology like in the past? This is probably almost a definite, but in what ways? Can we create and maintain job security for ourselves and future generations? With the economic mess we have placed ourselves in; the subjects of jobs are a huge concern. Technology taking what is already scarce is intimidating to say the least.

I got up to the sound of my cell phone alarm and started to get ready for the day. The first thing I did was check my school schedule and my email to make sure what I was doing for the day. Then my boyfriend called me on my cell phone and I talked to him about his night at work. He lives about an hour and a half from IUP so I usually talk on the phone a lot with him since I can't see him all the time when I'm here. Once i got off the phone with him, my sister called and I let her know where her class was going to be. I then got in the shower and started to get ready for the day. I checked my email after I was done getting ready to see if anyone had sent anything, and saw that my mom had sent me and email. I was running short on time so I made some lunch and headed to English class. So here i am now writing this blog which is my first ever.