Ok this has no relvance to this weeks blog i havnt had enough time to sit down and write that yet.. BUT please tell me someone else saw the news report on the Korean "E-Athletes".. that is teams of guys who are now famous.. for what? for online gaming they even have a coach! Is this where our sports will be heading? i get mental pictures of overweight people with extremely toned and freakishly strong fingers
Just something i couldnt help but share!
Will do my web 2.0 blog soon i promise!
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Virtual Communities
I think the great thing about this weeks topic was that for most of us its made us a take a step back and look at our own online behaviour. Because all or atleast most of us are plugged into one of the many networking sites it makes it easier to understand the topic as we have something to relate it back to. Also if your like me and have been in Erikas classroom before, this week would have been a nice refresher and an oppertunity to feel good about yourself for actually knowing something!!
The thing i find interesting is that during our seminar the consensus seemed to be that we are all security conscious and like to think that we only divulge personal information to our close friends because we know the dangers in talking to complete strangers who may not be who they say they are. Then how do some people get so caught up in their online lives that they could go as far as to marry some one they have never meet online before meeting them and moving in (i recently saw an article about a couple who did exactly that in a womens day or something). If you look at the second video on my "video bar" it is an introduction to the online community Second Life If you were in Erika's 201 coms class you will know about it if not take a look. It makes you think again about the question of whether or not offline communities could be replaced by online ones. there must be something about it if even Harvard has classes there with open debates and Duran Duran has concerts... For me this is a scary thought yes the internet is becoming vastly important to our everyday lives but to actually live your life in a n online world and even buying land and houses with real money... well its yet to convince me. (That wedding kiss would be quite as special) It is however realy interesting and well cool to look at...anyways im getting really off track
Ill be sure to come back to second life when we go over avatars, as you can tel I am quite fascinated with them
The thing i find interesting is that during our seminar the consensus seemed to be that we are all security conscious and like to think that we only divulge personal information to our close friends because we know the dangers in talking to complete strangers who may not be who they say they are. Then how do some people get so caught up in their online lives that they could go as far as to marry some one they have never meet online before meeting them and moving in (i recently saw an article about a couple who did exactly that in a womens day or something). If you look at the second video on my "video bar" it is an introduction to the online community Second Life If you were in Erika's 201 coms class you will know about it if not take a look. It makes you think again about the question of whether or not offline communities could be replaced by online ones. there must be something about it if even Harvard has classes there with open debates and Duran Duran has concerts... For me this is a scary thought yes the internet is becoming vastly important to our everyday lives but to actually live your life in a n online world and even buying land and houses with real money... well its yet to convince me. (That wedding kiss would be quite as special) It is however realy interesting and well cool to look at...anyways im getting really off track
Ill be sure to come back to second life when we go over avatars, as you can tel I am quite fascinated with them
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
hackers, missunderstood?
Ok so last week we looked at hackers and hacktivism and after completing the reading i realise there is a huge amount of politics surrounding these terms. As my mind is all over the place at the moment my points may be a bit disjointed so i have decided to do my blog this week in bullet point form with nuggets of what i have come to understand about this topic
off to class .. see you next week
- I am not pleased to admit it but I had fallen prey to the mass media's portrayal of hackers as socially inept "computer geeks" who can manipulate the net to break into bank accounts to steal money or even steal and destroy our identities like they did to Sandra Bullocks character in The Net . After finishing the readings however I have found some respect for the art of hacking and am once again left questioning the reasons behind the media framing hackers as purely criminal. Is it simply because they make the better news stories?.. Well as most of us are Comms students we know that the mass media companies are predominantly only out for themselves. By only broadcasting news stories portraying hackers as criminals the more the public becomes "afraid" (insert better word) of them and the easier it is for the companies to persecute them when it is their websites that are interfered with.
"We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons... My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for" -Lloyd Bankenship (1985).
- From the readings it seems that there are 3 main categories that a hacker can fall into.
- Those who enjoy to test the system and "explore" the net and abide by unspoken rules to "never act maliciously" and "never hack for financial gain" this type of hacking is usually associated with old school hackers.
- Those who hack with criminal or harmful intent such as Robert Morris who used a self-replicating virus to ring a whole network down. This type of hackers were referred to as crackers
- Hackivism is the convergence of hackers and activist, due to the far reaching scope of the Internet it seems like the perfect marriage. Hacktivists use electronic civil disobedience to raise awareness of unethical acts by individuals, organizations and governments. This could involve sending out emails of even breaking into a website and rearranging the page and posting social and political messages.
- Although hacktivist are acting non-violently out of ethical concern they too are starting to be associated as criminals and even worse; cyberterrorists. Since 9 11 we all know how much power the word terrorist holds and so do the governments who are using it. Because it is largely government websites that the hacktivist are targeting they need to find a way to discredit what they are saying... what better way than to label them as something the public fear most.. the most evil of all evils. a TERRORIST!
off to class .. see you next week
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Weeks 1-2
Ok, so my flat finally has broadband up and running and I can sit down and work on this blog!
Firstly I would like to say how impressed and a little intimidated I am with some of your blogs, I can really see how beneficial this little project will be when it comes to revision and exam time. I hope that at some point I will post something beneficial for someone.. anyone ha.
Anyways after that nervous ramble I wil get on to the subject of week two that is Architectures.
Architectures as we learnt in class are made up of three intertwined layers of users,networks and structures, to analyse this I thought it would be good to look at these through the example of our Blogger project.
Firstly lets look at users and identity:
The users in this case are obviously our class of COMS205 students (and of course Erika). The interesting thing will be how we each develop our online (Blogger) identities. A large part of this will come down to what we each chose to disclose: some of us may just disclose details only related to themselves as a COMS205 student and others may become more comfortable and disclose more personal details about their lives offline. I guess this will depend on those who decide to really immerse themselves in the project and those who are just filling it in for that precious 40%. I have a sneaky suspiscion that even the most sceptacle of us will eventually warm up to it and if not .. well unfortunatly as we learnt this week there is no such thing as anonymity online, once you have that blog set up then we can and probably will engage with you forcing you to interact!
I understand that the overall aim of this project is too see how communities are formed and if infact by the end of these 13 weeks we will have our own virtual community defined by Reingold (1996) as:
"social aggregation that emerge from the internet when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough with sufficient human feeling to form webs of personal relationships..."
Will the fact that we are all first and foremost doing this for marks mean that we will be unable to really form a community as subconciously we will not be able to let "human feeling" interfere with the acedemic task at hand?
OR
Will we fall into the trap of Blogger like most of us have with the likes of facebook and bebo, let our walls down and become a true online community of interest (not neccessity)?
Will the fact that we communicate in the real world in class and seminars have an affect?
At the moment I think that we will form a great acedemic network but i find a true online community will be a stretch... who knows i look forward to finding out!!
This is getting huge so i will just touch on the third layer: structures
In our offline world we have a top-down structure where the are rules put in place by our government and punishments enforced by our legal system for breaking those rules.
Our Blogger community on the other hand has a lateral structure meaning that we will adhere to social norms such as not swearing excessivly and refraining from personal abuse. If someone were to deviate from these social rules they would most likely be punished by the other bloggers in a way which we see fit eg. exculsion from blog, cold shoulder in class :P
Surveillance works by shaping and framing that is athough we may feel we have the ability to choose how we navigate the network as we please our choices are restricted by structures as in Erikas aquarium example. In our case although Blogger is a space for personal blogging, in order for us to gain 40% we have to critically discuss lectures and readings on a weekly basis and interact with others in our class. Thus our blogs have already been shapedto some extent before we have even logged on.
well thats all for now, please feel free to add to this or even correct me where you see that i havnt quite got the point haha
:):)
"
Firstly I would like to say how impressed and a little intimidated I am with some of your blogs, I can really see how beneficial this little project will be when it comes to revision and exam time. I hope that at some point I will post something beneficial for someone.. anyone ha.
Anyways after that nervous ramble I wil get on to the subject of week two that is Architectures.
Architectures as we learnt in class are made up of three intertwined layers of users,networks and structures, to analyse this I thought it would be good to look at these through the example of our Blogger project.
Firstly lets look at users and identity:
The users in this case are obviously our class of COMS205 students (and of course Erika). The interesting thing will be how we each develop our online (Blogger) identities. A large part of this will come down to what we each chose to disclose: some of us may just disclose details only related to themselves as a COMS205 student and others may become more comfortable and disclose more personal details about their lives offline. I guess this will depend on those who decide to really immerse themselves in the project and those who are just filling it in for that precious 40%. I have a sneaky suspiscion that even the most sceptacle of us will eventually warm up to it and if not .. well unfortunatly as we learnt this week there is no such thing as anonymity online, once you have that blog set up then we can and probably will engage with you forcing you to interact!
I understand that the overall aim of this project is too see how communities are formed and if infact by the end of these 13 weeks we will have our own virtual community defined by Reingold (1996) as:
"social aggregation that emerge from the internet when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough with sufficient human feeling to form webs of personal relationships..."
Will the fact that we are all first and foremost doing this for marks mean that we will be unable to really form a community as subconciously we will not be able to let "human feeling" interfere with the acedemic task at hand?
OR
Will we fall into the trap of Blogger like most of us have with the likes of facebook and bebo, let our walls down and become a true online community of interest (not neccessity)?
Will the fact that we communicate in the real world in class and seminars have an affect?
At the moment I think that we will form a great acedemic network but i find a true online community will be a stretch... who knows i look forward to finding out!!
This is getting huge so i will just touch on the third layer: structures
In our offline world we have a top-down structure where the are rules put in place by our government and punishments enforced by our legal system for breaking those rules.
Our Blogger community on the other hand has a lateral structure meaning that we will adhere to social norms such as not swearing excessivly and refraining from personal abuse. If someone were to deviate from these social rules they would most likely be punished by the other bloggers in a way which we see fit eg. exculsion from blog, cold shoulder in class :P
Surveillance works by shaping and framing that is athough we may feel we have the ability to choose how we navigate the network as we please our choices are restricted by structures as in Erikas aquarium example. In our case although Blogger is a space for personal blogging, in order for us to gain 40% we have to critically discuss lectures and readings on a weekly basis and interact with others in our class. Thus our blogs have already been shapedto some extent before we have even logged on.
well thats all for now, please feel free to add to this or even correct me where you see that i havnt quite got the point haha
:):)
"
Sunday, March 2, 2008
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