week two tutorial

Week two tutorial was dedicated to the conception of our blog. Everyone had to find the way through the site and start to create their own blog.
For that we mostly had to come with a name and fill out some details on line about us; in a general and then in a more personal way.
What is good in this sort of cyber blog is that you choose what you want to put on line; you decide what is worth writing and what is not.
It was interesting to see the different level of knowledge in this sort of new technology.
While some of the members of the class were struggling getting on the 'learning @ Griffith", others were already customising their blogs with pictures and different background.
It wasn't new for me to create my own blog but it is different in the way that it is more academic so if it's different, then I will surely get something out of it.

week two lecture and readings notes

Is e-mail dead?
History of new media studies:
-Popular cyberculture:
Apparition of the internet in the early 90's:
Feedbacks about the net and its interest were pretty negative when it was first introduced. It was seen as a 'new communication frontier' rather than as a 'toy'.
-Cyberculture studies:
By the end of the 90's, people were treating and seeing the internet differently taking this new communication technology more seriously
Different area were looked at with varying successes; for example-- technological determinists; meta-physicians; gender theorists, racial interests; post-humanists; AI experts; VR researchers
-Critical cybercultural studies:
Explore:
"-the social, cultural and economic interactions that take place online;
-the stories we tell about such interactions;
-analyses a range of social, political and economic considerations that encourage, make possible and/or thwart individual and group access to such interactions;
-assesses the deliberate, accidental and alternative technological decision- and design-processes which, when implemented, form the interface between the network and its users."

The rising of 'new media':
-It is distinguished by its heterogeneity, characterised by its diversity
-It is driven by an imperative to trace productive critical trajectories into the most compelling and specific spaces of contemporary techno-cultural change.' (Chris Chesher)
but new media is a distinct entity separate from media studies.

Week one notes

Week one notes
What are new communication technologies:
CD-ROM multimedia, Internet, interactive TV, virtual reality, SMS - text messaging, broadband, wireless, social networks, Facebook, MySpace, Hi5...

What are the differences between old and new communication technologies?
To understand these two ways of communication it is essential to define the terms: communication and technology.

What is communication?
-Definition by Aristotle: the speaker produces a message that is heard by the listener; a sort of face to face communication with two main characters with common background communicating directly
-Communication is a personal interpretation depending a own experience but new communication technologies are becoming more and more interactive and so introduce a problem of interpretation.

What is technology?
-Marshall McLuhan argues that technologies are “extensions of human body”
-Technologies are extension of the mind; the medium in which the communication can take place is the message; this can bring to the possibilities in the change from analog to digital technologies.

There is positive and negative sides in the move from analog to digital event though digital technologies are dominant, some prefer the texture of analog.

The last century has experienced a growing of media forms and the development of a mass society which developed an explosion of new communication technologies and therefore have ‘spawned new area of investigation”.