A Laugh Factory Performance Without the Laughs - The Michael Richards Racist Rant

Former Seinfeld star Michael Richards, characterized in the show as Kramer, let out a racist and offensive rant while performing a comedy show at the very popular Laugh Factory in Los Angeles on November 17, 2006. After becoming distracted by a group of two African-American individuals who had been talking during his performance, Richards spewed out a series of insults and racial phrases towards the pair that also offended many members of the crowd. His speech was extremely vulgar and offensive and included phrases such as: “Throw his a** out, He’s a n***er. He’s a n***er! He’s a n***er” and “That’s what happens when you interrupt the white man”.

The crowd reacted immediately to the rant, with many of the individuals in the audience calling out the Seinfeld star and telling him that his words were uncalled for. In addition, many of the onlookers decided to walk out of his performance. Most individuals in the crowd across all races displayed their disgust by booing Richards off the stage. The show was eventually cut short after approximately three minutes of the racist tirade, and the event went viral on the internet less than 24 hours later. The crowd in the Laugh Factory was disheartened and offended, but the biggest wave of backlash would come on the various forums and websites all across the internet.

In the months and years following the event, Richards has met quite a bit of backlash from his rant and the media has really stained his reputation. Consistent with the reaction the show’s physical audience, online users who have seen the videos of the performance, which have been posted to YouTube, have also reacted to the offensive rant with outrage. It is safe to say that the public image of Michael Richards, who was once a beloved Seinfeld star, has been forever tarnished. In the current era of online communication, examples of racist outbreaks and celebrity melt-downs can spread like wildfire. Michael Richards himself would later state that anger released his tirade, and not an underlying racist philosophy. This viewpoint has been rejected across online discussion forums, stating that no amount of anger should lead to such openly racist language and behavior. An article by the Associated Press quoted Richards as saying “I’m not a racist. That’s what’s so insane about this” during a 2006 interview. In conclusion, the Michael Richards rant has famously gone down as one of the most disturbing and offensive celebrity melt-downs in history. His November 17, 2006, Laugh Factory performance was truly career ending. 

Links:

YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoLPLsQbdt0
Today Article: http://www.today.com/id/15816126/ns/today-today_entertainment/t/richards-says-anger-not-racism-sparked-tirade/

Skype - An Entirely New Way to Connect

            When attempting to uncover a good example of a disruptive innovation that I use quite often, I began thinking about the technologies I use on a daily or weekly basis. I was soon led to my answer for this assignment and the technology I have highlighted as being disruptive: Skype. I first discovered Skype with my friends during my freshman year of high school. Although the technology had been around for a few years, it was during this time that the start-up company was really picking up steam and disrupting the multiple industries in which it operated.

            Skype was created by a pair of Scandinavian geniuses who also teamed up to create the very popular Kazaa music downloading technology. Janus Friis of Denmark and Niklas Zennstrom of Sweden first released Skype to the public in August 2003. EBay would go on to purchase the company in 2007 for $2.5 Billion before Microsoft eventually acquired the company and all of their technologies in May 2011 for $8.5 Billion. Skype now operates as its own division within the Microsoft organization. Skype has always been and will forever be free to download and use. When the technology was first released in 2003, the company solely focused on voice over IP (VoIP) operations, where two individuals could connect to each other and talk without a service charge as long as each individual had an internet connection and had downloaded Skype. In the years since these humble beginnings, Skype has since added a video chat feature and file transfer options to their list of technologies. These advancements allow Skype users to not only talk over the internet, but also videoconference and transfer documents with their friends and colleagues. While almost all of Skype’s features are absolutely free, users due have to pay a small fee (less than typical mobile rates) to call an actual telephone from their Skype profile.

            Since its founding in 2003, Skype has proven to be one of the most disruptive technologies of the 21^st century. In 2005, Skype held a 2.9% market share of the international call market. By 2012, this figure had risen to a 34% market share for international calls. Skype is beginning to compete heavily within the telecommunications industry. In particular, the international call market is currently undergoing a complete takeover. Most phone carriers charge additional fees to make international phone calls, due to the additional costs these companies endure when making connections oversees. These obstructions are eliminated when connecting individuals over the internet, which has no borders. Of course the ability to speak with family members in other countries for absolutely no charge is the main reason why customers prefer to use Skype. The videoconferencing feature only furthers the attractiveness of communications innovation. Skype is continuously looking for new features to add to their business plan and have led to the rise of multiple websites and similar apps where users connect via webcams over the internet.

The only thing that stands between Skype and a stronghold in the telecommunications market in my opinion is saturation of the market. Due to the popularity of Skype, almost all messaging applications have added videoconferencing features similar to the technology that originally brought about the company’s meteoric rise. Skype spawned an entirely new market for internet-to-internet connections. Now they must fight to control the market they created.

Jovoto: Bringing Crowdsourcing & Co-Creation Together

            While scavenging the internet for good examples of collective action, I was fortunate enough to come across a website that is reinventing the relationship between customers and corporations. The website is called jovoto (http://www.jovoto.com/). To start, I will provide a brief explanation of the function of the website, and the objectives of the site’s operations.

Jovoto describes itself as “a work environment, connecting creative talent and brands the fair way.” Potential clients, mainly large brands and organizations, come to the permanently employed creative strategists at jovoto with a set of needs for new ideas. The creative strategists work with the client initially to help frame these needs to acclimate them to the creative talent community that visit jovoto online. This is where the collective action begins! Anyone visiting jovoto can submit their ideas to a client’s project posting on the site. Each submission can be improved and modified based on recommendations and discussions with other jovoto users and submitters. Each user can gain recognition on the site for historically submitting engaging professional ideas that progressively answer the client’s set of needs. Each individual is allowed to vote on who wins the prize money that is attached to each client posting, which can be upwards of $30,000.One interesting feature I noticed was that no matter the outcome of the collaborative process or idea selection, the submitting user keeps the rights to their idea. If the client wishes to use a submitted idea, they must work out a deal with the jovoto user who gave them the insight. The clients ultimately gain tons of submissions with unique ideas that help solve their problems, while simultaneously collecting user perception for their service systems and product assortments.

            Upon my analysis of jovoto, I was thoroughly impressed by the ingenuity of the website’s founders and community. I classified this example of collective action as both “crowdsourcing” and “co-creation”. Jovoto is an illustration of crowdsourcing, because the corporate brands are soliciting ideas from a large community of online users. Additionally, co-creation came to mind, because each individual idea posted to a client’s submission page can be shared, combined, and retooled by others in the community to create the best idea possible.

            The objective of jovoto is to bring brands and an online creative community together under a format that serves the greatest good of all parties involved. Clearly, the corporations posting idea requests benefit from the wide variety of novel submission they receive. Similarly, the creative users are benefitting from jovoto by utilizing an online forum that lets them connect with fellow creative minds, while fairly competing for the chance to earn prize money and possibly win contracts with clients. Jovoto is rooted in the open online community philosophy that has contributed to many organizations’ successes throughout the technological era. By way of my study and genuine intrigue into jovoto, I conclude that the website provides beneficial avenues for the success of both the site’s online clients and creative users. Jovoto is one of the many ingenious sites driving collective action into the way individuals and groups create things in the present and will develop ideas for the future.

Digital Detox: A Relaxing, Yet Uncomfortable Experience

Upon returning from my Spring Break escapades, I decided to challenge myself to complete a Digital Detox over the five days I had remaining over break. At the beginning of the five day period (Tuesday-Saturday), my main goal was to stay off of social media. While I wanted to remove email from the equation as well, I simply was expecting too many important emails for that to be a realistic option. So I basically ignored my phone for five straight days other than actually using it for its original “mobile telephone” purpose to call my friends. I must say, I discovered that the push notification feature on my iPhone is one of the main perpetrators in my iPhone addiction. I quickly realized at the beginning of the five period how difficult the challenge would be, after I received four or five push notifications from Facebook and Snapchat within the first hour of my Detox. True to the challenge, I chose to ignore them, although I was very tempted to check the Snapchats. I remember thinking: “It would only take a second”, but if I have learned anything from this class, it is that digital addiction has a snowball effect and I would surely be lured by the intrigue of my iPhone’s web access.

Although that first bit of temptation was difficult, I found the next few days to be surprisingly easy. I believe the experience was tamed slightly by the reality that I was on Spring Break. This meant that my need to interact digitally took a back seat to pure relaxation. I cannot say I was more productive without Facebook and other apps/sites. In reality, I replaced the time I spent mindlessly cruising the internet with TV hours. I don’t have cable at school in Tucson, so one addiction just replaced another, but it was a welcomed change. I really liked shutting out Facebook for the week, but the limited texting that I allowed was dreadful. I waited to start my detox until after I returned from my main Spring Break trip to California over the first half of break. The plan was to freely use digital media, enjoy my friends, and have fun over the first half of break. I wanted to follow that up by just kicking-back and relaxing while pulling the plug on digital interaction. While I liked not being on the internet, I certainly missed texting my friends and being connected there. I knew I could just call them if I wanted, and to be honest I hung out with them and they were always around over the latter half of break, but it just felt weird. I did not like it! I also missed the news. I had to read a physical newspaper, which I don’t think I have done in years. I typically use my Pulse News app which neatly compiles all of my news sources into one screen. I was instead met by a 30 page bundle of random news stories, of which I only cared about a few stories.

My main conclusion is that the detox left me feeling relieved to know that I could go through with it, but uncomfortable about the way I missed using the main features of my phone and computer. I can happily say I did not cheat, but I part of me wishes that I had…

Online Dashboards: Increasing Infotention on the Internet

When piecing together my online dashboard, I quickly discovered some undeniable truths in the way I use the internet. I decided to create my dashboard using the very popular netvibes website and application. In order to fill your dashboard, the site directs you to either select from a group of feeds the site labels as essentials or search for other feeds or apps you would like to add. Smack dab at the beginning of the essentials list is Facebook. Of course, this was the first app I added to my dashboard. Reddit and YouTube, my other main uses of the internet, soon followed. I decided to group these three feeds onto a single tab and labelled it Social. I think that by grouping these three site feeds and applications together on a tab, I will be able to achieve a couple of my infotention objectives. First and foremost, I will be able to consciously ignore that tab! I always find myself aimlessly wandering through these three websites with no filter or stopper for my addiction. Now I have a tab purposely separated from my other browsing uses. Additionally, by confining these three applications, I am hoping to diminish my addiction. Applications are not quite as enjoyable to use as a fully functional website.

           

The second tab I created is dedicated to the four main news sources I enjoy visiting. I gather the vast majority of my news through online outlets. I purposely placed USA Today news and Wired News next to each other in my dashboard. This act is aimed at allowing me to increased enjoyment in my news browsing practices. I often find great news articles on the mainstream news sites pertaining to the digital industries that I am interested in, but I quickly get distracted by the other stories and articles on their webpages. By placing Wired on my dashboard, I can immediately move from USA Today to a more technology-focused news source and follow-up on my interests. This will definitely help my infotention efforts.

           

My tertiary use of the internet is for accessing up-to-date information on all of my favorite sports teams and competitions. Therefore, I dedicated an entire tab in my online dashboard to sports news. Leading the charge on this tab is my most visited sports site: ESPN.com. I also included a feed for NCAA basketball, the Philadelphia Eagles of the NFL, as well as a feed for world soccer news. Traditionally, I visit ESPN.com for general updates on my favorite teams (all included in the previously listed feeds) then travel to more specific news sites for a deeper insight into sporting news. By surrounding my ESPN feed with more focused feeds pertaining to my major interests, I should be able to minimize my distractions, dive straight into the news I want to read, and hopefully the time I spend wastefully traversing the internet will diminish.

As a side not, Netvibes added a google search tab to my dashboard by default. I really like it! I have been using my dashboard for about an hour so far. The search tab has allowed me to immediately follow-up on news stories that do not fall into one of my traditional categories of interest. Without the dashboard and the accessibly search tab, I probably would not have retained enough interest (or just been too lazy) to further research these opportunities for increased knowledge! 

The screenshots of my dashboard’s tabs are provided below: