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

Week 6...

Our week 6 tutorial task was to make a short video and embed it into our blog.

About 3a.m last night I decided to flip through the media I had sitting on my mac because I'd never given iMovie a go. After a bit of messing about with themes, wipes, recording a shitty introduction in Photobooth and putting music to the clip I pieced together a pretty unattractive look at a lazy Sunday afternoon in Newstead watching a man drink a lot of milk...

1501 Week 6 Tutorial from Rory Cox on Vimeo.

I chose to upload to vimeo over my photobucket or youtube account because I have a fewfriends who host their short films and skate films there and it seems like a nicer place on the net...

Good Lord this is Ugly

I just had a quick look at my blog and realised how hideous it is.

Sorry to anyone with as empty a life as me who wants to browse my musings...

Might give it a quick makeover in the next couple of days, some structure and less walls of text might help.

quiz questions

I'm a little late on this one;

Tutorial task for week 4.

To try find out the answers to these questions without Wikipedia or Google... I tried my best...

1. What did Alan Turing wear while riding his bicycle around Bletchley Park?
He wore a gas mask

I Popped this into ask.com and actually received another student's blog as the first result and thieved it from there. I think they used

alta vista )

2. On what date did two computers first communicate with each other? Where were they?

Sept 1969 – First node at UCLA

Oct 1969 – Second node at Stanford – They communicate for the first time

Searched in PCWebopedia - which im 90% sure just searches in google for just their url. I'm going to pretend I didn't notice the likeness.

3. What is Bill Gates’ birthday and what age was he when he sold his first software?
Born on October 28, 1955. I could only find that he created his first software when he was 13, not necessarily sold?

Microsoft.com , a little boring.

4. Where was the World Wide Web invented?
Switzerland.

yahoo! Answers

5. How does the power of the computer you are working on now compare with the power of a personal computer from 30 years ago?
In June 1979 - Apple Computer introduces the Apple II Plus, with 48 kB memory, for US$1195.

2009 - Using a 13'' Macbook Pro 2.53ghz dual core, 4gb RAM , 250gb SATA drive etc US$1499

Typing out that price is always a little depressing - apple.com and another ask.com result.

6. What is the weight of the largest parsnip ever grown?
8 pounds 6 ounces.

A simple lycos search led me to http://www.vintageassessments.com/vd/rawf_2003.html

7. When did Queensland become a state and why is the Tweed River in New South Wales?
Became a State on June 6, 1859. It separates QLD and NSW and I couldn't find info to suggest it lied in/belonged to either state.

Got from my brother's high school Jacaranda atlas, sitting on the table in front of me for some unknown reason.

8. What was the weather like in south-east Queensland on 17 November 1954?
Wet, Rainy, Cyclonic.

I asked my Dad.

9. Why is is Lord Byron still remembered in Venice?
I succumbed to wiki for this one after a bit of searching ; I could only really find some info on him naming the Bridge of Sighs in Venice and also google returned another Griffith NCT student's blog who had;

"He was a leading poet, and commonly known as the "Don Juan De Marko" of Venice, for his romance and antics with women." , Not sure where she got that from though.

Wikipedia/Google

10. What band did Sirhan Chapman play in and what is his real name?
Black Assassins and his name is Stephen Stockwell.

Fantastic.

week 4! Search engines etc...

I honestly can't remember what I used in the time leading up to me discovering google. I know as a primary school student in the mid 90's I vaguely recall arguing with my friends about whether Alta Vista or Lycos was better and the misguided attempt at marketing to kids that yahooligans! was. We're asked how search engines work, and being a bit of internet fiend I'm surprised I've never investigated in any length before. I ran into a number of sites that seem to throw out the same words to describe how search engines operate and return results;

Getting indexed and keyword density ;

One of the the main rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Call it the location/frequency method, for short.

Also a number of complex algorithms written by very intelligent men that I'll never understand.

Ranking of returned results

Wikipedia's explanation for ranking results ( complete with embedded links thanks wiki!):

By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce

the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs.SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms..

Some sites I came across that give some interesting info on who search engines work:

20 Ways Search Engines May Rerank Search Results

Top 5 Ranking Factors in 2009

These days, I'll always use google. I've had a bit of a bash around with Bing and if I'm at work I'll jump on yahoo for a client's sake ( a lot of them seem to use it as a search engine, so if I ask them to search for something I like to see what they're seeing) , but nothing stands up to google for me in terms of simplicity and ease of use. Imagesearch, blogsearch and other parameters I can put on my search make it better than anything else I've found.

something i'll never understand...

Yesterday in the tutorial we checked out some online worlds , most of us got involved in Activeworlds. Having never engaged in a 3d chat program before ( Outside of WoW ), I was pretty disappointed with how it all plays out. You log into an awfully rendered 3d world, presumably fly around chatting to people you ( for the most part ) don't know and build up some sort of reputation and potentially build a house or buy yourself nice things.

Now I've spent far too many hours in the World of Warcraft to judge someone for sitting in front of their computer pretending to be someone else but...

This seems to be a way for people who are so unsatisfied with their life they feel the need to project their ideal image of themselves onto the internet for nothing ( or very little) in return. I make the comparison to WoW as it's the closest I have, and as hollow and insignificant as they may sound the achievements and sense of accomplishment one can feel in a game knowing they are better than someone else , or having bested a challenge laid out to them by a developer seems to far outweigh anything I could hope to feel by purchasing a couch for my imaginary house or deciding on my skin tone and which one of Dennis Nedry's shirts I'm going to wear *big breath in*.

/rant.

social networking/ web 2.0

Week 5 lecture was presented by Adam on New Media, Social Media and the idea of web 2.0 .

He first went through how the internet used to be a way for people to share ideas with each other and communicate with others who have similar interests. While this still occurs today, the net is full of new virtual communities, an ego-centric social network where the focus has moved away from groups of people with common interests and settled on people posting about themselves.

The idea of web 2.0 and how the internet is all about me is something that both excites and frustrates me. Like the fellows from the twitter cartoon we watched I get annoyed that I suffer this constant barrage of mundane info from my friends, but I guess I put myself in this position by signing up in the first place so who am I to complain ?

We're asked what would happen if facebook or myspace were to disappear tomorrow?

I guess my inner voyeur would be a little disappointed, no more scoping babes when I've got nothing else to do... But these networks for me are a little redundant. Fortunately I post on a number of very active forums that house a lot of people who share the same interests as me and I'm treated to the information and discussion I want to read without the dribble ( not to say it isn't interesting from time to time). And the people I don't speak to often on these forums are just a click away on my msn or phone now that everyone is on a mobile cap they will never reach.

I'd suggest there'd be a lot of very lost individuals without this little outlet they have and the convenient way they can keep a tab on their friends and within days we'd have an alternative.

Social networking ...

Social networking was something I scoffed at after leaving school and refused to get actively involved with.

I created a myspace profile in the beginning purely so I could search for bands myspace pages and check out photos of my friends in 2002, a year before finishing school. I actually created my page in that I added photos and an "About Me" etc in 2005 when a forum I often read had a thread to link to your myspace, and I felt I should get amongst it.
I started using Facebook due to all of my friends switching to it from myspace, and that was only in December of last year that I made the switch. Submitting to peer pressure I guess was the main cause for me deciding to move my life online.

My personal privacy isn't a huge issue for me,if my photos are tagged and they're a little embarrassing or incriminating I'm likely to untag myself on Facebook/Myspace, and I'll usually only upload pretty tame photos of myself and others. Privacy isn't really a concern to me but I know that it's an issue for others so I try to be as respectful as I can to them. I personally don't really mind what info of mine is used by google or whoever, being that if I've decided to share this information on the internet I'm pretty comfortable with it being seen by whoever wants to take the time to find it.

As for meeting people from the net, I play a lot of online games so there have been hundreds of people I've known over the years throughout Australia and the world . I've met a lot of them over the last couple of years and have lived with someone who I'd known for 3 years on the internet but never met in real life when he needed a place to live in Brisbane and we had a spare room. A lot of people I know I've met through other friends, but have also had interaction with on the internet before meeting them . I've never been in a particularly awkward situation with any of these people as a result of only knowing them through various online networks but especially with gamers there can be a social barrier due to the fact that a lot of them don't spend a great deal of time interacting with other people.

This seemed as appropriate as any a video to link to after my little rant, a bit dated now but caught my eye back when the whole "No Clean Feed" topic was pretty hot on the net:

The Internet!

Too much of my life in recent years has been consumed by the internet, be it sifting through 6 months of Kevin Smith twitter updates or getting lost in Azeroth until the wee hours.

Since 1994 when my Dad came home with the fresh 28,800 dial up modem I've been intrigued with everything relating to the internet and how certain people deal with it and how some people abuse it. I'm a little upset we didn't get to touch on the lecture that was missed from the course outline due to the Ekka but I've had a bit of a browse around and asked some of my friends for their take on how the internet has affected their learning and how it's involved with their every day lives.

There are a number of arguments for the internet and the positive effect it has on people's lives and the world in general. The Internet as we know it has allowed us to communicate on an entirely new level with 24/7 news and information and the ability to find out what we want whenever we want. I guess there are arguments for and against social networking but say what you want it's definitely changed the way people can interact with each other , and in a good way in my opinion. From a personal point of view, access to the internet has allowed me to view my interests in a whole new light. A passion for gaming and film is fed online, and fortunately the nerds of the world share my interests feeding me with pages on pages of news, hype and ultra-biased opinions on everything from actors they hate to leaked information ( World of Warcraft expansion? Blizzcon this weekend and a lot will come to light I suppose ) from data mining and "hacking".

I suppose it's only fair to touch of a few reasons why some people aren't so keen on the internet. In our course material we were linked to this news story outlining the security fears that some people ( like the Police ) have regarding the internet. While all sorts of crime occurs on the net whether it's credit card fraud, identity theft or the more traditional "hacking" (I guess generally resulting in theft of some sort?), it strikes me as odd that people would even play with the idea of getting rid of the internet entirely , at least in the form we are accustomed to. People put their information on the internet for other people to see. There are varying degrees to which they do so obviously as you only want certain people to have access to this infomation. The problem arises when those who aren't supposed to have access to this information , gain access to it. The obvious solution is to never put this information out there for these criminals to gain access to, but then everyone would lose this ultra convenient tool everyone has just assumed would be there whenever they want it. How can we have the best of both worlds? Where i can safely buy my Back to the Future action figures from America without fear of some dude in Romania buying a plane ticket with my credit card? And post pictures of my kids swimming at the beach without them winding up on 4chan being chased by pedobear? I don't know but I'm sure there are much smarter men than me getting paid lots of money to find other solutions.

For the moment I guess we will deal with what we have and as far as I see it : If you are willing to put your life on the internet for people to see , or take the risk of ordering things from Nigeria on your Mother's credit card, you deal with the potential consequences of doing so.

We've all been scammed in one way or another online but just like walking through the City on a Wednesday night with no government curfue telling me I have to be sitting at home inside, people just need to use common sense and regular caution when approaching the internet and know what they're putting out there has the potential to be seen by other parties. I guess that begs the argument that certain companies have a duty to protect our information but i might go into that another time because I'm sitting in bed writing this when I should be sitting in my news and politics lecture.

first post from tut #1!

I'm not sure where to start with this being my first foray into blogging , I've linked to a few of my favourite blogs ( or at least I will link to them as soon as I can figure out the gadget tool within blogger! ) and hopefully I'll draw some inspiration from them. Perhaps a small introduction to who I am, and why I'm choosing to do this course...

My name is Rory Cox, I'm a 23 year old ( first semester ) Arts Student. I have an interest in music, FIlm/Television and sports which may be apparent from my choice of links. I'm doing this course hopefully to learn how to write effectively for an internet audience, being out of study for the last 3 years putting my thoughts into text for someone to actually read and take in is something I think I'm going to struggle to get back into the swing of. 

I'll begin my reflection on course material with today's lecture which went through a brief history of computing and the internet. Having done a course in the past that centred on the history of computing, it was interesting to see another take on the subject and what Stephen/ Adam felt were the more important and significant moments to include. Unfortunately we didn't get through the content that was outlined in the lecture notes nor the video that Stephen had planned for us to get through so it's something I'll be getting onto this evening.