Communication and You.

Well the first lecture is done and dusted. The lecture started off with a basic introduction to the course, what's going to be covered, what assessment items need to be covered, etc.

As per the wonderful people in the IT department at Griffith Uni, we couldn't actually get any of the information needed before coming to the lecture, thanks to a problem they had with the learning@griffith.com 'chucking a hissy fit' and not wanting to talk to anyone anymore. But now the issue has been resolved, half an hour before the lecture was meant to start, but it's there now and that's the important bit.

The lecture made a rather interesting statement regarding the communication process with the more modern approach being a little more accurate, as the model stated the communicator decides on what they want to transfer, they arrange the information in a logical order to themselves and then decide on a transfer medium, be it verbal, visual, physical or electronic. Te sender then transmits their message across the chosen medium. In the process of transferring the information there will always be an element of external noise that will cause a distortion of the original message, and then the listener perceives the message and then converts the data from the message into information. This is not something you really think about in a regular basis but I guess that it is a fairly accurate representation of how information is transfered .

The lecture then went on to show a couple of videos, one of an old video about the downfall of the mass news media due to the use of combined search engines and services providers which customises the content transmitted to the individual users based on what they have read or purchased, and what the people they associate with are reading and purchasing. The other video was of The Daily Show, with John Stewart, which I must say was hilarious. As usual John and Stephen Colbert were taking pot shots at the media's doom and gloom approach to reporting and made some rather derogatory remarks regarding journalists and their desire to retain their perceived monopoly on the news.

Well, time for me to go and read the recommended readings for today.

Till tomorrow

^_^