Week 13

This week we briefly talked about advertising and mobile media.

We answered the following questions,

How much do you spend on communications?

I only usually use my phone for text/calls and facebook n my laptop.

Time; I usually am on facebook for about 20 minutes every day and maybe spend 10 minutes texting or phoning. This is all on average.

Power; Power of keeping my laptop and phone charged up is all.

Money; ~$20 a month for internet but facebook is a tiny portion of that, same goes for phone which would be another $20/month probably.

How does technology shape communication?

Gives you more choice in what you can do. Everything becomes simpler, easier.

How do companies shape communication?

Unfortunately companies like to use communications technologies to advertise so communications is quickly becoming a very commercial technology.

The iPhone is a good example, Apple has completely revolutionized the way people think about mobiles because it becomes so much more than that.

Week 12

Firstly in this tut we were asked to construct a news story from twitter posts about Bangkok. 

It’s bloody hard!

Then we asked the question; what is lost when you try to construct a story out of twatter, sorry, twitter posts.

I answered any form of coherency ( I don’t understand twitter posts much) and a proper story.

However what is gained is instant broadcasts that can literal by by the minute and also perspectives from different people.

It is a good example of the internet allowing practically anyone with access to it the ability to participate with news telling.

This week the readings were about facebook so of course everyone read it.

•          Facebook is addictive.
•          It makes stalking easy. Privacy is a concern. It easily enables sharing of personal information.
•          It is used heavily as a promotional tool, like advertising stuff.
•          And as a way to promote yourself.
•          Although it can be seen as a distraction from ACTUAL social interaction it can be seen as a promotion to actual social interaction. Like those EVENT things.
•          It originated in education.

Facebook really asks the question, how has privacy shifted over the last decade or so?

I could answer that due to the ability to share information with the world easily it has made our lives a lot less private and unfortunately many people are naive about it.

We also spoke briefly about the benefits of different communications.

I think the conversation was quickly over deciding that facebook is awesome.

2 more weeks!

Week 11

Hello! This week was all about Blogs! Like this one! Only interesting…

For the first reading about news blogs we got these points;

•          People get more involved in blogs than traditional media.
•          Blogs are like do it your self journalism.
•         The more visitors the more successful your blog appears to be.
•          Blogs are not subject to restrictions of traditional media (this means more swears J. Or seriously, stuff like news that is not usually reported on, local angles etc.).
•          It gives a different perspective. Although this can be a bad thing as blogs are a lot more opinionative than news.
•          Anyone can spread news.
•          Doesn’t always focus on facts. Blogs’ curse in my opinion. My motto; never trust a blogger.

We were asked to share our favourite blogs in class,

Laugh out loud, no one had any.

As a class we decided news websites were a better alternative to news blogs as they’re less likely to be biased and do focus on facts.

See you in week 12.

Week 10

This week we had an interesting reading. Let me just say this now, it’s very outdated. I’ll explain why as it show you my dot points. It discusses internet news.

•         Old media (newspapers & TV) is agenda setting, it tells us what to think about.
•          However Internet cannot set agenda as it has a small audience (DERP! SO wrong, heaps of people read news online, many as the only source of news they get. This is so outdated).
•          However it cannot set an agenda as well as old media because internet uses can choose what to read and compare stories more easily. Also anyone can publish news, which also effects agenda setting.
•          Newspapers and TV are being replaced by web news. Old people are sticking to old media more though (OMG WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN? 7 YEARS AGO?! Actually it has you idiot. So outdated).
•          He presents us with studies that were carried out in, get this, 1949 and 1966. Seriously when was this written? So irrelevant and outdated.
•          Digital publications don’t use the following as much; time span (news can be broken instantly), composition (placement of stories in the newspaper to contrast with other similar or opposite stories) and space (so much space on the internet not so much on the paper).
•          It talks about how people that use the Internet are like geeky people from sci-fi movies. Seriously? SO outdated, I’m pretty sure my dogs are even online now. Or are they alien sci-fi dogs? People from 2003 are stupid.
•          Web design should follow designs like magazines. I agree with this.
•          The author reckons many Journalists don’t agree with this “new” style of writing. Maybe in the 1920’s, idiot, now they just do their jobs, they don’t care if it’s on the internet.
•          Internet news has lower production costs.
•          Finally I liked this point, he thinks newspapers will be killed by web papers but that won’t be the case, if every paper also has a news website then the websites profits can in turn support the newspapers.

Obviously I didn’t think this reading was very useful but I still got a lot of good points so woot. We talked a bit about topics related to the reading in class too but most of it is covered in the points I already discussed.

Four more weeks to go.

Week 9

This week we looked at more video game related material, particularly online and fan culture.

The first reading we had to do this week was on alternate reality games, mystery games that take place in both a fictional setting and the real world and are often used to promote other media products such as TV shows or games.

There are a few points that I gathered and the class gathered;

•          It contradicts Jenkins views on decentralization as ARGs partly take place in the real world and are kept relatively local. Also if it’s marketing a TV show, many TV shows don’t air at the same time in different countries so an ARG that runs concurrent with the TV show (like ALIAS) will make little sense to someone from another country who isn’t receiving the TV episodes at the same time.
•          ARGs are made by the industry and can also be made by fans. They both have strengths and weaknesses.
•          ARGs teach participants to work together to achieve a goal, such as solving a mystery together. Some can affect how they live. (World without oil).
•         ARGs make the TV show more interactive by encouraging the users to participate with the fictional world.

The other reading named Playing on the Digital Commons discussed gaming, piracy and fan culture and the affects of these.

•         The first video game was actually a hack of a computer system. Wow!
•        It discusses the ease of piracy thanks to the Internet and the prevention of piracy as well. Gamers are quite often fairly tech savvy so this can cause gaming to be a very pirated medium.
•         It assumes that the gaming industry gets significant losses due to piracy. Being a gamer I can say this is not necessarily the case, many of the last generation of video games had ways to prevent piracy over the internet (the Gamecube being one example with it’s stupid tiny discs) and the current generation has numerous countermeasures against game piracy. PC games are the easiest to pirate however the majority of PC gamers don’t actually pirate games and so the losses are not particularly significant.
•          Machinima creation= promotion of the product. I think I’ve discussed this before. It’s true, some games actually give gamers the tools to make their own michinima as it is seen as a profitable idea. However film makers have to be careful with copyright issues.
•          Virtual trading. I can’t remember what this was written for but I’m going to say “Godammit I hate virtual trading cause I like having a cover come with all my games, it makes my game collection look awesome when I’ve got like, a million covers. Virtual trading will ruin that for me. And it ends up costing more cause they take up so much of your god damn internet download limit. Virtual trading is lame. But it’s the future so... L

Other things we looked at in class was participatory culture in games. This can include modding (which is very popular with PC gamers), machinima, cosplay (eurgh), everything else that can be done with movies and books and I wrote down Halo because it’s a good example of getting gamers to come online to share each others experiences.

We were asked if there is any constraints to this to which I answered legal constrains and if there are tools included in the game code to aid you participate with it your are limited to what the game allows you to do.

And is the economic model different?

Well, most user-made media is low budget but that applies to nearly every form of user made media…

Till next week!