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!!