How I Use Technology to Communicate

hello again out there,

Yet another day of blogging has past, so today we're discussing how modern technology is being used on a daily basis to enable our social interactions.

For myself, I'd have to say that technology forms a significant part of my daily routine. As an example, i start the day with my mobile phone's alarm clock going off. I recently had the rather unpleasant experience where my mobile phone was left at a friends place. It brought into stark contrast how much I've come to rely on it as an appliance and as external memory storage for all of the phone numbers I can't remember.

Social wise, i have a subscription to an online MMO called EVE Online. In this game i am a member of a player corporation with members who span the breadth of the planet, most of which I have and probably will never meet in person, we have members in the USA, Japan, England, Australia, New Zealand and 2 from Germany. The fact that we are spread over the world has lead to the problems of people living in various time zones and people's first language not being English. EVE Online has been setup to run in real time, meaning that 1 minute in the real world is equal to 1 minute in the game. This has lead us to seeking people from around the world so that there is always someone online to look after the corporation's management and the security of it's assets.

If you are interested in having a look at eve you can check it out using a free trial available from their website at www.eve-online.com

In the lecture today we went into the history of computing and the internet. It was rather interesting looking at the beginnings of the humble home PC. The video describing how the TCP/IP works was an excellent description on how packets are transmitted and received. I've personally done some work on networking so it's not a new concept for me.

The process of how the computer company Apple came about was interesting and was a rather amusing reminder of how the product cycles have developed over time, with the Apple I quickly being replaced with the more main stream version the Apple II and so forth to the modern personal computers we use in our daily lives.

Thinking back now on how Microsoft has developed into such a widely use product from such humble beginnings was interesting, as it's not something i ponder in my day to day life. The fact that Bill Gates was so protective of the software back then is quite an interesting in site into today's copy protection wars that rage between the software providers and the public.

When talking to other none technical people about the internet as a whole it's worth pointing out that as in the lecture notes the various parts have all been lumped into a single category called the internet, there is no distinction made between the various elements, such as the web pages, IRC, news groups, IM and gaming servers. This comes back to the fact that most people will only ever use the web pages element of the internet and never venturing out side this domain.

With the advent of P2P programs the ease of which people can share proprietary information has become a major concern for the mega corporations as this is a medium that is very difficult to control. The main problem they face is that people will share the information if they want to, if they use the law to shut down a particular service or software, people will just find another one to share through. This is something that is causing the traditional business people headaches as they try to adapt the law to the new and expanding technologies.

The rise of the IM service or Instant Message service has seen computers become more and more integrated into our lives as people are using the internet as a more of a socializing tool rather than the traditional view of it being an anti-social one. The rise of socializing sites such as Facebook.com has brought another problem to today's society with workers spending more time chatting to friends while they should be working.

Well all and all it was an interesting session today, with more to come tomorrow.
TTFN ^_^