So we've come to the end of the semester and it's time to publish my last post. Overall New Communication Technologies has been a useful subject towards my studies.

Admitingly at first I did not like the sound of going to a class where I had to use computers and post blogs about lectures every single week. It was fairly daunting aswell considering I believe myself not to be very computer literate. But after some help from my fellow class mates and our friendly tutor Jules (thanks) I settled into it quite comfortably. I found myself using programs like photoshop and sites like blogspot. Programs I have never used before but by the end of this semester I am quite familiar with. It was also interesting to learn about the history of the computer and its assests in the lectures. I learnt about the birth of the computer, the origin of the Internet, and things like Cyberpunk which at one stage would have seemed to be a foreign language to me. However, at times the lectures seemed to drag on and borderline on boring. There was not enough action or interaction within the lectures which made it hard to retain interest and attention. Perhaps the length of the lecture played a major role in this too. Those are just some slight issues that may need to be reformed but overall the subject is extremely educational. I did like the tutorials aswell because I think it's important to activey engage in what your learning, in order to retain the information given. I learnt alot and I think this will aid to the prgression of my knowledge throughout my time at university!

Here's a summary of week 11's lecture on Cyberpolitics!

• It is important to distinguish between the idealist view of a democracy on the web encompassing all citizens (cyberdemocracy) and the democratic uses of the internet to improve the quality of access to existing democracy. While cyberdemocracy is not particularly evident in the way cyberspace 1) is organised on hierarchical lines and 2) its uses for commercial purposes, the internet has become a valuable addition to the ways that debate occurs in our society.
• In The End of History and the Last Man Francis Fukuyama argues that the 1980s saw the near-universal triumph of liberal democracy and its representative institutions. He concludes from the dissolution of communist totalitarianism that the current practice of liberal democracy is 'the end point of mankind's ideological evolution [and] the final form of human government'.
• Representative democracy as we know it is very much the product of the nations of the industrial age so these simple accounts of democracy do not address the impact of the present period of rapid transition from an industrial to an information economy and the consequent challenge to the power of nation states by global economic and cultural processes.
• The increasing concentration, centralisation and commercialisation of the mass media appear to have foreclosed avenues for democratic participation in currently existing representative democracy. However, a number of theoretical counterpoints and interventions suggest that there may be ways in which the arena of deliberation, or the public sphere, may be extended via the application of new communication technologies and a better appreciation of the power of the audience.
• Deliberation and discussion are key attributes of democracy, maybe talk is the most important element of democratic activity. The ability to convince and the willingness to be convinced are what provide the give and take that makes democracy something for all citizens. And that requires access to free speech.
• The declaration of independence for the Internet is very specific about its disregard for traditional ideas about the usefulness and appropriateness of censorship.
• Hackers regard computer systems not as corporate property but as part the common wealth and do not believe it is wrong to break into systems to look around and understand.
• The word 'hacking' has a number of meanings that reunite in the work of the hacker: it suggests both cutting through thick foliage and managing or coping with a difficult situation, often with an appropriate application of ingenuity or a creative practical joke. Can you hack it?
• Hackers are descendants of phone phreakers who used anomalies in the phone system to make free calls.
• Hackers seek to free information and are at pains to distinguish themselves from crackers, intruders who damage or steal data whether in simple forms such as denial-of-service attacks or in systematic and clearly fraudulent ways such as credit card manipulation.
• Hacking has developed beyond its anti-social and avant garde origins to incorporate any approach to any media that seeks to use hidden potentialities and anomalies in that media to open interpretation and debate.
• Hackers are imbued with the cynicism of the machine, refusing to accept the 'official' story at face value, always digging and exploring to find their own truth beyond the standard explanation.

I found the information that was touched on about hackers within the community, extremely interesting, partially due to the fact that I did not know most of the information that was given! Hence why most of my notes are on the hackers!!

Here's a summary of week 9's lecture notes on - Cyberpunk!

• Cyberpunk is a science fiction genre based in the possibilities inherent in computers, genetics, body modifications and corporate developments in the near future.
• Punk was represented in the music of bands such as Sex Pistols, Clash & Black Assassins.
• Cyberpunk developed as a reaction against the over-blown and predominantly safe stories pf 'space opera' such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy and George Lucas's Star Wars. The precedents for cyberpunk can be found in paranoid and reality-challeging literary work of Phillip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep made in to the movie Bladerunner,) and the hi-tech for low purposes storyline in movies like The Conversation. Common themes include hackers vs corporations, artificial intelligence and cities out of control and and post-industrial dystopias dissected with a film noir sensibility.
• The Matrix (the movie) pushed the limits of cyberpunk so it became like the bloated soap operas that it had originally scorned. Nevertherless it deals with philosophical issues at some depth.
• This movie pushes the boundaries of computer-generated effects as it explores apossible future world where machines dominate humans but keep them inignorant bliss of their real state. The machines in Matrix create atotally illusory reality for people, constructing their identities tosuit the purposes of the machine.
• Cyberpunk sought to demythologise technology but effectively predicied/created the World Wide Web and so was used to remythologise technology.
• The last two hundred years have seen a large number of Utopian experiments where people have attempted to live out the literary myth, sometimes by embracing new technology (as in Robert Owen's New Lanark) and sometimes by eschewing new technology (as in the Aquarius Festival's Nimbin).
• The Shape of the City dictates the kind of lives that most people lead. The City in Bladerunner is avowedly post-modern,built up layer on layer but starting to lose its relevance - people are moving to the Off-World. Sometimes it is crowded, sometimes it is lonely - which is what cities are like: you can be anonymousin the crowd.
• The latest development to mimic the equalising structure of the telephone is the Internet. The Internet made it possible for an individual to 'publish' to a huge audience.
• As Bill Gates stated - the Internet made it possible for an individual to 'publish' to a huge audience.
• Shadowing this split between the technologies of dissemination and the technologies of interaction is the shift discussed by a variety of theorists from modernism to postmodernism, from the certainties of the 'grand narratives' of big institutions to the complexities of personal survival for individuals.
• But just as postmodernism is built upon modernism, the second media age is built on the first and is thus largely dependent on the the world view inherent in existing technologies. It is through the combination of old and new technologies that new industries, uses and expansions have occurred, and continue to emerge. The new media brings with it a need for new understandings - particularly political ones - to protect the public interest.
• Virtual reality duplicates and warps reality. Virtual reality transcends reality. It multiplies the experiences you can have and therefore the memories you can have. It alters the ways in which you construct yourself as a person. If the individuals are changed, then so is the society. This opens up space for new forms of culture to emerge.

Week 8's lecture - net.art and digital creativity!

I did not take physical notes on this lecture as such, but more mental notes as I tried to engage in the presentation by the School of arts - Jason Nelson. Jason showed us alot of his work. We covered topics such as net. art, drug-takin, privacy on the internet, video games, blog etiquette and animal porn!

Was good having a guest speaker in, changed it up a bit, made me engage more in the lecuture and dare I say find it even interesting hehe!!

Here's a post of week 7's lecture notes on video game studies...Kids go crazy for video games!!!

• Games are popular art, collective social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism. Both games and technologies are counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of the specialized actions that occur in any social group. As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the actions and the reactions of whole populations in a single dynamic image. -Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
• We should be studying: the game itself, on it's own as a self-contained system of rules; the player of the game who affects the flow of gameplay and narrative according to those rules, or some combination of the two which becomes difficult to balance.

That's all the lecture notes I took before I left early to print off an assignment before my next class - at least I'm honest! Video games aren't really my thing, but it is interesting to see how many people are into it and how much of their time they spend on such trivial games!

No lecture on week 6 - therefore no lecture notes!

Here's a post of week 5's lecture notes on - Virtual Reality, Virtual Philosophy and the Screen Age. Not a favourite lecture at all (sorry)!

• The 19th and 20th centuries saw the exponential development of communication technologies that have radically altered the economy of the planet. These changes have also set in train a shift from the certainties of the literary age and the rationality of logical positivism to the still emerging screen age and an attendantvirtual rationality.
• Plato developed a rational argument that reality was expressed in hiddenforms that could only be appreciated by an elite who thus had the dutyto use the arbitrary powers of the police state to enforce a harshidealism. Plato's pupil Aristotle bent pure rationality into the arbitrary categories ofscientific enterprise. Socrates left a heritage of a pair of schemesforever drawing boundaries around the chaotic, random exuberance oflife.
• In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell patented the first telephone whichallowed sounds, including the human voice to be transmitted over longdistances.
• Thomas Edison invented many of the devices we use today. While hismost famous invention is the lightbulb, in 1876 he recorded and playedback sound on wax cylinders. This device led to the development ofcassettes, records, CDs and other sound-recording devices.
• In 1895 Marconi invented a process of wireless telegraphy that allowed messages to be sent over longdistances by modulating electro-magnetic radiation. Initially radiocarried Morse code from point to point and, in amateur hands, produced an international web of independentcommunication. By the 1930s, radio was modified to transmit and receiveall manner of sounds and thus the radio industry was establishedallowing the immediate and simultaneous broadcast of information tomass audiences. In Australia, broadcast radio was pioneered by the ABC. Different formats of radio broadcastdeveloped depending on whether the transmitter modulated the amplitude(AM) or frequency (FM) of the radio wave.
• In 1926 John Logie Baird first demonstrated television that wasgradually refined until it could broadcast sound and moving picturestogether. By the late 1930s, TV was ready to be marketed to a massaudience and was presented in London and at the 1939 New York WorldFair. World War Two intervened and it wasn't until the late 1940s thatTV gained a mass market in the USA. TV was introduced into Sydney andMelbourne in 1956 and to Brisbane in 1959.
• The way in which t.v works is a light is filtered by lenses onto a photoelectric surface, which isread by an electron-scanning beam which turns the information into anelectrical current. That encoded information is stored on videotape,edited into a program and broadcast either as electro-magneticradiation to be picked up by the aerial attached to your TV or sentdirectly down cables. However that information arrives at the TV it isthen sent to an electron gun which, in a reverse of the camera process,rapidly shoots rows of pixels (color and darkness information) at thephotosensitive screen of the TV.

To tell the truth that is all I got up to in the lecture before I literally fell asleep. Sorry but I found it really boring, hence why my lecture notes are all over the place and don't even cover half of the lectures information. You can't please everyone I guess and this was my day I suppose!!