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.

Week 3, new comm tech

New communication technologies are continuiously growing. Users start using communication technologies today are mostly as young as 12 years old. I've been using Facebook for friends, Myspace for music and Twitter to check on celebritys' every move. I've been using myspace since I was 13 years old. The most influence or motivation were from friends who have these websites and want to stay in contact. Privacy issues are not of concerns to me and I think websites such as Facebook and Google should collect information about their users for safety and backup. For example if there is a criminal group planning out criminal activities on the net, the website can keep the information as evidence. I would however encourage people to have a private profile to protect from certain users in the public network from viewing personal information about other users. Having a private profile does not stop the user from adding 'strangers' but it all comes down to how much you trust that person when you get to know them. I have one or two friends whom I've met on the internet, we'd chat and send messages but I never intend to meet them in person, especially if that person is from overseas. Even though some people might not turn out to be how you thought they'd turn out to be, you must remember that meeting people via cyberspace is not the same as meeting them in person. Misunderstandings might occur when chatting on the internet because you cannot see how the other person is reacting towards you. This is communication in my perspective.

Qualitative Differences between 3D and IM

Questions of social identity in the socialising space always arise when people talk about social networking. social identity is however viewed differently according to the quality of network socialisation. The 3D experience is very different from an IM experience. Although you can express emotions with both through text and emoticons, the user does not get a full picture of who you are as a person and your identity. The 3D world offers a very realistic chat experience where there are avatars, scenes and a complete virtual world. A good example of 3D space are Second life and IMVU. MSN, Skype does not offer any virtual experience, it is simply a mean of communication between people as well as an image sharing tool. The way people understand others is different according to what service they are using, neither however can give a clear picture of the person's exact identity. For some people, their social networking identity is different to how it is in reality. Some people tend to be someone they are not as an affect of who they are communicating with as well as the medium used for the communication.

Week 5 lecture, Media

Virtual community is created by the individual identity where individuals create personal web pages; blogs, videos (YouTube), images and posting them on social networking sites by using web 2.0. This creates a personal relationship established by the user and shared with other users either the open public or friends. Although the websites claim that they do not own the contents being posted, they are allowed to tamper with the contents that are against the terms and conditions of the website contract. Social media consists of blogs/weblogs, social network services such as Facebook and Myspace and content sharing communities such as YouTube and Flickr.