Copyright has been a hot topic for debate in the maedia world for sometime now. People are either fighting for the freedom to share and obtain information freely or for theree to be restrictions on the available content. There are so many ways in which people are able to obtain music, movies, and other content. Bittorrent files are the most popular way of downloading illegal content and the most popular sight being 'The Pirate Bay'. This site allows you to download games, software, movies, music and TV shows with all the copyright of the contents being breeched but it is nonetheless still a very popular sight for downloads.
One of the biggest questions raised under the topic of copyright is of copyright reform, 'Do we need to enforce copright reform?' The two sides of the argument look at how putting reform in place means that content will be less accessable which will in turn create a better time for the industries. The other side of the coin is that imposing this suggested reform means that the community created through downloading will be broken and materials much less obtainable.
Copyright infringment is a big problem all over the world as people download more content illegally than they do legally. The indusrties that suffer the most are the music indusrty, film industry and the TV industry. People (especially in the UK and US) tend to download TV programmes and movies illegally because they want to see them first. This impacts on DVD and CD sales, they dip and sometimes plumet due to the record numbers of people downloading. Piracy is also another element that goes hand in hand with copyright. In the last few year piracy has sky-rocketed! People are downloading more and more in recent years meaning piracy has become common place. Which in my opinion is wrong but its so easy to dowith todays technology.
An idea to help combat cinema piracy lies within the introduction of 3D films into the cinema. They are harder to film and therefore copy etc, however they are only being introduced to the cinema not to TV so programme piracy will still be a problem.
The internet is a staple and key component of todays society. All ages use it for a number of different things, amongst the most popular being social networking and virtual communities. The biggest community of social networking is done by the younger generation (teenagers) and by some is seen as their 'lifeline'. The concept of Facebook and Twitter is for people to be able to keep in contact with friends and realtives across the world, but for many it has become their only source of social interaction. This is in extreme cases but virtual communication can become addictive to some making it less likely that they'll form real relationships. There have been stories in the news about how social networks are damaging communities.
The common question asked concerning the virtual world is 'Can communities really exist online'? Facebook and Twitter are the most popular forms of creating a virtual community among the younger generation. As the community is text based with a few videos it can be resrtictive but its the users that make it the community it is today. Normally when we think of virtual communities we thing of Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and Bebo, all of the main social networking sites. However there are other more literal forms of virtual communities the most well known being 'Second Life'. This is an application downloaded to your computer which allows you to lead a second life in the virtual world. You're able to create your own character, change their apperance and you can even make them fly. It is supposed to resemble the life we lead in the real world but it adds the impossible elements, such as flying. As part of our experience of the virtual world we signed up for a Second Life account and had our own 'second life'. It allowed us to chat to people all over the world and expericene the virtual community being created first hand.
The idea of virtual worlds can applied to any area of life. 'Muse' specialises in creating virtual worlds for media and advertising companies. This is a more specialised type of virtual world as it seems to serve a specific purpose where as Second Life is open to everyone and has no limits (concerning businesses etc). Personally I think that being part of this virtual community is an exciting new experience, however it is known that there are dangers of creating a 'second you'. The old danger of people not being who they say they are online applies here. People get engrossed within the enjoyment of being someone new and having a network without actual interaction but this can lead to dangers.
All in all I like the idea of a virtual community because I think it allows everyone to be creative and keep in contact with people no matter how far away they are. I hope to see evenmore improvements in the future for the social network and the virtual community.
On the internet today there are many websites devoted to the nature of campaigning. More and more young people, especially students, are getting invloved in the change of major issues. In order for us to understand where and how these ideas are developed we had to (in groups) think of a campaign idea and make a campaign video for it. My group chose to campagin to stop the idea of students having to do complusory community service to repay loan debts. Our video and campaign was called 'Students Against Community Service'. We used Channel 4's Battlefront website to gather ideas for our video. After watching numerous videos we chose to do something that we could relate to and that would effect our lives. This then developed into the idea that we shouldn't do something too serious as students are more likely to relate to a more humorous and light hearted campagin video. All this lead to the following video.
We chose the topic of 'Students Against Compulsory Community Service' because it was an issue close to our everyday life. Should the idea become reality it would be us that would 'suffer' as a result. We thought that choosing a topic close to our lives would create a good 'buzz' among students and student communities. We also all had strong negative opinions about the idea of having to do compulsory community service for gaining our degree, when the government is willing to allow us to pay back our loans once we have a decent job.
We chose to make our video simple as we believed students would listen more if there was only one thing to focus on. The humour element provides a more 'laid-back' approach to campaigning, still serious about the topic but making it more approachable for the audience to get involved. We encouraged participation by giving web addresses for Facebook and Twitter pages. We chose to advertise the pages on social networks rather than creating a webpage because, being students ourselves, we know that our campaign would get much more attention on a social networking site. We didn't make a facebook page for this topic because there already is one but we did create a twitter page.
The overall aim of this activity was to gain an understanding about how easy and beneficial it is to campaign for what you believe in and what could be changed. It is easier to make a difference in society than many of us think and espcially as a young person/student it can be hard to be heard but with the community of campaigning, using such sites as Battlefront, we are able to make that difference. This is where facebook and twitter can be very effective.
In week 9 we were set a Psychogeography project. We were set the task of planning a unique way to navigate around Leicester. We had to plan a route using specific items/instructions.
My group chose to navigate using street names. We took the last letter of the previous street and looked for a street beginning with the same letter. We then walked down the road, took some photos and took the last letter and repeated th process. We began on Mill Lane on DMU campus and so looked for a street beginning with 'E'. This proved more difficult than we thought, so we used the 'L' of 'Mill' instead. We found more roads beginning with this, which lead us to walk for a while unti lwe got stuckon trying to find a road beginning with the letter 'G'. We thought this would be much easier than it turned out to be.
This lead us to walk for 3 miles out of the city centre and into an entierly new area for us, at which time we decided we'd walked far enough and we headed back. On out way out of the centre we had noticed lots of streets beginning with the letter 'B' so we changed our idea for the return journey to navigate by streets beginning with only the letter 'B'. This proved more productive and we got more photos and found lots more streets then our 1st attempt.
We eventually ended up back in the city centre and maade our way home. We worked out in the next workshop, whilst making our mapon Google maps, that we had walked a total of nearly 7 miles! We felt this was a good thing because we fully tested the idea of this psychogeography project.
In week 11 we had to gather all our findings from our walk and make a map of our journey. To do this we used 'Google Maps' which is a useful application on the internet, found by the link on Google's homepage. We used an exsisting map of Leicester and added our points along our jouorney. These points are marked by coloured markers and each marker has a photo to show where we walked. The purpose of the photos is to give an atmosphere of the street and/or area as the map doesn't give that sort of detail.
This project was different to any other i've done before but it was fun to plan and the walk was unpredictable which made it interesting. As a group I think we undertook this task well and got a good result.
Our week 5 workshop focused on making a presentation on web 2.0. We presented these in or week 6 workshop. My group decided to focus on "The web as a platform".
We had a maximum of 15 slides and we spoke for 20 seconds per slide. We focused on the topics of cloud computing and the web as a platform.
Slide 1: Introduced the presentation topic
Slide 2: Displayed the diagram of the web as a platform. The term 'web as a platform' allows the internet to move away from the old system of many seperate pages that arn't linked together. These pages are read much like newspapers and were barely interactive, but now the web as a platform pages are seen as indiviual servers that can be interacted on so many different levels or platforms. The way we use the internet is changing, but is it moving away from the computer and towards the cloud...?
Slide 3: Looked at how Google have developed their own versions of Microsoft Office, with 'Google Docs' and spreadsheets. The development of 'Google Mail' has also become popular, sometimes being preferred to Microsoft Outlook. Could this be an on going development.
Slide 4: Key characteristics of Cloud Computing 1. Device and location independence allows user to acess systems using the internet regardless of where they are or whether they are using a PC or mobile phone. Users can connect from anywhere. 2. Reliability improves through the use of multiple sites, which makes cloud computing suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery. 3. Multi-tenancy lets a huge pool of users share resources and costs. 4. Agility improves with users able to quickly and cheaply provision technological infrastructure resources.
Slide 5: Clouds can be either public or private. A public cloud is where a service is sold to everyone on the internet, e.g. Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Where as a private cloud is an exclusive service which is only available to a select group of people.
Slide 6: WIFI is a local area connection allowing the user to connect to the internet. Aa WIFI device is installed in many computers, games consoles, mobiles and near enough all laptops. WIFI has become widespread as the price of chipsets continues to drop. It is available in more than 220,000 public hotspots and millions of homes and campuses worldwide.
Slide 7: Flickr - The web as a platform's main characteristic is the interactivity of the website. This is demostrated well in the photo sharing website 'Flickr'. The power of production is in the user hands. It allows people to upload, edit and catagorise their photos. Flickr is not just a set of pages, it provides a valuable service to a huge number of people.
Slide 8: Youtube - The cloud and platform allow lips recorded on other devices to be uploaded onto the internet site and become part of the cloud. This, like Flickr, places the power with the user. It is a service to share, comment and subscribe to useres videos. It is also ever changing and the way one person uses the site is completely different to the way another person does.
Slide 9: Facebook - demonstrated by facebook as you can use this platform to do what you want at any time.
Slide 10/11/12: Google Docs consists of two services, 'Writely' and Spreadsheets. Google combined these as a singular product, which was released on Oct 10 2006. Since release Google added their third programme for presentations, and Google Doc's plans to make many products that don't require software installation.
This idea is very simple and effective whilst taking up no space on hard-drives. Google docs is perfect for solo, groupand combined input assignments. The programme allows multiple user acess, simultainiously, to documents. Google also implimented a mobile app. so you can acess documents everywhere. However you can only use the mobile app. to view docs and spreadsheets, they haven't made it possible to view PDF presentations on it yet.
Slide 13: In the future there may not be a need for software anymore as everything will be available on the internet. For example you won't need to buy Microsoft Office software packages as you'll be able to acess the same services on the internet, in the same format as Google Docs. The future is questionable. How much more will technology and the web change? Could we see a Web 3.0?
