Cross-Cultural Blog: My First Forum

This entry was written in response to the Research Blogging Assignment for Stanford's Fall 2008 Cultural Interfaces class. For more about this assignment, click here. You can leave a comment on this post by clicking on the "comment" link below.

I will consider my first week of research for my project on the cyber subculture of music pirating in my Cross-Cultural Rhetoric class at Stanford University a success. I went to the library and came away with books; I searched in online databases and discovered scholarly articles; I searched on Google and found the federal websites I had hoped for. The most interesting aspect of my research, though, has been my most unconventional: my blog activity. I created an account on AlbumHunt.com, a music directory website used by the 2008 pirate-types (not the same as your old school Napster or Kazaa users). Along with music download links, the site also has Forum and Community pages for its users. The forum topics range from new music to politics to relationships to ethics. In fact, I began to participate in a thread called “Is immorality something we learned?” A user named dreamz began the thread by stating: “We as humans have evolved. We've been changing since before Roman times. As times go on society changes. Do you believe that our morals have changed with time?” Before I joined the thread, the discussion ranged from the innate evilness of humanity because of Eve’s actions in Genesis to the influence of graphic music and video games.

Then user kakarot differentiated between “learned behavior” (e.g. racism) and “inherent behavior” (e.g. homosexuality) and whether these inherent behaviors can be considered immoral. My first post on the site, the forty-third on this thread, stated the irony in such a topic being discussed on an illegal music downloading site and the immorality of that not-so-foreign practice to these users. User Damien explained the music-downloading practice by returning to the notion that “mankind is weak,” and although downloading might be wrong, it’s still cheaper than buying. He continued to mention the presence of studies that examine why people commit immoral acts, but the lack of studies explaining why people don’t choose the immoral option. He argued that immoral acts can be justified whereas moral acts are just challenging for people. Some really thoughtful and educated posts have been made on the thread.
My activity in this forum has given me a new enthusiasm for my project. I’m no longer dealing only with impersonal books and articles, but I am actually interacting with my sources. Hopefully the rest of my research is as fun as this has been…

Comments

Hi!
My name is Jessika!

Posted by: Rankcinkaby | October 12, 2008 10:23 PM

Ben,

Glad to see you've found such a wide variety of resources. It seems like just five days ago that you sat next to me in the library, said you were going to start some PWR research, and then confidently typed that first search query. It was a good query.
Anyway, I like the idea of this sort of community-based source. Seems like it really capitalizes on the internet's beauty: a million people and their well-organized tidbits are more helpful than one expert brainiac know-it-all.
It's awesome that you already dug into the ethical underpinnings of stealing music. The topic kind of reminds me of those commercials from a couple years back. They were all like, "You wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't kill a man, so how could you possibly pirate music?"

Now that you are onto the more legal/ethical stuff, you might want to try and talk to Lawrence Lessig, or someone else from the law school. Music is a big part of the whole "free culture" debate, it's convenient that so much of the Creative Commons buzz emanates from Stanford.

Keep up the good work, kid.

Posted by: John Lyman | October 16, 2008 12:48 AM

Hey Ben!

It's going to be very cool to follow the progress of your experience in this online forum, what rhetorical strategies you use to create your image on the forum, and what responses you get if and when you create your own thread. I would love to hear more about your research questions, or about the direction you will be steering your project! I know you found lots of valuable material in the section of the Lane Reading Room that Christine showed us...because my topic is similar to yours and I found lots of great books for my topic! I look forward to your presentation and the future of your project!

-Stephanie

Posted by: Stephanie P | October 18, 2008 06:40 PM

Thanks for posting this. I learned a lot.

Posted by: Edward | November 13, 2008 03:34 PM

Thanks, Ben.
Thanks for useful information.

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