Reflection of a Weblog

To reflect upon my initial feelings on blogging, would mean filling the rest of this page up with expletives. After having a breif read over some other peoples blogs I find that similar to them, my feelings have changed. I now see the power of the weblog as an efficient and effective communication device. Blogs can be an open forum for everything from public ranting to political activism. They allow you to defy the boundaries of proximity to reach a large global audience through an open an interactive medium.

As they are interactive blogs have distinct advantages over traditional paper journals which have restricted viewing opportunities (you need the physical copy, you can't just google it). Blogs are active, whereas traditional journals are passive viewing only. With blogs readers can activley interact witht the blog by posting comments or following links. Blogs use colour and graphics, even video to enhace the way they present and communicate their message. (Even though my computer would disconnect from the internet EVERYTIME I posted a picture/tried to edit a post with a pic in it and NOT SAVE THE EDIT!!!!!!!! Hence a lack of graphics in this blog) There is also the advantage of search functions so you can eaisly find exactly what your looking for.

Of course the pendulum swings both ways. Although you can access your blog anywhere with an internt connection, you can't carry it aroung with you, what if there's no internet connection? Keeping this weblog was a very long and sometimes ardorous task. A lot more involved than simply making a few notes in a journal, and you're never gooing to have a problem with your paper journal not saving any ammendments you make.

I think creating a public forum for my ideas is a great if I have something intesting or worthwhile to say, otherwise it's really just a waste of time and space. But hey, thats the beauty of the blog compared to mainstream media, it's not shoved down our throat. Because of programs such as 'blogger' blogs are easy to use and anyone can start one, but not everyone has to read it!

Many of the other blogs seem more involved and mabey some people enjoyed doing it a lot more than others, what can I say they're all different. But that's what happens when you gave people free autonomy to create something isn't it? They'll all end up different. Another beauty of the blog.

Although I may not continue this blog, this will not be the end of my blogging career. So until next time, I blog you farewell...

New Media Culture Technology

What drew me into this reading was the relatinoship between technology and social/cultural pursuits. A recurring theme I find blindingly regurgitated by left wing pinkos (such as these guys) is that we are all mindless consumers, victims of 'consumerism' and 'corporatism' etc. etc. and that this is bad with no real offer of fact to back up these claims. Yet here is an article that may give some credence to such claims, however further investigtaion reveals that this is in fact not the case, or even if it is, it's really not that bad...

"Technology no longer served the interests of humanity, but rather we served the interests of technology and the corporations that were connected to those technologies. Part of the effect of the technologies most associated with cultural pursuits, according to Adorno and Horkheimer in particular, was an obliteration of cultivated thinking. Whether it was film or popular music, the populace was blinded by the sheer sensation and drawn in by the banality of the entertainment to not see their true interests." (Marshall, p.3)

However with the advent of the microchip and the creation of the digital divide, such conclusions seem less bleak. McLugan provides us with some intriguing insights. Particuarly when applied to new media.

1) McLuhan thought of technology as an extension of our senses. Moreover, he saw emerging
with electronic technology the capacity to connect intelligence or the actual outering of the
nervous system into an elaborate network.

2) McLuhan's terminology of hot and cold media. Cool media allowing for audience interaction and the audiences as participants complete it's form and meaning.

3) McLuhan's insight that it is more significant to think of medium rather than content. If we concentrate on what the medium does we can extrapolate its future in terms of its uses and how it transforms the social world, and how things such as games an the internet shape us indiviudually and socially.

This reminds me of a quote by a young boy I posted previously "As we grow technology grows with us, like brother and sister." New Media Technology is not a one way consumption culture. It is interactive and participatory, connective and empowering.

The two weaknesses in McLuhan's technological determinist approach to the way technology shapes society are most definatley valid, as too much emphasis should not be placed on one factor in shaping society and social or political factors should not be overlooked. But McLuhan's thinking still gives insight into how technology emerges.

We use technological apparatus to develop new relatiionships with the world. Be it GPS guidance in cars, digital cameras, DVD's or MP3 players, Marshall explains that these seemingly diverse technologies are all related. According to Marshall, the regularity of the use of the digital machines is that we have naturalized the expansive presence of the digital and the microchip in the way that we move through the world. The interaction with the digital technology become second nature to our being and normalize ideal forms of interaction.

New technological apparatus evolve through complex political, social, economic and cultural conditions, and our social, political, cultural and economic institutions evolve with them in a new form of Techno-Darwinism.
Technology is not evil, its evolution.

From Door-to-Door to All Over the Place

Reading Wellmans insight into the rise of networked individualism has reminded me of my own recent, and now very obvious transition from a distinctly door-to-door community, to a place-to-place community. This

I spent the first fews years of my university life living at a college on campus. Like most others I had just moved to Brisbane and only knew a few people, thus my new social network was formed primarily by people at College. This was very much a door-to-door community. There was no need for computers to communicate, everyone lived in a single locale and everybody knew everyone else. However, naturally my time spent there would come to an end and very similar to the phenomena described by Wellman (allbeit on a much smaller scale, as outside the college environment we were all already involved in place-to-place communities) there was an evolution of the college social networks from a door-to-door community to a place-to-place computer supported network.

We were now spread out geographically and became dependent on technology such as mobile phones, email, MSN and cars to communicate. Now we were in a place-to-place networked community. I mean, I knew who my immediate neighbours were but beyond that relied on computer power to maintain social connections. Several of the implications that have been outlined by Wellman which could be clearly observed were;

• active maintenance of people’s sparsely-knit ties and fragmented
  networks. By contrast, it is easier for people in groups to sit back and let
  group dynamics and densely knit structures do the work. That is why
  friendship networks are less apt than kinship networks to persist in times
  of overload.

It was now necessary to activley maintain relationships as you would not see literally everyone several times a day on a daily basis.

• a shift in the proportion of interactions away from those based on
  ‘ascriptive’ characteristics people are born with - such as age, gender, race
  and social class - and towards those based on ‘achievcd’ characteristics
  that they have adopted throughout the life course - such as lifestyles,
  shared norms and voluntary interests.

For example, some people graduated and began full time work, thus underwent significant lifestyle changes.

• reduced identity and pressures of belonging to groups.

As people were no longer geographically tied, there was no longer the pressure of also being sociall tied.

I find this transition interesting as it is an example of how a theoretical phenonema described in the readings and lecture, whether I liked it or not, played itself out in my real life. It's not like I'd decided, 'right I've had enough of door to door, I'm gonna go try living in a place to place community', that is just what happened.

Identifying and understanding such trends can be important tools for marketers/advertisers as they show how people interact and communicate, thus revealing how best to target specific markets.

All this reminds me of an old zen proverb...

"If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understant, things are just as they are..."

Blogger Ethics

Nearing the end of our blogging saga, I felt compelled to read over the weblog marking sheet. After reading the critera; Demonstrates an awareness of the role of reflection in critical thinking and ethical communication practice.

I was slighlty confused as to what exactly 'demonstrating an awareness of the role of reflection in ethical communication practices' actually meant. This lead me to thinking, what about ethical blogging? A responsible blogger should recognize that what they are publishing is being made public, thus they are constrained by certain ethical obligations to their readers, the people they write about, and society in general (for more on this click here).

After googling the term 'ethical blogging' I came across a sample bloggers code of ethics.

Bloggers Code of Ethics

1. I will tell the truth.
2. I will write deliberately and with accuracy.
3. I will acknowledge and correct mistakes promptly.
4. I will preserve the original post, using notations to show where I have made changes so as to maintain the integrity of my publishing.
5. I will never delete a post.
6. I will not delete comments unless they are spam or off-topic.
7. I will reply to emails and comments when appropriate, and do so promptly.
8. I will strive for high quality with every post – including basic spellchecking.
9. I will stay on topic.
10. I will disagree with other opinions respectfully.
11. I will link to online references and original source materials directly.
12. I will disclose conflicts of interest.
13. I will keep private issues and topics private, since discussing private issues would jeopardize my personal and work relationships.

So there you go, it's all pretty straight foward although I'm sure there's much more to say on the issue thats all I have time for today. However click here for a brief and interesting analysis of this code of ethics by a blogger called Elliot Black.

Chat Session Reflection

Had first assessable chat session. Found these discussions the most interesting we've had in Virtual Cultures all year, probably because we got to choose our own topics. I think having discussions online makes it a very relaxed form of assessment. It's also good as the discussion involves everyone and you can see just how well your grasping the units content in relation to everybody else. It seemed to me as if we were all on par. Well done teachers.

However, I originally thought that having text based chat would give people enough time to formulate long responses, but I found that as there are so many people involved the chat moved so fast that there wasn't enough time for these. Sometimes you'd be in the middle of writing and by the time you got to the end of what you were saying, the topic had completly changed, thus the chat was dominated by those who could type the fastest, not necessarily those who had the most to say.

My suggestion would be to use a forum based chat as it still gives students the opportunity to interact in an online environment however as it is not real time no one will be disadvantaged. Mabey we could create our own KCB201 Virtual Community and be assessed on our participation in it?

Internet Protocol

In the Internet, there is no central node, and only minimal centralized
management structure, limited to a few housekeeping
functions such as standards setting.
-PAUL UARAN

We all know the internet, the world wide web, the decentralisation of information, connecting people all over the globe. It can't be governed, it can't be controlled....or can it?

The answer is yes, kind of. But how can control exist in a decentralised network? Cue Alexander Galloway 'Protocol: how control exists after decentralisation'. Now this was a full-on reading. Despite being more difficult to engage with than previous readings, it did give me an appreciation of the importance of internet protocol, which was something I previously hadn't given much thought to other than the fact that it probably existed.

"Protocol is a type of controlling logic that operates outside institutional, governmental, and corporate power." (Galloway, p.6). It was quite amazing to read how the internet, a massive decentralised network that is used by millions of people everyday is in fact 'controlled' by a small group of techno-elite peers, such as the IETF. I also enjoyed the description of those who write protocol as “an ad-hocracy of intensely creative, sleep-deprived, idiosyncratic, well-meaning computer geniuses.”

This reading revealed just how complex protocol can be, that the internet is in fact based on a principle of control, however a control centered on universalism and of homogeneity. That it must promote standardization in order to enable openness.

Thankfully someone else is taking care of it is all I can say...

Tutorial Chat 1

Had our first practice chat session in the tute today. A rather interesting observation I noted was that we were talking about the differences between online vs. offline personas, anonymous vs. identifiable, and that as we were all only identified by our student numbers, we were in effect anonymous to each other in the virtual world and that were in fact having the most in depth chat we had had about any topic in any tute so far. I guess because there is less chance of embarassment infront of peers for not knowing what you are talking about. Particuarly due to some of the complex theories we address in vitrual cultures.