Week 5

This week’s lecture gave a good insight into Wikipedia and its credibility. It was learned that Wikipedia is not a credible, scholarly source. This is evident as shown in the articles written about Steve Stockwell and Lee Cox which held no truthfulness whatsoever. Whereas there are people employed to screen everything that is written to ensure truthfulness and credibility, articles are being posted at such a fast rate that these editors cannot keep up.

A short story – Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges was read as well. Although quite hard to understand, the story explored ideas of a made up country, Uqbar, and how by creating false knowledge, truth is altered and people can start to believe it without physical proof.

Important notes included:
Correspondence Theory: Just the facts - observable, measurableCoherence Theory: Does it fit together and make sense?Performative Theory: I do declare
Social Theory: What can we agree on?

Tutorial Task
Walter Benjamin’s ideas in “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” do apply to contemporary digital media as it discusses new forms of communication in comparison to old forms eg. Audiences seeing everything in a play in comparison to the highly edited forms of entertainment watched nowadays, in the forms of television and movies.
Now that anyone with a computer can create things digitally (music, images, videos, etc), art is starting to lose its authenticity. Artworks made in the past suffer in physical condition and change ownership many times. Digital art can always be produced as many times as needed as well as updated – therefore losing its authenticity.
For this reason, photo shopped images are not authentic.
Also, it was found that digital things do not have an aura, as said by Benjamin, “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” He further explains that “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.” Really, once a work of art is reproduced, the original loses its value as everyone has access to their own copy at much cheaper prices.

Week 4

This week’s lecture reflected upon Old Communication Technologies, with the lecture starting off with a look at an old rock scribing featuring animals in different positions with several humans scattered over the piece. Whereas the meaning of the work was unclear, it was still interesting to note the way humans communicated in that age.
Also discussed was the origins of the alphabet, ancient texts and jumping forward many years, print, telegraph, telephone, radio, cinema etc.
The subject of semiotics was also brought up, which seemed interesting, followed by the perspectives of several notable theorists.

During the tutorial this week, a scavenger hunt was conducted with the answers as follows; (Some were not found)


1.
2. Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian inventor with a degree in electronics, science and mathematics, invented the paperclip in 1899. http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blpaperclip.htm
3. The disease is caused by infection with Ebola virus, named after a river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) in Africa, where it was first recognized. http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/spb/mnpages/dispages/ebola/qa.htm
4. The largest recorded earthquake in the world was a magnitude 9.5 (Mw) in Chile on May 22, 1960. http://www.cdli.ca/CITE/earthquakes_what.htm
5. 1,073,741,824 kilobytes in a terabyte; the power: 2^30 http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/
6. Ray Tomlinson http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/bhhall/e124/e124emailinvention.pdf
7. A fast-spreading bot/virus that participates in a network of infected computers and allows a hacker to control your computer http://resnet.ucsd.edu/stormworm.shtml Heise Security estimates that, as of early August 2007, 1.7 million computers were infected worldwide as part of a massive botnet, and that number has surely escalated since then. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070902-storm-worm-adds-millions-of-computers-to-botnet.html
8.
9. Veteran Rex http://www.brispop.com/index.cfm?action=dsp_bio&artistID=611
10.

Also in the tutorial, the question was asked as to how search engines rank the stuff they find on the internet. I found this brief description on http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/6-10-2005-71368.asp

“It's common knowledge that Google relies heavily
on inbound relevant links to rank a site. Now they explain exactly how it works.
As well as the number, quality and anchor text factors of a link. Google
seems to also consider historical factors. Apparently the Google 'sandbox' or
aging delay begins count down the minute links to a new site are discovered.
Google records the discovery of a link, link changes over time, the speed at
which a site gains links and the link life span."

Another useful site I found entitled “Search Engine Ranking Factors” which was put together by 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization and included 200+ ranking factors. Although too long to be summarised in this blog, it is of much value and is recommended for reading. The site is:http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

When asked what our favourite search engine is, I decided have found Google to be my favourite search engine, for the simple fact that it provides a vast array of information closely related to the searched subject matter.

Week 3

This week’s lecture provided time for us to watch Jean Luc Godard’s film Alphaville, made in 1965. The film centres around a detective agent from the ‘Outlands’ who enters Alphaville – a large area controlled by Professor Von Braun and an obscenely large computer referred to as Alpha-60. The great power of Alpha-60 has caused citizens of Alphaville to lose the ability to think, feel and love. The movie was quite hard to understand, but the main issue derived from the it was that of ever changing and evolving technology and its impact on humans. It stirred thought as to the perceptions of the movie at the time of it's release. In 1965 the issues and ideologies explored would have been outlandish and hard to digest, whereas we now look back over thirty years later to find the technologies are now standard and widely accessed, although the computer has not yet managed to take over human thought. Once getting past the initial frustrations of subtitles, novice special effects and the like, the movie can be appreciated for it's artistic value and important place in the realm of communication and technology.

In this week’s tutorial the film Alphaville was discussed. Also touched on were the views on the movie from 1965 as opposed to today. It was found that the ideas the film presented would have seemed obscene and outlandish to those who viewed the film in 1965, but are now looked viewed as old and basic, with technology having evolved in leaps and bounds since the film’s making.
Also, the blogs were worked on, and a new feature of ‘friend adding’ was discovered. This will enable students to share ideas, provide constructive critisism and form an interactive online presence.

Week 2

Clearly email is not dead. This became apparent in week two’s lecture after reviewing the results of the New Communication Technology survey. Around 60% of survey participants say email has its place, many of whom are using email on a weekly basis. With 81% of survey takers saying they like having a wide range of information available to them as opposed to the 16% who feel overloaded, it looks as if the internet is more than useful. Pew Internet (Pew Internet & American Life Project) was of great use during the lecture, giving insight into the many uses the internet has, as well as examples of positive attitudes towards the internet.

Despite the many benefits the internet provides for us, awareness was raised the lecture as to just how many scams are presently operating via the internet. Phishing, spam, empty promises and thousands of inappropriate advertisements bombard email accounts on a daily basis. Privacy is imperative and personal details, especially bank details, must never be given out on the internet.

Are bloggers journalists? This was also a question of much discussion brought up in the lecture. An interesting point of thought was whether bloggers have the qualifications to be a journalist and if so, do they have morals or ethics they must abide by? Because of the increasing number of bloggers sharing their opinion on present issues, information sources are becoming unreliable due to the sharing of incorrect or bias viewpoints – something that must be considered when researching for assignments.

In tutorial, the week’s lecture was discussed and blog accounts were set up. Also, the ‘save as’ issue was covered and now all students are aware of where documents can be saved, with up to 50 megabytes available. Some issues occurred with students being unable to log in, and some automatically being logged out which proved the idea bought up in the lecture in that caution must be taken as technology is not 100% reliable.