Generation i

Just few thoughts inspired by the posts The iPad. and Reinventing the Square Wheel, and Why It Doesn't Work, related to the Apple's new "magical and revolutionary product" iPad. 

The popularity of the new device isn't really at question here, as it's directly proportional to Apple's multi-million advertising budget. Neither is novelty. What more interesting is the iPad's determinant power regarding the format and design, that now dominate the market. 

Just a few interesting examples of the followers: 

ExoPC

The JooJoo

Adam Tablet

HP Slate

ViewPad

...among thousands of others.

piracy of comics

The piracy has been a big issue today.
There are more than 90 million internet users in Japan now, and there is an increase in piracy through the Internet. The phenomena of crime using the Internet are derived from its anonymity, widespread cyber crimes and those crimes tend to be committed by people at lower age. Most of those crimes are sales of illegal copy and upload without the permission. Now, uploading popular manga (comics) and anime (cartoons) on Youtube has become considerably harmful influence with Japanese youth. There is a significant increase in young people who involve with illegal upload those works.

14th of June this year in Japan, 14 years old boy has been arrested due to upload more than 30 titles and 120 works of popular manga such as Onepiece, Naruto and Gintama etc. This disclosure of piracy through Youtube is the first case in Japan. According to the report, those manga he uploaded have been played more than 8 million times and the amount of damage is worth 20 million yen (NZ$310000). Even the publishers offer a deletion of his upload, but he kept uploading those.

Manga or anime illegal uploading has rapidly increased since 2007. Japanese youth who upload works without permission do not realise that they break a law. Therefore, education that relates to copyright and piracy is required not only at school but also within a family and the society now.

Pixel Art: Cultural artifact of technological age

From the late 80s pixel based graphics formed an integral part of popular culture, and surprisingly up until today it still echoes in media and digital arts.

The era of mass popularisation of pixel graphics came in 1980’s when the technology was quick adopted by the video game industry. Early video games consoles featured a slow image processing capacity and worked within a very small screen resolution. For example The Atari 2600 had a screen resolution of 192x160 pixels and The Nintendo Entertainment System - 256x240. In comparison, today’s HD television features a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. For such technical constrains, early video games could not be visually complex and featured limited 8bit colour palette, which posed a real challenge for game developers to produce minimalist yet representational and visually appealing graphics in the early video games. There is a classic story of Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of The Legends of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. video games, who had to gave Mario big nose and a moustache to get around the lack of facial details of the character.

In the modern era of fast computers and High Definition screens, the role of pixel as technological device significantly diminished, yet the use of old pixel graphics as tool of artistic expression in the course of past decade escalated enormously. Today pixel art can be easily found both in and beyond computer screen. 8-bit images present in modern advertising, street graffiti art, music album and magazine covers, digital and print artwork, tattoos and so on. This raises a curious question: how such an old and limited technology enjoys a tremendous degree of popularity in the modern “hi-tech” world.

I think we can partially find an answer if look back into the history of arts. For, in it’s nature, pixel graphics is in many ways similar to various traditional art forms, such as embroidery (cross-stitch), mosaic, stained glass, beadwork, and many others types of art where image is constructed out of multiple small coloured elements. Even in the last century’s expressionistic paintings could be discovered the essence of pixel art.

Paul Klee - Southern (Tunisian) Gardens – 1919

Syosa, a pixel artist from Japan, explains in the interview: “When I pixel, I do not only use my artistic sensibilities. I have to beat my brain to develop the most efficient palette, due to colour and size restrictions. I find pixel art is very similar to Japanese Haiku. I've worked with 2 to 5 colour palette challenges, size restricted challenges and downsizing challenges in Japanese pixel art forums. Pixel art looks best when there’s no wasted colour.”

http://www.pixeljoint.com/2009/10/03/2938/Pixel_Artist_-_Syosa.htm

Pixel artist Jason Rory, in 2007 designed an 8-bit video game “Passage” featuring 2 characters, only 8 pixels tall each. In the documentary short called “Pixel” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mqAZ06dwKU) he explains that the beauty of pixel graphics is that it is representational and abstract at the same time, it’s expressive power lies in its ambiguity and simplicity. Also, nowadays many people find 8-bit graphics a creative answer to the modern 3D graphic industry with it’s strive for complexity and photorealism.

Most importantly, it is undeniable that the golden age of console games left a significant cultural imprint on the society and peoples past. As childhood experience generally plays an important part in any artists work, many graphic designers tend to nostalgically return to that retro image of 80s to recapture the spirit of “good old times.”

OLPC Project

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) is a non-profit project conceived and put into practice by MIT professor and media analyst Nicholas Negroponte. The stated mission of the enterprise is to supply developing countries with affordable study tool, an XO-1 laptop, and, according to the project outline, “to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning." The project attracted a great deal of support from various companies and institutions including: AMD (the OLPC chipset designer), Ebay, Marvell among number of others.

Besides its lucrative possibilities, the project also received an enormous amount of criticism. The main areas of concerns involved such issues as:

-More vital necessities (food, water, medicine, etc.) in some of the targeted geographic zones,
-Technological determinism in non-technocratic cultures,
-Western cultural imperialism,
-Language barrier,
-Methods of equal distribution of computers, technical support and environmentally friendly ways of disposal,

and many others.

Yet, despite the valid criticism the idea of affordable learning and communication platform is enormously attractive, and, rather yields a strong potential in its technologically native “first world”. There’s great positive aspect about supplying local demands with cost- and resource- efficient alternative. Interestingly enough, Intel, one of the major opponents of OLPC idea, went on to release its own version of educational computer called “Classmate”, to supply the internal market with durable and low-cost tablet laptops. 

New Media, the New Zimbabwe

The 'Oxford English Dictionary' definition for an audience as "an assembly of listeners" appears to be an insufficient description in relation to new media. Nowadays audiences influence, and even sometimes dictate the types of content they are going to consumer. The controls of audiences are apparent across various media platforms such as television and internet websites.

With the proliferation of advertising, television programmes are now produced with the main intention of catering to specific audience demographics. These demographics are solely based on the possibilities for an increase in revenue via advertising. For the most part, creative expression in television programmes have now gone. An example of the lack in creativity in television programmes is the amount of adaptations from the "Twilight" film series. Adaptations such as "True Blood" and "The Vampire Diaries" have become vehicles for advertising to similar audiences from the "Twilight" film series. Therefore audiences, to an extent, now dictate the content produced and presented to them because of the importance of advertising. If the television programmes do not appeal to different mass audiences types then advertising decreases and consequently the series is cancelled.

Similarly the internet is a media platform for audience dictation. This is because of the openness of the internet amalgamated with the anonymity of the internet. These two factors allow audiences to democratically voice their opinions. "YouTube" is a website where audiences control what is considered to be good-quality content and what is not. The quality of a video is instantly shown, simply by the amounts of audience views it has, with the actual physical size of the writing indicating the amount of views, being larger than any other information on the page of the video except for the title. Comments also have a significant contribution to the success of a video on "Youtube". I experienced this personally when uploading some of my own remixes of well known songs onto "Youtube". Within twenty minutes I had my first comment, a positive one. However six minutes later I received a comment so negative and brutal, that I was tempted to take down my small collection of videos. The open forum presented combined with the anonymous pseudo names that users hide behind allow audiences to possess a power they never had with previous media platforms.

Morality Online

Much has been said about the perceived immorality of online culture. In the minds of many academics there is a growing concern that the internet is corrupting the morality of youths. This is a topic which concerns us "digital natives" as we seem to be the target of such criticisms. I find this claim to be a bit naive, especially coming from older generations who, by and large,do not share the same relationship with technology as we do. Andrew Keen in particular brings up all these horror stories of youths becoming addicted to online gambling, watching pornography, and developing extremist personalities through online forums. But what is there to suggest that these same people would not develop these same traits if the internet didn't exist? Keen brings up the example of a kid called Greg Hogan, now this kid was almost the perfect child, a musical prodigy, he excelled also academically, winning a scholarship to a prestigious Ohio college, as well as being the son of an Ohio Baptist Minister. However he became addicted to online gambling and robbed a bank at gunpoint. Keen goes on to point out that Hogan is not alone in this kind of behaviour with a further 1.6 million US college students gambling regularly. I agree that gambling is a major social problem but to demonize the internet over a claim like this is absurd, simply because for each of those 1.6 million students gambling there are far more that are not. Also, while the internet facilitates gambling, getting rid of internet gambling will not cure the gambling in reality, nor will it cure the online gamblers addiction to gambling. I feel these issues are not enough to negate the benefits of the internet, I think that while people tend to voice more extreme views on the internet people are relatively civil if you yourself are civil. In my experience it is usually better to behave as you would in reality online. Sure you may hit a few brick wall's but usually adopting a non-hostile attitude is better (interestingly, using correct grammar seems to play a major role in identifying civil discussion).

While i disagree that the internet is corrupting us I do think there is justification in the idea that we are becoming more immune to a lot of controversial information, not just things like porn and gambling but even to more mainstream information, stories and videos on news websites and the like. We have become so used to reading or seeing how bad things are I sometimes fear we do not appreciate the situation fully. However there are still that rare story that provokes far more reaction than others, and ones that just makes your skin crawl.

I see this fluctuation in responses as primarily a result of accessibility to far more information than we are capable of absorbing, it only makes sense that we gear ourselves towards more relevant news. Sorting data becomes an important skill one needs to negotiate such an environment, this is a skill digital natives have grown up with, one that is a lot harder for people with older generations to pick up.it's the reason we are so much more connected to technology then older generations. 

Arggh I'm Captain John Silver the movie policeman

At the beginning of all movies we are repeatedly reminded to not 'pirate' this dvd, or others alike, but really seeing this at the beginning of an already copyrighted film doesn't have any affect. Researching on the wonderful search engine Wikipedia piracy equals a "war-like act committed by private parties that engage in acts of robbery and/or criminal violence at sea".
Now I dont think that 1. Wikipedia should never be trusted, 2. piracy is a cooler word for copywright infringement therefore we shouldnt even take note of engaging in acts of robbery and/or criminal violence at sea, and 3. that Sir Peter Blake iconic as he is (R.I.P) got 'pirated', becaus eit just doesnt sound right. In conclusion to this I would like to say that pirating is a big fail.

Onto copywright infringements, sure the short pre-movie to the pre-movie ads of 'would you steal this hangbag, ..would you steal this car,...would you still this video tape (and reproduce it), are slightly fun but still irritating to watch, do they really stop people from reproducing the tape?
I follow this question with another question, do those who illegally reproduce the tape and distribute it feel bad for what their doing, and do they even know the price that they have cost the origional distributor? I think heck no, firstly most of them dont care, or they must too much money to care. Problem is that by not caring that some of the pirated tapes in my experience (only seen fellow friends, not actually redistributed or bought my own) aren't upto a quality standard, hereby seeing figures who standup during the movie on the screen, also loud laughter during the funny moments. Due to these implications I think that the 'pirates' are getting what was coming to them for doing illegal things, and that the score is even therefore you should only pennalise the music copywrighters and not the movie ones, because lets think about it, no ones ever going to stand up in the middle of a song, laugh at the song, or have bad quality because piraters of this generation aren't dumb enough to record off the radio and give poor quality sound to their customers.

What happens, happens, if you get caught, then its your fault.

online dating : the culture of romance

The virtual space (internet/online) opens a window to numerous possibilities to finding friendship, distant family, people of the same culture and interests, people of the same religion, and also love. Online dating sites are hugely successful, no matter how old, or how big/small, short/tall, the virtual space breaks boundaries and allows those not as confident to put themselves out there, in a quest to find love. Although online matchmaking sites like matchmaking.com are quite popular, I believe the most influential are fantasy games and chat rooms. Fantasy games in the virtual world, for example Second life, are as I said before boundary breakers, it is all about choice, and because of the wall that the virtual world puts up, the choice to be who you want to be is quite appealing. You can be who you want to be, choosing every little detail of your image, to your job, house and car, your number of girlfriends/boyfriends, and where you live. The only thing that truly sticks is your voice. Some even so so far as too marry online. There is a huge element of imagination that goes on in virtual places, imaging ones fantasy in particular. Sure relationships can be and are formed online with other people but how good can you know someone without meeting them or even before meeting them. The virtual space leaves alot to the imagination, and questions the issue of trust. How much do you trust the person you are talking to or seeing a virtual image of? This is how paedophiles, rapists, cyber bullies, make their imprints, but for a lucky few they find love. So I say if your looking for love, and you've been looking for a while then why not try a matchmaking site just to 'check it out', but be careful as those who say they are something, could turn out to be nothing.

Sharing and Social Improvement due to Youtube?

Youtube has grown more and more popular over the last few years and has become a worldwide success user wise since it started in 2005. Youtube has made an improvement for educational and entertainment uses as well. The attraction is right there where music video, TV shows, movie trailers and just about anything that is media are available to watch. Most who use Youtube will agree it is a great source for entertainment and way to find visual and audio information. Even some media university courses are using Youtube videos for viewing and informing to use in their teaching. Sharing or posting videos has had a huge impact in the social sphere. Users can even leave comments if they wish and share their opinions.

To emphasize on the social importance of Youtube, even some individuals have attracted large amounts of publicity due their videos and have become somewhat famous. For example a talented singer Susan Boyle (who appeared on Britain’s Got talent) got so many hits and views on Youtube that it skyrocketed her to fame and success where she even got signed on and recorded her own album. I believe Youtube will continue to expand and gain more rights and popularity. Sharing social media through Youtube has made a huge improvement on social and culture of society due to its easy access to entertainment and informing videos. All in all Youtube is an excellent place for entertainment and place to access videos to just about anything relevant in society nowadays.

Privacy and the Online Public Sphere

When asked in the lecture about who is concerned with their online safety or safety in general, I was quite suprised that only a few put their hands up. But I think the reason why no one else did was because they were unsure of what their online safety constitutes. People need to think beyond just clicking the 'make your profile private' button and dig deep into all the access ways of the online world. I.P address, googlemap, google search engine, online networks, through all of these your valuable information is able to be accessed and outsiders are able to search through your private informaiton. Take for example an episode of 60minutes a few months ago where the reporter was able to access so much information of one random girl that she was able to find her at her job, during work hours, know exactly what she looks like, and have her contact details. Now if that doesnt make you think about internet safety, what will. i asked a friend her opinion of the matter and she thinks (studying law and all) that its your option to put whatever you want on the internet, and by putting it on the internet it means its out there for everyone to see, use, and access, just as blogs are, we can write our opinion, or comment about others, with or without their permission. Hearing on the radio this morning (Flava 95.8) a conversation with the hosts about online networks, and open opinion applications are now being censored, and you cant just write what you want. I think this is partly due to the Paul Henry case. But sure this could be good as internet bullying might be prevented or racial slurs be confined to personal thoughts, but really aren't they taking away a right we have a human beings? The freedom of speech, and being in a changing world it is online communication which is leading the way. Therefore shouldnt we be more concerned with those who are chosen to censor our words because they hold all of our information, I think if you put it on the internet then you want someone to set it, if you didnt then you probably would have dial-up, or no facebook page.

Downloading

Copyright and illegal downloading is such a big issue in todays society. The internet has provided people with limitless opportunities in pirating, copying, downloading and stealing. Movies and music can now easily be downloaded and accessed before the cinema release. Because it is free and easy to get, it is so tempting and frequently done by a majority of todays culture. When many are faced with the choice of downlaoding movies/music free versus purchasing them and paying to see them at the movies, the obvious decision would be the cheaper one. As it basically proposes no risks either.

I am proud to say I am a non-downloader. A strict purchaser of music via Itunes or by buying CDs. Much of the music market rests on these loyal followers of bands. This is the reason that CD's and concerts are still surviving. Dedicated fans are still going to be willing to pay for CDs and to see bands live. The novelty of owning a hard copy of a CD has not worn off. It is a lot more enjoyable flicking through Real Groovy that simply downloading off your favourite music site. Although I think the illegal download of music is inevitable and cannot be stopped, i do not think it will overtake the industry. Mp3s may be dominating the market but there is still a substantial amount of society who are considerate in what they download.

The increase in downloading music can also have its advantages as it applies more pressure to the bands to perform live. This is one aspect we cannot complain about. Mp3s and downloading may be the way of the future but there are so many aspects of music that will live on forever - i hope.

Chatroulette a way to enhance sexuality and intimacy online

New Media allows for new ways to broaden intimate relationships in many positive ways but also many negative ways. In the lecture on sexuality and intimacy online we discussed how the Internet and sites such as Chat roulette are making it more and more easier to meet people online, to become intimate with the also to be put in danger.

Recently on 60 Minutes; they looked into the issue of Chat roulett and how its users are being harmed. In particular a mother and daughter who witnessed a young girl being raped by an older man. They stayed online while they called the police and attempted to find out as much information as possible about the whereabouts of this child. This relates to what we discussed about online pornography and it is now a lot easier to access pornography than it was in the past. In this incidence the people who were affected by the live video was not only the young girl in the video but all of the people watching it with no way of helping the victim. This site and others similar to it can be very dangerous when used incorrectly, and is the perfect example of how new media has changed the way sexuality and intimacy is viewed by society.

http://shufflepeople.woome.com/?wtm_source=google&wtm_medium=cpc&wtm_campaign=ShufflePeople-Search&wtm_adgroup=Chatroulette-SP&wtm_keyword=chatroulette&wtm_network=Search&wtm_placement=&gclid=CKynsYOL1KQCFQITbAodI39DKA This site is very easy to access, you do not even need a user name to sign in before you start playing. It is very concerning that the only warning that there could be explicit sites in the videos is '18+, keep it clean, or be reported'. There is no warning what so ever that you may see something you do not want to see.

New media and sites such as Chat roulette open up new means for deception in relationships to increase. There is more ways of seeing other potential partners through these sites, and as many people who are on these sites may be looking for new partners it is possible that users who already do have partners may find it very difficult to resist. But this type of new media is not always negative, it also opens up new ways for relationships to be experimental, for example if you have a long distance relationship there are many more ways to contact your partner with new medias such as Skype and mobile phones.

Dailybooth, Dailytruth?

I recently discovered an online social networking site called Dailybooth, a photoblogging site which allows users to post pictures of themselves daily and to 'follow' their friends. A huge problem on this site is the emergence of 'Fakes', people pretending to be someone they're not.

'Fakes' have been highlighted through the emergence of Social Networking sites. I mean Britney Spears doesn't really have 20 twitter accounts!

Some social networking sites have tried to filter out these 'fakes'. The most effective way I think is on twitter by having verified accounts. This is where twitter posts a little blue tick at the top of the verified celebrities page saying 'verified account'. This makes it easier for the followers to sort out the actual celebrities from the fakes.

Generally when we hear about 'Fakes', its because someone is imitating an artist or famous person online. However, on Dailybooth the fakes run deeper than just celebrities. Networkers are stealing the identity of other everyday citizens. Stealing pictures, names, friends and followers from innocent and often unaware users of the site.

This goes back to the discussion we had in class about privacy. Generally identities are stolen from those who have the most information about themselves online. Celebrities are always in the media and a lot of their personal information is floating around the web making it easy to copy and re post.

Does this movement towards 'faking' ordinary people reflect our views on privacy?

Are we are posting too much personal information about ourselves online?

Don't dis me cause I got 'Friends'

Facebook "friends" - bringing a whole new 20th century meaning to "faking it"!

Actually I don't think it's like this at all. This blog post parallels that written by Rachael. The problem stems from Facebook itself having chosen such a simplified singular wording - friends - to represent this folder in which are stored all of your contacts. These contacts could have been added for any number of reasons as people's purposes for using Facebook differ, and the nature of their contacts differs likewise.

Rather significantly I feel, 'Friends' on Facebook are more fluid than friends in 'real life'. Those who you choose to associate regularly with can change depending on your current situation - what part of the world you are living, what career change you just made, right down to what lectures you are actually attending! At the same time, circumstances can just as much bring past friends back together. Facebook and social networking sites facilitate this fluidity extremely well.

Secondly, once a contact has been added, it is highly unlikely that you would ever delete them. Therefore, those who were close contacts whom for whatever reason are no longer so, are likely to remain in your "contacts" list forever. It is only inevitable that over time, people's "Friends" are going to grow so as to be a misrepresentation of their actual status. Unless, Facebook limited the number of 'Friends' significantly from the current 5000 limit then people will not need to adjust their friends list accordingly.

However, care should be taken not to dis those who have a large number of Facebook 'friends'. The reality is that, just because one has added a contact in Facebook which inevitably will be added to a folder called "Friends" does not mean that this Facebook determined term is suitable for all of ones contacts. Additionally, it means that the 150 friends study IS compatible with somebody who has a total number of contacts far in excess of that as the fluid nature of friendships in modern society becomes a significant factor.

Piracy problems?

Piracy – what’s all the big fuss about, really?

Multi-national cooperation’s that continue to raise a huge hue and cry about how much piracy is eating into their revenue should really step back and have a think.

For singers, celebrities and producers alike, piracy is actually probably a good thing. At the risk of sounding a bit too optimistic - perhaps, the best thing that’s ever happened to the music industry. Piracy of music means that everyone has access to it – so more people are watching and listening to them than ever before. The way I see it, piracy has proven to be one of the most strategic marketing tools ever. Music and songs that otherwise may never have seen the light of day, are now on everyone’s lips; and only because it’s available freely and easily accessible.

Sure, singers probably make a lot more money through concerts because of reduced CD and song sales, but what’s wrong about that? The way that the industry and market has evolved is probably the only way it should have evolved. The result is mutually beneficial – audiences and listeners get free access to music & artists get a chance to get their music right out there & to the masses.

So give me a break. Piracy is hardly a hurdle desperately needing to be overcome, in fact, it’s what the music industry needs to grow, survive and thrive.

Creepy.

The world we live in today is seriously creepy. I know it’s been hammered to death that sites like Facebook and twitter have privacy issues that need addressing but I feel like I need to get my little rant off my chest. At a glance, Facebook doesn’t seem like it is as bad as sites like twitter, because you’re not always talking about what you’re doing right then and there all the time, whereas twitter sees people telling the world where they’re having lunch, almost inviting a stalker to come find them. Facebook, though, does have its own issues, one of which I read on www.stuff.co.nz is the fact that they keep ‘deleted’ photos from your account for up to 30 months after you think you have erased them. The question that immediately springs to mind is ‘what else can they be keeping?’ e.g. private mail messages. They say they are trying to sort it out now and shorten the time it is kept on the server but how will we know that in that time someone hasn't taken or saved that picture? Creepy.

Twitter I just don’t understand. People have tried to get me onto it but I’m a little tentative at this stage. The way I look at it, it just seems like people post what they’re doing right there and then. Obviously there is A LOT more to it than that but that is the general feeling I get especially when the people that have access to your tweets are known as ‘followers’. People complain about their privacy issues all the time but sometimes you just have to be more careful to stop yourself from putting certain things out there. Imagine if an angry ex got onto your page and could find out where and when you’re doing something and decided to make your life a living hell. Or someone just stalked you and followed you wherever you went. Creepy.

Facebook and privacy

In September 2006, Facebook introduced a new feature on their website called “News Feeds”, which presented the Internet community with an ethical dilemma regarding information access and privacy. As users logged in into their accounts, the new service would display every recent activity of their friend base within the Facebook system. The new feature, on the one hand, presented users with the efficient tool to chronologically track the updates of friend’s accounts, yet on the other hand it provoked a tremendous outrage from the Facebook community since there has also been privacy implications concerned.

On the online conference Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, explained that the goal of “News Feeds” feature was to aid users to “keep tabs on their friends”, and feeds broadcast the information that is already public. Of course, Zuckerberg makes a valid argument, but are concerns of the Facebook community equally legitimate? In the context of the online community the issue, at first glance, may seem nonessential, yet let’s consider the following nuances:
Firstly, even though the personal information could be easily accessed anyway, “if you bother to look”, when it’s involuntary imposed on people it’s likely to produce an entirely different reading possibilities, as the information distributed among the entire friend-list is usually in fragments and taken out of contexts most likely to lead to misinterpretation.

Secondly, lets take the issue one step further. Let’s imagine the “real-life” scenario where every step we undertake during the day is monitored and automatically broadcasted to all the people we share acquaintance with. The new location tagging feature on Facebook Places gives enough a reason for interesting polemics regarding the issues of surveillance and privacy in our every day lives.

how interesting are the logics of gaming?

first of all the word game can mean it's inclusive of everything from board games, to online games, computer, to psp/1/2/3, xbox/360, gameboy, nintendo...blahblahblah, but really if you think about it the implications to different genders are really diverse! If you put all these games under the same catergory then farmville,world of warcraft, halo, c.o.d, twister, chess, snakes and ladders and all different types of gamers would be treated the same, but thus it is not. After taking on The Culture of Video Games paper back in summer school my eyes have been opened to the different representations of gender within video games, specifically the objectifying role of women created by a man dominated area. Theres a few point to note here, 1. That the female gender have stepped up and are now a growing part of the online gaming world, and are just as talented. 2. The stereotyping of characters within video games are at an all time high, with there being two main stereotypes, one which leads to the sexual objectification, and two which gives women strength by having a strong female lead character, but with implications such as the game is highly unpopular, the female character needs you to help her, or the character is a sexual object a tthe same time. I'm going to touch on the the last two.

In a male dominated gaming world it is only natural for them to produce their own image of women as their spectacles. 90% of video games cater to their need for this spectacle therefore producing games like Beach Volley Ball Series, where the women are all unproportioned in small bikinis, or fighting games like Tekken or Street Fighter where the women are in tight outfits showing most areas of skin (midrift, breasts, thighs). I sometimes wonder what the point is to this unrealistic virtual image because not even Victoria Secret models dress like that. Although it is highly popular, because of the growing amount of female gamers, feminism and sensoring has become a more popular matter and battles change the sexualisation and objectification of women in video games.

Going into my second discussion, female characters having lead roles,this topic is a contradiction in itself. As most of the game creators are obviously male the female lead characters who have indiana jones type roles, who are seen discovering different lands. Contradiciton is, they either need your help to make the decision, they ask male characters for help, or they walk around in sexually objectifying clothing, as in the case of Tomb Raider. Who is an athletic angelina Jolie typed woman who beats up the bad guys in small shorts and an extra small singlet.

I think it is key that society has come to terms with the stereotyping of women as sexual objects within video games, they are aware, and that sensorship has come from it to reinforce a more positive female gender role. This is the reasoning for websites such as womengamers.com and womeningames.com, women can do what men do, and should be portrayed with the same desency as men do.

Don't worry, Apple is the sober driver tonight.

A few days ago, some scientists in Germany unveiled a car, called MadeInGermany (MIG). It's like any other car, except for the sensory camera on the roof. Oh, and the fact that it can drive itself.

At the call of a smart phone, these cars can use GPS to find their owners or potential taxi fares, drive to them, and navigate their own way to the person's home.

These cars apparently have the potential to reduce traffic in Berlin to one-fifth of what it is now, because the cars will be able to plan their journeys to pick up several users headed in the same direction.

Back in the day cars that could drive themselves were cool and mischevious like Brum, or murderous and terrifying like Christine but now it seems to be a reality, who knows what to think. Its great in a way, because the main cause of car crashes is human error, but also very worrying because it puts corporations like Apple and Google in direct control of a pretty significant part of daily life.

I wonder if, like the taxi drivers in Bali who take their fares to stores owned by their family, these cars will casually drive you home via Apple outlets, or stop at a store and refuse to drive until you buy it a personalised Apple license plate.

Ok, probably not.

But if these cars are hooked up to our smart phones, the technology to alert them to favourite eateries, stores and facebook friends as it drives you past is definitely there. New media and technology interacting in ways like this definitely has potential, and the ability to take control from some humans while driving (I'm looking at you, grandad) may turn out to be very good for road safety.

Also, the techno nerd within is kind of excited to one day be able to issue my car instructions like KIT on Knight Rider. Come on, how cool would that be?

Facecrack more like it

Privacy today seems to be an issue. It seems like everyone knows what's going on in your life if you don't meet up with them! What I'm talking about is the evil downfall of Facebook. Even if you make your page private, your friends can see what you do and then possibly gossip to other people about it. If you want complete privacy, don't get a facebook. Keep it simple, ring/text someone to meet up, that way if gossip was to happen it'll happen slowly.

Facebook, what happened to you? I remembered it being very simple, plain and just a networking site for FRIENDS aka people you know. Look at it now. Advertisements on the side, and adding applications now have some sort of contract attached to it. Even when you aren't friends with someone, you read mutual friend's statuses ( when you have a friend that comments on it). I have a friend who just received disciplinary action at because he commented on a status which the "victim" did not write: ie going on Facebook at work, not logging out and having someone type something silly as your update. The victim complained and her father threatened to sue the company for $20,000 because it was considered bullying. In fact, they were all friends and always joked so it really puzzled him why she did that. Are people using Facebook and it's privacy as a way to gain money? Adding to that, companies that check your Facebook to see if you are the sensible, mature person they first viewed you as? Shouldn't you have two selves? A professional one for work and one where you are yourself? That is what references in CV are for, to check if you were reliable at your last job. How does your Facebook page show anyone about your professionalism?

So is Facebook that great anyway? It's just as addictive as World of Warcraft but people snigger when you admit you play this game. But people accept Facebook because it is a part of society. No one questions you if you play Farmville or Mafia Wars. I remembered Myspace and Bebo being a craze, but it never cause major privacy issues. It should only be a networking site but it clearly has become more than that.

I really wanted to get a some definitive statistics on Music piracy and it's impact on music sales loss and after trawling through so many pages all I could find was a conspicuous gap between the facts provided by pirates and anti pirates.On one side you have the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry and the Recording Industry Association of America teaming up with the republican party to draft policy to chase lost sales through digital piracy.On the other side there are plenty of consumers arguing that these lost sales are only hypothetical, since a pirate may buy digitally later.
To argue for the anti pirates:
-record sales have dramatically fallen, jobs have been lost due to piracy
-signing new artists is dramatically declining due to costs
-music stores are closing in freakish numbers
-musicians must supplement their incomes with other commercial ventures(touring,merchandise).
To argue for the pirates:
-while physical record sales,cd's etc have fallen off, digital music sales have increased, therefore the market loss is just a shift of sales from old format to digital
-it is impossible to measure the probable income of an artist since success is so variable,sales are not steady year to year
-a download does not constitute a lost sale since the pirate may buy later

The most I could establish was that while overall physical product sales have fallen 40%, digital sales are only growing at a 10% rate.So there could be a 30% loss at stake.
But this is only an observation of market growth, it is not a static comparison to constitute the gap in sales.Since so many variables influence sales; actual talent, distribution over time, there needs to be a control in the study; i.e. releasing encrypted music and downloadable music by the same artist in similar markets to measure a difference.
Further compounding the issue is that since the record companies have been so conservative in signing new artists in the last decade,purportedly due to losses, musiv has become homogenised and formulaic, and this could also explain a fall off in sales, a chicken or egg syndrome.


Even though the overall music market has fallen by around 30% since 2004 with sales down 12% in the first half of 2009, Digital sales have grown 940% since 2004[11]. Download sales of single tracks increased by an estimated 10% in 2009 to more than 1.5 billion units and digital albums grew more strongly, up by an estimated 20%[12]. The best selling track of 2009 was Poker Face by Lady Gaga, selling a total of 9.8 million units. By comparison, the best-selling single track in 2008, Lil Wayne’s Lollipop, sold 9.1 million units and in 2007 Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend sold 7.3 million units[13].

There are four specific types of music piracy. The first type is pirate recordings, which are the unauthorized duplications of just the sound of legal recordings. This does not include the duplication of the original artwork, label, title, sequencing or the combination of titles. The second type is bootleg recordings/underground recordings, which are the unauthorized recordings of a musical broadcast on radio, television or of a live concert. Counterfeit recordings are unauthorized recordings of the pre-recorded music as well as the unauthorized duplication of original artwork, label, trademark and packaging. Online piracy refers to the unauthorized download of sound recordings from Internet sites[3].

http://indaltsound.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/in-depth-explanation-of-music-piracy/


A recent research study on the economic impact of music piracy (Institute for Policy Innovation, August 2007) paints a grim picture. The impact of music piracy to the U.S. economy is estimated at U.S. $12.5 billion annually. It is estimated that 71,060 jobs are lost or at risk due to the economic impact of piracy and the lost growth opportunities account for 26,860 jobs that would have otherwise been created in the recording industry. Even the U.S. government is affected by piracy with an estimated loss of $422 million in tax revenues from lost personal and corporate income due to piracy.
Of course, these figures are based upon the assumption that sales of recorded music on CD would have held constant, or increased, from year to year. The truth is, however, that CD sales are on the decline as MP3 players and other digital technology make the need for music on physical media obsolete.
In addition to falling CD sales, half of America’s independent record stores closed between 2003 and 2005. (NY Post). One of the largest international chains of recorded music sellers, Tower Records, closed its doors forever on December 22, 2006.

http://articlesss.com/music-piracy-and-the-new-musician/


Every year, RIAA’s global partner IFPI publishes a digital music report, which can be best described as a one sided view of the state of digital music consumption. For several years in a row the report has shown that the sales figures of digital music have gone up, but still, the industry continues to blame piracy for a loss in overall revenue.
One of the key statistics that is hyped every year, is the piracy ratio of downloaded music. Just as last year, IFPI estimates that 95% of all downloads are illegal, without giving a proper source for this figure. Interestingly, those who take a closer look at the full report (pdf), will see that only 10% of the claimed illegal downloads are seen as a loss in sales.

http://cyberlaw.org.uk/2009/01/18/music-piracy-not-that-bad-industry-says/

FBCV - Your CV on Facebook

In this modern age of employment relations where employers, universities and scholarships check your Facebook to hire, fire and before throwing money at you.

But what if there was a way to ensure your Facebook stayed nice, neat and tidy? Well... I think there is.

Step 1: Create a new FB page.



Step 2: Fill it with the ultimate pictures of you.


I chose travel pictures to show myself as a rugged individual.

Step 3: Put down an awesome (And un-embarrassing) bio and likes/hobbies that put forward the version of yourself that you want.

Step 4: Find 10 friends who think its a good idea and get them to find 10 other friends to do the same thing. Then create your own separate and closed off Facebook community with your 100 friends: No embarrassing pictures and no inappropriate comments! Yay for being employed!

Step 5: IMPORTANT! Hide your previous account. If someone adds you on your visible account, you just add them through your other account!

If you want to have a look at my work in progress: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001566484040

Try one out yourselves and put yourself in the best digital light!

illegal download of games

Do you know “Majikon”? Majikon is the abbreviated name for “magic computer” originally and is known as a game backup device. This supposes to be used for a copy or backup for the game and to boot up the image files with video game consoles. Now, this device has been made bad use. Not only music or movie, but also software of games faces the issue of piracy and copyright today.

Recently, the copy of video game software also has been distributed with free of charge through the Internet, so that people can get the copy of game’s file instead of having original game software. The game downloaded can be played exactly same environment of original, so user can play it using the device without buying the original.
Video game companies consider it as reverse engineering device. It is spread out and now available globally, so that those companies such as Nintendo have been trying to remove it from market.

This illegal download of games and the use of Majikon have been spread out and common even among young age. The problem is that there is an increase in number of people those who do not think that illegal download is bad things to do and lack a sense of morality. Especially, youth do not realise that they break the law. The important thing is to call people’s attention. If we can make good use of Majikon, it might be useful and worthy.

Censorship, who needs it?

Learning that 50 cent writes his own tweets I decided to find what words of wisdom 50 could bestow on me.
to my dismay I could only find up-to-date tweets that were a little more couth than what I had expected, but today I found this, a list of his brightest thoughts. A best of. Tweets about Politics, Genetics and computers, you name it 50 has his own opinion on it.

My personal favorite is on Obama's approval rating. "Obamas ratings are down cause he didn't include pimpin and hoein in stimulus package. Good hoes would boost male moral and fix the recession".

It seems like a joke, but it’s completely serious. Most celebrities have people, some time teams of people, working on their social network sites like Facebook and twitter, but not 50.
I commend him for this, I think its great that he doesn’t care what people think, expressing his opinion however vulgar it may be. It makes him seem like a real person, we're only a tweet away from talking to the REAL 50 cent, not someone controlling his twitter site. It’s also great for a good laugh

To finish things off I’ll share my favorite viral video of the last 6 months, The beautiful woman, the beautiful woman, the rippin’ and the tearin’, the rippin’ and the tearin’

Piracy again

I was reading over this article http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-10-08-nintendo-piracy-not-behind-poor-sales in which the CEO of Nintendo makes the following comments

"I do not think we should attribute bad software sales solely to piracy.

"Even with piracy, as long as we can create products which can attract attention from many consumers and which can greatly entertain them, that software can make it to the number one position of the hit software sales chart."

too often music/movie/gaming companies are quick to use piracy as an excuse for poor sales of a product. I for one found it extremely refreshing to read Satoru Iwata's comments. You see it with games that are just crap, the developers turn around and cry that piracy has robbed the game of sales, music companies blame piracy for why the garbage CD that has only one good song isn't selling, Hollywood attributes poor movie sales on the film they threw millions upon millions into flashy effects but with little substance on piracy. It's much too easy of an excuse. The Nintendo Wii has outsold the PS3 and 360, it's also by far the easiest to mod out of all of these consoles, yet they don't play the piracy blame game.

Quality sells, quality makes money. People who produce quality aren't going hungry. If companies spent more time on trying to produce content that people want to spend money on and less time making rushed, cash grab type content, perhaps people would be more inclined to purchase.

Piracy... but everyone else is doing it!....

Piracy is for sure a contentious issue that has of course been elevated through the downloading a film improvements and rise of technology. On your dictionary.com Piracy is defined as “the unauthorized publication, reproduction, or use of a copyrighted or patented work” and we have all seen the ads at the start of a DVD about piracy, but do we actually consider downloading a film as being on the same level as stealing a car, or a handbag. The immediate answer seems to be no, why? Perhaps it is because we are used to having unlimited access to anything on the internet or because laws produced around copyright infringement have not yet found an effective way of monitoring and prosecuting people who download illegally. I think it is easy to get into the headspace that by downloading the only people who are losing out are the corporations such as Microsoft or record companies or production companies; we as a society can no longer subscribe to the concept of ‘ignorance is bliss’ as we are now comfortable enough with technology and know enough about copyright infringement to understand that we are doing something illegal when we are downloading a song or a movie through P2P networks. Most people I know take the view of who cares it’s not like I am going to be arrested. Piracy however affects far more people than just big corporations, think about a New Zealand artist you like, their incomes would be severely impacted from piracy, not only that new artists are having to find new ways of getting their music out as record companies have to be more selective about who they sign. Also with the amount of movie downloading occurring there is bound to be an impact on the industry and the amount and quality of films produced slashed if they are unable to make a profit. Now I am not saying I am completely innocent as I have used P2P networks, however until there is a way for piracy to be (a) effectively monitored and (b) fair and equally punishable offences then piracy will continue to be a problem in society not only for corporations but also people like the artists who lose out as well.