Week 9 Tutorial

My online essay will be on the following topic :

The idea of the internet as cyberspace has been a part of our contemporary culture for some time, particularly in the popular medium of film. But is the concept of cyberspace still relevant to our contemporary society? Discuss with reference to your own experience of contemporary media.

Building learning communities in cyberspace

RM Palloff, K Pratt - 1999 - online2.org

I've chosen this particular journal article that refers mainly to the use of 'Virtual Classroom' which I've discussed at length with my parents who are both teachers. It also talks about the importance of student buy in which suggests these sorts of communities can exist online all they want but don't matter until people make the effort to get involved.

Building learning communities in cyberspace

RM Palloff, K Pratt - 1999 - online2.org

This journal will provide a good outline of how online communities were approached last decade. From the introduction and snippets I've read so far it seems to have a completely different outlook to what we are faced with now on the now (even more ) security conscious and media flooded internet.

Hollywood versus the Internet, media and entertainment industries in a digital and networked economy

A Currah - Journal of Economic Geography, 2006 - Oxford Univ Press

This journal extract talks about the distribution of films and television, how Hollywood has reacted to this new method, file sharing and how studios have tried to deal with this change.

The organizational underpinnings of contemporary media conglomerates

J Turow - Communication Research, 1992 - crx.sagepub.com

This journal extract ( edited further and published online in 2006) explains the differences between private and public domains and how we now have a new theory of how collective action can better account for certain contemporary phenomena.

The governance of cyberspace: politics, technology and global restructuring‎

by Brian Loader - Social Science - 1997


Specifically the chapters relating to policing cyberspace and theorising cyberspace. This journal is the outcome of a small conference held in Tennessee in 1995 , the political implications of a cyberspace and who is responsible.

Week 9 Lecture

Weeelll I wasn't actually at this lecture/tutorial due to various Dust and mother's car related issues. After reading through some other student's notes on Jason Nelson I'm pretty disappointed I didn't get to see what he had to say. Instead I've played through a few of his games and read what a few other people had to say about him. After playing around with his site , it immediately reminded me of the work a friend of mine has done/does now ( Tom Noakes, his showreel can be seen on Vimeo here ) because of his style and approach to a mixed medium which doesn't adhere to a certain genre or fixed theme.
I'll continue to play around with his creations and further investigate the idea of a "Cyber Poet" which is a term completely foreign to me.

Week 8 Lecture Notes

Well, there was no lecture this week due to the strikes so...
I read through Stephen's lecture notes and what I took from them was that we would have gone through Democracy on the internet ( e-democracy ) and how politics come into play online and in real life. I do News and Politics as another subject this semester and as part of it we're encouraged to keep up to date with particular politicians via their twitter, public facebook pages and various other outlets online and also tweet about our assignments and how we're progressing. I suppose politicians and others take the online route to approach a younger and more "technologically aware" demographic.

The part entitled "Citizen Hacker - Doing Global Democracy" I found most interesting as it's something you run into every day with the misconception of the term hacker and the stigma it carries. He touched on how ( the majority of ) hackers seek information and try to distinguish themselves from crackers and various other types of supposed criminals. The idea of The Hacker Ethic is quite interesting and the wikipedia article is actually quite comprehensive even if it is like some dude at the pub telling me the ins and outs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

Week 8 Tutorial Task

In the tutorial this week we were asked to do the following:

Sign an e-petition

Being that I have never signed an online petition for anything before that wasn't KFC Burger related, I decided to approach a more serious matter... The inclusion of LAN Multiplayer in the upcoming Blizzard release Starcraft 2, along with 179000 others. Like most other online petitions I've seen, I'm not entirely convinced that many people are concerned with this issue.

The petition can be found here.

Respond to a professional blogger at a major news site.

Every day on news.com.au I read the title of their blogs. Usually it is something scandalous from Bossy and then a bunch of gear about raising your kids right. However, today Splat!'s blog post was titled "Death metal in the desert".

This immediately made me think of a fantastic documentary ( produced by Vice magazine and vbs.tv ) called Heavy Metal in Baghdad, a great watch if you haven't seen. Completely irrelevant to the pictures of abandoned planes in the desert that Splat! ( Evan Maloney ) was referring to but I felt it necessary to at least draw his attention to some real death metal in the desert.

What is Barak Obama up to today?

@barak_obama hasn't tweeted since signing up despite having almost 68,000 followers.

In similar news Barack Obama held a press conference on the 23rd of September, the transcript of which can be found here.

He also appeared on Letterman the other night, here are some highlights

Find out who your local, state and federal representatives are.

State - Timothy Nicholls

Federal - Wayne Swan

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

Tim Nicholls spoke on the 16th of September regarding the sale of public assets.

What do you think of the Australian Government's plans to censor the internet (the so-called "Clean Feed")?

In a previous post I touched on my thoughts toward the clean feed, and to be honest I haven't heard much about it since it was brought to the public's attention ( read : my attention ) a couple of years ago. I think it's a horrible idea and none of the reasons 'for' this change appeal to me in any way. I don't like the idea of anyone censoring what I can view in any media be it film, music or the internet. Above all else the idea of a "channel based" ( for lack of a better description ) internet seems incredibly greedy and just another way for THE CORPORATE HATE MACHINE to control my life.

What place does censorship have in a democracy?

Democracy
1 a : government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections

In this article ( taken from Sydney Morning Herald website) Margo Kingston speaks about Censorship in a democracy, with the specific example of Harmony Korrine's film Ken Park which I've watched recently. She talks about the need for classification not censorship and also states "Democracies survive and thrive when they find ways to look at things that are confronting or disturbing or ugly or strange." which explains how I feel about someone making the decision for me as to what I can or can't view.

Week 7 Lecture - Creative Commons and Open Source

This weeks lecture focused on"Free Culture and Free Society" most specifically Creative Commons ( http://www.creativecommons.org ) and Open source/free license software.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that was formed in 2002. As far as I understand it, CC provides a license that allows people to distribute and share media as an alternative to conventional copyright where all rights are reserved. This means there is a way to get your work out there for others to see and allows others to work on manipulate it presumably for the better. Before the lecture I wasn't aware of Creative Commons, though I had seen the logo pasted in various places, so this was a nice eye opener to something good going on.

Open source software is something I have a little more experience in. Adam spoke about GNU and Linux mainly and a brief history, the idea of open source code and how it is written in Ruby.

The only experience I've had with open source operating systems is Red Hat and Knoppix, both of which result in my linux-savvy friends making fun of me. Homework was to use open source software for more than a week to see how we liked it. I've happy to say that for the last few years I've been using open-office.org and neo office on my computers. And I just did a bit of research regarding Mozilla as I'm sure I was using it in high school ( pre 2003 and pre Firefox ) however I can only remember it being referred to as Firefox since using it, so I'm not entirely sure when I made the switch.


** Edit - I changed the position of the picture up the top, which looked a whole lot nicer on my nice white editing background.
I might hunt down a fresh one at a later date.

Week 7 Tutorial Task

I'm a bit late to the party with this one.

We were asked to post a follow up 3 minute video from our last 1 minute video.

I'm hoping this is considered a "follow up" in that they're both hungover events from a Sunday and featuring the same individual, the irreplaceable Michael Beveridge.

I challenged him to make a vegan pie that wasn't bland and I would enjoy. The end of the video is a little vague and we got a little side tracked but suffice to say he failed, and it was as bland as it smelled.

A Vegan Pie from Rory Cox on Vimeo.

Week 6 Lecture Notes

This weeks Lecture was presented by Josh again and mainly based around consumption and production and specifically mobile content.

We covered how initially media was shared with the public primarily through the cinema, be it movies or newsreels before a feature, something i've only seen in movies and on The Simpsons. I was thinking about how if not everyone had a TV how it would be having 'neighbourhood viewings' in my lounge room and how frustrated they would get with me flipping through channels and yelling at MTV.

The fan films were something that I found quite entertaining, being a fan 28 days Later ( and weeks, being that Rose Byrne is my future wife) I've always hoped someone would carry on the franchise. The re-cuts we were shown of The Shining and Mary Poppins were fun, and similar to some re-cut trailers a friend of mine put before his short film ( '$quid' now a feature to be released soon, website here) where Tom Hanks' 'Big' was presented as a Thriller/Horror and Home Alone shown with Kevin ( McCaulley Culkin) as the bad guy, terrorising a couple of men in his neighbourhood.

In the tutorial itself we were looking at intellectual property and who owns the rights to the media that we choose to post on social networking sites , video and picture sites. In one of my previous posts I said that I'm not terribly worried about the information or photos of myself posted online but I was still interested in finding out who has the rights to use this information and photos.

Facebook for example state this in their Statement of Rights and Responsibilities;

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

A link to the entire Statement of Rights and Responsibilities - http://www.facebook.com/terms.php and also their Privacy Policy - http://www.facebook.com/policy.php