As a part of our course we have been requested to write a bit about our thoughts on the course.
I must congratulate Adam Muir on his running of the course, he managed to make the lectures interesting by allowing the class to have open discussions about the topic while at the same time being able to apply what was being discussed back to the lecture topic. Having only ever experienced courses from the business faculty which is focused on work related topics which have right and wrong answers, it was a nice change being able to talk about topics many of which had multiple possible answers, or perhaps no answer at all.
I found the topics to be interesting not only from the perspective of a business student with the open source/free software available to use, but from a personal perspective, due to the fact that none of the people I know really show any interest in the philosophical questions of life the universe and everything, apart from quoting the Hitchhikers Guide by shouting '42' when the conversation turns to the topic. I found it a pleasantly intellectually stimulating experience being able to voice my thoughts and ideas to students from different faculties.
The fact that everyone had a good time and the course material was covered I'd have to give Adam 'a high distinction' for his teaching style and his management of the course.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Final Course Overview Lecture
Hello again,
Today we had a very quick and basic overview of the past 2 weeks. We started off by talking about the the various topics that we covered in the lectures and the discussions we covered. We started the week with defining what communication is and how communication it's changing. Then we looked at what is technology and how technology is changing the ways in which we communicate.
The next lecture was about the history of computers, starting with Charles Babbage who is said to have been the inventory of one of the first rudimentary computer with is Difference Engine, and at a later date he was also aided by Ada Byron, who had a creative approach to mathematics. We looked at various companies who were around at the beginning of computing like Xerox PARC, Apple Computers, IBM and Microsoft. Next we looked at a brief history of the internet, who invented it and how it came about with the introduction of the ARPANET. The lecture notes culminate in looking at some of the various applications that a lot of people were using, such as email, FTP and IRC.
The third week was focused on the development of the methods used to study new communication technologies. Starting in the 1920's with Bullet (inoculation) Theory, 1930's Application of Statistical Method, then in the 1940's with Minimum Effects, the 1950's Looking for effects with connections to psychology, in the 1960's with Marshall McLuhan and his Understanding Media, on to the 1970's with Mixed Effects theory and Louis Althusser who theorized the media as Ideological State Apparatuses, then into the 1980's with Baudrillard who theorized that the real was represented, now the hyper real was simulated. In the 1990's Nancy Fraser further criticises Habermas's account of the public sphere from a feminist perspective and in particular for its failures to confront the needs to eliminate social inequality, to accept a multiplicity of public, to break down the distinctions between public and private and to integrate the state and civil society. The lecture then looked at the various phases of how media studies have developed over time, beginning with Popular Cyberculture, through Cyberculture Studies, to Critical Cyberculture Studies.
The fourth session was on virtual philosophy, in which we looked at the Allegory of Plato's Cave, the philosophical questions raised by the movie series 'The Matrix'. We looked at the various philosophers theories that have developed over time such as, Guy Debord - Society of Spectacle; Umberto Eco's - Hyper-reality; Jean Baudrillard's - Simulacrum; William Gibson's - Cyberspace as a Consensual Hallucination; and Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's - Becoming Media. The lecture then looked at the concept of Virtual Reality, it's precursors and what defines VR, and it's possible future uses.
Next we looked at the current and emerging technologies and the advent of computer games. We covered applications like Instant Messaging and how it's advent has changed the ways in which we communicate, Peer-to-Peer and file sharing, which brought up the question of copyrights and piracy and the various ways people avoid detection using things like proxy servers and the TOR (The Onion Router) network, through to Voice over IP or VoIP and how this technology is being utilized. The lecture then moved on to computer games and the two paradigms of Narratology and Ludology. Narratology is the study of video games from the perspective of them being stories or literary works. Ludology in contrast, is not concerned with the story elements but rather with the Game and Play elements. We then went on to look at other methods used in the study of games.
The following day we were focused on the concept of free or open source software. We looked at the various organizations that are involved in the open source movement such as, the Free Software Foundation - www.fsf.org; The Creative Commons - www.creativecommons.org ; and the Electronic Frontier Foundation - www.eff.org. We watched a video with Richard Stallman talking about the creative commons licenses and what it means for the future development of software and creative arts.
This linked nicely to the following day's topic of Digital Creativity and how the future of copyrights and the internet is going to affect how we make and distribute content onto the web. We looked at things like the AMV (Anime Music Videos) where people take two proprietary mediums, being the music and the anime video, and combine them to make a music video but aligned with the anime timed to match the music. We also touched briefly on Project Gutenberg and the public domain materials. We finished the lecture with a discussion on electronic music and what defines it, how people are making it now and how it will be made in the future.
The next day we had a look at the Cyber Democracy. We started by defining what democracy means, with it coming down to the fact that there are many different kinds and definitions for democracy, such as representational democracy, direct democracy and radical democracy. We touched on the topic of the digital divide and whether the gap between the haves and have nots is shrinking or growing. Then we looked at the Gaps in the Mass Media, with a number of theorists coming up with various opinions, such as what Habermas calls 'the Public Sphere'. Marshall McLuhan's argument of electricity does not centralize, it decentralizes, and John Hartley systematized the political import of audience reception theory when he notes that post-modernity has seen the transformation of what constitutes 'knowledge' for the coercive instrumentality and enforced reality of 'imperial information' to the hermeneutics of intertextual intersubjectivity where meanings are liable to constant negotiations.
The lecture then looked at Free Speech and Censorship with a rather interesting quote from John Gilmore at the start of the section 'The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it'. We looked at the rights we have as Australian citizens and as citizens of the internet, and the concept of the Citizen-Hacker which is taking the traditional concept of the computer hacker who uses the rules of the system to their advantage and applying it to us in a national setting, where we can inform ourselves of the rules and then manipulate the system to our advantage, be it through political pressure or by organizing a political interest group.
The second last lecture was on the question of whether these new technologies will usher in the new age of the Cyber-Utopia, where everything is great and we won't have to worry about anything because it's all be taken care of or will it turn out to be a Cyber-Dystopia, where we are controlled by the technology or it is used to control us. We looked at the concept of the Media Ages, starting with the first (electronic) media age, which Mark Poster argues was characterized by the use of one source (or relatively few) with many receivers, into the second (electronic) media age which is characterized by distributed systems of interaction. Marshall McLuhan suggested that there are three media ages beginning with the Oral (spoken work); then the Literate(written words); then to the Electric (televisual/digital). A student of McLuhan went on to suggest that there were a further two media ages, being the 'mimetic age' and the 'interactive/digital age'.
We went on to look at the varied literature that has been written over the years looking at various theories on what kind of the future technology will bring. We looked at Utopian authors such as Plato's 'The Republic', Sir Thomas More's 'Utopia'. This concept of a technological Utopia where we can create, a microcosmic recreation of nature sanitized and optimized for human consumption/enjoyment. Then we looked at Dystopia authors such as Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World', and George Orwell's '1984'. In most of the literature it seems that even in a Utopian society the peace is disrupted by people who seek to exercise their own human agency and free will.
Which brings us to today's summary of the course, which is what you've just read. :)
Well that's it for another post. Stay frosty.
Today we had a very quick and basic overview of the past 2 weeks. We started off by talking about the the various topics that we covered in the lectures and the discussions we covered. We started the week with defining what communication is and how communication it's changing. Then we looked at what is technology and how technology is changing the ways in which we communicate.
The next lecture was about the history of computers, starting with Charles Babbage who is said to have been the inventory of one of the first rudimentary computer with is Difference Engine, and at a later date he was also aided by Ada Byron, who had a creative approach to mathematics. We looked at various companies who were around at the beginning of computing like Xerox PARC, Apple Computers, IBM and Microsoft. Next we looked at a brief history of the internet, who invented it and how it came about with the introduction of the ARPANET. The lecture notes culminate in looking at some of the various applications that a lot of people were using, such as email, FTP and IRC.
The third week was focused on the development of the methods used to study new communication technologies. Starting in the 1920's with Bullet (inoculation) Theory, 1930's Application of Statistical Method, then in the 1940's with Minimum Effects, the 1950's Looking for effects with connections to psychology, in the 1960's with Marshall McLuhan and his Understanding Media, on to the 1970's with Mixed Effects theory and Louis Althusser who theorized the media as Ideological State Apparatuses, then into the 1980's with Baudrillard who theorized that the real was represented, now the hyper real was simulated. In the 1990's Nancy Fraser further criticises Habermas's account of the public sphere from a feminist perspective and in particular for its failures to confront the needs to eliminate social inequality, to accept a multiplicity of public, to break down the distinctions between public and private and to integrate the state and civil society. The lecture then looked at the various phases of how media studies have developed over time, beginning with Popular Cyberculture, through Cyberculture Studies, to Critical Cyberculture Studies.
The fourth session was on virtual philosophy, in which we looked at the Allegory of Plato's Cave, the philosophical questions raised by the movie series 'The Matrix'. We looked at the various philosophers theories that have developed over time such as, Guy Debord - Society of Spectacle; Umberto Eco's - Hyper-reality; Jean Baudrillard's - Simulacrum; William Gibson's - Cyberspace as a Consensual Hallucination; and Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's - Becoming Media. The lecture then looked at the concept of Virtual Reality, it's precursors and what defines VR, and it's possible future uses.
Next we looked at the current and emerging technologies and the advent of computer games. We covered applications like Instant Messaging and how it's advent has changed the ways in which we communicate, Peer-to-Peer and file sharing, which brought up the question of copyrights and piracy and the various ways people avoid detection using things like proxy servers and the TOR (The Onion Router) network, through to Voice over IP or VoIP and how this technology is being utilized. The lecture then moved on to computer games and the two paradigms of Narratology and Ludology. Narratology is the study of video games from the perspective of them being stories or literary works. Ludology in contrast, is not concerned with the story elements but rather with the Game and Play elements. We then went on to look at other methods used in the study of games.
The following day we were focused on the concept of free or open source software. We looked at the various organizations that are involved in the open source movement such as, the Free Software Foundation - www.fsf.org; The Creative Commons - www.creativecommons.org ; and the Electronic Frontier Foundation - www.eff.org. We watched a video with Richard Stallman talking about the creative commons licenses and what it means for the future development of software and creative arts.
This linked nicely to the following day's topic of Digital Creativity and how the future of copyrights and the internet is going to affect how we make and distribute content onto the web. We looked at things like the AMV (Anime Music Videos) where people take two proprietary mediums, being the music and the anime video, and combine them to make a music video but aligned with the anime timed to match the music. We also touched briefly on Project Gutenberg and the public domain materials. We finished the lecture with a discussion on electronic music and what defines it, how people are making it now and how it will be made in the future.
The next day we had a look at the Cyber Democracy. We started by defining what democracy means, with it coming down to the fact that there are many different kinds and definitions for democracy, such as representational democracy, direct democracy and radical democracy. We touched on the topic of the digital divide and whether the gap between the haves and have nots is shrinking or growing. Then we looked at the Gaps in the Mass Media, with a number of theorists coming up with various opinions, such as what Habermas calls 'the Public Sphere'. Marshall McLuhan's argument of electricity does not centralize, it decentralizes, and John Hartley systematized the political import of audience reception theory when he notes that post-modernity has seen the transformation of what constitutes 'knowledge' for the coercive instrumentality and enforced reality of 'imperial information' to the hermeneutics of intertextual intersubjectivity where meanings are liable to constant negotiations.
The lecture then looked at Free Speech and Censorship with a rather interesting quote from John Gilmore at the start of the section 'The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it'. We looked at the rights we have as Australian citizens and as citizens of the internet, and the concept of the Citizen-Hacker which is taking the traditional concept of the computer hacker who uses the rules of the system to their advantage and applying it to us in a national setting, where we can inform ourselves of the rules and then manipulate the system to our advantage, be it through political pressure or by organizing a political interest group.
The second last lecture was on the question of whether these new technologies will usher in the new age of the Cyber-Utopia, where everything is great and we won't have to worry about anything because it's all be taken care of or will it turn out to be a Cyber-Dystopia, where we are controlled by the technology or it is used to control us. We looked at the concept of the Media Ages, starting with the first (electronic) media age, which Mark Poster argues was characterized by the use of one source (or relatively few) with many receivers, into the second (electronic) media age which is characterized by distributed systems of interaction. Marshall McLuhan suggested that there are three media ages beginning with the Oral (spoken work); then the Literate(written words); then to the Electric (televisual/digital). A student of McLuhan went on to suggest that there were a further two media ages, being the 'mimetic age' and the 'interactive/digital age'.
We went on to look at the varied literature that has been written over the years looking at various theories on what kind of the future technology will bring. We looked at Utopian authors such as Plato's 'The Republic', Sir Thomas More's 'Utopia'. This concept of a technological Utopia where we can create, a microcosmic recreation of nature sanitized and optimized for human consumption/enjoyment. Then we looked at Dystopia authors such as Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World', and George Orwell's '1984'. In most of the literature it seems that even in a Utopian society the peace is disrupted by people who seek to exercise their own human agency and free will.
Which brings us to today's summary of the course, which is what you've just read. :)
Well that's it for another post. Stay frosty.
The Future of The Internet
Today's task was to have a think about what direction the internet is going to take over the next 10 years.
I feel that, as with everything in this world there will always be shades of gray between the many extremes. I think there are going to be some rather interesting times ahead of us.
Due to the way that the western democracies work, it seems that they have built up a reputation of doing nothing, nothing, nothing and then suddenly in one massive knee jerk reaction bring in laws that are way exceed what was needed or even desired. As we've seen in the past governments have also taken this line with censorship.
The real problem that governments face with the internet is that it is a decentralized global system that does not follow the strict rule of country borders. Therefore to effectively police the system you need to have a set of laws that will be applied globally, otherwise you just get the situation that we have at the moment where countries like America, who are shutting down sites that host questionable material, but the people are just moving the sites to countries who will allow them to continue. This brings us the the reciprocal trade agreements we talked about yesterday where America is trying to trade on their intellectual property but are having problems with people just taking their ideas and just producing it cheaper than the American people are willing to make it for and not sending any of the profits back.
I came across a rather interesting development a little while ago, which I though was unique in it's common sense approach to copyrights. Basically in countries over in eastern Europe where 'piracy' is quite rampant the movie studios have developed this idea of the R5 copy. Basically an R5 copy of a movie is a kind of lower quality rip of the movie which is leaked/released by the studios when they release the movies to the cinemas, this allows the people who will 'pirate' the movie anyway access to the movie but at a quality which you can watch but it's not something you would burn onto a DVD and keep in your collection. This has circumvented a lot of angst and litigation while the movies studios still retain the revenue from the people who what to see the good version.
Another major issue I think that has some rather wide ranging problems is the issue of net neutrality, or the concept of keeping the internet an uncontrolled environment where people can post what ever they want. This I feel, is going to be quite a major political issue over the coming years as more people get connected and are exposed to the, shall we say, slightly less friendly aspects of the internet. The problem is that we've seemed to have decided to submit ourselves to the rule of others and if we are harmed in anyway we seem to want to blame those people who have been charged with our protection, which has brought about the whole knee jerk reaction I was discussing above. The leader have to be seen to be doing something about this perceived danger, so when they act, it's usually in an exaggerated way.
In regard to the ability to post content onto the internet in the future, I think this will be inevitably tied to the censorship issue. Will governments implement the filters at the personal, ISP, or at the communication network levels? As the new Web 2.0 gets integrated more into how we browse the web I believe that we will see a lot more usage of the tagging systems and RSS feeds, this will allow for much more accurate searches with the results being much more tailored to your own needs. This future was demonstrated in one of the videos we watch in the lectures about the rise of Google and the advent of the program called 'EPIC'.
China is another Pandora's box that is set to be opened in the not to distant future, with more people in China wanting the western style life, they are demanding access to more and more consumer goods, such as computers and the internet. This I think may prove to be the lead hammer that brakes the worlds back, with the rising pollution levels as the Chinese government sinks more money into their industries the rest of the world is going to start to feel the effects. Already there are places in China in which the air is toxic to breath, those people who have the money to move away have, those that don't have to stay and deal with it on a daily basis. In a documentary I watch recently they were filming in a town where the air was so thick with pollution the visibility had dropped to under 20 meters, the health ramifications of living in such a place are staggering. I believe that unless there is a fundamental shift in our belief systems in the 10 years or so, the world as we know it is going to change and not in a good way.
The digital literacy question is another interesting topic as we are already seeing a divide between those who have grow up with the technology in their lives to the older generation who are having to learn new things. As an example, a report I read recently was talking about the fact that the young children in primary school are already at the stage that they have multiple email addresses and Instant Messaging friends all over the globe.
In conclusion I'd have to say that the not to distant future will be a very different place to where we are now, the major issues effecting us will be, the question of net neutrality, governments trying to figure out ways to add censorship of the internet, and the population explosion that will occur and all the problems associated with it on the web if China becomes actively involved in promoting the internet to it's population.
Well I think it's home time for me, Y'all have a good one now ya hear.
I feel that, as with everything in this world there will always be shades of gray between the many extremes. I think there are going to be some rather interesting times ahead of us.
Due to the way that the western democracies work, it seems that they have built up a reputation of doing nothing, nothing, nothing and then suddenly in one massive knee jerk reaction bring in laws that are way exceed what was needed or even desired. As we've seen in the past governments have also taken this line with censorship.
The real problem that governments face with the internet is that it is a decentralized global system that does not follow the strict rule of country borders. Therefore to effectively police the system you need to have a set of laws that will be applied globally, otherwise you just get the situation that we have at the moment where countries like America, who are shutting down sites that host questionable material, but the people are just moving the sites to countries who will allow them to continue. This brings us the the reciprocal trade agreements we talked about yesterday where America is trying to trade on their intellectual property but are having problems with people just taking their ideas and just producing it cheaper than the American people are willing to make it for and not sending any of the profits back.
I came across a rather interesting development a little while ago, which I though was unique in it's common sense approach to copyrights. Basically in countries over in eastern Europe where 'piracy' is quite rampant the movie studios have developed this idea of the R5 copy. Basically an R5 copy of a movie is a kind of lower quality rip of the movie which is leaked/released by the studios when they release the movies to the cinemas, this allows the people who will 'pirate' the movie anyway access to the movie but at a quality which you can watch but it's not something you would burn onto a DVD and keep in your collection. This has circumvented a lot of angst and litigation while the movies studios still retain the revenue from the people who what to see the good version.
Another major issue I think that has some rather wide ranging problems is the issue of net neutrality, or the concept of keeping the internet an uncontrolled environment where people can post what ever they want. This I feel, is going to be quite a major political issue over the coming years as more people get connected and are exposed to the, shall we say, slightly less friendly aspects of the internet. The problem is that we've seemed to have decided to submit ourselves to the rule of others and if we are harmed in anyway we seem to want to blame those people who have been charged with our protection, which has brought about the whole knee jerk reaction I was discussing above. The leader have to be seen to be doing something about this perceived danger, so when they act, it's usually in an exaggerated way.
In regard to the ability to post content onto the internet in the future, I think this will be inevitably tied to the censorship issue. Will governments implement the filters at the personal, ISP, or at the communication network levels? As the new Web 2.0 gets integrated more into how we browse the web I believe that we will see a lot more usage of the tagging systems and RSS feeds, this will allow for much more accurate searches with the results being much more tailored to your own needs. This future was demonstrated in one of the videos we watch in the lectures about the rise of Google and the advent of the program called 'EPIC'.
China is another Pandora's box that is set to be opened in the not to distant future, with more people in China wanting the western style life, they are demanding access to more and more consumer goods, such as computers and the internet. This I think may prove to be the lead hammer that brakes the worlds back, with the rising pollution levels as the Chinese government sinks more money into their industries the rest of the world is going to start to feel the effects. Already there are places in China in which the air is toxic to breath, those people who have the money to move away have, those that don't have to stay and deal with it on a daily basis. In a documentary I watch recently they were filming in a town where the air was so thick with pollution the visibility had dropped to under 20 meters, the health ramifications of living in such a place are staggering. I believe that unless there is a fundamental shift in our belief systems in the 10 years or so, the world as we know it is going to change and not in a good way.
The digital literacy question is another interesting topic as we are already seeing a divide between those who have grow up with the technology in their lives to the older generation who are having to learn new things. As an example, a report I read recently was talking about the fact that the young children in primary school are already at the stage that they have multiple email addresses and Instant Messaging friends all over the globe.
In conclusion I'd have to say that the not to distant future will be a very different place to where we are now, the major issues effecting us will be, the question of net neutrality, governments trying to figure out ways to add censorship of the internet, and the population explosion that will occur and all the problems associated with it on the web if China becomes actively involved in promoting the internet to it's population.
Well I think it's home time for me, Y'all have a good one now ya hear.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Lecture Summary of the Day
Hi out there,
Today's lecture was looking at the ideal and nightmare societies that could evolve due to our embracing of technology, or in other words a Utopia verses Distopia.
The lecture began with two rather interesting quotes, the first from the movie Jurassic Park, "They were so obsessed with the fact that they could do it, they forgot to consider whether they should." This statement considers the ethical question of whether new technologies could be used for this theoretical ideal of 'for a good purpose' as opposed to the questionable practices that could come about such as this question of human cloning. This brings to bear this question of what is considered 'ethical', and can it be applied in a global setting? The real problem is that what is considered ethical, is very much entrenched in the societal norms in that place and time, if something is perfectly legal and acceptable where you live, does that mean it will be acceptable in an other country, or even in the same place but in a years time.
This was perfectly demonstrated in the movie "Alphaville" which we watch a portion of at the end of the lecture, every character in the movie smoked cigarettes, which at that time was a normal thing to do, if we were to move the story of the movie into present times it would not be allow to be screened because everyone smoked. This demonstrates that it is the societal norms in that time and place that dictates what is considered ethical behavior.
This brings us back to today's topic of the development of a societal Utopia through the use of technology. A researcher called Marshall McLuhan, theorized that there are three stages of media development, the oral (spoken word); the literate (written words); and Electric (which is...televisual,digital). A student of McLuhan called Robert K. Logan continued McLuhan's work by stating that he believe that there are a five stages of media ages by adding the 'mimetic age' and the 'interactive/digital age'.
McLuhan's first electronic media age is focused on a few centralized providers disseminating information to many receivers. For multiple reasons, only certain people could produce and send content; there were educational, financial and technical restrictions to those who could produce, and to those who could distribute.
Which brings us to the second (electronic) media age - decentralized interactions. This media age is characterized by distributed systems of interaction. the interactivity of the internet is simultaneously being worked out in associated technologies such as DVD's and Virtual Reality.
This raises the issue of who controls this new media, as postmodernist is built upon modernism, the second media age is build on the first and is therefore depended on the world view inherent in existing technologies. It is this combining of old and new technologies that new industries and uses have developed. With this new media brings a a need for new understandings, political ones in particular, to protect the public interest. Some of the questions that need to be raised are, the means to protect rights of access; equity in access; the means to strengthen and enhance existing community structures; the development of a global community; the development of strategies for developing, implementing and enforcing global laws; international intellectual property laws; and the freedom of speech.
Which brings us back to the lecture topic Utopia verses Dystopia. The statement 'technology itself has often been visualized as Utopia - somewhere we can create, a microcosmic recreation of nature sanitized and optimized for human consumption with all the hazards of life stripped away by the technology'. The question becomes, will this technology provide us with something that is better than our current reality. There are many examples of this in the current media, one of them being the 'Better Than Life' video game from the Red Dwarf TV series, this theme is also looked at in the Matrix movies, where humans have been reduced to living their lives in a digitally created world completely oblivious to their actual surroundings.
The problem with such a society is that if someone or something turns off the power, you may find that your technological utopia is something more akin to a dystopia.
There has been only a few Utopian societies in literature in the 20th century, however there have been quite a few Dystopias, with the works of Aldous Huxley's 'A Brave New World' and George Orwell's '1984', which pointed out that language could be corrupted into 'newspeak' to obscure the truth.
With the development of these new communication technologies comes another set of mythologies, focused on the transcendence of death, nature and humanity, this is dealt with rather well in the 'Ghost In The Shell: SAC' series which is set in the future where cyber-brains and cyborg bodies have become the norm. The show touches on the philosophical question of, what makes us human, is it the body that we exist in which sends electrical signals to our brains so that we can interpret the world around us, or is it the brain itself, and if we can take an image of the brain and a life times worth of experiences and digitize it will it be the person or just a digital representation of the flesh form. Basically can we replace the brain with a computer that holds all our experiences, that can learn in the same way normal brains would and retain what it is that makes us, human.
It seems that even in Utopian societies (in the film word as least) the peace is disrupted by people who seek to exercise their own human agency and free will.
As stated in the lecture notes, nothing epitomizes the cybernautic desire to transcend the body's limitations more than the fantasy of abandoning the flesh and downloading oneself to cyber-immortality.
In conclusion however we choose to view ourselves and the spaces we occupy, virtual or otherwise, with the advent of cyberspace, our conception of the world and ourselves is more than likely to change. Like Copernicus, we are privileged to witness the dawning of a new kind of space. Only time will tell, how we decide to integrate it into our culture.
Well that's it for another entry. Bye
Today's lecture was looking at the ideal and nightmare societies that could evolve due to our embracing of technology, or in other words a Utopia verses Distopia.
The lecture began with two rather interesting quotes, the first from the movie Jurassic Park, "They were so obsessed with the fact that they could do it, they forgot to consider whether they should." This statement considers the ethical question of whether new technologies could be used for this theoretical ideal of 'for a good purpose' as opposed to the questionable practices that could come about such as this question of human cloning. This brings to bear this question of what is considered 'ethical', and can it be applied in a global setting? The real problem is that what is considered ethical, is very much entrenched in the societal norms in that place and time, if something is perfectly legal and acceptable where you live, does that mean it will be acceptable in an other country, or even in the same place but in a years time.
This was perfectly demonstrated in the movie "Alphaville" which we watch a portion of at the end of the lecture, every character in the movie smoked cigarettes, which at that time was a normal thing to do, if we were to move the story of the movie into present times it would not be allow to be screened because everyone smoked. This demonstrates that it is the societal norms in that time and place that dictates what is considered ethical behavior.
This brings us back to today's topic of the development of a societal Utopia through the use of technology. A researcher called Marshall McLuhan, theorized that there are three stages of media development, the oral (spoken word); the literate (written words); and Electric (which is...televisual,digital). A student of McLuhan called Robert K. Logan continued McLuhan's work by stating that he believe that there are a five stages of media ages by adding the 'mimetic age' and the 'interactive/digital age'.
McLuhan's first electronic media age is focused on a few centralized providers disseminating information to many receivers. For multiple reasons, only certain people could produce and send content; there were educational, financial and technical restrictions to those who could produce, and to those who could distribute.
Which brings us to the second (electronic) media age - decentralized interactions. This media age is characterized by distributed systems of interaction. the interactivity of the internet is simultaneously being worked out in associated technologies such as DVD's and Virtual Reality.
This raises the issue of who controls this new media, as postmodernist is built upon modernism, the second media age is build on the first and is therefore depended on the world view inherent in existing technologies. It is this combining of old and new technologies that new industries and uses have developed. With this new media brings a a need for new understandings, political ones in particular, to protect the public interest. Some of the questions that need to be raised are, the means to protect rights of access; equity in access; the means to strengthen and enhance existing community structures; the development of a global community; the development of strategies for developing, implementing and enforcing global laws; international intellectual property laws; and the freedom of speech.
Which brings us back to the lecture topic Utopia verses Dystopia. The statement 'technology itself has often been visualized as Utopia - somewhere we can create, a microcosmic recreation of nature sanitized and optimized for human consumption with all the hazards of life stripped away by the technology'. The question becomes, will this technology provide us with something that is better than our current reality. There are many examples of this in the current media, one of them being the 'Better Than Life' video game from the Red Dwarf TV series, this theme is also looked at in the Matrix movies, where humans have been reduced to living their lives in a digitally created world completely oblivious to their actual surroundings.
The problem with such a society is that if someone or something turns off the power, you may find that your technological utopia is something more akin to a dystopia.
There has been only a few Utopian societies in literature in the 20th century, however there have been quite a few Dystopias, with the works of Aldous Huxley's 'A Brave New World' and George Orwell's '1984', which pointed out that language could be corrupted into 'newspeak' to obscure the truth.
With the development of these new communication technologies comes another set of mythologies, focused on the transcendence of death, nature and humanity, this is dealt with rather well in the 'Ghost In The Shell: SAC' series which is set in the future where cyber-brains and cyborg bodies have become the norm. The show touches on the philosophical question of, what makes us human, is it the body that we exist in which sends electrical signals to our brains so that we can interpret the world around us, or is it the brain itself, and if we can take an image of the brain and a life times worth of experiences and digitize it will it be the person or just a digital representation of the flesh form. Basically can we replace the brain with a computer that holds all our experiences, that can learn in the same way normal brains would and retain what it is that makes us, human.
It seems that even in Utopian societies (in the film word as least) the peace is disrupted by people who seek to exercise their own human agency and free will.
As stated in the lecture notes, nothing epitomizes the cybernautic desire to transcend the body's limitations more than the fantasy of abandoning the flesh and downloading oneself to cyber-immortality.
In conclusion however we choose to view ourselves and the spaces we occupy, virtual or otherwise, with the advent of cyberspace, our conception of the world and ourselves is more than likely to change. Like Copernicus, we are privileged to witness the dawning of a new kind of space. Only time will tell, how we decide to integrate it into our culture.
Well that's it for another entry. Bye
Looking at the Assignment
Hey out there,
As a part of the assessment for this course we are required to write an academic essay on a topic covered in this course. At this stage I'm torn between the first topic which is 'Mark Prensky's "Emerging online life of the digital native" and Dave Weinberger's "A New World" both present different views of contemporary internet users. IN light of your own experiences with new technologies do you think they are accurate portrayals? Discuss why or why not with specific examples; And the last topic which is 'What has happed to the idea of "community" in the age of networked digital media? Discuss.
These two topics appeal to me as they look at how new technologies are being integrated into our daily lives and in that act, are they changing the way we view the world around us with regard to the community. Has the advent of the online communities changed the definition at all? Is it still defined as a group of like minded people getting together to share their thoughts and ideas, just because they don't do it in a face to face setting, does this make it any less of a community? I personally have friends who I've never met but I've got a open invitation to go stay with them if I'm ever in their country, does the fact that we've never seen each other detract from our friendship? These are just some of the ideas that have been rolling around inside my head as I've been going through the course readings, if you have any thoughts on the matter please don't be shy and share. :)
Well that's it for now, till tomorrow for another action packed day.
I'm using this as a dump for some web links I've been coming across so please just ignore the following :P
http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/117445/The_First_Worldwide_Culture_is_The_Internet
Internet gives bullies more power
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22840745-1702,00.html
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/barnes/
http://www.zonalatina.com/Zldata99.htm
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2007/11/social_networks_overtake_webma.html
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/bryant.html
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/17/2125206&from=rss
http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2007/?page_id=28
http://www.editorsweblog.org/news/2007/11/social_networking_continues_to_develop_o.php
http://www.llrx.com/features/goodgoogle.htm
http://www.thisisherd.com/2007/11/great-social-networking-stampede.html
As a part of the assessment for this course we are required to write an academic essay on a topic covered in this course. At this stage I'm torn between the first topic which is 'Mark Prensky's "Emerging online life of the digital native" and Dave Weinberger's "A New World" both present different views of contemporary internet users. IN light of your own experiences with new technologies do you think they are accurate portrayals? Discuss why or why not with specific examples; And the last topic which is 'What has happed to the idea of "community" in the age of networked digital media? Discuss.
These two topics appeal to me as they look at how new technologies are being integrated into our daily lives and in that act, are they changing the way we view the world around us with regard to the community. Has the advent of the online communities changed the definition at all? Is it still defined as a group of like minded people getting together to share their thoughts and ideas, just because they don't do it in a face to face setting, does this make it any less of a community? I personally have friends who I've never met but I've got a open invitation to go stay with them if I'm ever in their country, does the fact that we've never seen each other detract from our friendship? These are just some of the ideas that have been rolling around inside my head as I've been going through the course readings, if you have any thoughts on the matter please don't be shy and share. :)
Well that's it for now, till tomorrow for another action packed day.
I'm using this as a dump for some web links I've been coming across so please just ignore the following :P
http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/117445/The_First_Worldwide_Culture_is_The_Internet
Internet gives bullies more power
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22840745-1702,00.html
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/barnes/
http://www.zonalatina.com/Zldata99.htm
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2007/11/social_networks_overtake_webma.html
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/bryant.html
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/17/2125206&from=rss
http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2007/?page_id=28
http://www.editorsweblog.org/news/2007/11/social_networking_continues_to_develop_o.php
http://www.llrx.com/features/goodgoogle.htm
http://www.thisisherd.com/2007/11/great-social-networking-stampede.html
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Task of the Day
Hi again,
For today's task we were given a bunch of questions that we had to answer. I missed out on asking the lecture if he wanted us to perform any research on the topics so from a consensus of the people left in the room I went for the personal experiences approach.
Questions:
Given the conventional wisdom that traditional media are still the dominant form for getting "news" out to the world, do you think the internet will effect the audience for those old media?
I think that the traditional media will find that the going to have to adapt to the new technologies as they become more and more common. Already we are seeing newspaper providers, host the contents of their newspapers free online, they are still manufacturing the news in it's physical form of the traditional newspaper for those people who still want to have something they can hold onto and take with them to places that do not have access to computers, but they recognize that some people desire the information in purely electronic form.
I feel that this will cause a decline in the patronage of the traditional media forms, the content providers have moved their operations to where the people require it, which is online. An added advantage to the new media forms is the ability to update online content on a timely basis where the traditional media is usually a once a day occurrence.
In conclusion I believe that while the advent of new media will detract from the traditional forms of media, there will still remain a requirement for content providers to distribute hard copies to people who may be lodites, (technologically illiterate), when it comes to technology or just want to be able to catch up on the news away from a computer desk.
Check out the local IndyMedia website. What kind of news is there, and do you think a website like that has a place in your life?
From looking around both the local and international website of IndyMedia it appears that the site is dedicated to news article about community activism and the proliferation of the topics that are not being given mass media attention. The articles look to be based heavily on the political process and informing people of what's going on in the world around them. Unfortunately it appears that the Melbourne chapter of the association has closed down to work out what it is they are trying to achieve with the website, however they have left the site active and the archives accessible. There are some interesting articles about the plans to make nuclear power the prime source of electricity in Australia, another article focused on the protests that took place outside the G8 summit over in Germany.
For myself, I try to get my news from several different sources, I guess this is a kind of personal fact checking that I like to do, having found some rather glaring omissions from the local mass media news outlets over the past several years I grew very disenchanted by the commercial outlets. After having read a few articles on the site, they appear to be well written with only a slight political bias and quality photos. So yes, I think I will add this to the list of sites if frequent to get my news, as it has an interesting local focus, but more importantly the site covers things that do not appear readily in the commercial outlets.
Do you think the internet is (was?) an effective tool for politicians to reach out to their intended audience?
I think that the internet is an effective tool for politicians to reach a particular audience. It has been my experience that there is almost what you'd called a sub-culture developing around those who use the internet on a frequent basis and those who do not use it at all or only a very small amount. What this means is that while posting videos and political advertising on the web is an effective way to reach the people who frequent those sites, the problem is that there are so many different web sites out there that the issue is choosing which one to host on.
Therefore audience you reach will be restricted to the kind of people who visit that kind of site. To gain the maximum benefit for their advertising dollar I personally feel that they would be much better off spending their advertising budgets on mass media outlets, but try to find the most popular sites and post your message on those sites.
What do you think about blogs as a way for people to get information out? What about their role as political commentary?
I believe that using blogs is a great way to disseminate information. It is a cheap, efficient way to host information which may or may not have mass media coverage, or information that is specialized. As an example, my mother has recently got into making quilts, it turns out there are hundreds of people out there in blogger land who take great pride in writing tutorials on how to make particular designs, or different methods of sewing, etc.
If those people hadn't taken the time to sit down and write those articles, my mother would have had to find the information some other way, either by paying for it or just simply doing without. This has created a sort of mini-community of quilters who spend their time designing quilt ideas and sharing them with others, they have absolutely no intention of ever making the design, they just gain enjoyment of sharing the design itself, this has lead to design competitions within the community for both people who actually sew the quilts and those who just design the quilts using software.
For myself I have found blogs to be an invaluable tool for finding information about a particular problem with my car. There are surprising quite a few blogger's out there who are more than happy to assist you with a problem, all you have to do is ask. While you will come across a few people who have what I call 'tech arrogance' (they took the time to find out for themselves, so why shouldn't you, kind of attitude), the general feeling I found is a happy and helpful one.
The role of blogs as a political commentary is I think a valid one, it allows us to read the thoughts of many different people so that we can get a more holistic view of the public sentiment. The anonymity that the internet supposedly provides is a very warm blanket for a lot of people who fear reprisals for stating their views. As was demonstrated in one of the course readings, Reporters without Borders(2005) 'A Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber Dissidents', in some countries making comments on the political process can be a very dangerous pass time, blogs allow these people to get their message out to the world while circumventing the laws of their country.
So in conclusion I would say that blogs are an excellent medium for disseminating information not readily available to the general public and as a tool for making political commentaries.
Well that's it for another day, hope to see you all tomorrow.
For today's task we were given a bunch of questions that we had to answer. I missed out on asking the lecture if he wanted us to perform any research on the topics so from a consensus of the people left in the room I went for the personal experiences approach.
Questions:
Given the conventional wisdom that traditional media are still the dominant form for getting "news" out to the world, do you think the internet will effect the audience for those old media?
I think that the traditional media will find that the going to have to adapt to the new technologies as they become more and more common. Already we are seeing newspaper providers, host the contents of their newspapers free online, they are still manufacturing the news in it's physical form of the traditional newspaper for those people who still want to have something they can hold onto and take with them to places that do not have access to computers, but they recognize that some people desire the information in purely electronic form.
I feel that this will cause a decline in the patronage of the traditional media forms, the content providers have moved their operations to where the people require it, which is online. An added advantage to the new media forms is the ability to update online content on a timely basis where the traditional media is usually a once a day occurrence.
In conclusion I believe that while the advent of new media will detract from the traditional forms of media, there will still remain a requirement for content providers to distribute hard copies to people who may be lodites, (technologically illiterate), when it comes to technology or just want to be able to catch up on the news away from a computer desk.
Check out the local IndyMedia website. What kind of news is there, and do you think a website like that has a place in your life?
From looking around both the local and international website of IndyMedia it appears that the site is dedicated to news article about community activism and the proliferation of the topics that are not being given mass media attention. The articles look to be based heavily on the political process and informing people of what's going on in the world around them. Unfortunately it appears that the Melbourne chapter of the association has closed down to work out what it is they are trying to achieve with the website, however they have left the site active and the archives accessible. There are some interesting articles about the plans to make nuclear power the prime source of electricity in Australia, another article focused on the protests that took place outside the G8 summit over in Germany.
For myself, I try to get my news from several different sources, I guess this is a kind of personal fact checking that I like to do, having found some rather glaring omissions from the local mass media news outlets over the past several years I grew very disenchanted by the commercial outlets. After having read a few articles on the site, they appear to be well written with only a slight political bias and quality photos. So yes, I think I will add this to the list of sites if frequent to get my news, as it has an interesting local focus, but more importantly the site covers things that do not appear readily in the commercial outlets.
Do you think the internet is (was?) an effective tool for politicians to reach out to their intended audience?
I think that the internet is an effective tool for politicians to reach a particular audience. It has been my experience that there is almost what you'd called a sub-culture developing around those who use the internet on a frequent basis and those who do not use it at all or only a very small amount. What this means is that while posting videos and political advertising on the web is an effective way to reach the people who frequent those sites, the problem is that there are so many different web sites out there that the issue is choosing which one to host on.
Therefore audience you reach will be restricted to the kind of people who visit that kind of site. To gain the maximum benefit for their advertising dollar I personally feel that they would be much better off spending their advertising budgets on mass media outlets, but try to find the most popular sites and post your message on those sites.
What do you think about blogs as a way for people to get information out? What about their role as political commentary?
I believe that using blogs is a great way to disseminate information. It is a cheap, efficient way to host information which may or may not have mass media coverage, or information that is specialized. As an example, my mother has recently got into making quilts, it turns out there are hundreds of people out there in blogger land who take great pride in writing tutorials on how to make particular designs, or different methods of sewing, etc.
If those people hadn't taken the time to sit down and write those articles, my mother would have had to find the information some other way, either by paying for it or just simply doing without. This has created a sort of mini-community of quilters who spend their time designing quilt ideas and sharing them with others, they have absolutely no intention of ever making the design, they just gain enjoyment of sharing the design itself, this has lead to design competitions within the community for both people who actually sew the quilts and those who just design the quilts using software.
For myself I have found blogs to be an invaluable tool for finding information about a particular problem with my car. There are surprising quite a few blogger's out there who are more than happy to assist you with a problem, all you have to do is ask. While you will come across a few people who have what I call 'tech arrogance' (they took the time to find out for themselves, so why shouldn't you, kind of attitude), the general feeling I found is a happy and helpful one.
The role of blogs as a political commentary is I think a valid one, it allows us to read the thoughts of many different people so that we can get a more holistic view of the public sentiment. The anonymity that the internet supposedly provides is a very warm blanket for a lot of people who fear reprisals for stating their views. As was demonstrated in one of the course readings, Reporters without Borders(2005) 'A Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber Dissidents', in some countries making comments on the political process can be a very dangerous pass time, blogs allow these people to get their message out to the world while circumventing the laws of their country.
So in conclusion I would say that blogs are an excellent medium for disseminating information not readily available to the general public and as a tool for making political commentaries.
Well that's it for another day, hope to see you all tomorrow.
The Internet and Cyber-Democracy
Hi all,
Today's lecture provided some rather interesting incites into the current systems of democracy and how the advent of the internet and it's associated technologies could affect the democratic process. The question was put to us, how does this new medium effect how we communicate and does this in turn effect how we govern?
The current system of representational democracy is said to be a product of the nations of the industrial age so these simple accounts of democracy do not address the impact of the present period of rapid transition from an industrial to and informational economy and the consequent challenge to the power of nation states by global economic and cultural processes.
The lecture then went off on a bit of a tangent talking about the various problems as we see it with the current system and various foreign governments and how the internet, being a decentralized network, has effected the world as a whole and as individuals. Which brought us to the concept of the digital divide, this gap between the haves, who have access to the internet at it's related technologies and the have nots, who lack the ability due to economic conditions or political conditions to access these kinds of media.
The increase in the concentration, centralization and commercialization of the mass media seems to have cut us off from democratic participation in the currently existing representative democracy. However with the rise of the internet and social news sites this balance of power is said to be shift back to the population. In past times this was achieved by people congregating in public places, such as literary salons, political clubs, debating societies, pubs and coffee houses, to discuss the politics of the day. An author called Habermas postulated that political debate flourished to produce an independent sphere of influence from which emerging bourgeoisie could criticizes the state and civil society. He goes on to argue that the commercialization of the press in the nineteenth century saw the transformation of the public sphere, from the journalism of private persons to the consumer services of the mass media which privileged the private interests of the owners and advertisers.
A researcher called Mark Posters stated his argument is that we are currently witnessing the advent of 'the second media age' which is supplanting the first media age of centralized broadcasting media emanating form a few sources to many consumers, to the second media age where it consists of decentralized media systems with global reach what will eventually be accessible to all and so produce a new politics based on the communication of many to many.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger proposes to place the technical means of media production in the hands of ordinary people amounts to a radically demotic account of the public sphere. He argues that there is not such thing as an manipulated truth, rather a revolutionary plan which must make everyone a manipulator so that by producing aggressive forms of publicity which were their own, the masses could secure evidence of their daily experiences and draw effective lessons from them.
In Popular Reality, John Hartley systematised the political import of audience reception theory when he noes that post-modernity has seen the transformation of what constitutes 'knowledge' form the coercive instrumentality and enforced reality of 'imperial information' to the hermeneutics of intertextual intersubjectivity where meanings are liable to constant negotiations.
This moment was significant because it returns media theory to the negotiated meanings which produces two-way communication and which is always the ground on which free deliberations occurs.
This brought the discussion back to free speech and censorship. There is a great quote by John Gilmore in the lecture notes which states that 'The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it'. This is from my experience when dealing with the web, a very accurate description of what takes place on the internet. It comes back to the culture on the internet of people who want to know something will go out and find the information they require, if something blocks their path, they look for ways round the block, i feel this is a fundamental trait of human beings, we are curious creatures that if told we are not allowed to do something we will instinctively seek out the thing we are being denied. Case in point, I have a bit of a quirk that if a particular game is banned in Australia, I'll go and find a copy of it to see what all the fuss is about, nine times out of ten the game isn't worth the effort and it's usually some minor graphics related issue that the censors couldn't look past that caused it to be banned in the first place.
In case you don't realize, I am very anti-censorship, I truly believe that we should be allows to choose what can and cannot look at, if we are personally disturbed by violent images, THEN DON'T LOOK AT THEM, it is in your own personal power to make these decisions. End of rant.
This brings us to the question 'Is free speech a basic right?' Here in Australia we do not have a constitutional right to free speech, this is an American concept. it was only recently that the High Court find that free political expression was implied by the Australian constitution and that was only at the behest of a TV station who was concern that their revenue streams could be harmed if political advertising was banned. Rather we might view free speech as self-correcting mechanism - in using free speech people to make democracy happen.
The lecture then looked at the concept of the Citizen-Hacker. Where a computer hacker is said to be able to understand the systems, the rules that apply to it, and then take that knowledge and use it for their personal advantage. The Citizen-Hacker would be someone who understands the democratic process and the rules that apply to it and then use those rules to bend the system to maximize their return on their investment into the system.
Basically we need to investigate as citizens how we can become a part of the political process, so that if they make it illegal to protest publicly, we have other avenues available to us to get our message across to those who have influence.
The lecture finished with a video with Cory Doctorow, a participating member of the EFF, who talked about the economy of the internet and the wealth creation afforded by it.
He stated that the the industrial age was the direct cause of the informational age, due the futurists taking the present day knowledge and 'shoveling it into the future' to see the various possibilities.
He goes on to talk about how American economic policy was based on the idea of America exporting all their raw materials to developing countries with very low labor costs and in return they would ship back finished goods for consumption, as a part of this deal the countries had to sign a trade agreement which states that they must codify into law the copyrights of the American innovations. The theory stated that this would lead to prosperity for America because it was receiving all these really cheap goods, but where it fell down is that the revenues gained from the intellectual property was supposed to offset the loss of jobs in the manufacturing industries inside America. Basically this required the American government to try to protect it's citizens copyrights which is why there has been such a significant influx in the amount of litigation coming out of the USA.
He states that the current system of copyrights is stiflingly creativity because the content providers have become so aggressive in their pursuit of these 'pirates' that people are now turning away from their content to avoid the possibility of litigation.
Possibly the funniest part of the video for me was the story Cory told about the independent movie creator who was contacted by one of the heads of the MPAA in Washington DC, who told him that he'd just seen his movie and he wanted to talk to him about it. The movie creator was puzzled by the call because he thought the only copy of his movie was with the MPAA in LA, to which the gentleman from the MPAA replied 'O, they burned me a copy'. This to me is the antithesis of the hypocrisy that is prevalent in the whole RIAA/MPAA litigation fiasco.
Cory concluded that the only way to stop this restrictive closed environment of copyrights from occurring is to stop using it.
Well that's it for the lecture summary, hope it was an informative read.
Today's lecture provided some rather interesting incites into the current systems of democracy and how the advent of the internet and it's associated technologies could affect the democratic process. The question was put to us, how does this new medium effect how we communicate and does this in turn effect how we govern?
The current system of representational democracy is said to be a product of the nations of the industrial age so these simple accounts of democracy do not address the impact of the present period of rapid transition from an industrial to and informational economy and the consequent challenge to the power of nation states by global economic and cultural processes.
The lecture then went off on a bit of a tangent talking about the various problems as we see it with the current system and various foreign governments and how the internet, being a decentralized network, has effected the world as a whole and as individuals. Which brought us to the concept of the digital divide, this gap between the haves, who have access to the internet at it's related technologies and the have nots, who lack the ability due to economic conditions or political conditions to access these kinds of media.
The increase in the concentration, centralization and commercialization of the mass media seems to have cut us off from democratic participation in the currently existing representative democracy. However with the rise of the internet and social news sites this balance of power is said to be shift back to the population. In past times this was achieved by people congregating in public places, such as literary salons, political clubs, debating societies, pubs and coffee houses, to discuss the politics of the day. An author called Habermas postulated that political debate flourished to produce an independent sphere of influence from which emerging bourgeoisie could criticizes the state and civil society. He goes on to argue that the commercialization of the press in the nineteenth century saw the transformation of the public sphere, from the journalism of private persons to the consumer services of the mass media which privileged the private interests of the owners and advertisers.
A researcher called Mark Posters stated his argument is that we are currently witnessing the advent of 'the second media age' which is supplanting the first media age of centralized broadcasting media emanating form a few sources to many consumers, to the second media age where it consists of decentralized media systems with global reach what will eventually be accessible to all and so produce a new politics based on the communication of many to many.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger proposes to place the technical means of media production in the hands of ordinary people amounts to a radically demotic account of the public sphere. He argues that there is not such thing as an manipulated truth, rather a revolutionary plan which must make everyone a manipulator so that by producing aggressive forms of publicity which were their own, the masses could secure evidence of their daily experiences and draw effective lessons from them.
In Popular Reality, John Hartley systematised the political import of audience reception theory when he noes that post-modernity has seen the transformation of what constitutes 'knowledge' form the coercive instrumentality and enforced reality of 'imperial information' to the hermeneutics of intertextual intersubjectivity where meanings are liable to constant negotiations.
This moment was significant because it returns media theory to the negotiated meanings which produces two-way communication and which is always the ground on which free deliberations occurs.
This brought the discussion back to free speech and censorship. There is a great quote by John Gilmore in the lecture notes which states that 'The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it'. This is from my experience when dealing with the web, a very accurate description of what takes place on the internet. It comes back to the culture on the internet of people who want to know something will go out and find the information they require, if something blocks their path, they look for ways round the block, i feel this is a fundamental trait of human beings, we are curious creatures that if told we are not allowed to do something we will instinctively seek out the thing we are being denied. Case in point, I have a bit of a quirk that if a particular game is banned in Australia, I'll go and find a copy of it to see what all the fuss is about, nine times out of ten the game isn't worth the effort and it's usually some minor graphics related issue that the censors couldn't look past that caused it to be banned in the first place.
In case you don't realize, I am very anti-censorship, I truly believe that we should be allows to choose what can and cannot look at, if we are personally disturbed by violent images, THEN DON'T LOOK AT THEM, it is in your own personal power to make these decisions. End of rant.
This brings us to the question 'Is free speech a basic right?' Here in Australia we do not have a constitutional right to free speech, this is an American concept. it was only recently that the High Court find that free political expression was implied by the Australian constitution and that was only at the behest of a TV station who was concern that their revenue streams could be harmed if political advertising was banned. Rather we might view free speech as self-correcting mechanism - in using free speech people to make democracy happen.
The lecture then looked at the concept of the Citizen-Hacker. Where a computer hacker is said to be able to understand the systems, the rules that apply to it, and then take that knowledge and use it for their personal advantage. The Citizen-Hacker would be someone who understands the democratic process and the rules that apply to it and then use those rules to bend the system to maximize their return on their investment into the system.
Basically we need to investigate as citizens how we can become a part of the political process, so that if they make it illegal to protest publicly, we have other avenues available to us to get our message across to those who have influence.
The lecture finished with a video with Cory Doctorow, a participating member of the EFF, who talked about the economy of the internet and the wealth creation afforded by it.
He stated that the the industrial age was the direct cause of the informational age, due the futurists taking the present day knowledge and 'shoveling it into the future' to see the various possibilities.
He goes on to talk about how American economic policy was based on the idea of America exporting all their raw materials to developing countries with very low labor costs and in return they would ship back finished goods for consumption, as a part of this deal the countries had to sign a trade agreement which states that they must codify into law the copyrights of the American innovations. The theory stated that this would lead to prosperity for America because it was receiving all these really cheap goods, but where it fell down is that the revenues gained from the intellectual property was supposed to offset the loss of jobs in the manufacturing industries inside America. Basically this required the American government to try to protect it's citizens copyrights which is why there has been such a significant influx in the amount of litigation coming out of the USA.
He states that the current system of copyrights is stiflingly creativity because the content providers have become so aggressive in their pursuit of these 'pirates' that people are now turning away from their content to avoid the possibility of litigation.
Possibly the funniest part of the video for me was the story Cory told about the independent movie creator who was contacted by one of the heads of the MPAA in Washington DC, who told him that he'd just seen his movie and he wanted to talk to him about it. The movie creator was puzzled by the call because he thought the only copy of his movie was with the MPAA in LA, to which the gentleman from the MPAA replied 'O, they burned me a copy'. This to me is the antithesis of the hypocrisy that is prevalent in the whole RIAA/MPAA litigation fiasco.
Cory concluded that the only way to stop this restrictive closed environment of copyrights from occurring is to stop using it.
Well that's it for the lecture summary, hope it was an informative read.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Digitial Creativity/Electronic Music Lecture
Hello and welcome to another day at the keyboard,
Today was a little different to the previous lectures as it is usually taken by someone else apparently, so we had a bit of a mixture of topics today.
We started off by watching a quick AMV (Anime Music Video)that are created by fans of the anime series that take music and create things called mashups where they take certain scenes in the anime video and match the lips of the characters to the lyrics in the music. The discussion then turned to the legality of such clips with regard to the copywrite owners of both the video and music. Basically it came down to the fact that unless the content provider particularly doesn't want their material to be used in such a way, they allow fans to continue to make these types of clips, of course also as long as they do not profit from the work.
The lecture then moved on to look at the question of what makes electronic music, electronic? Is it the process of creating it in a digital medium? Is is when the music is created using electronic instruments? Or is it perhaps the media used to transfer the music that makes it electronic?
We had a discussion on the legal ownership of media and it's copywrite, with the codifying into law the Mickey Mouse Copywrite Extension Act, this is as a result of Disney taking the law to court to allow them to extend the copyright for at least 75 years. This brought up a quick discussion on public domain music, upon which we were referred to the Project Guttenberg.
The lecture then showed a video called 'Modulation', which was about the development of the various types of electronic music. The video did provide me with a couple of interesting quotes which I found interesting. The item was that one of the DJs was combining the mediums of music and video and setting up video so that an image is matched to a particular note. So that you get a truly multimedia experience.
Another rather interesting artist in the Modulation video was the French man 'Musique Concrete' which he was playing music from his imagination not from an external source. From listening to his music, I'd have to say that he has the distinct sound of Jazz, using modern equipment, but still the very distinct structure on unstructured music.
We then moved onto the interaction of the modern drug culture and popular music and the significant effects on the way music is made and listened to, with Jungle music having been described as being due to the dark-side of the ecstasy culture.
This brings us back to the instant gratification generation, who are very self focused on their experiences in the now and the detriment of future gains.
As a closing note I found it interesting to compare the electronic music to the Disco craze of the 70's where DJ's were having to mix songs for people to dance to all night long.
Today was a little different to the previous lectures as it is usually taken by someone else apparently, so we had a bit of a mixture of topics today.
We started off by watching a quick AMV (Anime Music Video)that are created by fans of the anime series that take music and create things called mashups where they take certain scenes in the anime video and match the lips of the characters to the lyrics in the music. The discussion then turned to the legality of such clips with regard to the copywrite owners of both the video and music. Basically it came down to the fact that unless the content provider particularly doesn't want their material to be used in such a way, they allow fans to continue to make these types of clips, of course also as long as they do not profit from the work.
The lecture then moved on to look at the question of what makes electronic music, electronic? Is it the process of creating it in a digital medium? Is is when the music is created using electronic instruments? Or is it perhaps the media used to transfer the music that makes it electronic?
We had a discussion on the legal ownership of media and it's copywrite, with the codifying into law the Mickey Mouse Copywrite Extension Act, this is as a result of Disney taking the law to court to allow them to extend the copyright for at least 75 years. This brought up a quick discussion on public domain music, upon which we were referred to the Project Guttenberg.
The lecture then showed a video called 'Modulation', which was about the development of the various types of electronic music. The video did provide me with a couple of interesting quotes which I found interesting. The item was that one of the DJs was combining the mediums of music and video and setting up video so that an image is matched to a particular note. So that you get a truly multimedia experience.
Another rather interesting artist in the Modulation video was the French man 'Musique Concrete' which he was playing music from his imagination not from an external source. From listening to his music, I'd have to say that he has the distinct sound of Jazz, using modern equipment, but still the very distinct structure on unstructured music.
We then moved onto the interaction of the modern drug culture and popular music and the significant effects on the way music is made and listened to, with Jungle music having been described as being due to the dark-side of the ecstasy culture.
This brings us back to the instant gratification generation, who are very self focused on their experiences in the now and the detriment of future gains.
As a closing note I found it interesting to compare the electronic music to the Disco craze of the 70's where DJ's were having to mix songs for people to dance to all night long.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Photoshop Task of The Day
Hey out there in blogger land,
Today's task is centered around being able to have a play around with Photoshop to prove to ourselves that we are able to use software that is foreign to us. We were given a bunch of topics which we had to find pictures that represent the topics, then edit the pictures so that they emphasize the given theme. Unfortunately I do not have any means, at this stage, to transfer pictures from my camera phone to an external source so I've had to once again source these images from web sites, the links are provided at the bottom of each review.
The topics of the day are as follows:
Friends
For the theme of friends I've found this image of a bunch of friends in a heads together group hug. I feel that this is an excellent example of friendship as they are all smiling and making intimate body contact. I altered the image by changing the background colour to something more cheerful and added some text to exaggerate the group hug . http://campacorn.org/volunteer.htm
High-tech
This picture is representational of high technology as it is a picture of a CPU socket on an X38 chipset motherboard also known as the 775LGA socket. I've taken the standard picture and included the logo of the site where i got the picture from, Tom's Hardware, (an excellent source for your computing informational needs), and I included a bit of text which has a dig at the one of the sticking points in the current battle that rages between the major chip manufacturers Intel and AMD. http://www.tomshardware.com
News
I found this picture on the Google images site when I went looking for pictures about news. It represents the News in that it combines various recognizable pictures from around the world which all have significant meaning to most people. I have slowly developed over time a significant disenchantment when it comes to what is reported by the Mass Media outlets and have found that if you are interested, there are many different angles and sides to the stories that are fed to us. For the alteration I've cropped the image taking out some extraneous information and making it smaller and I've added some text depicting my view of what we get fed as consumers of 'The News'. http://www.andisheh.tv/news.php
Summer
For this picture we had to find a picture that is representational of the theme Summer, so I thought to myself, what is it that makes an Australian Summer. I decided that the two things that are basically Aussie, the beach and what's at the beach in summer, sharks, so i combined the two. As a rather timely reinforcement, in the newspaper today on the front page there is a picture of a shark stalking a bunch of people standing in the surf with the headline 'Shark Bait'. I started with the beach scene and found a picture of a shark, I then did a free hand cut out and paste onto the beach image and positioned the shark image so it's just about to eat someone. http://www.pantzar.org/hip-helsinki/summer-days
http://dailyweirdandfunnynews.com/2007/10/07/weird-but-true-shark-facts/
Games
This is a couple of different images mashed together to form a new one, the image from new game on the left is a screen capture from a newly released game called Clive Barker's Jericho, a truly demented horror FPS/Adventure game that's getting some rave reviews of late and looks extremely promising, and on the right and image from yesteryear, the ubiquitous PAC Man. I thought it would be provide an interesting contrast of how far the games have have advanced in terms of not only graphics but in style of play, from the third person where you were controlling another entity, to today's FPS where you take the role of the character, the fact this change took place over such a relatively short period in time says a lot about what drives game development.
http://www.arcadestreet.com/pac-man.htm
http://au.pc.gamespy.com/pc/clive-barkers-jericho/823375p1.html
Successful
For this topic I was having a hard time coming up with a definition for being successful, I eventually decided to go with the two ends of the spectrum on how some people achieve success, on one end we have Ghandi, a man who dedicated his life to protest through non-violent measures and in this he was a success with many people following his world and praising his forsight. On the other end of the spectrum we have George W. Bush a man who has taken a once great nation and dragged it's name and international reputation through the mud by using force to achieve his goals. I started out with two separate images, reduced the size of the pictures and cut and shut them into a single image.
http://www.nycanimalrights.com/excuses.htm
http://www.aramnaharaim.org/English/ArameanHistory.htm
Celebrity
Here I found a picture that represents the celebrity theme with a picture of Eddie Murphy standing beside the character he does the voice over for in the 'Shrek' movie series. I've taken the picture which was quite large and shrunk it down, added some text to the picture as a bit of a joke. I then went and found a banner of one of the movies titles shrunk that down and pasted it into the original, I had to do some minor touch ups with the photo as the movie title took a chunk out of Eddie's shoulder.
http://www.funnyphotos.net.au/shrek/
Well that's it for today's task, thank you for joining me and I hope to see you soon, this is Mammon signing off.
PS. Here's a quick review of Clive Barker's Jericho by a very funny man who reviews games in the style of zero punctuation. (Language Warning for the easily offended)
Today's task is centered around being able to have a play around with Photoshop to prove to ourselves that we are able to use software that is foreign to us. We were given a bunch of topics which we had to find pictures that represent the topics, then edit the pictures so that they emphasize the given theme. Unfortunately I do not have any means, at this stage, to transfer pictures from my camera phone to an external source so I've had to once again source these images from web sites, the links are provided at the bottom of each review.
The topics of the day are as follows:
Friends
For the theme of friends I've found this image of a bunch of friends in a heads together group hug. I feel that this is an excellent example of friendship as they are all smiling and making intimate body contact. I altered the image by changing the background colour to something more cheerful and added some text to exaggerate the group hug . http://campacorn.org/
High-tech
This picture is representational of high technology as it is a picture of a CPU socket on an X38 chipset motherboard also known as the 775LGA socket. I've taken the standard picture and included the logo of the site where i got the picture from, Tom's Hardware, (an excellent source for your computing informational needs), and I included a bit of text which has a dig at the one of the sticking points in the current battle that rages between the major chip manufacturers Intel and AMD. http://www.tomshardware.com
News
I found this picture on the Google images site when I went looking for pictures about news. It represents the News in that it combines various recognizable pictures from around the world which all have significant meaning to most people. I have slowly developed over time a significant disenchantment when it comes to what is reported by the Mass Media outlets and have found that if you are interested, there are many different angles and sides to the stories that are fed to us. For the alteration I've cropped the image taking out some extraneous information and making it smaller and I've added some text depicting my view of what we get fed as consumers of 'The News'. http://www.andisheh.tv/news.php
Summer
For this picture we had to find a picture that is representational of the theme Summer, so I thought to myself, what is it that makes an Australian Summer. I decided that the two things that are basically Aussie, the beach and what's at the beach in summer, sharks, so i combined the two. As a rather timely reinforcement, in the newspaper today on the front page there is a picture of a shark stalking a bunch of people standing in the surf with the headline 'Shark Bait'. I started with the beach scene and found a picture of a shark, I then did a free hand cut out and paste onto the beach image and positioned the shark image so it's just about to eat someone. http://www.pantzar.org/
http://dailyweirdandfunnynews.com/2007/10/07/weird-but-true-shark-facts/
Games
This is a couple of different images mashed together to form a new one, the image from new game on the left is a screen capture from a newly released game called Clive Barker's Jericho, a truly demented horror FPS/Adventure game that's getting some rave reviews of late and looks extremely promising, and on the right and image from yesteryear, the ubiquitous PAC Man. I thought it would be provide an interesting contrast of how far the games have have advanced in terms of not only graphics but in style of play, from the third person where you were controlling another entity, to today's FPS where you take the role of the character, the fact this change took place over such a relatively short period in time says a lot about what drives game development.
http://www.arcadestreet.com/pac-man.htm
http://au.pc.gamespy.com/pc/clive-barkers-jericho/823375p1.html
Successful
For this topic I was having a hard time coming up with a definition for being successful, I eventually decided to go with the two ends of the spectrum on how some people achieve success, on one end we have Ghandi, a man who dedicated his life to protest through non-violent measures and in this he was a success with many people following his world and praising his forsight. On the other end of the spectrum we have George W. Bush a man who has taken a once great nation and dragged it's name and international reputation through the mud by using force to achieve his goals. I started out with two separate images, reduced the size of the pictures and cut and shut them into a single image.
http://www.nycanimalrights.com/excuses.htm
http://www.aramnaharaim.org/English/ArameanHistory.htm
Celebrity
Here I found a picture that represents the celebrity theme with a picture of Eddie Murphy standing beside the character he does the voice over for in the 'Shrek' movie series. I've taken the picture which was quite large and shrunk it down, added some text to the picture as a bit of a joke. I then went and found a banner of one of the movies titles shrunk that down and pasted it into the original, I had to do some minor touch ups with the photo as the movie title took a chunk out of Eddie's shoulder.
http://www.funnyphotos.net.au/shrek/
Well that's it for today's task, thank you for joining me and I hope to see you soon, this is Mammon signing off.
PS. Here's a quick review of Clive Barker's Jericho by a very funny man who reviews games in the style of zero punctuation. (Language Warning for the easily offended)
Lecture Summarised
Hi All,
Today's lecture was on the rather interesting topic of Free and Open Source software. For most people the who use programs on their computer do not even consider the legal ramifications of them using the software manufacturer's copywrite license. As a quick summary on software, programmers write a bit of software in human language, then they use another piece of software that converts the code into a language the computer can understand, called a compiler, which converts the code into an executable files with the extension of .exe. The original code written by the programmers is called the source code.
What you get when you buy a piece of proprietary software is the executable file and a license that explicitly forbids you from de-compiling the software back into the source code. This brings us back to today's topic of Free or Open Source software, which basically means that you not only can read the source code, the license with the software allows you to edit the source code to alter the software to your own needs.
Free and Open Source software differs from proprietary software in a number of different ways, first and most obvious the software is free for you to use and distribute, with one of the base concepts being the idea of Copyleft, (one of the founders, Richard Stallman, calls it 'copywrite flipped over'). Copyleft is the core concept behind putting stuff on to the internet for free. The way the free and open-source license works is that the creators gain a legally-binding contract that controls the use of the software called GPL (GNU General Public License) which protects the people who invest time and effort into making really good programs that are not for commercial purposes.
With the rise of the litigious industry bodies such as the RIAA and MPAA, the open-source or free software is starting to gain more of a foothold in the market place as people get fed up with the increasing restrictions placed proprietary software (sit down and read a EULA sometime and you'll see what I mean) and/or protesting in a way that they listen to by voting with their money and not buying products from companies who trade under the banners of the RIAA, MPAA, etc. This open-source software offers people completely free software that actually works and doesn't come with all the restrictions on how you might want to use it.
The lecture then went on to look at Creative Commons which appears to be an extending the idea of open-source code to other creative areas by providing the creators a legally-binding contract on the specific level of use afforded to that item, for instance you could state in the license that the item is free to use in a non-commercial setting, however if it is to be used in a commercial setting you require permission and/or payment. This has created vast cooperative communities who work together on projects for the love of the thing, not just to end up charging someone a billion dollars to use.
The lecture finished by looking at 'The Electronic Frontier Foundation', as quoted from their website here:
'From the Internet to the IPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. The EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990, well before the internet was on most people's radar, and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation and consumer rights today. The EFF have championed the pubic interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.'
A simple way to look at the two entities would be to say that the Creative Commons deal with changing laws to do with copywrite and intellectual property, and the EFF deals with the law and digital media across the whole spectrum. They're concerned with keeping the net an open medium, not controlled by any one country, government or corporate entity.
Well that pretty much sums up the day's activities, till next time.
Today's lecture was on the rather interesting topic of Free and Open Source software. For most people the who use programs on their computer do not even consider the legal ramifications of them using the software manufacturer's copywrite license. As a quick summary on software, programmers write a bit of software in human language, then they use another piece of software that converts the code into a language the computer can understand, called a compiler, which converts the code into an executable files with the extension of .exe. The original code written by the programmers is called the source code.
What you get when you buy a piece of proprietary software is the executable file and a license that explicitly forbids you from de-compiling the software back into the source code. This brings us back to today's topic of Free or Open Source software, which basically means that you not only can read the source code, the license with the software allows you to edit the source code to alter the software to your own needs.
Free and Open Source software differs from proprietary software in a number of different ways, first and most obvious the software is free for you to use and distribute, with one of the base concepts being the idea of Copyleft, (one of the founders, Richard Stallman, calls it 'copywrite flipped over'). Copyleft is the core concept behind putting stuff on to the internet for free. The way the free and open-source license works is that the creators gain a legally-binding contract that controls the use of the software called GPL (GNU General Public License) which protects the people who invest time and effort into making really good programs that are not for commercial purposes.
With the rise of the litigious industry bodies such as the RIAA and MPAA, the open-source or free software is starting to gain more of a foothold in the market place as people get fed up with the increasing restrictions placed proprietary software (sit down and read a EULA sometime and you'll see what I mean) and/or protesting in a way that they listen to by voting with their money and not buying products from companies who trade under the banners of the RIAA, MPAA, etc. This open-source software offers people completely free software that actually works and doesn't come with all the restrictions on how you might want to use it.
The lecture then went on to look at Creative Commons which appears to be an extending the idea of open-source code to other creative areas by providing the creators a legally-binding contract on the specific level of use afforded to that item, for instance you could state in the license that the item is free to use in a non-commercial setting, however if it is to be used in a commercial setting you require permission and/or payment. This has created vast cooperative communities who work together on projects for the love of the thing, not just to end up charging someone a billion dollars to use.
The lecture finished by looking at 'The Electronic Frontier Foundation', as quoted from their website here:
'From the Internet to the IPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. The EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990, well before the internet was on most people's radar, and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation and consumer rights today. The EFF have championed the pubic interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.'
A simple way to look at the two entities would be to say that the Creative Commons deal with changing laws to do with copywrite and intellectual property, and the EFF deals with the law and digital media across the whole spectrum. They're concerned with keeping the net an open medium, not controlled by any one country, government or corporate entity.
Well that pretty much sums up the day's activities, till next time.
New Computer Update
Hello everyone,
I've finally got my new computer up and running and for those that are into your computer hardware and benchmarking, it's pulled an 11,358 score on 3dMark 06 which I must say I'm rather pleased with. For those not in the know, anything over 10,000 in 3dMark 06 at the moment is considered quite decent with my old rig coming in at 6788 points. Now it comes down to the tweaking phase to see what speeds I can get out of it while keeping it stable. From all reports the GA-X38-DQ6 is about on par with the other board manufacturers on stock settings, however it out shines almost all of the other boards when it comes to playing around with overclocking, due to the higher quality capacitors.
That's pretty much it for this post, I just wanted to share my results with you all.
Bye.
I've finally got my new computer up and running and for those that are into your computer hardware and benchmarking, it's pulled an 11,358 score on 3dMark 06 which I must say I'm rather pleased with. For those not in the know, anything over 10,000 in 3dMark 06 at the moment is considered quite decent with my old rig coming in at 6788 points. Now it comes down to the tweaking phase to see what speeds I can get out of it while keeping it stable. From all reports the GA-X38-DQ6 is about on par with the other board manufacturers on stock settings, however it out shines almost all of the other boards when it comes to playing around with overclocking, due to the higher quality capacitors.
That's pretty much it for this post, I just wanted to share my results with you all.
Bye.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
A Picture is Worth a 1000 Words
Hello again,
Today's task revolved around the being able to post pictures into our blogs. We are required to seek out pictures that have something to do with the provided topics. As I am currently without any means of transferring the images I have on my camera phone to the computer I have decided to have a quick search around some web pages to see what i can come up with.
The topics are as follows:
Friends
I feel this picture is a good representation of the concept of friends as it depicts three Japanese girls smiling and waving to whoever is taking the picture. Their body language and the way they are standing so close together is a reasonable indication of their friendship. I found this picture through a Google images search.
High-tech
This is a picture of the motherboard I've just purchased for my new computer it's a Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 board, the GA signifies that it's made by Gigabyte, the X38 refers to the type of chipset the motherboard uses for talking to it's components and the DQ6 is the boards identity within their range of boards. As with all things in the computer industry the selection of hardware comes down to a compromise in price between the latest 'bleeding edge' technology and yesterday's still current but superseded 'cutting edge' hardware. This picture I found on the Gigabyte website.
News
I feel that this picture apart from it having NEWS stamped over the top of it, provides a collection of pictures that have all have significant impact on our lives over the last decade. Pictures such as the twin towers being hit, the pope, a space shuttle launch and world leaders give us visual cues that make us remember these past events and what they meant to us. This picture was found on an international news networks website Andisheh TV.
Summer
This is a good representation of Summer as it shows lots of people on what appears to be a hot day all congregating at a beach to cool off, the image shows people having fun and playing in the sun which is something the average Australian would equate to doing in summer. Again I found this picture through a search in Google images.
Unconventional
There were just so many unconventional pictures available on the web but I've managed to pick one out of the thousands available. This is a picture of a rather unconventionally arranged bathroom, I guess this is for those couples that have to do "everything" together. This picture is apart of a series that was posted on the web that showed unconventional urinals, its well worth the look if you are amused by this sort of thing. :) Click HERE to go to the site
University Life
Here's a picture that I think is an excellent representation of university life, with a significant amount of time spent sitting in lecture theaters listening and learning from the person standing up the front of the room. This picture is probably a bit of an exaggeration, as in my experience the number of people who actually turn up to the lectures usually doesn't amount to so many. ^_^ I found this picture on the Griffith University website.
Well that's it for me for today. I'm looking forward to having a go at playing around with Photoshop on Monday as I've never had anything to do with Photoshop previously.
Bye.
Today's task revolved around the being able to post pictures into our blogs. We are required to seek out pictures that have something to do with the provided topics. As I am currently without any means of transferring the images I have on my camera phone to the computer I have decided to have a quick search around some web pages to see what i can come up with.
The topics are as follows:
Friends
I feel this picture is a good representation of the concept of friends as it depicts three Japanese girls smiling and waving to whoever is taking the picture. Their body language and the way they are standing so close together is a reasonable indication of their friendship. I found this picture through a Google images search.
High-tech
This is a picture of the motherboard I've just purchased for my new computer it's a Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 board, the GA signifies that it's made by Gigabyte, the X38 refers to the type of chipset the motherboard uses for talking to it's components and the DQ6 is the boards identity within their range of boards. As with all things in the computer industry the selection of hardware comes down to a compromise in price between the latest 'bleeding edge' technology and yesterday's still current but superseded 'cutting edge' hardware. This picture I found on the Gigabyte website.News
I feel that this picture apart from it having NEWS stamped over the top of it, provides a collection of pictures that have all have significant impact on our lives over the last decade. Pictures such as the twin towers being hit, the pope, a space shuttle launch and world leaders give us visual cues that make us remember these past events and what they meant to us. This picture was found on an international news networks website Andisheh TV.Summer
This is a good representation of Summer as it shows lots of people on what appears to be a hot day all congregating at a beach to cool off, the image shows people having fun and playing in the sun which is something the average Australian would equate to doing in summer. Again I found this picture through a search in Google images.Unconventional
There were just so many unconventional pictures available on the web but I've managed to pick one out of the thousands available. This is a picture of a rather unconventionally arranged bathroom, I guess this is for those couples that have to do "everything" together. This picture is apart of a series that was posted on the web that showed unconventional urinals, its well worth the look if you are amused by this sort of thing. :) Click HERE to go to the siteUniversity Life
Here's a picture that I think is an excellent representation of university life, with a significant amount of time spent sitting in lecture theaters listening and learning from the person standing up the front of the room. This picture is probably a bit of an exaggeration, as in my experience the number of people who actually turn up to the lectures usually doesn't amount to so many. ^_^ I found this picture on the Griffith University website.Well that's it for me for today. I'm looking forward to having a go at playing around with Photoshop on Monday as I've never had anything to do with Photoshop previously.
Bye.
Today's Lecture on the study of Games
Hello again,
Today's topic was split between some of the current applications that are being used by people on the web to assist them in communicating with other people. We started by looking at the emergence with of Instant Messaging services. With a lot of people now using MSN Messenger it's interesting in to look at where the concept began. The program called ICQ was one of the first to be adopted on a large scale, this allows people to have lists of friends who they can chat to it also gives you the ability see who was both online and offline and allowed you to leave messages for those people who will received them when they next log on.
This IM service could be said to be an extension of the chat rooms and programs such as IRC or internet relay chat where people could join a channel or room with other people. IRC was a major player in the market with a lot of people using it, it's use has wained of late however they are still frequented by the more 'hardcore' section of the community.
Some of the available programs out there now are
mIRC - http://www.mirc.com
ICQ - http://www.icq.com
AOL Instant Messenger - http://www.aim.com
Yahoo Messenger - http://www.messenger.yahoo.com
Gaim - http://gaim.sourceforge.net
We then went onto talk about the advent of portable music/audio and pod casting, we mainly focused on the MP3 debate of DRM or data resource management, which involves the restriction of the use of the files. This is a bit of a contentious issue with me as I feel that if you put protection on something people will just find ways around the security. It's been interesting to watch the industry move from no protection through to the overbearing protection and now there has been a shift again away from this type of protection. It also brought up the growing use of RSS Feeds. An RSS feed is a way to syndicate and update content, basically you have a reference feed to a particular site and the RSS feed readers collects any changes to the site and informs you of the change.
Next we looked at Peer-to-Peer and Filesharing programs, this is a very litigious area at the moment as the major record and movie companies have been spending extraordinary amount of money pursuing people who share their propriety information, through associations such as the MPAA and the RIAA. There are a plethora of different file sharing programs out there, the problem being is that the distribution companies sue the program providers and get them shut down, the people just start using a different program, this has happened quite a few times now with KAZAA and Napster, with having now moved to torrent software. The increase in litigation has created a subculture among the internet users with the increase in things called 'darknets', this concept of a close nit community who will only share between members, the only way to become a part of one of these communities is to know someone who is a part of one and be invited to join.
Then to finish off the first session we looked at the rise of VoIP or Voice over IP and voice chat. Basically this refers to using the web's transfer protocols to talk to other people rather than using the phone lines in the traditional way. The rise of VoIP was in the beginning causing the telecommunications companies some concern as they feared that people would stop using their service. As history shows this has yet to happen as there are still bandwidth related issues plaguing the VoIP software over long distances.
The next part of the lecture was focused on the study of video games. The study of video games seems to have been split into two camps, one camp sees computer games in a Narratology sense in that they represent a story being told, or viewing games in the same way you would view a piece of literary art.
The other camp focuses on Ludology, in contrast to narratology, is not concerned with the story elements of the games but rather the Game and Playing elements. Basically Ludology follows the argument that the story elements in many games is there for decoration only, and is incidental to just playing the game.
Researchers have kind of moved on from the two differing camps to now look at video games in a technical sense, by looking at how they came about and how they are linked to the hardware they are being played on.
The lecture then went on to look at computer games as mediums of communication or expression that have precursors in more traditional media, this approach tends to favour the semiotic approach to video games as outlined by Sassure, that games can be pulled apart into it's pieces and studied that way.
We then looked at another way of studying games in the form of 'Games'. By comparing today's games to the ones played in yesteryear's and looking for similarities and differences in what makes games what they are.
In today's readings, the first chapter of Half-Real: Video Games, Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, it was interesting to look at games as a being defined by their rules. The makers of the games have to find the delicate balance between creating rules that are reasonable to the player, and making the game difficult enough within those rules to be able to make the game challenging enough to make the person want to play the game, but not so difficult that they get frustrated and stop playing the game altogether.
By definition games have rules that tell us how the 'World' operates then we confronted with question of whether we should be studying the game itself on it's own as a self-contained system of rules; or the player of the game who affects the flow of game play and narrative according to those rules or some combination of the two which becomes difficult to balance.
We then finished by looking at examining games for what they are, their ontology, how their world shapes what you re in the virtual world. Some other questioned raised include the aesthetics of the games, i.e. what makes the games fun to play and how is this concept of fun develop through the playing of the game.
I found this short video on www.youtube.com which I found to a be rather amusing summary of computer game development over time.
Well that's pretty much it for today's lecture, till Monday ppl. ^_^
Today's topic was split between some of the current applications that are being used by people on the web to assist them in communicating with other people. We started by looking at the emergence with of Instant Messaging services. With a lot of people now using MSN Messenger it's interesting in to look at where the concept began. The program called ICQ was one of the first to be adopted on a large scale, this allows people to have lists of friends who they can chat to it also gives you the ability see who was both online and offline and allowed you to leave messages for those people who will received them when they next log on.
This IM service could be said to be an extension of the chat rooms and programs such as IRC or internet relay chat where people could join a channel or room with other people. IRC was a major player in the market with a lot of people using it, it's use has wained of late however they are still frequented by the more 'hardcore' section of the community.
Some of the available programs out there now are
mIRC - http://www.mirc.com
ICQ - http://www.icq.com
AOL Instant Messenger - http://www.aim.com
Yahoo Messenger - http://www.messenger.yahoo.com
Gaim - http://gaim.sourceforge.net
We then went onto talk about the advent of portable music/audio and pod casting, we mainly focused on the MP3 debate of DRM or data resource management, which involves the restriction of the use of the files. This is a bit of a contentious issue with me as I feel that if you put protection on something people will just find ways around the security. It's been interesting to watch the industry move from no protection through to the overbearing protection and now there has been a shift again away from this type of protection. It also brought up the growing use of RSS Feeds. An RSS feed is a way to syndicate and update content, basically you have a reference feed to a particular site and the RSS feed readers collects any changes to the site and informs you of the change.
Next we looked at Peer-to-Peer and Filesharing programs, this is a very litigious area at the moment as the major record and movie companies have been spending extraordinary amount of money pursuing people who share their propriety information, through associations such as the MPAA and the RIAA. There are a plethora of different file sharing programs out there, the problem being is that the distribution companies sue the program providers and get them shut down, the people just start using a different program, this has happened quite a few times now with KAZAA and Napster, with having now moved to torrent software. The increase in litigation has created a subculture among the internet users with the increase in things called 'darknets', this concept of a close nit community who will only share between members, the only way to become a part of one of these communities is to know someone who is a part of one and be invited to join.
Then to finish off the first session we looked at the rise of VoIP or Voice over IP and voice chat. Basically this refers to using the web's transfer protocols to talk to other people rather than using the phone lines in the traditional way. The rise of VoIP was in the beginning causing the telecommunications companies some concern as they feared that people would stop using their service. As history shows this has yet to happen as there are still bandwidth related issues plaguing the VoIP software over long distances.
The next part of the lecture was focused on the study of video games. The study of video games seems to have been split into two camps, one camp sees computer games in a Narratology sense in that they represent a story being told, or viewing games in the same way you would view a piece of literary art.
The other camp focuses on Ludology, in contrast to narratology, is not concerned with the story elements of the games but rather the Game and Playing elements. Basically Ludology follows the argument that the story elements in many games is there for decoration only, and is incidental to just playing the game.
Researchers have kind of moved on from the two differing camps to now look at video games in a technical sense, by looking at how they came about and how they are linked to the hardware they are being played on.
The lecture then went on to look at computer games as mediums of communication or expression that have precursors in more traditional media, this approach tends to favour the semiotic approach to video games as outlined by Sassure, that games can be pulled apart into it's pieces and studied that way.
We then looked at another way of studying games in the form of 'Games'. By comparing today's games to the ones played in yesteryear's and looking for similarities and differences in what makes games what they are.
In today's readings, the first chapter of Half-Real: Video Games, Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, it was interesting to look at games as a being defined by their rules. The makers of the games have to find the delicate balance between creating rules that are reasonable to the player, and making the game difficult enough within those rules to be able to make the game challenging enough to make the person want to play the game, but not so difficult that they get frustrated and stop playing the game altogether.
By definition games have rules that tell us how the 'World' operates then we confronted with question of whether we should be studying the game itself on it's own as a self-contained system of rules; or the player of the game who affects the flow of game play and narrative according to those rules or some combination of the two which becomes difficult to balance.
We then finished by looking at examining games for what they are, their ontology, how their world shapes what you re in the virtual world. Some other questioned raised include the aesthetics of the games, i.e. what makes the games fun to play and how is this concept of fun develop through the playing of the game.
I found this short video on www.youtube.com which I found to a be rather amusing summary of computer game development over time.
Well that's pretty much it for today's lecture, till Monday ppl. ^_^
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
The Virtual Field Trip
Hello again,
Well today's task, I have to say, was most enjoyable. As a part of the course we were required to participate in one of the online 3d worlds. We all ended up in 'Active Worlds' which appeared to be a precursor to second life with pretty much all the elements that exist in 'Second Life' appearing int 'Active Worlds'. The program provided you with either a first or third person view of your surroundings and a command line into which you could converse with the people in the same area as you. The interface was reasonably intuitive with the cursor keys (arrow keys) being used to navigate around the world, you could enter vehicles and drive them around or teleport off to a different world.
The major differences between an instant messaging (IM) service and 3d programs such as Second Life comes down to providing the user with a point of reference. When using an IM service you usually have a front end which provides the user with a boxed window in which other peoples text is displayed and an other boxed window into which they type their text. The difference in this context between IM and the 3d worlds is that the IM service is usually only between 2 people with the exception of group discussions, but you have to permission to talk to someone you don't know with them deciding whether or not to accept your invitation to a conversation. In Active Worlds the chat window was visible to everyone in the same area as you, so there exists an ability to discover and chat with complete strangers.
Also in regard to the 3d world the ability to create and customize your avatar is a major advantage over the IM programs. While you do have the ability to attach a picture to your profile in most IM services, most IM programs stop there in their ability to customize. This ability to individualize your character to look however you want it to look gives players a much more involved experience with the program, by providing an emotional attachment to the character. This brings up another social problem associated with these types of programs, with some people becoming extremely involved in their online lives to the point that they begin to neglect their physical bodies. As a case in point a South Korean gamer died recently after a three day marathon 50 hour non-stop gaming session, which i found here.
Personally i think that the main difference between IM services and these 3d environments is that people prefer to have a visual point of reference when they are talking to someone, by giving people a point of reference they are able to perform some of the actions they would do in real life, such as looking at the person who is speaking and as demonstrated in the Second Life documentary we watched with the development of sexually based material for adults to enjoy.
What I believe is that these programs and the web in general are simply an extension of our beliefs, fantasies and desires, so because humans have this subconscious in built drive to reproduce, we will inevitably begin to port our sexual fantasies into the virtual worlds. This is already evidenced by the sheer volume of pornography available on the web. The concept of virtual sex is not a new one with what started in the IM services as a thing called 'cybersex', where people got together and had very sexually oriented conversations, the 3d worlds have taking this a step further and have provided you with a graphical representation of the act instead of being an entirely text based interaction.
I feel that while these types of 3d programs will continue to grow and prosper, but I feel given the current trends there will always be a place for quick and simple text based interactions. But who knows this may change as the hardware side of the equation gets faster and we are able to transmit larger and larger amounts of information across computer networks, we may find that the humble IM service fades out in the same way as the written letter and now to a certain extent the venerable email.
That's it for me for today, the time has come to head off as it's now dark outside. : P
Till next time, stay frosty.
Well today's task, I have to say, was most enjoyable. As a part of the course we were required to participate in one of the online 3d worlds. We all ended up in 'Active Worlds' which appeared to be a precursor to second life with pretty much all the elements that exist in 'Second Life' appearing int 'Active Worlds'. The program provided you with either a first or third person view of your surroundings and a command line into which you could converse with the people in the same area as you. The interface was reasonably intuitive with the cursor keys (arrow keys) being used to navigate around the world, you could enter vehicles and drive them around or teleport off to a different world.
The major differences between an instant messaging (IM) service and 3d programs such as Second Life comes down to providing the user with a point of reference. When using an IM service you usually have a front end which provides the user with a boxed window in which other peoples text is displayed and an other boxed window into which they type their text. The difference in this context between IM and the 3d worlds is that the IM service is usually only between 2 people with the exception of group discussions, but you have to permission to talk to someone you don't know with them deciding whether or not to accept your invitation to a conversation. In Active Worlds the chat window was visible to everyone in the same area as you, so there exists an ability to discover and chat with complete strangers.
Also in regard to the 3d world the ability to create and customize your avatar is a major advantage over the IM programs. While you do have the ability to attach a picture to your profile in most IM services, most IM programs stop there in their ability to customize. This ability to individualize your character to look however you want it to look gives players a much more involved experience with the program, by providing an emotional attachment to the character. This brings up another social problem associated with these types of programs, with some people becoming extremely involved in their online lives to the point that they begin to neglect their physical bodies. As a case in point a South Korean gamer died recently after a three day marathon 50 hour non-stop gaming session, which i found here.
Personally i think that the main difference between IM services and these 3d environments is that people prefer to have a visual point of reference when they are talking to someone, by giving people a point of reference they are able to perform some of the actions they would do in real life, such as looking at the person who is speaking and as demonstrated in the Second Life documentary we watched with the development of sexually based material for adults to enjoy.
What I believe is that these programs and the web in general are simply an extension of our beliefs, fantasies and desires, so because humans have this subconscious in built drive to reproduce, we will inevitably begin to port our sexual fantasies into the virtual worlds. This is already evidenced by the sheer volume of pornography available on the web. The concept of virtual sex is not a new one with what started in the IM services as a thing called 'cybersex', where people got together and had very sexually oriented conversations, the 3d worlds have taking this a step further and have provided you with a graphical representation of the act instead of being an entirely text based interaction.
I feel that while these types of 3d programs will continue to grow and prosper, but I feel given the current trends there will always be a place for quick and simple text based interactions. But who knows this may change as the hardware side of the equation gets faster and we are able to transmit larger and larger amounts of information across computer networks, we may find that the humble IM service fades out in the same way as the written letter and now to a certain extent the venerable email.
That's it for me for today, the time has come to head off as it's now dark outside. : P
Till next time, stay frosty.
Lecture Of The Day
Hi all,
Today's lecture was on the philosophy of the virtual worlds. We started out with a podcast of a news program about the American government's illegal wiretapping scandal that came about after a tech working for AT&T took his story to the media about a secret room that housed an information splitter that took a copy of all the traffic that was passing through that exchange.
We then went on to discuss a quick history of various philosophers that have provided us with theories which seek to explain the world around us and the ways in which we perceive our surroundings. This conversation developed into the theories of subjective experience where the way in which individual's perceive their environment is dictated by the sum of their combined previous experience. Personally I find this type of conversation fascinating because it brings into question the our current scientific knowledge and how we each apply our knowledge when we interact with our surroundings.
There was list of philosophers who all contributed to our current base of knowledge in no particular order Guy Debord who gave us 'Society of Spectacle' or the over watching omnipotent 'big brother'; Umberto Eco who gave us the theory of our existence being a 'hyper-reality'; Jean Baudrillard with his theory of the 'Simulacrum', as a side note Jean's theories were used as a background for the series of movies 'The Matrix'; William Gibson who gave us 'Cyberspace as a Consensual Hallucination' and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari with their combined post modern theory of 'Becoming Media'.
The lecture then went on to focus on the Greek philosophers who are attributed as being the founding fathers of philosophy, covering the Socrates' Method and the allegory of Plato's cave. I find it interesting that 'cyberspace' as we know it is Platoism as a working product, with the separation of the mind and body. The issue is that instead of bringing certainty about one world, this concept of cyberspace has just provided us with all the confusions of current scientific theory which embraces such abstractions as Chaos Theory and the Uncertainty Principle.
One of the major problems that researchers are having problems with, is understanding the difference that exists between the mind and the body, with one of the central myths of western society being Cartesian dualism - the split between the mind and the body. With the development of 3d virtual environments this abstract dividing line has become more concrete.
The lecture notes go on to talk about the history and development of the various media up until today with the virtual environments. Starting with the telegraph in 1837, moving on to the telephone in 1876, then to the Phonograph 1876 for recording sound. In 1895 the radio was introduced and with it the wireless telegraph, the lecture notes go on to talk about the development of cinema as we know it, then on to television with a brief explanation of how the images are captured transmitted and finally viewed by you.
We finished the lecture with a video about the rise of the computer program 'Second Life', looking at how the concept was first conceived and how they decided to implement their idea into reality. The major draw card of Second Life appears to be it's economy, from which people can use real world money to purchase in game currency and most importantly the ability to convert their in game currency into real world money again. This brought up a number of issue regarding the legal ramifications of having virtual assets and how you exert control over your assets, also how other people could steal from you in game. The general gist of the article seemed to be about the fact that technology is advancing at a staggering rate and governments are falling behind.
Well, that's it for this post time to work on my task for the day.
BYE ^_^
Today's lecture was on the philosophy of the virtual worlds. We started out with a podcast of a news program about the American government's illegal wiretapping scandal that came about after a tech working for AT&T took his story to the media about a secret room that housed an information splitter that took a copy of all the traffic that was passing through that exchange.
We then went on to discuss a quick history of various philosophers that have provided us with theories which seek to explain the world around us and the ways in which we perceive our surroundings. This conversation developed into the theories of subjective experience where the way in which individual's perceive their environment is dictated by the sum of their combined previous experience. Personally I find this type of conversation fascinating because it brings into question the our current scientific knowledge and how we each apply our knowledge when we interact with our surroundings.
There was list of philosophers who all contributed to our current base of knowledge in no particular order Guy Debord who gave us 'Society of Spectacle' or the over watching omnipotent 'big brother'; Umberto Eco who gave us the theory of our existence being a 'hyper-reality'; Jean Baudrillard with his theory of the 'Simulacrum', as a side note Jean's theories were used as a background for the series of movies 'The Matrix'; William Gibson who gave us 'Cyberspace as a Consensual Hallucination' and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari with their combined post modern theory of 'Becoming Media'.
The lecture then went on to focus on the Greek philosophers who are attributed as being the founding fathers of philosophy, covering the Socrates' Method and the allegory of Plato's cave. I find it interesting that 'cyberspace' as we know it is Platoism as a working product, with the separation of the mind and body. The issue is that instead of bringing certainty about one world, this concept of cyberspace has just provided us with all the confusions of current scientific theory which embraces such abstractions as Chaos Theory and the Uncertainty Principle.
One of the major problems that researchers are having problems with, is understanding the difference that exists between the mind and the body, with one of the central myths of western society being Cartesian dualism - the split between the mind and the body. With the development of 3d virtual environments this abstract dividing line has become more concrete.
The lecture notes go on to talk about the history and development of the various media up until today with the virtual environments. Starting with the telegraph in 1837, moving on to the telephone in 1876, then to the Phonograph 1876 for recording sound. In 1895 the radio was introduced and with it the wireless telegraph, the lecture notes go on to talk about the development of cinema as we know it, then on to television with a brief explanation of how the images are captured transmitted and finally viewed by you.
We finished the lecture with a video about the rise of the computer program 'Second Life', looking at how the concept was first conceived and how they decided to implement their idea into reality. The major draw card of Second Life appears to be it's economy, from which people can use real world money to purchase in game currency and most importantly the ability to convert their in game currency into real world money again. This brought up a number of issue regarding the legal ramifications of having virtual assets and how you exert control over your assets, also how other people could steal from you in game. The general gist of the article seemed to be about the fact that technology is advancing at a staggering rate and governments are falling behind.
Well, that's it for this post time to work on my task for the day.
BYE ^_^
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Tutorial Task of the Day
As a part of our course we are required to demonstrate our ability to use various search engines to find specific information. The following is a list of questions:
1. Who was the creator of the infamous "lovebug" computer virus?
2. Who invented the paper clip?
3. How did the Ebola virus get its name?
4. What country had the largest recorded earthquake?
5. In computer memory/storage terms, how many kilobytes in a terabyte?
6. Who is the creator of email?
7. What is unique about the political organisation of the Kingdom of Nri?
8. If you wanted to contact the prime minister of Australia directly, what is the most efficient way?
9. Which Brisbane punk band is Stephen Stockwell (Head of the School of Arts) a member of? 10. What does the term "Web 2.0" mean in your own words?
Task 1.
I started with a search under Ask.com, which gave me this link http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?sf=31&click_id=31&art_id=qw957707941236L112&set_id=1
Which provides us with the Love Bug Virus originating in Zamboanga, in the Philippines
by a hacker who identified himself as "mailme", "spyder" and "ispyder".
I then went to http://webcrime.tripod.com/id14.html which gave us the name of the script kiddie, (a script kiddie being the derogatory term used by coders, for people who just copy other peoples code without creating anything themselves) that wrote the virus, a Filipino computer studies student called Onel de Guzman was the said to be the culprit. However due to the lack of cybercrime laws in the Philippines he was never charged.
Task 2.
For task 2 I directed the browser to altavista.com to find out who invented the paperclip. It took me to http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blpaperclip.htm where it states that Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian inventor with a degree in electronics, science and mathematics, invented the paperclip in 1899. He received a patent for his design from Germany in 1899, since Norway had no patent laws at that time.
Task 3.
For task 3 we had to find out where the Ebola virus got it's name, once again I used the altavista.com search engine and came up with http://www.idph.state.il.us/public/hb/hbebola.htm which states that it was discovered in 1976, Ebola virus was named from a river in Zaire, Africa, where it was first detected. As a side note, until recently only three outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever among people had been reported.
Task 4.
For the biggest recorded earthquake since 1900 when records were starting to being kept, http://ask.yahoo.com/20000823.html states that it occurred on May 22, 1960, in Chile and measured 9.5 on the Richter scale. More than 2,000 people were killed, 3,000 injured, and 2,000,000 left homeless.
Task 5.
This task was an easy one for myself as I deal with this issue on a very regular basis. I came across http://ww.techeez.com/windows_tips/bits_in_a_byte.htm which gave us that there are 1073741824 kilobytes in a terabyte.
Task 6.
In this task we had to work out who was the creator of email. From the various readings the actual first instance of email is attributed to a Computer engineer, Ray Tomlinson who is said to have invented internet based email in late 1971. Under ARPAnet several major innovations occurred: email (or electronic mail), the ability to send simple messages to another person across the network (1971). Ray Tomlinson was experimenting with a popular program he wrote called SNDMSG that the ARPANET programmers and researchers were using on the network computers (Digital PDP-10s) to leave messages for each other.
Task 7.
This task was a little more time consuming than the other tasks as the searches were suggesting a lot more irrelevant websites, eventually i came across this article at http://ahiajoku.igbonet.com/2002/. This article was on how the religious beliefs of these people permeate almost every part of their existence. With regard to the political structure of the country the article states that 'Before taking any decision, the Igbo have the tradition of gathering together to discuss matters of interest in order to arrive at a consensus and agreement. This is call in Igbo Igba izu (consultation). This is the basis of Igbo republicanism which E.G. Ekwuru (199:134) calls the Consensus philosophy, but referred to as Unanimity by T.U. Nwala (1985:168). Thus modern democracy is not after all foreign to the Igbo because it has its root in Igbo origin and thought. The Igbo life did not start with colonization rather before the advent of the Europeans Igbo already had a philosophy, established structure of government, education and technology.'
Task 8.
For this one we had to figure out the most effective way to contact the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard. After some frustrating searching I stumbled across this site http://www.directory.gov.au/ which provides you with the direct contact details of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Which if your interested are as follows:
Enquiries: (02) 6271 5111
Fax: (02) 6271 5414
Website Link
Postal Address:
PO Box 6500 Canberra ACT 2600
Location:
One National Circuit,Barton ACT 2600
Task 9.
Here we had to try to figure out the name of the band of which the Griffith University lecturer is a member of, here for the sake of a bit of variety i used the Google search engine which provided us with:
http://www.brisbanewritersfestival.com.au/2005/content/standard.asp?name=StockwellS
In the article it states that Stephen Stockwell is a member of the punk band 'Black Assassins'.
A bit of further searching provided us with their home page:
http://www.blackassassins.net/
Task 10.
After some searching on definitions of Web 2.0 I think a reasonable explanation would be that Web 2.0 is a development platform which is based on and around the existing World Wide Web to enable more people, easier access to participate in online communities, such as uploading and sharing content. I think Richard Monson-Haefel's statement from http://apsblog.burtongroup.com/2007/04/web_20_a_simple.html states "Web 2.0 is an Architecture of Participation built on the World Wide Web", this simple statement encompasses the various aspects of Web 2.0 as it being designed towards increasing the participation of the general public in the world wide web. Author Tim O'Reilly also provided a very insightful article in which he gives excellent examples of how Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 differ at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html with this statement "Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core". In a later blog entry Tim O'Reilly gives another definition, stating "Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices" found here http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/web_20_compact_definition.html.
So in conclusion to task 10, I would have to say that Web 2.0 is just a new way of connecting and indexing information with the key principle of Web 2.0 being that the service is designed to gather information so that it automatically gets better the more people use it, due to the software's ability to store, combine and track links through things such as RSS feeds, so the more an article is used and referenced the greater the ability of the software to provide people with other useful information about that topic.
Well that's it for me for today hope these answer your questions. ^_^
Fare thee well.
1. Who was the creator of the infamous "lovebug" computer virus?
2. Who invented the paper clip?
3. How did the Ebola virus get its name?
4. What country had the largest recorded earthquake?
5. In computer memory/storage terms, how many kilobytes in a terabyte?
6. Who is the creator of email?
7. What is unique about the political organisation of the Kingdom of Nri?
8. If you wanted to contact the prime minister of Australia directly, what is the most efficient way?
9. Which Brisbane punk band is Stephen Stockwell (Head of the School of Arts) a member of? 10. What does the term "Web 2.0" mean in your own words?
Task 1.
I started with a search under Ask.com, which gave me this link http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?sf=31&click_id=31&art_id=qw957707941236L112&set_id=1
Which provides us with the Love Bug Virus originating in Zamboanga, in the Philippines
by a hacker who identified himself as "mailme", "spyder" and "ispyder".
I then went to http://webcrime.tripod.com/id14.html which gave us the name of the script kiddie, (a script kiddie being the derogatory term used by coders, for people who just copy other peoples code without creating anything themselves) that wrote the virus, a Filipino computer studies student called Onel de Guzman was the said to be the culprit. However due to the lack of cybercrime laws in the Philippines he was never charged.
Task 2.
For task 2 I directed the browser to altavista.com to find out who invented the paperclip. It took me to http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blpaperclip.htm where it states that Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian inventor with a degree in electronics, science and mathematics, invented the paperclip in 1899. He received a patent for his design from Germany in 1899, since Norway had no patent laws at that time.
Task 3.
For task 3 we had to find out where the Ebola virus got it's name, once again I used the altavista.com search engine and came up with http://www.idph.state.il.us/public/hb/hbebola.htm which states that it was discovered in 1976, Ebola virus was named from a river in Zaire, Africa, where it was first detected. As a side note, until recently only three outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever among people had been reported.
Task 4.
For the biggest recorded earthquake since 1900 when records were starting to being kept, http://ask.yahoo.com/20000823.html states that it occurred on May 22, 1960, in Chile and measured 9.5 on the Richter scale. More than 2,000 people were killed, 3,000 injured, and 2,000,000 left homeless.
Task 5.
This task was an easy one for myself as I deal with this issue on a very regular basis. I came across http://ww.techeez.com/windows_tips/bits_in_a_byte.htm which gave us that there are 1073741824 kilobytes in a terabyte.
Task 6.
In this task we had to work out who was the creator of email. From the various readings the actual first instance of email is attributed to a Computer engineer, Ray Tomlinson who is said to have invented internet based email in late 1971. Under ARPAnet several major innovations occurred: email (or electronic mail), the ability to send simple messages to another person across the network (1971). Ray Tomlinson was experimenting with a popular program he wrote called SNDMSG that the ARPANET programmers and researchers were using on the network computers (Digital PDP-10s) to leave messages for each other.
Task 7.
This task was a little more time consuming than the other tasks as the searches were suggesting a lot more irrelevant websites, eventually i came across this article at http://ahiajoku.igbonet.com/2002/. This article was on how the religious beliefs of these people permeate almost every part of their existence. With regard to the political structure of the country the article states that 'Before taking any decision, the Igbo have the tradition of gathering together to discuss matters of interest in order to arrive at a consensus and agreement. This is call in Igbo Igba izu (consultation). This is the basis of Igbo republicanism which E.G. Ekwuru (199:134) calls the Consensus philosophy, but referred to as Unanimity by T.U. Nwala (1985:168). Thus modern democracy is not after all foreign to the Igbo because it has its root in Igbo origin and thought. The Igbo life did not start with colonization rather before the advent of the Europeans Igbo already had a philosophy, established structure of government, education and technology.'
Task 8.
For this one we had to figure out the most effective way to contact the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard. After some frustrating searching I stumbled across this site http://www.directory.gov.au/ which provides you with the direct contact details of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Which if your interested are as follows:
Enquiries: (02) 6271 5111
Fax: (02) 6271 5414
Website Link
Postal Address:
PO Box 6500 Canberra ACT 2600
Location:
One National Circuit,Barton ACT 2600
Task 9.
Here we had to try to figure out the name of the band of which the Griffith University lecturer is a member of, here for the sake of a bit of variety i used the Google search engine which provided us with:
http://www.brisbanewritersfestival.com.au/2005/content/standard.asp?name=StockwellS
In the article it states that Stephen Stockwell is a member of the punk band 'Black Assassins'.
A bit of further searching provided us with their home page:
http://www.blackassassins.net/
Task 10.
After some searching on definitions of Web 2.0 I think a reasonable explanation would be that Web 2.0 is a development platform which is based on and around the existing World Wide Web to enable more people, easier access to participate in online communities, such as uploading and sharing content. I think Richard Monson-Haefel's statement from http://apsblog.burtongroup.com/2007/04/web_20_a_simple.html states "Web 2.0 is an Architecture of Participation built on the World Wide Web", this simple statement encompasses the various aspects of Web 2.0 as it being designed towards increasing the participation of the general public in the world wide web. Author Tim O'Reilly also provided a very insightful article in which he gives excellent examples of how Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 differ at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html with this statement "Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core". In a later blog entry Tim O'Reilly gives another definition, stating "Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices" found here http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/web_20_compact_definition.html.
So in conclusion to task 10, I would have to say that Web 2.0 is just a new way of connecting and indexing information with the key principle of Web 2.0 being that the service is designed to gather information so that it automatically gets better the more people use it, due to the software's ability to store, combine and track links through things such as RSS feeds, so the more an article is used and referenced the greater the ability of the software to provide people with other useful information about that topic.
Well that's it for me for today hope these answer your questions. ^_^
Fare thee well.
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