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!!

Here's a summary of week 4's lecture - A short history of the internet!

• Cyberspace is a common mental geography,built, in turn, by consensus and revolution, canon and experiment; a territory swarming with data and lies, with mind stuff and memories of nature, with a million voices and two million eyes in a silent,invisible concert of inquiry deal-making, dream sharing, and simple beholding.
• The Internet is the sum of interconnected computer hardware and the software that runs it, the Web is a particular application of the Internet that is particularly easy to use and Cyberspace is the sum of users' imaginations as they use the Internet.
• The internet, is a network of networks. These networks include servers, mainframes and personal computers and many other devices that use CMC (computer-mediated communications) technology, loosely interconnected by the telephone system and, more recently, broad-band cable and satellite services, to link people around the world into an information-sharing system.
• The World Wide Web, is one particular use of the Internet that emerged in the 1990s as people generally began to see the potential for computers to communicate with each other as a matter of course. The Web includes all the internet sites that people have made available on servers around the world.
• A working definition of cyberspace might be: A conceptual space where words, relationships, data, wealth and power are manifested by people using Computer Mediated Communication technologies.
• Netiquette is etiquette on the Internet. Poor netiquette because you're new is one thing, but such practices as spam (unsolicited email) and flaming(abusive communications) are another matter. They are bad behaviour that disrupts other people's use of the internet.
• The growth of cyberspace is generating a new grammar that is shaping a new approach to economics. Its interactivity suggests new ways to think about capital that reflects new ways to do things with each other:
  Social network capital - the value in person to person interaction though we might never meet
  Knowledge capital - the value in ideas means that sharing information equals sharing power
  Cultural capital - the value in the values we share and that allow us to live creative lives in a civil society.

A fairly standard, easy to understand history of the net. We also watched the end of alphaville, was weird to say the least but still I didnt mind it at all!

So a summary of week 3's lecture on the birth of the computer...was actually an alright lecture and I did, surprisingly, like the alphaville movie!!

• The computer has its origins in various adding machines, most notably Charles Babbage's 19th Century difference engine which was designed to calculate and print mathematic tables.
• The serious work required for the development of the computer was done by Alan Turing.
• Turing investigated programming, neural nets, and the prospects for artificial intelligence. His philosophical paper on machine intelligence Computing Machinery and Intelligence suggested the Turing Test: a human judge sits at a computer terminal and interacts with both a computer or a human by written communication only; if the judge cannot tell which is which then the machine has passed the test and it would be reasonable to call the computer intelligent.
• Computers were first commercially produced by IBM in the 1950s. The first generation of computers were large, unwieldy and expensive machines for military, government and corporate work but it quickly became apparent that computers would get smaller, quicker and less expensive at an exponential rate.
• Several computer nerds got together at regular, hobbyist 'Home Brew' meetings. They exchanged ideas and displayed their latest and greatest home-made PCs. It was in this environment that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak got hooked up together and started their own little company - Apple. They produced the Apple I - a primitive machine with a single circuit board, no case and no keyboard. It sold for $USA666.60. They sold fifty of them. Their dream became to produce and sell the first self-contained PC for people who weren't techies ... for people who were more interested in the software and its possibilities, than the hardware.
• To run computers, there are two types of software required: the language and the Operating System.
• Microsoft/Bill Gates made a decision to promise an Operating System. They found and bought an Operating System which had been developed by Tim Patterson. It was called Kudos and was based heavily on Kildall's CPM. Microsoft paid Seattle Computer Products (Patterson's employer) $50,000 for it.
• Over the ensuing years, IBM gained more and more of the market share - largely through its association with the software giant Microsoft.
• Alphaville (1965) by Jean-Luc Goddard combines French new wave sensibility with a science fiction story line to produce a film noir account of a dystopia where a technocratic dictatorship has taken control. Set in the future and on another planet, there are no special effects. The film was shot in the real Paris using modernist locations to give a futurist feel. Was actually entertainment for me!!

Here's a summary of week 2 lecture:

• The twentieth century saw the development of mass society and an explosion of broadcast media forms (newspapers, cinema, radio, and television) where messages were distributed from centralised sources to audiences around the world. Theorists struggled to keep up. A number of sometimes competing, sometimes compatible academic disciplines have sprung up to investigate issues around communication.
• In the last decade, the rise of computers and other new communications technologies have spawned new areas of investigation:
  New Media Studies
  CyberStudies
  Internet Studies
  Cyberculture Studies
  Web Studies
• Understanding Media, first published in 1964, focuses on the media effects that permeate society. McLuhan's starting point is the individual (because he defines media as technological extensions of the body) so he frames media effects as 'hot' to 'cool' in terms of the intensity of different media on the physical senses - radio and cinema are hot because their dense information consumes the audience, telephone and television are cool with less intense information so the audience has more sensory participation. This invariably entails a psychological dimension.
• 'Culture' is wrested from that privileged space of artistic production and specialist knowledge (high culture) and into the lived experience of the everyday.
• "Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet [who is also unable to] deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality."(Adorno, T & Horkheimer, M Dialectic of Enlightenment Verso London 1979 p126)
• The tangle of communication theory that has emerged in the last century cannot be resolved by one side winning, it can only be resolved by accomodation (powersharing). Political economy seeks to do that by grounding their analysis in the economic base of society while appreciating the force of the dialectic between the economic base and the cultural superstrucure

To be truthful, not highly entertaining and some information was a little hard to retain, but it's information that needs to be learnt I guess!

CHRISTINE MATHOT
BACHELOR OF ARTS STUDENT


NEW COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES 1501



Assignment 1 Brief: Academic Essay

Project Outline: Music Downloading Piracy

Workshop Time: Monday 10am – 12pm

Weighting: 20% marks
Length: 1000 words
Due date: Friday 11th May 5pm (End Week 10)



MUSIC DOWNLOADING PIRACY



Most of us would never consider stealing a car. You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a movie. So, is music (and video) piracy stealing? Internet piracy is music compressed, posted and transmitted globally via the internet without permission of the rights holders. ‘Digital copying is as serious and criminal as stealing a CD from a record shop or a DVD from a video shop’ (Moore 2003). Everyday people download tracks off the Internet, simply by opening one of the many peer-to-peer (P2P) file share programs, selecting the tracks, downloading and burning to a CD-ROM. Yet such a simplistic task is a serious offence under the copyright protection laws.


Many illegal downloaders are teenagers and university students who are “money-poor but time-rich”. They install programs such as KaZaA, where you search the internet for songs that somebody else’s computer may have, copy it to your computer and then make your own folder of music to share with other users. Therefore the music industry cannot claim that those downloads were lost record sales, due to the simple fact that they wouldn’t have gone out and bought the songs they downloaded anyway. However the recording industry says that file sharing is detrimental to the future of popular music. People will not pay for something that they can so easily get for free and in turn record companies and musicians won’t profit from their work and may eventually go out of business.

In 2004, Microsoft big cheese Steve "Ballistic" Ballmer reportedly claimed "the most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'" (Ballmer 2004). Music piracy has had some serious effects on the recording industry causing the revenue to decline sharply within the last three years due to a 20% drop in sales every year. The use of peer-to-peer files such as KaZaA and Grokster, are responsible for 2.6 billion downloads of copyrighted files every month.


‘With the rise of the computer and the internet, an increasing number of digital products and services have been copied and distributed most of the time without the authorization of legal owners. This trend has become a concern for both product manufacturers and policy makers. A recent illustrations are the legal actions by record companies against file-sharing technologies and their users, backed up by the reinforcement of the copyright law stated in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The main argument of the record companies is the huge revenue losses claimed to be due to Internet piracy’ (Bach 2004).


Many are unaware that the criminal penalties or music piracy can be as high as five years in prison or $250, 000 in fines. It has been brought to the AFM and the RIAA’s (Recording Industry Association of America) attention that music piracy touches on such issues as privacy, copyright infringement, property rights and the evolution of digital media. So Congress has begun to send out music piracy bills. In the Constitution, there is a clause that empowers Congress ‘to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries’ (Article 1, Section 8). This is the basis for patents. The Copyright Act states that only the copyright owner has the right ‘to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords’ (Article 1, Section 6). Here a few factors, people need to be mindful of:
· ‘The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) can sue for as much as $150,000 per song illegally downloaded.
· Almost 2000 individuals have been sued by the RIAA for illegally downloading as of March 2004.
· More than 400 individuals have settled, paying fines averaging $3000.
· The Department of Justice recently announced the creation of the Intellectual Property Task Force, which examines all aspects of how the DOJ handles intellectual property issues’ (CMTA 2004).


The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects owners from the ‘unauthorised reproduction, adaptation or reproduction of sound recordings, as well as certain digital performances to the public’ (Beal 2004). If you have bought a CD you are allowed to record it to MP3 files for your own use, however once you decide to upload these files in order to share them via P2P, you are committing a serious offence in a breach of the law.

With all the use of these P2P programs, its depriving not only the government of income from sales and excise taxes but also taking away the rights of recording artists, record companies and composers to ‘choose the value of their creative property in a free and open market’ (CRIA 2006). However, some may choose to disagree and believe that illegal downloading may actually be slightly beneficial to the industry. A group the like to call “samplers” where an ‘older crowd who downloads a song or two and then, if they like what they hear, go out and buy the music’ (Silverthorne 2004).

Deliberate infringement of copyright materials is physical music piracy. It is highly illegal and reaps serious consequences if caught. It causes copious amounts of revenue loss within the music and recording industry, due to the fact that if a person is able to download the music they want off the Internet for free, then that person will not go out and buy that CD. Strategic implications need to be sort in order to stop this ongoing piracy. As Cary Sherman, president of Recording Industry Association of America stated: “We want people to stop engaging in the theft of music so that people can go on making it. This is a terrible thing where people are biting the hands that make the music and destroying the very music that they want to continue to be created” (Sherman 2003).




Bibliography

Author - Rafael Rob and Joel Waldfogel
Title - Piracy on the High C's: Music Downloading, Sales Displacement, and Social Welfare in a Sample of College Students,
The Journal of Law and Economics, volume 49 (2006), pages 29–62,
2006, The University of Chicago.


Book – Peitz M, Waelbroeck P. 2003, Piracy of Digital Products: A Critical Review of the Economics Literature, cesifo-group.


Bach D. 2004, The Double Punch of Law and Technology: Fighting Music Piracy or Remaking Copyright in a Digital Age?, Business and Politics: Vol. 6 : Iss. 2, Article 3. Available at: http://www.bepress.com/bap/vol6/iss2/art3


Book – Brown B, Sellen AJ, Geelhoed E. 2001, Music Sharing as a Computer Supported Collaborative Application., Hewlett-Packard, Publishing Systems and Solutions Laboratory

Beal V. 2004, http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2004/music_downloading.asp


Haines L. 2006, MS in illegal music download shocker, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/02/happy_birthday_outrage


Law and Society Group Blog. 2007, Illegal Music Downloading, http://ledux.blogspot.com/2006/07/illegal-music-downloading.html


Silverthorne S. 2004, Music Download: Pirates or Customers?, http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4206.html


American Federation of Musicians. 2004, Online Music Piracy, http://www.afm.org/public/departments/leg_issues_05.php


Gruden. 2006, Music Industry Privacy Investigations, http://www.mipi.com.au/musicpiracy.htm



Christian Music Trade Association. 2004, http://www.cmta.com/brochure.htm


Moore C. 2003, Is Music Piracy Stealing?, Applelinks.