Week 8, CyberPolitics and eDemocracy

Internet has always been known as a tool for communication opening endless possibilities to businesses and organisations, normal everyday communications and social networking, military communication and now more than ever political mass communication and perticipation. Democracy especially is known as a true form of communication on the net and is greatly priviliged from cyberspace. CyberPolitics is the political activities carried out in cyberspace including blogging, fundraising, online journalism and electronic voting. It is a strategic form of communication that links the world of politicians and democratics with citizens to have their say in political practices. To be continued...

Week 7, Creative Commons, FLOSS

We all know that everyone wants free stuff. After all, people say all the good things in life are free. So why can't we have things for free? At least to unleash our creative side. Did you know that in the period from the 1960s to the 70s software was completely free? Any one could change the instructions in the program, create different things within the program and share it with others who will add and change other characteristics of the program and share it with other people as well. That was until businesses became aware of the capabilities of what this offers and decided to make their own programs and sell them. That is when Creative Commons came about in 2000.

Creative commons allow people to share free or libre, open source software (FLOSS)for people to be creative. While these software are free, they only own some rights, unlike Copyright, who has all rights reserved and Public Domain, who have no rights at all. Open source software include Open Office, Mozilla FireFox, Linux etc... Closed Source software however include Microsoft programs, Internet Explorer and Windows programs. Creative Commons helps break the barriers put in place by copyright and allows users to be creative and share their creativity with others and therefore allows others to become creative. So why can't we get the same thing for free?

week 6 Consumption And Production

We are all consumers of media and thanks to technology, we can also be producers of media. In the past, cinema and theaters were the primary media provider and we share it with the public within the theater. Television brought a whole new perspective into media consumption where we can watch privately or with the household. The personal computer also brought big changes to the way we consume media. The name says it all, however as much as it is private, it is also shared world wide with the use of Internet that connects people with the public. An example of sharing with the public using the personal computer is through uploading videos using Metacafe.com, YouTube.com, google videos and a lot more. Now and more popular than ever is the mobile phone. As more and more things become available on mobiles, the more people rely on them for media consumption especially news, sports and entertainment as whole.

Personal computers and mobile phones allows people to become producers of media. People upload movie advertisements, fan films, mash ups/ recap, concerts, music videos, parties and other small videos that can be recorded on a video or phone camera. News rooms such as CNN's ireport.com relies on people to gather news using their phones or cameras to record what is happening. Although technology has become more mobile these days, there still are some constraints and limitations on what can be filmed on a phone or a video camera. Problems can occur with the quality of the camera and the audio. Technology has come a long way from audience being just consumers to audience becoming producers of popular videos uploaded on the net.

uploading videos on the internet

This video that I've created myself shows just how easy it is for anyone to make a video and upload it online for the whole public to view. It is basically a short and simple story about a date gone wrong. I've used movie maker, paint and music to compose it together to create the story. There are also many features on movie maker to help people create a video such as transitions, affects and text options that allows a still picture to be developed into something more than that. Enjoy.