The Online World and Our Everyday Uses of It

‘In recent years it has become commonplace to discuss the Internet as a community – as a virtual place where people meet, chat, conduct business and develop a sense of togetherness.’(Trend, 2001). Almost every person you talk to has a different view of role of the internet and the web in our lives. This is shown in the two readings ‘The emerging online life of a digital native’ by Marc Prensky (2004) and ‘A new world’ by Weinberger (2002). Although, these two views are truthful descriptions of the web, they have slight differences in how positive they believe the uptake of the Web in house holds is. Both are positive views on the web entering our daily lives, although as Weinberger (2002) shows a wary view of the internet saying ‘A new world is opening up, a world that we create as we explore it. Some are inventing it, some are abusing it, and every person browsing and posting is setting bytes in flight that shape this new world.’ Don Tapscott (1998, p.8) has a more positive outlook regarding this, ‘Time on the Net is not passive time, it’s active time. It’s reading time. It’s investigation time. It’s skills development and problem-solving time. It’s time analyzing, evaluating. It’s composing your thoughts time. It’s writing time.’ This argument has some truths for helping the development of our children but it is also truthful for adults. It allows us to keep thinking outside of our squares. If you have a job like landscaping for example, you will have little to do with the computer on a daily basis, however, looking for information about plants or legislation in certain areas on the net is keeping your thought processes active. Just like if it was a child researching a school assignment.

There are many ways to be involved with the net, from email and chat rooms to blogging and creating your own homepage. People also search for products to buy and sell as well as finding information from how to write an essay to finding information to settle a bar quiz disagreement. The web is used by most people in the developed world and many in developing countries. But for different reasons people used the web in different ways. In this essay I have outlined some of the basic uses for the internet that I or my friends use in daily life. These include email, chat rooms, blogging, peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing, as well as buying and selling.

‘Students are not just using technology differently today, but are approaching their life and their daily activities differently because of the technology,’ Prensky (2004). I believe this is not just students but adults as well. Nearly every person I know has an email account but it goes further than that, adults who have moved countries and are keeping in contact with relatives via email, instant messaging as well as through ‘social networking’ sites like facebook or through Web blogs. ‘The technology of the age both expands the variety of human relationships and modifies the form of the older ones. When relationships move from the face-to-face to the electronic mode, they are often altered. Relationshsips that were confined to specific situations like offices or living rooms have become “unglued.” They are no longer geographically confined but can take place anywhere.’ (Ermann et al. 1998, p. 140). Email makes it so easy to keep in touch with people all over the world, a thing that use to be so hard to do, due to cost and time restrictions, I personally find it so much easier with friends living and working all over the world. Prensky (2004) calls email an ‘asynchronous’ form of communication. This is because only one of the communicating parties has to be present, the writer can write the email and send it in their own time and the reader can open it, read it and reply to it in their own time. Of there is another form of communication that Prensky defines which is ‘Synchronous’ this is communication in real time, i.e. the phone is a form of this communication. More and more people are turning to instant messaging on the web, as it is usually cheaper than a long distance phone call. It allows people to write short sentences and send and receive them instantly. So you can in fact have a conversation while on the net. You can even team this with a webcams and you can see each other while you are chatting. It gives you the feeling you are next too each other in stead of far apart. “Whist most people use this technology to keep in touch many young people to use it instead of the talking on the phone, from the privacy of prying parental ears.’ (Prensky, 2004).

Blogs are becoming more common practice with young people and adults alike choosing to add a journal of their lives or interests to the web. Instead of keeping a journal private, you can now create a blog and upload stories, photos and videos, for all to see. This idea of showcasing artwork, music and thoughts is not only for the general public, but for professors and news writers as well. Many of these professional people publish regular blogs which are regularly read by many. Blogs are particularly useful for people that study the Web, as things move so quickly rather than waiting to have their papers published when they will most probably be out of date, they post parts of their work on the blog as to platform the work that they are doing and find other people with the same view. ‘Discussions concerning the results of studies suggesting that people adopt new technology to facilitate and maintain relationships are often framed in a positive light. However, problems may surface from the practice of essentially broadcasting content that has been traditionally defined as personal or private, analogous to content found in a personal diary.’ (Stefanone et al. 2007). Although, at the same time you can create a whole life on your blog and it doesn’t even have to be the real you, Robbins (2000), states that ‘The new technology promises to deliver its user form the constraints and defeats of physical reality and the physical body.’ Starting with a screen name you can create avatar and write your blog around the screen profile. Weinberger (2002) states that ‘it is not unusual on the Web for someone to “try on” a personality and to switch personalities from chat room to chat room; behaviour that would cause your family to plot an intervention off the Web is the norm on the Web.’ I have never encountered this as I don’t often use chat rooms and the only blogs I read belong to my friends. But I can see how easy this is to do, if you never meet the person at the other end of the blog or chat then who’s to say they are who they say they are.

‘YouTube has become a popular form of social networking.’ (Lange 2007).People are not only uploading snippets from their favourite songs or TV shows, but also videos of themselves living life, everything from somebody’s wedding dance to clips from road trips. ‘YouTube participants can broaden or limit physical access to their videos and thus create larger or smaller media circuits by using technical features such as limited "friends-only" viewing or strategic tagging. Viewers may locate videos using keywords or "tags" that video makers designate for their videos or write into the video's title or description.’ (Lange, 2007). This allows uploaders to keep their videos private for friends and family or open for all YouTube visitors to see. This idea of exchanging data is quite strong on the Web, ‘young people increasingly see things available to them online as “free” of ownership and cost. Although legislation and some widely publicised prosecutions have slowed this sharing down some what in the United, I predict this is just temporary,’ Prensky (2004). Most data shows a continual increase of P2P activity. P2P applications are still the most downloaded on the Internet. ‘Young people exchange music and other data as an expression of who they are’ Prensky (2004). Because regular copyright does not allow the download and the use of material, the creative commons was introduced. ‘If a person chooses to license their work under a CC attribution license, for example, they retain there copyright but allows others to use there work without permission and without payment, as long as they credit them for the original creation.’ (Kim, 2007). According to Kim (2007), the use of creative commons is growing in popularity, because as they observed that contemporary copyright law has become so restrictive that it risks impeding future innovation and creativity. Although I had never uploaded anything to YouTube or needed to use creative commons, I think these are a great way to support the creative commons.

‘Search is now the second the biggest use of the Internet, after email’ (Prensky, 2004). Many people use the internet to search for holidays, addresses, phone numbers, or just information for a subject they are interested in. People that use the net frequently will use many different search engines and be looking for more in depth information. However, those that are tentative about what they are searching for will tend to use Google, Msn search or yahoo the most famous and user friendly search engines. This is due to the Information processing and decision theory that Wirth (2007) suggests that, ‘in complex decision situations such as information retrieval on the Web, people tend to favor simplified decision strategies.’ Any search engine can be pulling together a listings page for me based on my interest in e.g. “a cruise holiday,” while at the same time building pages for thousands of others who have other, unpredictable interests, this is because as Weinberger (2002) states the geography of the web is as transient as human interest.

People are also buying and selling products on the web. Sites like amazon.com and eBay are making it easier to easier to find certain products you are looking for. “Real-world time is a series of ticks to which schedules are tied. My time with eBay was different auctions, placed a bid, and checked back every few hours to see if I had been out bid, I felt as if I was returning to a story that was in progress, waiting for me whenever I wanted” (Weinberger, 2002). Amazon and eBay work with the same concept as a search engine, except they only search for information of things for sale on their site rather than the entire Web, but searching for the items you wish to purchase is just as easy as searching for anything else on the net.

‘The Web is woven of hundreds of millions of threads. And, in every case, we get to determine when and how long we will participate, based solely on what suits us. Time like that can spoil you in the real world’ (Weinberger, 2002). Email has become a major part of peoples lives allowing them to keep in contact with people all over the world with relative ease. Many people are also taking up social networking as well as creating web blogs, in order to inform others of their ideas and interests. Blogs are also a great way for scholars to upload abstracts of their papers and study concepts, so they can get feed back and added information from other academics researching the same topics, as well as encouraging people to be creative and innovative. Searching for information and buying and selling items has allowed people to conduct business and shop with added ease, allowing you to get things done quickly so you have more time to spend with friends and family. All of these factors show that the Web is becoming a large part of our lives in a positive way.

Bibliography

- Ermann, M.D., Williams, M.B., Shauf, M.S. (1997). Computers, Ethics and Society, 3rd Edn, Oxford University Press, New York.

- Kim, M. (2007). The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital era: Use of Creative Commons licenses. [Downloaded from Journal of Computer-Mediated communication, 13(1), article 10. http://jcmj.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/kin.html - Last Accessed: 06/12/2007]

- Lange, P.G. (2007). Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube. [Downloaded from Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 18. http://jcmc.indiana.edu./vol13/issue1/lange.html - Last Accessed: 06/12/2007]

- Prensky, M. (2004). The Emerging Online Life of the Digital Native. [Downloaded from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/ - Last Accessed: 30/11/2007]

- Robbins, K. (2000). Cyberspace and the world We Live In. Bell, David & Kennedy, Barbara M (ed.). The Cybercultures Reader (pp. 77-96), Routledge, London.

- Stefanone, M.A, & Jang, C.Y. (2007). Writing for friends and family: The Interpersonal Nature of Blogs. [Downloaded from Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 7. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/stefanone.html - Last Accessed: 06/12/2007]

- Tapscott, D. (1998). Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, McGraw-Hill, New York.

- Trend, D. (2001). Welcome to CyberSchool: Education at the Crossroads in the Information Age, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc, Maryland.

- Weinberger, D. (2002). ‘A New World’ IN Small Pieces Loosely Joined: a Unified Theory of the Web. [Downloaded from: http://www.smallpieces.com/content/chapter1.html - Last accessed: 30/11/2007]

- Wirth, W., Böcking, T., Karnowski, V., and Von Pape, T., (2007). Heuristic and Systematic use of Search Engines. [Downloaded from Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 2. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/wirth/html - Last Accessed: 06/12/2007]

Course Evaluation

Well as its the last day of the course, our blog task is simple to evaluate the course.

To be honest I found the course really interesting, as I thought it would be that's why I took this course. I learned about things like Photoshop that I find interesting and other creative mediums. All in all I thought the course was really informative and allowed for class interaction in lectures which is good when you are trying to understand topics and it makes it easier if you can ask questions and hear other peoples views on topics.

I think the way that the lectures where structured where good as well, focusing on certain areas every day and sub topics within that area. And also watching videos and things during the lecture about what we were talking about also gave another view point so it was really good. I found it very easy to learn because the topic was just so interesting.

Well that's it, I know its not much but the course was really good and made me think about things like creative commons and free software and I will definitely think about these things in the future when dealing with the internet.

Thanks Adam.....

Day 10

Well Today was the last day of our little summer course. If this was in a regular semester we would have had an overview of the course, however since the course is only going for 2 weeks we just chatted about the essay and sources of references.

Usually in a proper semester there would be an end of semester exam, however our lecturer thought that it would be a bit intense for a 2 week course. So we just had a quick look at a few of the questions that would've been asked. We had a look at some of the questions and talked about the answers. I think we all did pretty well.

So today was a pretty chilled atmosphere and a good round up of the course and a time to ask questions about anything in the course we would like to know more about.
So that was the last day of the course. Now I just have an essay to write, Its been 2 years and the last essay I wrote was a scientific report so hope it goes well. :/

The Future of the Internet community...

Todays task is to contemplate what a realistic future on the culture of the internet over the next 10 years would be....

I don't think much will change in the next 10 years. Although censorship will try to get stronger and laws will eventually be made when the government get up to date. I think there are always going to be people doing things on the net they shouldn't be doing. I think in the future there will be more sights like You Tube, where people can add there own content to the web will be available. I also believe in the future more people will be involved in actions like the EFF, creative commons, and free software, but of course this will all come down to education on these sources.

I hope that these laws do not become too totalitarian, I do believe we need laws to make sure that people accessing certain sights can be legally prosecuted for it. But at the same time it shouldn't hinder people that are on the net in accordance with the law shouldn't be hindered in what they can do on the net. People should be free to add content to the web as long as it is not interfering with anyone else's freedom.

Education is an important issue for the future, there are a lot of developing nations that will have more and more ability to become on line free software will aid this with cheaper computers. Hopefully this will help with all levels of education in these countries and the people of these countries the ability to interact with the rest of us. Although at the same time, the younger generations are losing their ability to read and write properly, they use computers so often that when they write they do not write words correctly and use the correct grammar. In the future I am hoping that schools also focus on reading and writing skills as much as computer skills.

In the next ten years you can only imagine what developments will be made in the forms of mobile devices, I mean how far have they come in the previous 10 years. I can not think of what would happen in the world of social forums, I cannot see sites like second life becoming a major source for social forums, I think people want to see what their friends are up too and see photos of holidays and things like that, they don't want their friends to create an avatar that is nothing like them.

The next ten years is pretty hard to think about, when I think about the developments in systems that have happened in the last 5 years. I can only hope the internet is still a place of democracy where people can upload and download content without being handed fines every time they log in. I also hope there are more sites for people to create their own content . I also hope more people embrace the creative commons, in order to encourage creativity of the future users of the net.

Day 9

Todays Lecture was about the idea of Cyber Utopia and Dystopia. Is the internet going to be this amazing, perfect place where people and technology are in harmony. Or is it going to fall to a kind of anarchic, place of disorder and fallen dreams.

There is a quote by Heim that says: " When we speak of a global village, we should keep in mind that every village makes villains, and when civilisation reaches a certain degree of density, the barbaric tribes return, from within. tribes shun their independent thinkers and punish individuality. A global international village, fed by accelerated competition and driven by information, may be lost to an unprecedented barbarism."

This idea that that the hazards of the life will be screened out of the internet. Can technology and the internet provide us with something that is happier and nicer than the real world. Some call it a "disneyised" approach to the internet. But as was mentioned about in the first movie The Matrix, the first matrix that the machines created was too perfect and the humans couldn't react to it. This is truly the case, humans need a sense of chaos and that is why there will never be a Uptopia of the internet. In Utopian societies the peace is disrupted by people who seek to exercise to their own free will.

But when someone acting on their free will encroaches on someone else's ability to act in their free will this will no longer be a Utopia. People will always try and go against the grain. Not to the degree that every law must be broken and no one will be safe, it'll never be a Dystopia. It will sit someone in between these two extremes.

Getting the News to the world

Todays tutorial task is to consider the following 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?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?Do you think the internet is (was?) an effective tool for politicians to reach out to their intended audience?What do you think about blogs as a way for people to get information out? What about their role as political commentary?


In regards to New media and Old media, I don't think these two forms of news formats really make a difference to how people will source the news. For those people who don't readily have access to the net, papers and television are easier for them to get the news. It all comes back to access those people that can log onto the net with great ease will probably go to look at news on the web. There is also the fact that many people can't read long stories straight off the web, so it is easier for them to get a paper and look to the internet for more information on a topic they are interested in.

On the Sydney IndyMedia website: http://www.sydney.indymedia.org.au/, I found it be a lot of alternate news articles that maybe mainstream news would devote less time too. The sense of being able to write your own articles and comment freely on them, is something you can not do with the mainstream. This is concept is good for those who want to be involved in local projects and have an opportunity to do this. This probably has no place for me, as I like to just get a small amount of news then go out and look up any news articles I would like to learn about.

As for the politicians, it comes down to whether or not people want to know more about what the politicians are up to. During the campaign for the election, I mainly got my information about what the political parties were up too from the news and the papers. But if there was a certain topic I wanted to know about I then went onto the net and looked it up like a parties policy on health for instance. A lot of my friends did the same thing. As we don't really have time to sit there looking on the net for hours cross checking each political argument. Although I can see why using Facebook and YouTube would be a good way to try and reach out to the younger generation, rather than ready the information you can just watch what each spokesman had to say.

I think blogs are a good way for people to talk about their views. Its a way in which you can talk about whatever you want (to a degree of what is socially excepted content) and you have show your interests and your views. It is a good form of political commentary in the way that you can see each persons views and read people comments, it can be used like in a debate format. Although, it can be used in the wrong context and that is always something that has to be acknowledged when reading peoples blogs.

Day 8

Todays lecture again got a little bit side tracked and a bit intense with the thought of democracy of the internet.

The thought of democracy in a democratic country is something that will always get people talking, because at the end of the day that's what democracy is. Its freedom of speech and the ability to be able to vote for who your leaders are and more importantly not to vote for anyone that is going to take away your liberty. But what if this democracy is taken away? What if the internet becomes governed and you are suddenly told what you can and cannot look at and research on the net.


At the beginning of the lecture notes there were some simple words to think about in regards to the internet and democracy, I thought this may help summarize our lecture.

Access, when it comes to information who has access to it, and at the end of the day this is a matter of education. Many people can simply not afford a computer and the internet, so these people have to rely on books, newspapers and television. So are they not getting the same information as the rest of us. I hope they are and just because the internet seems an easier way of finding the information, I hope that doesn't mean there's a difference in the relativity of the news.

Encryption, do we have the power to encrypt the information we are sending and receiving on the web, are we sending any information that needs to be encrypted. Most of the traffic on the web is not encrypted so it is easy for encrypted things to stand out and be checked, and this is a good thing if the encrypted information has something to do with terrorism, or child pornography. This stuff should be found deleted and the people involved should be looked up. So if everyone is encrypting everything they send it would make it harder for these criminals to be found and caught.

Commodification, is information a commodity more than just a service. This idea that information can be bought and sold, more importantly can information on the internet be bought and sold. Will we one day have to pay for everything we download by the page.

Intellectual property, is the legal rights of the people that create content. It covers copyright, patent, trademark, industrial design right and trade secret. On the internet this can be difficult to police. However, as we have seen on many occasions the music industry 'not liking' people downloading music. This is why we have spoken so much in the course about Creative Commons, this idea you can add content to the net, and people can add to it and make changes yet still giving you the credit for the original process. Is intellectual property still relevant when it comes to the internet.

The public sphere, is in the old sense when you had the right and ability to group together in public and talk about issues relevant to the time, i.e, sitting in a coffee shop chatting about the upcoming election. In the modern sense this is the ability to still talk about it in public but also take that public forum to the web, you can go to forum chat rooms and right up your beliefs on a web blog and have other people read it and make comment on it.

Decentralisation, is taking the source of information away from one major source and making global, there is no one source of the internet there are millions of different networks and if your shut down one network the whole system will not collapse. This sense of it truly being global in the sense that there are no boarder boundaries for the web a person in Australia can quite easily exchange information with someone in Iceland at the click of a button. You can quite easily get news from any source around the world and not rely on what your news provider wishes to tell you what happened, you can take it onto yourself to go out and find news yourself.

Anarchy, in its form that there is no one governing body of the internet. It is a complete opposite of democracy as is it not governed. This idea of no governance, no rules, no laws. It obviously doesn't exist we can see that in copyright laws being exercised on the web. there is a sense of anarchy with people tyring to stand up to the 'man' so to speak with using the ideas of the eff, creative commons, and open source software. ........

So talking about all these things, we contemplated the idea that the internet was the equalising agent and boarders are non existent. If that is true then the internet is anarchy, and is open to the down falls of anarchy. The idea of uncontrollable data though is quite scary, I don't like the idea of terrorists having open range to material that is a danger to society, as much as I don't like anything that happens on the net that will inhibit my life in the real world.

At the end of the lecture we watched a video of Cory Doctorow, speaking at the authors@google convention. Although he is an ex employee of EFF, and was talking about topics that the EFF are. The idea that we should not be told what we are allowed to do with the software we have on our computers, and also what we can do with the cd's and dvd's we have purchased. We should be allowed to be as creative with it as we like. You can check it out at:

Task for Day 7

There was no formal task for todays tutorial. So I decided to try and add some music to my blog. Then I thought I'd do something else. I put the videos on instead. I chose music videos that were animated so it would enforce the works of modern technologies and what you could do with it.

So there you go check them out if you like, they are catchy little tunes.

Day 7

Today in the lecture we were meant to about Digital Creativity, i.e. net.art and electronic literature, however unfortunately the guest speaker was unable to attend the class. So the topic was changed to electronic music and the changes over time in how music is created. Although having said that we spent much of the lecture trying to define electronic music.

At the being of the lecture we watched a YoutTube anime: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfsR-XphEWg. which shows an edited anime film that has a Muppet song over the top. The way it is edited to look like the characters are singing along to the Muppet's. It was very clever. but with copyright law doing that would be illegal. Unlike if it was protected by the creative commons contract.

Electronic music is music that is produced by electric musical instruments or electronic processing. In this modern world, a lot of the music that we listen too has been recorded electronically or even if its being played live there are electronic amps and other aids to get the sound across. Electronic music can also be produced and playing using electronically made sounds. Today we have many names for this style of music the most commonly used term is Dance, Techno, or Hip Hop music. These styles of music have been in development since the 70's with Disco using these synthesized sounds in the songs.

The first synthesizer to appear was the Blucha in 1963, the idea behind this came from Morton Subotnick, who had the idea of a 'black box' that composers could have in their home to create their own music from a home studio. Another synthesizer, came in the form of a piano styled keyboard and was the invented by Richard Moog in 1964. Although these synthesizers where originally for art composition it wasn't long before they were embraced by popular culture, and in the late 70's early 80' more and more people were interested in creating songs and music with completely synthesized instruments and tunes. In the 70's the group Kratwerk, who used Moog synthesizers, where known for catchy, synthesized melodies. They were influential for many following electronic musicians. In both America and the UK this sort of music was developing through the 80's and the 90's and was very popular in the 80's and 90's club and rave scene. Today it is still predominant in the club scene but the jungle, acid, house genres of the 90's are more underground and dance tends to be a more commercial genre of music.

At the end of the lecture we watched a documentary of the history of this music called 'Modulations' by Lara Lee.

Photoshop 2

Part 2 of the Photoshop task . This task is to find photos representing Friends, High-Tech, News, Summer, Games, Successful, and to modify them using Photoshop or GIMP, or any other modifying program.

This photo is like the last photo that I think represents friends, is shows a group of people all with similar interests and having a good time. This photo was taken with a digital camera and I have adapted it using GIMP, and have simply made the colour dark sepia to give it that memory kind of feel.

I used the same photo that I used for High-Tech in task 1 that was taken on a digital camera. Using GIMP again to make the modifications, I blackened out the background keeping only the 2 light spheres and changing the spheres to a purple filter in order to make it seem abstract and make the sphere look nothing like what they are meant to represent.

Again this is the same photos I used for the news section. Taken on a digital camera, I used GIMP to amend this photo again. Firstly I cropped the photo to focus on the harbour bridge. I then darkened the photo to focus on the lightening flashing. I thought this was a way of making the mood of the photo dark and mysterious.

Yet again I used the same photo for summer as in task 1, this photo was taken on a digital camera and I modified it using Photoshop. For this photo I simply used the liquid tool and added it to the bridge, boat and parts of the water to give the impression of a really hot day. I think it's just another aspect of our summers that sort of heat coming off the horizon type image.

I decided to use this photos for the games aspect, it to was taken on a digital camera and modified by GIMP. This photo is one of my mates playing golf which of course is a type of game. When making changes this photo I cropped it a little bit to better show the figure. Then I outlined the figure and darkened the colours just in the figure leaving the rest of the photo normal colours. So despite the fact it all belongs in the same photo it looks like the figure has been added to this background.

This photo was taken on a digital camera and modified on GIMP. This may seem like an unusual choice for successful. This photo was taken from the top of a mountain my friends and I have hiked to the top of. So in my opinion this was a success at it was a really tough hike and we made it in really good time. When making my adjustments I darkened the background in order to bring focus to the rock in the foreground in order to show where we had made it to.

For the celebrity photo, I found this photo of Rai Thistlewaithe the lead singer of Thirsty Merc. This photo was taken on a digital camera and updated using GIMP. Due to the lighting and the way the photo was taken it already had the red and black effect. So I tried to play around with it and make the red and black differences more intense. To make it look a bit retro and grundgy.

Day 6

Todays lecture was about Free Software and Creative Commons.

Proprietary software is different from free software, as you must pay for it up front and can not be changed from its original code. Free software on the other hand is free to use and distribute and you may change any details of the code, so long as you forward these change on free of charge for others to benefit from.

This idea came from Richard Stallman the founder of copyleft (copyright flipped over), and is the core concept of putting stuff on the internet for free. It is a legally binding contract that controls the use of free and open software, it is essentially protects people who invest time into making programs that are not used for commercial gain.

In the early days of computer programming people would share their software with others and encourage any feed back on these programs, until the dawn of companies like Microsoft said that proprietary software should be created as the best way to make money and to use that money to make better programs, faster.

There are other options though by going to http://www.fsf.org/ you can find more information on downloading free software.

We then watched a video of a speech given by Prof Lawrence Lessig at at TED conference. The video can be found at http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/187. Prof Lessig was discussing his ideas of The Creative Commons (CC), this is an interesting idea. Using the old ideas of Copyright, but tweaking it in a more communal aspect. It gives people the freedom of being able to use other peoples photos, music and information without being sued, as long as the use is within their guidelines of their contract. When you add your creative material to the web you can add a CC contract, and customize it to your own prerequisites. You can stipulate whether your photos are used for commercial or not. You can also say if someone uses your photos and makes them your own then they must also say the source of the photo and pass their modified work on for free if it contains your photos. This is a great way of getting your work out there yet allowing people to use it as well. To learn more you can go to http://creativecommons.org/.

The final topic that we talked about was The Electronic Frontier Foundation, http://www.eff.org/. Like the Creative Commons, the EFF is a non profit organisation. the organisation is concerned with making sure the internet stays open for people to have access to without being restricted by conglomerate interests.

I have not really heard of EFF or CC and never really used free software before. So todays lecture was interesting for me to learn more about these avenues, to know that you don't just have to accept what you're being told you what you to have as your software and what you can do with it.

Day 5

In todays lecture we discussed modern applications for the web and computer. The first application we talked about was Instant Messaging (IM), this includes things like ICQ and MSN messenger that I have used. Of course these were not the first IM services, IRC had been in circulation since 1988. Of course when it first started it was text based, but it was good because you have multiple person chats in real time.

After IRC people moved on to chat rooms, but they were mass groups of people all interacting. With the introduction of ICQ you could have all your friends linked up to it and you could tell when they were on line and chat to them in real time. I keep saying this but its fantastic for people long distances away from each other. Although of course its mainly used by teenagers after school chatting to their friends.

Microsoft noticed the big number of people joining these pages and they introduced MSN messenger which came with every version of Windows XP. Which is handy as you don't need to find it and download it to your computer and since most people had it you could get in contact with more people. With MSN, it also allows you to have video chats, you can upload photos and you can do things like nudge each other.

Of course as in all applications on the net there are lots more versions you can find download and use if you feel the need.

We then went on to talk about Portable audio and podcasting, which is the ability to transfer your audio and video into a format on your computer that allows you to shrink the size of the file and transfer it onto Portable media players like MP3 and MP4 players. Shrinking the file size allows you to fit more files onto your player.

The second part of the lecture was about the study of video games in an academic sense. Arcade Games, Consoles, Computer Games, MUDs, MMOGs and others like this are all forms of Video Games and for a few years now people have been studying the games not in a psychological but as a form of cultural practise and what makes games uniquely entertaining in a different ways from books, cinema, television.

When academics first started talking about this study, there were two main schools of thought. The first school of thought was that video games are like stories and the study of games should be approached in the same way that one would study a 'text'. Like the video game 'Space Invaders' has the story of aliens are trying to invade earth and you and you space ship have to go out and shoot them all down and move onto the next level where more space ships come. These scholars were from the Narratology school for thought. On the other side, were the scholars from the Ludology school, rather than looking at the stories of the games these people looked at the play aspects. Saying games like Tetris can not have a story, and many games that have story elements are there for decoration rather and is incidental to the game being played.

And of course in all academic worlds there are more than just two views and many people fell somewhere in the middle of the Narratology and Ludology schools. For intense you can have academics that just focus on one genre of video games, e.g, only the study of console games, or computer games. Some consider that video games are a sort of media, and the game can be pulled apart into its different aspects and studied that way i.e. what are the rules of the game, what makes up the world in the game, and of course what makes it fun.

Its a pretty in depth way to look at what I try to think of as just a fun thing to do. Like most things if you know the behind the scenes workings of something does it make it less fun because you have taken the magic out of it.

Photoshop

Todays' task regards Photoshop.

Its part 1 of a 2 part task. To up load photos to communicate the following ideas: Friends, High-tech, News, Summer, Unconventional, University Life.......

This is the obvious representation of friends, a group of people all enjoying each others company that have similiar interests. It was taken on a digital camera, I think its was a Cannon.

I thought this was somethign that was pretty 'high-tech' or is it just artistic, well I thought it looked pretty high tech. But its a form of street lighting in Brisbane Square. It was taken on a Sony Cyber-Shot digital camera.

I know this may seem an odd connection but to me anytime it rains anywhere in Australia it is news worthing, so pictures of this storm in Sydney would be my choice for news. I was taken on a digital camera although I'm not sure what sort.

To me this says summer. Water, clear sky and a chilled out atmosphere. It was taken lasst Australia Day, which also says summer to me. It gives off a sense of freedom that comes with summer. It was taken on a digital camera, this time an Olympus.

This ride is pretty uncoventional. Its a theme park rollercoaster and instead of sitting down on the ride, you lay down on your belly face first and it's liek you are flying through the air. It was taken on a digital camera, Sony Cyber-Shot.

I had to tose up this photo, between these textbooks which is an obvious sight of univeristy life, or a picture of the beach where I spend much time 'studying' while soaking up the rays. But yes our educational aids are what help us get through uni successfully. This was taken on digital camera, Sony Cyber-Shot.

Our Virtual Field Trip...

Today in the tutorial we ventured into the 3D world known as activeworlds, it is the precursor to second life but now is a bit dead, not many people hanging out there. It can be found http://www.activeworlds.com/. I have never used a 3D sight before and I have wanted to see what they are like but having been there and done it, and to be honest I thought it was a bit cool in the fact it's sort of like a game and you can create these people and live these lives, but I got bored fairly quickly with it. There's so many people in these worlds doing their own thing its hard to make connections in order to talk too and interact with them, and I'm not a person that feel the need to meet people on the web. I got to the point where I couldn't really see the point in it and wanted to leave. To me its like a game that takes to long to load and is a bit slow, I couldn't be in world for too long.

Having said this, I have on occasion used MSN, a socialising program that allows for instant messaging. This is a good format for those that can not see each other and that can not go out for coffee and catch up face to face with their friends. In some cases internet access is cheaper than a long call and in many cases much cheaper than long distance and international calls. So using MSN, you can talk instantly by writing messages, it allows for groups of people and its all about the conversation. It allows for students to chat and not annoy parents by tying up the phone lines.

In our lecture we watched a 4 corners report on a interactive world called second life, a place where you can create a life and using real money that is transferred into life money you can make purchases and sell products. Anything from paying for a new face to buying water front property. There is speculation in the future we would be logging onto these 3D worlds and using them as search engines and making purchases from amazon, ebay and other internet stores. My problem with this is, why bother going through all the hassle of creating a avatar (your in world persona) and then finding a search engine, searching and then getting to where you want to be, to find a journal will you have to find the in world library and search there. Or would it be easier to log into your computer a few clicks and you are at your search engine of choice and finding what you are looking for.

That's obviously my opinion and I don't want to insult anyone that is all for this kind of virtual being as this has been a desire of many people from the beginning of the concept of the internet. But for me personally I would rather go shopping for myself than let my avatar have all the fun.

Day 4

Virtual Reality..... What is it?....

It is very difficult to summarise todays lecture, as it was very thought provoking and philosophical, as well as a little intense. We talked about the concept of reality and virtual reality. The topic is always going to be very opinion based, they have been talking about reality for centuries, so you could see how the lecture often went off on a tangent, while everyone was trying to understand understand virtual reality and creating their own descriptions.

Its a case of what are we seeing? Is it real or is it not? For instance the Matrix when Morpheus said: What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about your senses, what you feel, taste, smell, or see, then all you're talking about are electrical signals interpreted by your brain?

By this speech alone you can see just how philosophical the talk about reality is. This is due to the fact that the talk of reality spans back to Socrates and Plato. The Allegory of Plato's cave
is like television of the ancient times, instead of watching the flickering shadows on the cave wall, you can watch movies and television and features on the web.

What I think virtual reality is, is like imagination. Its only there if you allow your mind to grasp it. In an interactive sense, the virtual reality on the web enables and requires people to move and respond to a simulated environment, allowing users to sense and manipulate 'virtual' objects as they would in the real world.

Things like video games, and secondary computer lives are examples of this virtual concept. Those games and web sights that are in a 3D context encourage you to move and live in these worlds. Essentially dealing in a different reality from what you get in real time or even reading books or watching television. Books and TV give you the story that has happened and you are reading or watching a reality that is being played out, the way you can imagine this virtual reality being played out in front of you. Where as virtual worlds allow you to create something new and experience new things. You are the creator and are creating the interaction in the 3D virtual world in games and second lives.

Search Engines.....

The Second part of Task 3 was to consider search engines.

To start, I thought I'd better find out what a search engine actually is. A Search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help locate required information stored on a computer system. So in this case, a web search engine helps locate information on the web. Search engines come in many different forms, they can be general searches like Google, or yahoo. Or they can be more specific engines for instance if you are looking to academic journals.

Search engines list the information that meet the criteria specified by the query is usually sorted in some regard to place the most relevant items first. This reduces the time required to find the desired the information. The information is usually ranked by page heading first, so whether the criteria is mentioned in the web page heading, then as the sites become less relevant the web pages are ranked by whether the information you are looking for is mentioned in the descriptions of the pages. but of course this could just be one word of your search criteria and of course would not be relevant for what you are looking for.

As I have been out of the study network for sometime, I rarely use search engines and if I do it tends to be yahoo or Google, just for ease really. So I can not really comment on which search engines are better for specific searches.

You can check out the following links for recent articles about search engines:


- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6505647.stm
- http://edition.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS/11/05/google.mobile.ap/index.html
- http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/11/13/yahoo.china/index.html
- http://edition.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS/11/01/google.stock.ap/index.html

Scavenger Hunt

The scavenger hunt questions and their answers:....

As part of todays task we were given some questions to find using search engines that are not Google or wikipedia, and told to think about where we get the answers from and do we believe the answers to be true. So using these search engines you do have to be diligent in what you use as a reference site. I have tried to do that here....

1.) Who was the creator of the infamous "lovebug" computer virus?

Onel de Guzman of Manilla is believed to be the creator of the love bug virus. I found this information of CNN.com archives after searching yahoo.com

2.) Who invented the paperclip?

A man by the name of Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian inventor. He patented his version of the paper clip in Germany in 1899. However, an English company call Gem manufacturing patented the creation and design of the paper clip we know in 1899. http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blpaperclip.htm I found this site using askjeeves.com

3.) How did the Ebola virus get its name?

The Ebola virus got its name from the Ebola river that goes through the Sudan and the Ivory Coast where the virus originated. http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/spb/mnpages/dispages/Fact_Sheets/Ebola_Fact_Booklet.pdf I found this site using Altavista.com

4.) What country had the largest recorded earthquake?

With a magnitude 9.5 (Mw), Chile had had the largest recorded earthquake on May 22, 1960. Taken from http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learning/kids/facts.php, to get this information, I used Askjeeves.com

5.) In computer memory/storage terms, how many kilobytes in a terabyte?
1 kilobyte = 1073741824 terabyte. I found my answer on http://www.whatsabyte.com/P1/storage_converter.htm and I found this site on yahoo.com

6.) Who is the creator of email?

Using yahoo.com I found inventors.about.com again for the name of the person whom created email. It was Ray Tomlinson who invented the internet based electronic mail, in 1971. http://inventors.about.com/od/estartinventions/a/email.htm

7.) What is unique about the political organisation of the Kingdom of Nri?

Using Yahoo.com, I found this website http://www.nrikingdom.com/ which lead me on to more sites, where I found out the Nri or Eri people, rather than just inheriting your chief hood you had to earn it. An individuals fitness to govern was determined by his wisdom and his wisdom by his age and experience. Land, obtained through inheritance, was the measure of wealth. Handicrafts and commerce were well developed, and a relatively dense population characterized the region. Despite the absence of chiefs, some Igbo relied on an order of priests, chosen from outsiders on the northern fringe of Igboland, to ensure impartiality in settling disputes between communities. I found this using yahoo.com

8.) If you wanted to contact the prime minister of Australia directly, what is the most efficient way?

You can send mail to the PM

The Hon John Howard MP
Prime Minister
Parliament House

CANBERRA, ACT 2600
or you can contact the PM by going to this website http://www.pm.gov.au/contact/index.cfm. I found this website using yahoo.com You also can reply and commetn to his Youtube post.

9.) Which Brisbane punk band is Stephen Stockwell (Head of the School of Arts) a member of?Using Alltheweb.com I found this site http://www.brisbanewritersfestival.com.au/2005/content/standard.asp?name=StockwellS which shows a mini biography of all the contributers to the brisbane writers festival and it states that Stephen Stockwell, wrote music and played keyboard for a band called the Black Assassins.

10.) What does the term "Web 2.0" mean in your own words?

Web 2.0, is essentially the ability for everyday people to contribute to the content that is on the web. Using applications which use a kind of architecture by participation, like flickr, you tube, ebay, myspace, facebook, a person is encouraged to add value to the application as they use it. Its turning away from what application creators want you to be able to interact rather than tell you what you are to see and do on the web.

Day 3

Todays lecture was about media its definitions and modern studies mainly the study of the internet and the web in relation to communication to the masses.

Communication as a study area has been developing in America and Europe since the 1920's.
In America it was lot about psychology and the effects of the media on people, i.e advertising and how well advertising worked. In the 1960's, Marshall McLuhan developed a "revolutionary" study and the ratio between the individual and physical senses, and how they interact. then in the 70's it became more about mixed effects of media and communication on people. E.g., if the news keeps telling you of crime and criminal acts, is there a high crime rate or are you lead to believe that there is.

While in Europe at the same time there was a slightly different view on media and communication. In the 1950's, Guy Debord came up with the following thesis, "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation" which is kind of like an intense version of people watching, everybody watching everything that everybody else does. This is relative in modern times with Big Brother and reality television. Following that in the 1960's a man called Hambermas, developed a notion that the public sphere of communication like talking over the paper in a coffee house, became commercialised and was sort of a publication of private events. This can be related to modern internet chat rooms and some of the views the are shown on the news or even talk shows. Then there was Baudrillard in the 1980's who real world events were being simulated, we could go beyond what is actually happening and be told what is happening, because we are too involved in information and technology to know the difference. They say you can thank Baudrillard for the concept of the matirx.

With the emergence of the internet and the web, takes the study of communications to the next level, studying communication on the web. How people perceive the web, is it a help or hindrance to our lives. People are studying different aspects of the internet and the web. Research being down into how people interact socially on the web, the good ways catching up with old friend and the bad ways of people pretending to be something they are not. Also people studying the cultural effects of the web, how people from different cultures can interact or if certain cultures don't allow for web use so are those people missing out on something.

Its quite interesting to see how all these things are studied and related to life. It has become a time when you can communicate in multiple ways. But there is still the fact that people can make up whatever they want on the web, and its out there and someone could easily take it to be Gospel if they do not research the text fully.

The Use of Modern technologies in everday life

The speed at which modern technology has become available to the everyman has meant that every person can attain a computer and get on the net and communicate with the world. Even the ability to sms a friend makes life just that little bit easier. Instead of having to call someone that maybe busy, you can simply send them a text message and they can read it when ever they have time.

But on a more global scale, looking at the web and its applications. The first use I had for the web was hotmail probably back in 2000. a free and fast way of contacting friends all over the world. I never really thought I would need anything else. However, the introduction of social forums has aided this ability to keep in touch.

Although I have never made friends with someone over the internet (my paranoia about personal security can be seen through the secrecy of this weblog) I have used the new social forums like facebook and bebo to keep in contact with friends old and new. Travelling around and meeting new friends you find it difficult to write full emails and keep in contact with all the people you meet along the way. However, these social forums allow you to post short comments about what you and your friends are doing. You can also upload photos so everyone can share in the experiences you have been on. It makes it that much easier when you have limited time in internet cafes or just can't be bothered writing a full long email.

It has become a case that many people are in fact addicted to these forms of communicating. Making friends with people they met in chat rooms, being members of many social forums, befriending as many people as they can. I can see how this sort of thing worries parents as it is difficult to censor what posts they are receiving from friends, and who they are befriending. especially if they are internet friends. As you don't know if the other person is telling the truth. .And what they really want, befriending a stranger could lead to all sorts of danger from identity stealing to getting youngters to run away.

Day 2

The History of Computers and the internet

Today in our lecture we discussed how computers developed into what we know today. From the beginnings as number calculators through to what we know today. We discussed the influx of ideas on making the computer used in the business and military worlds to a personal computer that developed in the 70's.

How Apple developed an idea to make all computers essentially the same stock and you know what you are getting, where as IBM and Microsoft tried to develop a more individual computer so each person can have what they need and miss out on the things they don't.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0tLubCFdyM&feature=related

We also discussed history of the internet, the web and cyberspace and the differences in their meanings and what people perceive them to be.

Internet being the sum of interconnected computer hardware and the software that runs it. However, the web is a particular application of the internet that is particularly easy to use, in order to access information. Cyberspace, is the sum of the users imaginations as they use the internet.

The internet was in development way back in the 1960's and really came into being thanks to the military. In the way that the military does, it put money into the research and development and probably in a way fast tracked by this. As many other technologies are helped along by the money feed to the research by the military. Who knows how long the internet may have been delayed, if the research hadn't had the funding when it did.

HTML is the language that wed pages are written, and it allows the page to be seen in the way that it is set up. this is why there are so many different views for web pages. Essentially a web page is just a collection of files (html documents, images, sounds, animations, etc) that exist on a computer somewhere.

With out HTML we wouldn't be able to see the web pages as we do. Its would just be in a text format, which would basically just be like reading a standard word document. The web wouldn't be as interesting and interactive as it is and probably would not be as easily accessible to the average person. Which makes you wonder if HTML had not been created the way it has would as many people be using the web.

These developments have allowed us as consumers to do some amazing things, with the ability to find out information about any subject we choose, in a matter of minutes, and we can contact and share photos and videos with people all over the world.

Day 1

Today was the first day of the summer semester course.

We had a general overview of the course and what would be taught and assessed.

We talked about the definitions on communication, technology and weblog.

Its interesting to see other peoples views on the Internet and its uses. While watching a comedy news sketch the question came up are blog journalists, really journalists. Are you a journalist just because you report the fact on your bloggs, with or without credentials. Many bloggers do go out and attend press conferences and find out the news first hand, but also many bloggers don't tend to go out and get the information themselves rather they find the information from already published pages. So is it news when its secondary news.

However blogs are not only for journalist bloggers, but anyone who wants to put their views on the web for everyone to see. It could be a personal blog about someones travels, or a team blog about how a team is doing through the year, or just someone wanting so show the world on the net what they are about. Athlough many journalist bloggers think of these people as knit bloggers, as a joke on the fact they want to talk about their interests and things like that. But the fact still remains the internet and web are places where there is encouragement to add to the applications to the web. The web is a form of free speech.

But the question is when does that freedom of speech go too far? or too many personal things being posted lead to someones ability to steal your identity.....

At present the laws on what is uploaded to the web are behind the times and for the safety of everyday people using the web. This is something that only only be watched for the near future as the government tries to catch up and do what it can to legislate the web.

Hidi hi...... Intro Blog

Hey I'm Cubic,

Just a little introduction about this blog.
The blog is being written for a Uni Summer semester course. The course is about Communications Technologies, a subject I thought would be interesting to learn more about to learn more about. It would also help my course in the long run as I am studying Communications.

The course is about modern media and its uses in todays world. Things like this blog and other social forums, chat rooms, search engines, even the fact you can do your grocery shopping from your fridge. Hopefully we will also talk about public and private pages as well as the security and the law of accessing sites and people accessing you.

I suppose I'd better introduce myself a little bit, as you can probably tell by the set up of this blog, I enjoy my privacy. I'm not against interactive social forums, I do have a facebook. However, as this is for uni and not personal use, I thought it would be good to keep this academic and not clutter it up with personal stuff.