Week 6: Political Participation.

Sign an e-petition.
http://www.wwf.org.au/what_you_can_do/do_it/sign_our_antarctic_petition/

Respond to a professional blogger at a major news site.


What is Barak Obama up to today? Can you send him a message about the importance of freedom on the internet?
http://twitter.com/BarackObama
http://www.facebook.com/barackobama
You can supposedly contact the White House here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact


What are the Australian Government's plans to censor the internet (the so-called "Clean Feed")?
http://nocleanfeed.com/ 

What place does censorship have in a democracy?
Censorship is a word with a lot of negative connotations attached to it, as soon as it's mentioned people start yelling out "FREE SPEECH!" and generally just getting their blood up. However is it still called censorship if it's used to stop the distribution of and access to child pornography on the internet? Surely that's just the law? I think in general censorship should not have a place in a democracy but I think at times the lines around what censorship is can get a little blurry and that needs to be addressed.

When will the NBN get to your place? What are the benefits?
According to the NBN Rollout map (http://www.nbnco.com.au/rollout/rollout-map.html?icid=pub:hme:rollout:hro:img) work to install the NBN will begin in my suburb in approximately 3 years and from there it should take around 12 months for the services to be available for use.  To learn about the benefits watch the video below.

 

Find out who your local, state and federal representatives are. Send one a message.


Look up the Queensland or Australian Hansard to find the last time your local member spoke in parliament.

Let your local member know what you think about their last speech.

Week 6: White Hat Hackers.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The term "White Hat" is a name given to hackers that use their skills to benefit companies and organizations by letting them know where they are vulnerable to their not-so-helpful hacker brethren. When I think of hackers I think of the movie Die Hard 4.0, Timothy Olyphant plays a hacker that partially succeeds in taking down the USA with his scary hacking skills (before Bruce Willis gets in the way), I believe in the film Olyphants character used to a White Hat or something similar before he was disgraced and turned to the dark side. Because organizations may not have the resources capable of testing their security systems themselves it makes more sense to hire outside their organization and this is where White Hats come in. For obvious reasons a White Hat has to be completely trustworthy because the organization is paying them find their weaknesses and not to take advantage of them. The idea of White Hats makes sense because in other areas of our lives we try to account for the worst, we test the safety of cars in crash simulations, not because we plan on crashing but because we know it's a possibility and if it does happen we want as little damage as possible to occur.

Palmer, C.C 2001, Ethical Hacking, IBM Sytems Journal, Vol. 40, No. 3.

Week 5: Social media.

This is my take on a few social media sites...

I believe I've expressed in an earlier post that I am not much of a Facebook fan. Anytime I do a quick roll through the feed I find myself wondering why I still have a Facebook account when I am not actually friends with most of my Facebook "friends" and I don't care at all about what they're having for lunch or that they are in the process of drinking a whole bottle of Jagermeister.

I only just realized that Last.Fm is a social media, up until this point I've just considered it a a starting point for the occasional Youtube spiral as I look for more bands "similar" to the one before and the next thing you know I'm listening to a Norwegian hardcore band and wondering why I've just wasted 3 hours of my life.

YouTube is probably the social media site I use the most. I've never posted a video or a comment but I do watch a lot of videos. I once spent 2 hours watching a guy doing drum covers of songs that I like, I watch funny/cute animal videos, recordings of live music, the occasional rant video and some really random things that friends have suggested. That's not to say I don't have my problems with YouTube, of late I've found myself having to continuously shoo away advertisements during my viewings, but I guess that's what you get from anything Google related. There are always other video sharing websites but I can't see myself ridding my life of YouTube to avoid clicking away a few ads.
Here's an oldie but goodie:

Week 4: Cyberpunk.

For the week 4 task I was instructed to make a timeline outlining some key moments in the history of Cyberpunk. For this timeline I used the website TimeToast and overall it was a pretty straightforward exercise. I wasn't entirely sure how to embed the timeline into my blog so I watched a brief tutorial online, here's a link if anyone else is having trouble: http://www.beedocs.com/timeline3D/movies/EmbeddingTimelines.php

These are the results:

Week 5: Social Media Survey.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Week 4: Bladerunner.

This week I had the task of watching Ridley Scott's 1982 film Bladerunner for the first time. This movie is considered a classic of the cyberpunk genre and encompasses all the elements cyberpunk is about. Bladerunner is set in a world on the brink of failure, technology is advanced but in many ways it's cost the world its humanity. Humans have invented humanoid robots called Replicants, they are virtually indistinguishable from real humans but are lacking human emotions. These Replicants are essentially used as slaves, carrying out the dangerous, dirty jobs that humans deem below them, and after 4 years they are disposed of like rubbish. This idea brings up the discussion of the ethical responsibilities in the fields of technology and science. In this film they  created a race of faux-humans, superior in strength, gave them memories to make them feel human and then told them they didn't have the same rights as real humans. Obviously this was never going to end well. This movie of course is technically fiction but in the real world there is already considerable work that has been done in brain-machine interfaces, mixing the human body with technology. So far the progress made has generally been for therapeutic purposes, to help blind people see and amputees regain limbs but when these have been mastered will enhancement of the human body and its capabilities be the next agenda? If we start using technology to give certain people advantages over others it could easily take a turn for the dangerous. If the military could give their troops a physical advantage over other countries this would lead to retaliation through even more advancements. In summary the development of brain-machine interfaces without extensive ethical consideration is an incredibly risky path to take, and if left in the hands of a half-mad megalomaniac we could be left with a bit of a Bladerunner situation on our hands.

Peterson, Gregory 2005, Imaging God: Cyborgs, Brain-Machine Interfaces, and a More Human Future, A Journal of Theology Dialogue, Volume 44, Issue 4, p 337-346.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Week 3: Library Books & Databases.

Which of Stephen Stockwell's books are in the Griffith library? 

• Stockwell, Stephen 2005, Political campaign strategy: doing democracy in the 21st century, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne. Located: Nathan and Gold Coast Campuses

• Scott, Paul & Stockwell, Stephen 2000, All-media guide to fair and cross-cultural reporting: for journalists, program makers and media students, Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy, Nathan. Located: College of Art (Southbank), Gold Coast, Mt Gravatt and Nathan Campuses

• Isakhan, Benjamin & Stockwell, Stephen 2011, The secret history of democracy, Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Located: Gold Coast Campus 

Cite three academic books that might provide useful material for an essay about Jean Luc Godard's Alphaville. On which campuses do they reside?

• Temple, Michael, Williams, James &Witt, Michael (eds) 2004, For ever Godard, Black Dog, London. Located: College of Art (Southbank)

• Brown, Royal (ed.) 1972, Focus on Godard, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs.Located: Nathan Campus

• Lesage, Julia 1979, Jean-Luc Godard:a guide to references and resources, G.K. Hall, Boston. Located: Nathan Campus

What is a book that will assist you to find out about possible research methods to explore social media?

• Weerakkody, Niranjala 2009, Research Methods for Media and Communication, Oxford University Press Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne. Located: Gold Coast and Nathan Campuses

Stephen Stockwell writes about politics and the media, particularly in Australia. What database would you use to find his first academic article about Brisbane in a national journal? What year? Provide a full citation.


What is the latest medical thinking about internet addiction? What data base did you use? Full citation.

What are IT engineers thinking about surveillance cameras? Identify a theme you could write an essay about and cite three papers that would be useful.

Week 3: A bit about The WELL

The WELL (The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) was founded in 1985 by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant as a way for the writers and readers of The Whole Earth Review to connect and converse. The WELL is not a particularly well known site, I personally had never heard of it before writing this blog post, but it has been known to a select few since before the internet became available to the public. My first impression of the website is that the appearance of the site is quite basic, certainly no bells and whistles, which I guess is appropriate as the users are no doubt more concerned with the quality of content rather than how that content is packaged. Anyone can become a member of The WELL but there are a couple of guidelines to adhere to. First of all you must use your real name to register, so you won't find any of those irritating fake middle names that Facebook users are so fond of using. Secondly you have to pay for membership, a concept that is most likely strange to anyone who has grown up relying on such social networking websites as Myspace or Facebook. The WELL has never been a overly large community and as of late the relatively small number of members they did have has been dwindling, in June 2012 The WELL had a mere 2,693 people paying for it's services (Wingfield, 2012). The website seems to rely on a 'quality, not quantity' view of things with intellectuals being the main users and the topics up for discussion are varied and in depth.   

References:

1. Wingfield, Nick 2012, 'The Well, a Pioneering Online Community, Is for Sale Again', The New York Times, 29 June, 2012 
2. Salon Media Group Inc. 1985, Homepage, San Francisco, viewed 25 August 2012, <http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/29/the-well-a-pioneering-online-community-is-for-sale-again/>

Week 2: Key moments in communication history.

Spoken word seems to be a good place to start as far as key moments in communication history, however since nobody has figured out exactly when that first started there's not much I can say about it. The next would have to be Cuneiform writing and Egyptian Hieroglyphics, these first primitive forms of written communication provide the building blocks for the development of the Phoenician alphabet, the first wide spread phonetic script. Written communication is perhaps the most important development humankind ever made because it allowed people to keep a more reliable record of information for future generations so we could learn from the past and society could evolve and flourish.

Giovanni Battista della Porta first describing the camera obscura in a book seems another seminal moment because "a picture tells a thousand words" isn't a saying for nothing. Photos allow up to see into the past and that is surely as important as written word because photos provide stories and information that can be understood across the worlds language barriers.

Another major development would have to be the first Newspaper ever created in Germany, 1609 A.D. Newspapers are a way to dispense important information to large amounts of people and they are still used for that very purpose today, which demonstrates the importance of this development in communication history.

The invention of the first telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 was a miraculous thing indeed because it allowed people to truly communicate over large distances, something that couldn't really be achieved through written letters or telegraphs because when we speak it's not just facts and figures that we exchange it's also emotions that we convey in the way we speak.

Lastly I'm going to list the World Wide Web because it's become such an essential part of how most of the world lives. Growing up in a developed country I cannot even comprehend not having the Internet available to me, I use it for the gathering of information, communication, entertainment and the general management of my life.

Week 2: New Communication Technology & I.

I like to think I'm a fairly moderate user of New Communication Technology, I don't use it excessively but there are aspects of it I would miss dearly if some sort of technology apocalypse occurred. I have a Facebook account which I check maybe once every couple of weeks and I can't remember the last time I posted anything on it. I do have a smart phone BUT I am pretty sure I don't take full advantage of it. I'll sometimes check my phone at four in the afternoon and see that a notification I got at midnight is still up because I haven't bothered opening my phone yet that day. I do use the internet quite a lot, it's where I get the news stories from the day and check my emails and peruse the blogs that I follow. And if you consider television a New Communication Technology than that brings my interactions with them up considerably. I've never been the first to jump on board with new communication technologies but after a while everyone you know is using them and you think if everyone else is using them it must be for a reason so you give it a try. I think the main reason I don't use social media such as Facebook or Twitter on a regular basis is I feel if I have something interesting to share I'd rather do it in person with someone I actually know, rather than online with people that I didn't really talk to when I went to school with them five years ago.

Week 1: Under what circumstances will new communication technologies become old communication technologies?

To me it would seem that once a communication technology has been replaced by an improved model the original technology is no longer considered a new communication technology because there is something better (in theory) available. Some examples of this are; DVDs replaced videotapes, Email replaced the Postal Service and Phones replaced Telegrams. Obviously a lot of what we consider old communication technologies are still viable and in fact used everyday by many people but they are no longer seen as new media. It seems to me that whilst the technologies we use currently are always being updated and improved upon there really isn't any new ground being broken in regards to a completely new form of communication technology. They can can improve the megapixels on your smart phones camera and do a little nip/tuck on the Facebook layout, but as far as creating a completely new form of communication technology I'd like to see how they can drastically change the entire experience. Of course that's probably something that a lot of incredibly clever people are working on at this very moment. I found a video on YouTube which looks into the possible direction communication technology will take and I shall attempt to link it to this blog...