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.