Blog 8: Online Piracy and How the Internet has Shaped Campaigns

A big theme that I got out of these chapters that we read for today was how the Internet really changed a lot of different things and how people did not anticipate these changes. Ryan begins by talking about online piracy. It first starts out by a guy who took a Metallica song and converted it to an MP3 file. Back then, there were constraints around what size files could be and to be able to compress the audio made it possible to store songs on a computer. Soon, websites such as Napster came about. It made it easy for people to find any song they chose and download it for free rather than searching the web and different websites. Soon the music industry fired back by suing napster which effectively ended the website's ability to let people download music. This did not stop people from pirating music. With the advent of torrenting, it allowed people to pirate larger things than MP3 files now. They were able to download software and movies for free. Online piracy is still a huge issue today and I do not foresee anyway that it can be controlled. Once you take down one site, there will be a hundred more to come up to take the burden of the traffic the site once had.

Another thing that was very important was how the Internet shaped our politics today. It allowed a former wrestler become elected as a governare. Jesse Ventura was able to get enough attention because of a website that he made that allowed people to see his message. It also allowed people to see pictures that he had taken with them. This was revolutionary at the time. Nothing like this had been done in the past. This was the start for how the Internet helped politicians get elected. There were other candidates that Ryan talked about but the other one I want to talk about is Barack Obama. So much of the success of former President Obama’s campaign had to do with the Internet. It allowed people to donate money and see his campaign promises. Ryan talks about how former President Obama went and reached out to people at Netscape to get a sense for what is was going to be next. The Internet has shaped many things but these are just a few of the examples that Ryan talks about in these chapters.

Questions:

Will there ever be a way to combat online piracy?

Do you think that the Internet will have as much of an impact on a politician's campaign now that they have been using it as a tool for awhile?