Networked Culture – lecture 6

{ January 31, 2007 @ 12:41 am } · { Uncategorized }
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Although I couldn’t make it to the lecture today because my baby had her first immunisation and was grumpy all day :(   I have read some people’s blogs and done the readings. I found the first reading very interesting and easy to read. I saw that a lot of the points in it related so much to me and could not believe how precise it was in terms of how I felt towards politics and the internet. I found it amazing that the number of Americans using the internet as their main source of political news has doubled since 2002, wow, I mean with all the media agencies such as BBC, FOX news….why are more and more people turning to the internet, as one teenager put it “if you want to find out stuff that people don’t want you to know you go to the internet”. In my personal opinion, the top-down model is disappearing, the new generation is looking for more ways to be involved in deciding for themselves when and how to engage with the media. Web2.0 has made this possible by the user generated content and blogging phenomena. We are practicing being reflexive individuals more than ever.

This is a very interesting site i recommend visiting it http://www.bushflash.com, it is an American anti-Bush site produced by young people with very interesting content.

I am finding this course very interesting and enjoying listening to the class discussions. Last week has been a turning point for me in terms of relating everything I do to our study, and I find that Mary’s teaching style is very interesting, there’s a lot to learn from her, I’m glad I enrolled in this course and got to be with such a great bunch of people.

UGC – user generated content

{ January 30, 2007 @ 12:37 pm } · { UGC }
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User-generated content (UGC) refers to various kinds of media content that is produced or primarily influenced by end-users; as opposed to traditional media producers, licensed broadcasters, and production companies. The term came into the mainstream during 2005 in web publishing and new media content production circles. It reflects the expansion of media production through new technologies that are accessible and affordable to the general public. These include digital video, blogging, podcasting, mobile phone photography and wikis. In addition to these technologies, user-generated content may also employ a combination of open source, free software and relaxed restrictions on intellectual property, which further diminish the barriers to collaboration, skill-building and discovery.

A blog in google relating somehow to this topic:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/domino-effect.html

information is cool

{ January 29, 2007 @ 10:10 pm } · { information }
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testing for categories and tagging

From Network Technology to Networked Society-lecture 5

{ January 24, 2007 @ 11:25 pm } · { Agency, communication, face to face, Internet blogs }
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Today’s lecture gave me relief! For the first time I could sit in the lecture and be able to comprehend the material, or some anyway. At the same time I found it interesting and it was great that some of the students were brave enough to speak up what probably some of us were thinking J

 

The first set of readings was daunting, but thankfully Mary has summarized the key points of the readings in the notes. What I found very interesting is the second topic for today, blogging.

Blogs are changing our perception of the truth – as illustrated by Riverbend – which is by the way a very interesting blog that I have started reading after hearing about it from a student in the lecture. Thanks to blogging, Riverbend has been able to tell the story of the falling of Baghdad. America can control the media, it can control what people can and cannot say, but can it control blogs? Probably not considering that recent estimates of blog sites is at 1.3 million and growing. Humans are gaining control of their agency – and are searching for ways to act as a reflexive individual. As Mary said in the lecture there is a lot of rubbish out there in the net but if we look carefully, there is a whole new world which cannot be experienced F2F- Class discussions are great and I personally benefit a lot from them, although I prefer to listen rather than contribute, but once we step outside the room who is benefiting from the discussion we had or the materials we learnt? Whereas the internet is endless, a single blog can attract millions of readers, many of who will talk about it to their friends and social network. The internet is allowing us to act as a freed-agent, we must take advantage of this opportunity. Over and out.

Changes in organisation of Knowledge, and Knowledge organisations – lecture 4

{ January 24, 2007 @ 11:23 pm } · { Uncategorized, web 2.0 }
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The invisible vs visible colleges, a very interesting topic and lecture today. For centuries humans have communicated through a formal channel, but it seems that we are gradually breaking out of this cycle and resorting to less formal structures for communicating ideas and knowledge.As for invisible colleges vs organizations of knowledge, its kind of like information and knowledge, one is a series of facts and relationships amongst them, the other is giving meaning, through an interpretation process.To sum up web1.0 vs web2.0, in web2.0 USERS ADD VALUE. But, only small numbers of users will go to such trouble, so web2.0 companies “set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data and building value as a side-effect of ordinary use of the application”. also a distinct feature of web2.0 is the fact that the systems or the sites get better the more people use them. They are dynamic and change thanks to the RSS technology, making the website a live web for example our soci245 website.                                                                                                                                      Another interesting fact about web2.0 is that its a site or product relies on advertising to promote it then it isn’t web2.0, in other words word-of-mouth advertising is the marketing tool that makes web2.0 so powerful.I guess what’s making web2.0 so popular is the fact that the media decides what’s important not “a few people in a back room” as O’Reilly puts it. People including scientist are turning to web2.0 to be free agents and not some obedient souls to standards, assessments, and accountability by some higher power

Shifting powers – lecture three

{ January 22, 2007 @ 5:20 pm } · { Internet blogs }
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“Faced with constantly changing conditions, the pressure for firms to innovate is enormous” Brown & Duguid (2000)

We are living in the New Economy dominated by knowledge & innovation. An idea can turn into a million dollars. An interesting examlpe is napster which was the first widely P2P music sharing service, here is an interesting video of the scene from the movie “the Italian job” which shows how the name napster came to exist

The death of the firm & the death of the distance are two major phenomenons that have emerged in the post-industrial society where it has never been easier to share knowledge regardless of where we are, and mega-companies such as amazon.com are proving that brick-and-mortar is no longer a characteristic of a successful business model.

  Weak links represent an important role in communication in the network society, imagine that any person in the world is only 6 persons away from us. They also give access to new information and make it easier for knowledge to flow.

Virtual spaces of information – Lecture 2

{ January 19, 2007 @ 12:24 pm } · { Internet blogs, online community, social interaction, virtual spaces }
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As I was reading through this week’s never ending but surprisingly interesting readings (I do not often take interest in reading for study), I thought to myself, this is the most relevant reading to what has been happening in our group blog. For example: the internet has become a place for social interaction, with an increasing number of people turning to the internet as a medium for interacting as opposed to Face-to-face, but according to our reading, Smith (1992) notes in a study that 50% of all messages were written by only 1% of the total population in a community so where is this interaction?? This poses another fact – most people are in the category of “lurkers” (limiting one’s participation to the passive role of a reader rather than also becoming a writer). I guess this can be related to our group blog in that some people are commenting (in a negative tone) that a lot of us sit in the lecture without contributing to the class discussions or the course blog, lurkers in their acts of reading what others have written without also writing themselves constitute significant information-gathering activities- Burnett (2000).
Another example is in Monday’s lecture during our small group discussion of the freed agent, one of our group members gave an example of a virtual community which she belonged to – which initially started out as an informational group about a certain actor and then turned into a social group, but the comment that mostly caught my attention was that “topics on the actor only constitute around 1% of the conversation”, this directly supports Marchionini’s suggestion that most of the activity of online forums is recreation rather than information seeking.  I conclude this blog with the fact that many can argue for the internet as the 21st century F2F medium, and many can argue against this, who’s side am I on, both. As much as I like F2F, I cant deny the fact that I am part of many virtual communities.

The Internet as a social entity – lecture1

{ January 9, 2007 @ 12:43 pm } · { communication, Internet blogs }
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 Today’s lecture was interesting as we do not often think of how the internet affects our social structures and our lives.

 I found it very interesting, and a bit scary at the same time that society is being driven rather than driving technology and technological development. This great phenomenon “the internet” is supposed to help us and solve all of our problems. How can it if we as individuals cannot change the nature of technology??

In regards to Castells readings, extensive studies show that the internet has a positive effect on social interaction, I always viewed internet to be leading to social isolation, but facts and studies from the reading convinced me otherwise. Some of these facts are firstly that e-Mail represents over 85% of Internet usage, E-mail is a form of communication between family and friends, workmates and the community, secondly, the analysis by Katz, Rice, and Aspden found that internet users interact more socially than non-users.

We as individuals do not practice much agency – we are regulated by laws, assessed by our teachers and considered the “dumb user” which needs to be guided without questioning… but with the rise of blogs, internet communities, youtube…. we as individuals are becoming active in the shaping of the social environment through networks and the internet.

I look forward to comments on this topic. See you all next lecture :)

Hello world!

{ January 8, 2007 @ 11:12 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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