Monday 7 January 2008

Moral Panics and Concerns with Online Technology

Social Networking...is it taking over? The internet being created into a more and more reliable source for communication or online socialising. Games like Second Life show the start of an online world where anything can be achieved, life itself is being turned into a cyber-life, where all form of communication can be carried out via computer and nothing else seems necessary to most people. Some good examples of growing online socialising companies include Myspace, Facebook, Second Life, World of Warcraft an more. Although easier to use etc. it is not as reliable as a real-life exchange of whatever the subject or object is and problems can occur which can effect people financially or moraley. People are starting to interact differently in that face-to-face interactivity is becoming less and less necessary and people use, games, blogs, online profiles and other forms of social networking to achieve there goals be it financialy, personal, information or general conversation. Large services, such as MySpace, often work with law enforcement to try to prevent such incidents. There is an issue over the control of data - information having been altered or removed by the user may in fact be retained and/or passed to 3rd parties.

Future for online technology

1. Chris De Wolfe is the Co-founder of myspace, a social netowrking site which allows users to transfer there offline lives onto screen. he believes that the future of social networking will become 'infinitely more personal, more portable, and more collaborative'. He predicts that social netowrking will more or less take over the world as it becomes more portable (use via mobile phones etc). He believes a new generation of developers will lead to a more collaborative and dynamic web and directly affect the tools and feature sets available on socially-based sites. Quote; 'the evolution of social networks is kick-starting a broad global shift for how people, content and culture collide on the web'.

2. Chad Hurley is the Co-founder of the most widely used video broadcasting site in the world; Youtube and he explains that his companies goal is to get users to the centre of their video experience, allow users to gather more information and overall create the world a smaller place by this means of communicating. Chad Hurley is a positive technologival determinist as although i think there is plenty of media communications available on the internet and that 'creating the world into a smaller place' by this means is another way to see that we are misusing the planet, he means to do good by his morale thoughts and by the majority of the world.

3. Maurice Levy says that the challenge for advertisers is to become a lot more creative and to start thinking/portraying creativity now, something that is avialable both digitally and analogue. 'Liquid media' is where you can move seamlessly in and out of different settings compared to 'linear media' where you can only go through the object in the A-B... order it is set out in.

4. Norvig parallels Edison's invention of electricity with the development of online technology in terms of searching for information in that Edison created electricity thinking of how useful it would be to him and others around, but did not think of how many ways it could be used, and never would of considered some of the applications we use electricity in today. This parallels with the development of online technology in that the development people make within online technology is another step to the unknown and that the online applications could be used for any unknown future ideas.

5. A current developing issue today is creating an internet link to southern and eastern Africa via an undersea connection but a lack of infrastructure and lack of money in such places limits its oppurtunites. There is a limited national infrastructre which will limit internet development from now till 2012. But mobile telephoney has exploded the African market into one of the fastest growing markets in the world, and with SMS available it can provide financial, agricultural, health, and other information services. A digital divide is evident now in this world as digital technology takes over there is less and less reason for any personal meetings as such, and more availability to communicate, transfer and propel through this form of technology.

New Media

New Media

Digitality - new way of gathering imformation, binary (on or off).
Interactivity - new ways of streaming compressed information (satellite). 'Interactive'!
Hypertextuality - organisation of texts, no longer linear, shuffling, jumping wherever you likein the data.
Dispersal - to do with how the inofrmation is shared and communiacted. Increasing market for producers
Virtuality - ideas linking with the real and represenation (iconography), virtual worlds can be represenational.
Convergence - big issue, new technologies and merging into one, mp3 players showing photo's, phones that can e-mail etc. SIZE MATTERS!

Audience?
Regulation and Control?
Ownership?