NCT: Comm Chronicle

A fellow student and I created this video for a project in this class.

It is called Comm Chronicle. It is all about a guy named that gets a computer chip implanted in his brain after a serious head injury. This chip allows him to access the Internet just by using his thoughts. But this technology was never fully brought into human trials and so he develops unexpected powers.

Here it is.

Ultimately, after his friend turns on him for the power of the chip, Austin decides that the power is too dangerous for human kind to handle so he destroys the chip. This is a good lesson for all of mankind as our technology grows and we become more powerful with the things we do, we do not want to overstep our boundaries.

NCT Essay

Social media is a new phenomenon in today’s society. While our parents had to pick up corded phones and turn a dial to contact their friends at home, we can now pick up our mobile phones and get in contact with friends all the way across the world through Facebook. People can now post pictures online through Instagram, putting filters on it to make it seem “artsy.” Twitter allows people to tell us little snippets of their lives without using almost any of their precious cellular data. Have these new technologies had an adverse side effect on the youth of our age? How has being glued to our phones and laptops affected how we react and interact with each other and the world around us? Based on my extensive research, there shows to be an overwhelming bias that there has been a negative effect on youth, but I would like to argue the contrary. I believe that the youth of today grow and learn through social media.

There has been a lot of talk about how Facebook affects young people. Where the concern mostly lies is in cyberbullying and a lack of self esteem brought on by social media and by Facebook specifically.  Jenn Anderson says in her article, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, that cyberbullying is especially dangerous because “perpetrators can use a broad range of platforms, including Web sites, cell phones, e-mail, and instant messaging” (Anderson 2014, pg. 281). This can be a big problem for youth because they simply cannot get away from the bullying due to its permeation through our lives. This flooding of social media can prove distressing for young people because they cannot just run home and hide in there room. This is in stark contrast to people from generations before who only had to deal with bullying at their school. However, social learning is a very necessary part of growing up. As Paul A. Kirschner describes: “[s]ocializing via the Internet has become an increasingly important part of young adult life” (Kirschner 2010, pg. 1237). Just as kids play on the playground and hierarchies are formulated within the classrooms, kids learn social norms and stigmatisms nowadays through use of websites such as Facebook. If a high school or college student does not make a Facebook account like so many of their fellow students, they miss out on a lot of socializing and learning opportunities that comes along with the site. Children and young adults alike have had to deal with social obstacles for millenniums, whether it takes place in a classroom or on a computer screen.  As Ruth Sterner states in her essay The History of Hazing in American Higher Education, “The origins of hazing can be traced back to the founding of Plato’s academy in 387 B.C.” (Sterner n.d.). This observation shows that bullying is not a new phenomenon in human history, it is simply happening in cyberspace now. In conclusion, I noted that a lot of the articles I found seem to have an extreme bias toward the negativity of social media, specifically Facebook. This bias may be due to the generational gap between youths and the authors of the articles.

Now to look at social media in general, specifically the negative aspects of social media and the harm they may have on the youth of today. There is, of course, a lot of controversy about social media. A big debate that has arisen is over the exposure of violence and sexual situations and content to young people. There is no real way to monitor how people will act on these social media sites and that is what makes them have such a negative impact. Many of the older generations believe that this generation is being desensitized by all of the media that they view. As Roger Collier says in his article called Social Media and Mental Health, children are experiencing “exposure to unsuitable violent and sexual material and the decline of real social interaction” (Collier 2012, pg. 577). This article is about a declaration from Parliament in Ireland in an attempt to justify regulating the content of social media. This article says that the Irish Parliament believes that social interaction on the Internet is not social interaction at all and instead, it is shrewd information intended to poison the minds of their young. Of course there is a lot of harmful information on the Internet, in fact, pornographic websites have the most traffic of any genre of site on the Internet. However, social media is a place to go and socialize, to learn social boundaries. Paul A. Krischner says in his article that “Homo Zappiens,” referring to the digital generation, “learn in a considerably different way…,” than their predecessors. Due to the introduction of communicative technologies such as social media, kids have grown up interacting and learning differently from their parents, learning skills such as problem solving and organization with no instruction (Kirschner 2010, pg. 1240). This difference is not a bad thing, rather a simple shift in culture and the way we live. This shift in culture brings on other issues; this youtube video I found talks about how children’s values nowadays differ from that of earlier generations. It claims that this change in values is due to social media and that the youth of today are obsessed with “likes” and “follows” and fame (The National 2014). Acceptance in life nowadays may seem shallow to those who are not fully engulfed in social media like the younger generation is, however it’s really no different than their sense of acceptance, it just happens to be more tangible. Because so much time is spent on these sites, friends interact over social media just as kids used to hang out after school. Sites like YouTube allow young people to gain views, likes, and subscribers that add to their popularity not just locally, but sometimes even internationally. This popularity, some could not even dream of at their schools. As for the shift in values, it has started an uprising in entrepreneurship as we have learned in this very class. Creativity and drive to create something new and hip seems to be more prevalent amongst this younger generation.

Social media has been a place of learning for the younger generation that provided them with skills that are developed very early in life. Social media allows the young people to organize their thoughts and time the way their interests suits them as shown in the article Youth Media Lifestyle: “youth differ in the ways they structure their leisure time, balance options and put together meaningful combinations of activities to suit specific interests… Each young person weaves together a huge diversity of activities in a unique way” (Claudia van Kruistum, Paul PM Leseman, Mariëtte de Haan 2014, pg. 510). This observation goes along with the self teaching abilities of this new generation. Kids tend to learn from what they see in their peers and this takes place on social media. They learn to organize their profiles and adapt to how people react to, and like, their posts. These skills of organization are important because they are happening simultaneously with academics, sports, leisure time, dinner, and even sleep. According to Marjorie J. Hogan in her article Prosocial Effects of Media, young people spend “[o]n average, 7 hours 38 minutes daily are devoted to media use” (Hogan 2012, pg. 236). Most of this time taking place while engaging in other things such as school and extracurricular activities. Both Kirschner and Hogan dub this ability to navigate social media and other life activities “multitasking” and note that this generation is notably skilled at it. Kirschner goes on to say that “children now have acquired specific new multitasking skills that they are able to apply in a learning setting…” (Kirschner 2010, pg. 1240). Clearly kids are learning and teaching themselves skills and abilities that are applicable to everyday life and how to become a successful member of society, all from their ability to manage and dedicate time to social media.

Though there seems to be a bias against social media and its affect on young people, there is hope that empirical evidence will sway this bias caused by older generations. There is a great quote that comes to mind about this very topic: “Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.” This quote is attributed to Socrates. Social media may seem to be harmful but that may be because it is different from the traditional style of learning and interacting that the older generations are used to. Technology is moving forward and thus, society will change. Social media is an outlet of expression and a relief from boredom, while teaching kids how to effectively act and behave around each other and, potentially, with others around the world. Clearly there are no real harms to be dealt from it.

 

References

Hogan, Marjorie J.. (2012). Prosocial Effect of Media. Pediatric Clinics of North America. 59 (3), 635-645.

van Kruistum, Claudia., Leseman., Paul PM, de Haan, Mariëtte. (2014). Youth Media Lifestyles. Human Communication Research. 40 (4), 508-529.

Collier, Roger. (2013). Social Media and Mental Health. Canadian Medical Association Journal. 185 (12), 577.

Anderson Jenn, Bresnahan Mary, and Musatics Catherine. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. May 2014, 17(5): 281-286. doi:10.1089/cyber.2013.0370.

Kirschner, Paul A.. (2010). Facebook and Academic Performance.Computers in Human Behavior. 26 (6), 1237-1245.

Sterner, Ruth. (Unknown). The History of Hazing in American Higher Education. History of Hazing. 1 (1), 1-19. ruthsterner.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/histpdf.pdf

YouTube – Broadcast yourself/The National. 2014. How Social Media is Affecting Teens. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QWoP6jJG3k. [Accessed 25 September 14].

Rather, Aftab Ahmad. (2013). Facebook and Youth: Depression and Other Health Issues are the Offshoots of Over Use of Facebook. Asian Journal of Research in Social Sciences and Humanities. 3 (8), 157-165.

GoodReads/Socrates. 2014. GoodReads. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-our-youth-now-love-luxury-they-have-bad-manners-contempt. [Accessed 25 September 14].

Essay Structure and Blog

Intro: Social media is a new phenomenon in todays society. Where our parents had to pick up chorded phones and turn a dial to contact their friends at home, we can now pick up our mobile phones and get in contact with a friend all the way across the world through Facebook. People can now post pictures online through Instagram, putting filters on it to make it seem “artsy.” And Twitter allows people to tell us little snippets of their lives without using almost any of their precious cellular data. But has this new technology had an adverse side effect on the youth of our age? How has being glued to our phones and laptops effected how we react and interact with each other and the world around us? Based on my research I think that there has been a (I haven’t started any research yet) effect on the young people influenced by the social media available today.

 

here is my bubbl account to help me organize my references

 

First body paragraphs:

Facebook: Negative and Positive outlooks on bullying

 

Second body paragraphs:

Social Media in General: Negative aspects

 

Third body paragraph:

Social Media in General: positive aspects

 

Conclusion: sum up research and wrap back into intro.

 

This weeks lecture was all about copyrighting. I believe that copyrighting is one of the most important human inventions. Copyrighting allows people with great ideas able to sustain their great idea by stopping people, legally, from stealing their ideas. Just as a person is prohibited by law and morality to not steal an object from another person, why would it be different if it is someones creation? Copyrighting allows people to have creative ideas and not have them stolen without, at least, some kind of payment back if they are stolen. Take Facebook for instance. Mark Zuckerberg basically took the idea for a “facebook” off of a fellow student, thouhg he claimed he used none of their code. Now the idea was only in its early development and would not have been copyrighted at such an early stage. But, intellectual information should belong to the owner of the information. If I have a great idea and I share it with my friend and then that friend goes out and does the idea, cutting me out, I would be fuming. That is why I think copyrighting is so important. In a day in time when it is so easy to get information just with a simple download or web search, copyrighting has become less and less useful. Take the music and movie industries for instance. Pirating movies and music illegally is a huge problem in America just as it is in Australia. If I do not want to pay to go see a movie that’s out in theatres I can simply wait a month or two, dig deep down into the internet, or not deep at all depending, and find it pirated online. This is horrible for the creators of that movie because they are not getting any revenue from me or any of the other millions of people that go about doing the same thing.

A Blog and Essay: Beginning a Topic

Social media is a new phenomenon in todays society. Where our parents had to pick up chorded phones and turn a dial to contact their friends at home, we can now pick up our mobile phones and get in contact with a friend all the way across the world through Facebook. People can now post pictures online through Instagram, putting filters on it to make it seem “artsy.” And Twitter allows people to tell us little snippets of their lives without using almost any of their precious cellular data. But has this new technology had an adverse side effect on the youth of our age? How has being glued to our phones and laptops effected how we react and interact with each other and the world around us? Based on my research I think that there has been a (I haven’t started any research yet) effect on the young people influenced by the social media available today.

 

Today in tutorial we learned about writing essays and how the structure of an essay can really help your grade in the long run. This is most definitely true in my eye because if your essay is totally scrambled, the teacher will have no idea what you are trying to say, be very confused, and most definitely mark you down. It is funny though; what we are learning about, the introduction and the body and the conclusion, are all things I learned long ago. But every class I have had here in Australia has had a “pre-essay” instructional tutorial or lecture. I do appreciate them because they allow questions to flow more naturally than they would at the end of a class where the professor says “Okay any questions about the essay?” While everyone is standing up to leave the room. I just think its funny that its so enforced here whereas it is simply implied back at home. Now about the lecture. I really enjoyed this lecture, maybe because I am really into video games. I found it cool that I was learning about the games that I have been playing for years: Gears of War, Skyrim, Halo, Splinter Cell, and many more. Learning about these games really brought me back to playing them and having such a good time with my friends. It got me thinking about where we are technologically and communicatively. The fact that I can sit down, especially now with the next generation of consoles, and plug in my headphones and play in a game with my friends that are hundreds of miles away all while hearing their voices as if they’re right there. It astonishes me. We have really come a long way from the simple pong game of the early 70’s.

Week 6, Government and Communication

I was tasked with signing an e-petition. Here is my receipt to that.

I was also tasked with posting a comment on a professional bloggers blog. For this I picked the WordPress Daily Blog called Digging Deeper in the Image Editor. It was a very informational post explaining an easy way for people to use the WordPress blog easier with images. The blogger actually ended up commenting to a lot of blog posts as well answering questions which I found helpful too.

In order to contact the president of the United States there are a couple of hoops to jump through. This is naturally understandable because there are a lot of people within the United States that may have some concerns that they wish to speak directly with the president about. There also may be a lot of trollers out there that would just give him a hard time. The most efficient way to get a response from the president is to send him a letter. The next would be to comment online on the president’s website, though that may just be some guy that is not the president responding. You can also call the white house but it is doubtful that Obama will take your call.

There have been several acts passed within Australia that prohibit Internet use. The first is the Broadcasting Services Act of 1992 which prohibited a lot of sites dubbed for 18+. The next act was the Copyright Legislation Amendment Bill of 2004 which had a harsh impact on service providers. The next was the Suicide Related Materials Offence Act in 2006. This prohibited people from talking about suicide in a good light. As of right now there is  “clean feed” movement that forces Internet service providers to filter content of websites that the Australian Communications and Media Authority deem unclean.

The NBN is going to be an attempt by the Australian government to improve the Internet and phone line access to every home in Australia. This will benefit people all throughout Australia by giving them the ability to have Internet and a secure phone line. This will also help businesses if they decide to use it. I cannot find any information about payments or anything, but if it was free Internet that would be awesome. More likely than not though is that it will only give people the ABILITY to access the Internet and not so much provide it for them. They’ll still have to pay. NBN will allow people with it in their home to pick from several providers.

Since I am an abroad student I do not know much about Queensland politics but let me see if I can find someone I like. I found Hon Jarrod Bleijie. He is a member of the Liberal National Party and the Attorney General and Minister of Justice which is what caught my eye. Looks like a good guy. I could not find where his most recent speech was but I found one from July 15th, 2013 in which he thanked volunteers for their time and effort in helping others. This was a very heartwarming speech so I emailed him at Kawana@parliament.qld.gov.au to tell him how volunteer service is important and I like his style.

In the lecture we talked about cyberpolitics. This is about the overarching power structure within the Internet which is put in place by the people using the Internet. This of course leads to actual politics. eDemocracy is the discussion of how the Internet has an effect on the world outside of the Internet and more specifically, the government.  The question that is proposed in this weeks lecture is whether our form of government now is comparable to the actual idea of democracy that has been laid down. Democracy in its truest form is when every single person within a nation has the exclusive right to govern themselves, having a say in every matter, big or small. But this is almost impossible nowadays because there are so many people and voices to be heard. Though as I am thinking about it now, it may actually be possible. It would be a huge and controversial switch, but perhaps the government could go digital. It would have to be the most secure function of the Internet on the planet but perhaps, instead of people having to go out and physically cast votes people could cast them from their computer. Two big problems with voting is that people are too lazy to go out and vote and people are too uninformed about the issues that the vote deals with. By putting it online it would eliminate the need for people to leave their computer screens but also allow for people to read up on the issue while they decide. Forums could be set up allowing people to discuss their feelings just within the voting webpage. A nice technology that allows people to communicate about issues of government. There could be issues about fraud and people voting more than once but that would be fixed by the security of the system. It could just work.

Week 5 Lecture Blog

Since there was no tutorial for week 5 I will be blogging about the lecture for week 5. This lecture was all about social media and the web. The first topic was about web 1.0. This primitive, first version of the Internet was described as shopping carts and statistic pages. Within this version there was not a lot of uploading or feedback, it was merely just information put up by a select few and minimal online shopping. I do not have a lot of memory about this form of the Internet because it was around when I was very young. However, I do remember the webpages being very rigid and not very pretty to look at. We then went on to discuss web 2.0 and the development of social media. Web 2.0 is more geared for the user and the uploader. Web 2.0 allows users to use applications on their computer to assist in their everyday lives. Web 2.0 is almost geared specifically for social media because it allows the user to post feedback to original articles, blog, upload photos and share their wants, needs, and opinions with the world. With the emergence of social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram people were now able to share their lives with the world which has become so integrated into our lives that it has become normal for people to post statuses, pictures and other things on a day to day basis. We also delved into what may be to come in web 3.0 and 4.0. Web 3.0 is projected to allow users to have a broader reach with what they can do with their social media, for instance, tweeting something and having it also come up as a Facebook status. While web 4.0 may be able to promise communication back and forth with the OS itself, much like in the movie Her. We may also not need to use our hands for this, projecting that it may be voice executed. Very sci-fi like. At the end of the class we watched The Social Network which was funny because I had watched it just the night before. The most astounding thing I find about the movie is that it tells us that the most social, friend-oriented website on the planet was founded and created by a kid that didn’t want any friends.

Cyberspace and Cyberpunk

I decided for this tutorial to make a timeline of the development of the television. I did a research project on television last semester so I think that it is one of the most important media in the past century.

Here is the link to my timeline: Development of TV It includes times that I believe are some of the most important events in the medium’s development.

In order to create this time line I used my prior knowledge of the subject and this PDF which was very helpful.

 

I found that the exact definition of Cyberspace is “the notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs.”  So in this way, the Internet contains cyberspace, but cyberspace is not the Internet. Knowing this, it can be said that instead of specific, physical location existing in the world, the event or website, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. exists within the cyberspace, which can be mapped to show the “location” of such things. Cybernetics on the other hand is the study of systems of command. An example of this within my own life would be an app on a phone. There are apps that people can buy that allow someone to control their house. The ADT Security Corporation has put out an app in recent years that allows the user to turn lights on and off, close their garage doors, lock their house, and even lock their house, all from kilometers away. This new innovation is a perfect example of cybernetics because it gives the user a way to command another object from a far off distance, using telecommunicative technology. iTunes could be argued to be a cybernetic system as well. iTunes has control over a large amount of music and the distribution and flow of said music to customers and listeners. It could also be argued that Universities are cybernetic systems as well. The leaders of the University provide areas of learning in which students take part in and professors teach. By controlling what subjects are taught at the University, it can control the outcomes of its student’s learning. I do not believe that cybernetics removes the human element because, as humans, we are often part of our own cybernetic systems and, being individuals, we can also control the outcome of our own systems. A cyberpunk that  I am a fan of is the Halo series, Cortana specifically. Cortana is an AI and though she has a very human personality, faults and all, she is still a computer generated image, only based off of another individual. I would not say that the Hunger Games is a cyberpunk because, though they live in a very high tech world, it is the individualism, the characters themselves that makes the story what it is. Cyberpunks are very focused on how technology affects the world/characters, whereas The Hunger Games focuses on the character’s own personal drives.

Finding Reference Material

This blog is all about finding reference material from the library in Griffith University and the Library.

Stephen Stockwell has three books that he has written himself within the library. They are as follows:

Stockwell, S 2005, Political campaign strategy: doing democracy in the 21st century, Australian Scholarly Publishing

Stockwell, S 2010, Rhetoric and Democracy: Deliberative Opportunities in Current Electoral Processes, VDM Verlag Dr. Müller

Stockwell, S 2000, All-media guide to fair and cross-cultural reporting: for journalists, program makers and media students, Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy

 

Darke, C 2005, Alphaville: Jean-Luc Godard, 1965, viewed August 15th via Griffith Library Proxy

Brody, R 2008, Everything is cinema: the working life of Jean-LucGodard, Metropolitan Books, found in SOuth Bank Campus

Lesage, L 1979, Jean-Luc Godard: a guide to references and resources, G. K. Hall, Found in Nathan campus

 

Bryman, A 2012, Social research methods, Oxford University Press

 

For some reason the databases from Griffith University would not allow me to access them. Not sure why but when I go to log in it said it could not be accessed.

 

This post is now about my thoughts on our class discussion. While reading the reading, as I mentioned in class, I was concerned about the things they called biochips. These are little chips that will be inserted into the brain, enabling the user to access the Internet. This could be very helpful and ultimately be the way of the future. If we could simply access the Internet with our minds, it would almost eliminate the need for personal computers. I am sure that after a while, software and other kind of hardware will come out enabling us also to use other aspects of personal computers such as microsoft word, excel, powerpoint… just to list a few common ones. Spreadsheets, essays, presentations could all be done while walking to class, or on our way to work, just by using the chips in our brains. Aside from all that, just being able to access the Internet is futuristic enough for me. Simple tasks such as looking up information, googling something, looking at wikipedia to fact check an argument. All these things done simply by thinking. But this is where this technology also starts to concern me. I am graced with a Mac Book Pro and so do not get many viruses, though more and more are coming out recently. My concern is that, if I get this chip in my head and access the Internet and end up on a sketchy cite, what happens to me if I get a virus. Will there be cyber-brain-hackers who can tap into my brain and steal my memories? Access my bank account records and passwords. Get access to my entire life. Or maybe I get locked out of my own brain, become a zombie until someone can clear my head of a virus. Or even kill me using some kind of shut down program virus. Who knows? Anything is really possible with technology.

 

 

Communicating Using Technology

Being an abroad student I have been looking into contacting my friends and family back in the United States. My primary way of communicating with my friends is through Facebook. Facebook makes it really easy to communicate through their “inbox” system. Using this I can talk to all of my friends at once if I want. I started using Facebook way back in freshman year of high school. It was sort of a writ of passage to be able to make a Facebook account because all of the high school kids used them. A big issue people have with Facebook today is privacy. Personally I do not really care because I do not really put much on my Facebook, I simply use it for communication purposes. What is nice about Facebook is that I can keep in touch with my friends that do not live near me at home. A big thing nowadays is meeting people on the Internet. I don’t know many people that do that however. As I said before, I usually just use it to contact my friends from home.

Inside Communication

This video I found on the Internet does a good job at explaining how mobile phones connect to their servers and how the big phone companies deal with having so many phones on one network by using multiple towers. This is definitely relevant because nowadays almost everyone has a mobile phone.

Check it out

There are several key turning points in communications history. These are when a new technology comes out that allows us to communicate more effectively, through more area, to more people or just simply, more easily. The first of these was the telegraph. Up until this point in history, the only way human beings could communicate was face to face or through letters which had to be delivered. The telegraph allowed people to communicate across a large area of space almost instantly. The next was the telephone. Where the telegraph was instantaneous so was the telephone. But where the telegraph lack was that it could only transmit beeps and dots, a form of communication call Morse Code. The telephone allowed people to communicate to one another across a nation not only through beeps and dots, but through their own voice. Finally a granddaughter could hear her grandmother’s voice from half a country away, a mother could hear her son, a brother could hear his sister. Next was the radio which became a national pass-time in America. Families would sit around in the living room listening in on games, debates, news etc. But the radio did something for communication that the others before it had not done; for the first time a message could be heard by any number of people that decided to tune into the radio station. Mass communication was finally electromagnetic. After this there was cinema which allowed a visual aspect to be added to the viewer experience. Then there was television which allowed people to bring the visual aspect into their own homes.