Week 8- How twitter will change the way we live?

What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online application that is part of blog, part  of social networking site, part cell phone or IM tool which designed to let the users answer the questions ‘ what are you doing’ and ‘what are you thinking of’ by using 140 characters for each ‘tweet’. It also let the users find the responses from other tweets through online resources that they are interested in music, movies, even a common topic. Twitter is very similar with Facebook which is other social networking site which is much more popular than Twitter as they are both involving to the users’ mini updates. Besides that, the users can follow anyone to know about the latest update for the personal status of ‘what they are doing’ and also their latest news. For example, the celebrity use Twitter to increase their population as their fans can communicate and follow the latest news of the celebrity.

Twitter changes our life in the ways:

1.       News and opinion.

Traditional newspaper normally update one day after the accident but through twitter, peoples sharing new information and news update on the spot, it maybe from the victims or the sides. So, the news spread faster than the newspaper compare with twitter.

2.       Searching

It the information is for entertainment or news update, searching it on Twitter is more accurate compare to the search engines or news article as articles mostly filter by the big company to defend their reputation. The search engines mostly are more written by the historians but if you want the article recommended by peoples or had the highest response rates, Twitter is the best ways and application for it.

3.      Advertising

Now is an internet world which people more likely use internet as the media compare to TV, radio and outdoor advertising. Mostly internet advertising is more effective comparing to the others because peoples spend more time in internet world though mobile devices, computer or any devices they could access to internet.   As Twitter is a trend which have millions of people using it, so advertise through this media platform can meet the advertisement objectives.

As my opinion, Twitter got its good and bad as people can use it as a personal status updated but 90’s generation is too addicted in Twitter is not a good phenomenon too. The first thing people do every day is posting their status instead of greeting with their parent. People will have less face to face communication with their parents and in the end it will become digital’s world as people will communicate through the electronic devices.

Twitter is the platform of building relationship too. Through Twitter, users can follow the peoples they concern such as high-school friend, colleagues, relatives, parents even friends that had lost contact for a long time period. Through Twitter, they can know what they are doing recently and also find the friends they had lost contact for a long time. So, it is a good application for building relationship too. If Twitter and Facebook these kind of social networking keep assisting, there will never lose contact and people can follow their old friends as frequency as they can.  

Week7- Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

What is mass amateurization?

Mass amateurization means the process whereby the two parts between experts and amateurs (a person does a thing because of his/her pleasure rather than for financial benefit or professional reasons) is dissolving and creating a new category of professional amateurs. It means that shift away from professionalization. For example, people change to writing to the internet rather than writing to the print media as internet creates a space or platform that encourages people to write out loud.

Compare with traditional publishing and weblogs

	Traditional publishing	Weblogs
Intrinsic value	Publish anything in print, more work & high cost. Large market share taken by big companies.	Platform for unlimited reproduction and distribution of written word, low and fixed cost
Extrinsic value	Need to convince a professionally skeptical system to take risk on print publishing due to the reason high cost on large scale printing.	Effortless as people can write out loud without asking for help and permission.

In mass amateurization, everyone can become professionalization as there is not constraint for them. People can take photo and share their photo through internet (weblogs, Facebook) although there are not professional in the particular field. People can share their ideas or mind in the written form through weblogs to tell the worlds what are they thinking about without any restrict compare to the print publishing. In print publishing, the publisher will edit the things that you write and publish to the public but the writing is not valuable to the author as that is not the original work that he or she wants to share about.

However, there are still limitations for weblogs posting or publishing the original works as it will become worthiness because weblogs doesn’t pay for the work but print publishing does. Like Shirky said in the article:

‘Oxygen is more vital to human life than gold, but because air is abundant, oxygen is free like weblogs make writing as abundant as air, with the same effect on price. Prior to the web, people paid for most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of us, most of the words we read cost nothing.’

However, recently, weblogs start to pay some rewards to encourage peoples to write more. The most famous or higher rated post will be given some incentive to encourages the webloggers to post more as webblogers will always be the de facto farm team ( people who written in practice or actuality, but not officially established). Those incentives will get from the advertisements which advertise in the particular weblog, personal sponsors or getting donations from Amazaon and Paypal tip jars.  

As conclusion, each types of publishing have it good and bad, like weblogs will be less credible compare to print publishing as mostly weblogs were written by the amateur and the print publishing is written by the professional who are more reliable by the public as professional are the expert in their field. This will become the limitation of weblogs but the one things that amateur can win professional is the creativity as amateur can publish whatever they one without restriction and they can written loudly whatever they think or the ideas in their mind. 

Week 6- The Culture Logic of Media Convergence

This week, we learn about media convergence.

What is media convergence?

Text + photos + audio + video + graphics = multimedia.

Convergence means the context of media. It refers to the technology driven unification of different media channels. In addition to convergence at the distribution level there are areas in which the same content can be re-packaged across medial for example; computer games and films use the same content in different ways. According to Henry Jenkins, media convergence is more than simply technological shift. Convergence refers to an evolution process of technology like nowadays cell phones are not simple telecommunications devices that use for contact peoples. They allow us to play games, download information from the internet and receive and send photographs even text messages.

Media can influence a person through changing their perception.  Peoples believe what they see in their own eyes. There are few theories that mean media can influence people behaviour such as cultivation theory, magic bullet theory and also hypodermic needle theory. When peoples spend long-time period in a particular television programs like sexual, violence or horror, peoples’ behaviour tend to change because they will imitate and learn what the see and hear on the media. Due to this reason, gate keeping theory shown as a role that filtering the content that ‘they’ think will influences the social behaviour.  ‘They’ refers to different media controllers from different countries. However, according to the journal, it said that: ‘convergence is a risk for creative industries because it requires media companies to rethink old assumptions about what it means to consume media- assumptions that shape both programming and marketing decision.’ This decision narrows the range of the creative peoples from limit them to come out with new creative ideas in creative fields.   

Nowadays, people learn not only from TV, radio or print media. Internet had an important role of shaping public’s perception. Through internet, people can know the truth from the debates. So, in my opinion, the media should not filtering so much as people can know from the internet and they will feel they had been cheated by the society as consumer doesn’t like to be cheat. Media convergences affect us positively as well as negatively. Therefore, people should know how to use it for our benefits and not letting them bring negative impact to our lives. 

Week 5 In Against Intellectual Monopoly by Boldrin & Levine

This week talks about intellectual monopoly and intellectual property. How Watt related to intellectual monopoly?

Before this, let have a reviews for Watt’s first,

James Watt (1698-1782), at nineteen he was sent to Glasgow for learning the trade of a mathematical-instrument maker and he returned to Scotland in 1757 and established his own instrument- making business. Watt soon developed a reputation as a high quality engineer. In 1763, Watt was sent a Newcomen steam engine to repair. This made him start his go into more studies on discovered the ways to make engine more efficient and he finally success produce a steam engine that help him earned money and clear his debts. His stream engine was very popular on the century as the engine was four times more powerful than the original engine which design by Thomas Newcomen.

So, answer to the question: “How Watt related to intellectual monopoly?”

The steam engine that developed by Watt was too powerful that it can help to promote economic development. So, many people started to do further studies on the machine as Watt was the only one who sell the steam machine. To prevent anybody else from making a steam-engine like the one he had developed, in 1755 years, Watt had been granted a patent from Parliament. For the next twenty-five years, they had a virtual monopoly over the production on steam-engines.

Nowadays,

There are still intellectual monopolies which happen on Microsoft and Apple. Apple increasing using patents in an aggressive fashion just like Microsoft. As recently people use jail breaking to unlocking the application which needs to pay in Apple. Although jail breaking of Apple devices was legalized, Apple intends to patent its mechanism which allows it to detect a jail broken iPhone, iPad or iPod and restore it to factory settings.

To know more details, you can refer to this link:

http://techrights.org/2010/08/24/datel-settling-apple-spyware-swpat/

As in the book “Against Intellectual Monopoly”, it reaches the conclusions that are at variance with both sides. There are good and bad for intellectual monopoly.

In the intellectual property:

It divided in to 3 broad types that recognized in the legal systems:

1.       Patents

A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the Patent and Trademark Office.

2.       Copyrights

Provide protection for authors “original works of authorship”, including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished.

3.      Trademarks

It serves to identify the goods, services, and ideas.  Trademark rights used to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark, but not to prevent others from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services. It also uses to protect a title, slogan, and other short word phrase too.

As conclusion, I feel that all the intellectual property is the law that uses to protect the author original work and advice people to create and explore for new ideas. It can to produce more creative works to the industry. However, in the consumer sight, it will become not reasonable due to the intellectual property law. Some of the “black heart”  businessman will increase the price for the original work as no other people can produce the same things and consumer need to buy in higher rate. So, there are pros and cons for the intellectual property and it will be a long journey for arguing on the existence of intellectual property.

Networked Citizens power and responsibility at work by Peter Bradwell & Richard Reeves

Orange said that :"recently，the "noise" about social networking and particularly its online elements such as Facebook and Bebo and business equivalents including LinkedIn have created an extra layer to the potential opportunities for connection.The use of technology has added more richness and enabled network to become truly global and fundamentally change business models."

In the journal also mention that" the last two decades have seen a shift away towards service and knowledge-based work.*Knowledge-based services grew 177 per cent between 1995 and 2005, compared with 52 per cent for non-knowledge-based services.Between 1996 and 2006 employment in knowledge-intensive services in the UK increased from 37 per cent of all jobs to 43 per cent."

*Knowledge-based services comes from a fuller recognition of the role of knowledge and technology in economic growth.Knowledge, as embodied in human beings (as "human capital") and in technology, has always been central to economic development.

Economic nowadays are more dependent on the production,distribution and use of knowledge than before. Output and employment are expanding faster in high-technology industries, such as computer,electronics and aerospace.However, many interactions, both economic and social, involve network relationships.Many specifics of the network structure are important in determining the outcome, for example, the exchange of information. 

Modern economic growth theory also used to prove the specialization has increased as in the journal mention that modern economic growth theory is the vital role that technological progress and knowledge play in generating long-term growth.In the other words, human capital contributes increasingly to corporate and national performance. Knowledge can raise the returns on investment, which can in turn contribute to the accumulation of knowledge.It does this by stimulating more efficient methods of production organization as well as new and improved products and services.There is thus the possibility of sustained increases in investment which can lead to continuous rises in a country's growth rate.

Due to the flourishing of the network, the traditional businesses and organization tend to change their management and follow up the trend as network had become one popular media and the most highest usability for the people nowadays.Coase(1937) offers a framework that he attempted to explain why organizations exist. Williamson(1975) built on this theory and developed the current framework for understanding the rule of TCE in organizations.The premise on the individuals , in an imperfect market,will utilize hierarchy rather than the market to reduce the friction of exchange,which can better be described as transaction costs.We just need to understand the network logic changes the relationship and it can affects the people across the worlds with given large impact for co-workers.

According to Paul Worthington, in becoming a network citizen, there are three areas that will become critical:

1.Creating value by increasing and strengthening the connections between the nodes in the network.

Within the new network environments, it appears that strengthening the connections sit atop a foundation of mutual exchange.

For example: Starbucks asking customers to help them with incremental quality improvements through mystarbucksidea.com who use social channels to promote content created for the customers. 

Here is the mutual exchange of content between brand owner and brand consumer appears to both strengthen connections and increase the number of nodes on the network.

2.Creating value by contributing to the issues that people naturally build community around.

Brand think that community will be formed by their customers around them. Instead,community appears to form more densely around peoples issues of interest.

For example: rather than a community forming around Tylenol,you're much more likely to find one forming around a related issue such as acute back pain.

In this environment, brands have a tremendous opportunity to fit within the network and enable people's interest in the issue. In the case of Tylenol and acute back pain, they could  strengthen the network though providing a combination of established and emerging thought leadership on back pain and pain management.

3. Creating value by abiding by the unwritten rules of the network and being generous with its other members

Every environment within the new networks have different unwritten rules. 

For example: You don't want brands spamming on your Facebook wall or you don't want they filling your Twitter feed with needless messages about the benefits of using their products.
Being generous and fitting within the unwritten rules of a flat network is a key aspect of Network Citizenship.Already for some brands, the boundaries between brand and customer are beginning to blur as customers increasingly participate in the activities of the brand itself, creating a real-tome relationship effect with the customers.

As conclusion,network citizen has the potential to create a new generation for the brands  in the 21st century as network citizen has the potential to create significant competitive advantage, where the strength of a brands network drive both loyalty and recommendation and creates an incredibly strong emotional barrier to switching and it can cause the economic for the particular businesses or organization grow along the long-term period.

Related link :

http://pworthington.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/becoming-a-network-citizen/

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/51/8/1913021.pdf

http://www.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/netstab.pdf

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Resources/hoff-stiglitz-frontiersofdevec.pdf

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow

What is Cyberspace?

According to Rabab Jaffery said:

"Cyberspace" is a place to make connections with people far and wide, from places all over the world.The interactions and behaviors observed in this virtual world are yet another interesting aspect to delve into."

How the word "Cyberspace" coined?

The word "cyberspace" was coined by the science fiction author-William Gibson. When he sought a name to describe his vision of a global computer network,linking all people, machines and sources of information in the world, and through which one could move or "navigate" as through a virtual space.

The word "cyber" referring to the science of *cybernetic, as it derives from the Greek verb "Kubernao", which means " to steer" and which is the root of our present word " to govern"/It connotes both the idea of navigation through a space of electronic data, and of control which is achieved by manipulating those data.
For example: in one of his novels Gibson describes how someone, by entering cyberspace, could steer computer-controlled helicopters to a different target. Gibson's cyberspace is thus not a space of passive data,such as a libray: its communication channels connect to the real world.

* Cybernetics defines as a science of information and communication, and cyberspace's substrate is precisely the joint network of all existing communication channels and information stores connecting people and machines.

In Gibson word's:
The word "space" connotes to 3 aspects which are:
1. A space has a virtually infinite extension, including many things that they can never be grasped all at once. This is a existing collections of electronic data, such as Internet.
2. It is a space that connotes the idea of free movement, of being able to visit a variety of states or places.
3.A space has some kind of a geometry, implying concepts such as distance,direction and dimension.

How cyberspace related to cyber communication?

Cyber communication is a mental process that occur during the communications that take place in cyberspace. Cyber communication overrules real life communication with some of its unique features: the ease of all-day access. the wide range and diversity of communications possible (all in one time), and the option of keeping one's identity anonymous are some of its attractions. A great advantages that interaction in cyberspace has is that it is unrestricted by a time frame, hence giving the time and opportunity to think and restructure thoughts before they are sent out as words.So, cyberspace becomes a great field for socialization and meeting people that are probably hard to come across in real life. 

Influences Cyber-communication on today's youth

• Influences in the personal Domain

Positive

It provides opportunities for valued learning, responsibility, and independence.Students can learn to manage time and resources effectively, master the art of accessing and processing skills gained in a meaningful context and communicate this information clearly to the intended audience.Integrating the Internet with communication allows students to share personal perspectives,knowledge, and experiences and structure discussions for debate.

Negative 

Access to personal information. Just a press of a button, the personal information such as address,phone number even directions to someone's house can be find out.It is becoming increasingly hard to protect children from unsafe access to their personal information.

• Influences in the Social Domain

Positive

Expanded the social circle.Youth are actively using Internet as an important form of social interaction.Young people find that online chat is an important form of communication and there is no longer restraint on the limitation of geographic locations.Cyber communication helps children who might not to confident to communicate to do so quite well over the Internet.

Negative

Jokes for a rest:

A father sitting in front the computer and using Facebook sending a message to his son

My dear son, Ken,

Long time no see, how are you recently?

Daddy and Mummy miss you so much.

and your sister already grow taller and taller.

For concern, please don't online everyday.

You must have enough sports, or if you are free.....
Please shut down your computer,
and come downstairs and have dinner with us, is it ok with it?

So, this is the cons of cyber communication as less direct human contact thus social isolation for adolescents and the impact on family relations .Besides that, there are no repercussions personally and causes cyber-bullying,cyber-stalking,cyber-harassment conversations,or"flaming", a public personal attack, where people demonstrate verbal aggression.

• Influences in the Emotional Domain

Positive

Used as a vehicle for youth to express themselves. Many students access healthy resources like suicide hot-lines, support groups, information on medical conditions and contact with appropriate organizations. This interaction helps to give them a support system outside of their immediate environment to assist in dealing with emotional issues.

Negative

The ability of finding resources regarding the emotional domain can be harmful.There are hemlock(suicide) societies online.There is information on how to build bombs, self-mutilate,be sexually active.participate in drug use and many other illegal and illicit activities .(Payne,2006) Children expose to these unhealthy emotional ideas and outlets that they otherwise would not be aware of until a more mature age normally.

In the article by John Perry Barlow,

It said that Cyberspace is a space that have no elected government and sovereignty.This space is building by naturally independent and it won't exist any tyrannies and  government derive. This cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of the communications.I like this sentences he describe for the freedom in cyberspace :" Cyberspace is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live". It means that they have no sovereignty and influences the freedom of speech , writing and thinking and it is a precincts for people to share their perspective , knowledge ,experiences and structure discussions of debate. In the cyberspace world, people can express his or her beliefs , no matter how singular,without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

As conclusion, I think that the author shouldn't be so subjective as the cyberspace without rules and regulation will create many social problems too. Everything has it goods and bad , just in what angle we view on the thing.Cyberspace with freedom of speech can let people express and sharing their mind or thought freely but there are some bad thinking people will use the advantages to do some illegal activities. If the future generation influence by them, there will create a big and unsolvable problem for the society. So, we should smart use for the freedom resources that provide by the cyberspace.

Related link:

Barlow, J. P. (1996, February 8th). A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace 

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

Heylighen, F. ( 1994, October 17). Cyberspace 

http://pcp.lanl.gov/CYBSPACE.html

JAFFERY, R. (2009, January 19th). Psychology of Cyber Communication. Retrieved August 23th, 2011, from Islamic Insights: 

http://www.islamicinsights.com/features/technology/psychology-of-cyber-communication.html

Marie A. Wakefield, M. a. (2008). The Impact of Cyber-Communication on Today's Youth.

The nature of network

What is network?

Network is a concrete pattern of relationships among entities in a social space. Network can differentiate in formal or informal ways." Formal network" contractual relationships among organizations such as strategic alliances,buyer-supplier contracts, and joint ventures. However, "Informal network" is the inter-organizational relationships flow through people, for example, director interlocks, employee mobility, social networks that cross organizational boundaries.

According to the article, the digital media in the network builds an integrated environment based on the flows of information.However, the elements that build the environments aren't the atoms of the nature like soil,houses or any other but the flows of the information  produces by and processed through media as information use to communicate among people, to control processes across time and distances,to check and re-evaluate existing information,and to produce more new information that can arise the nodes.

I agree to  information in the network use to communicate with the peoples in the world as people nowadays use social networking service to communicate among people such as share interests and activities through the network.Besides that, social networking sites allow users to share ideas,activities, interests and their personal status within their individual network.

In the article, there are four basic dimensions form the information ecology:

1. Interdependence  

Information is not objective data, however,information is the relation which arises within the environment,and it is the difference that makes difference.

2.Change

In the article said that a bridge does not simply couple two independent village across a river but it creates a new city.I totally agree with this it is like take the useless or old elements that will effect the progression and create a new flow in the way of adding in new element which can change the nodes become different so that the nodes can stand up among others to let the nodes grow.The flows of information are infinitely malleable.

 3.Time-boundaries 

In the article said that in an environment where information flows very quickly, at the speed of light thorough computer networks, and the new interrelation are born as fast as old connections die time is a supreme factor. As i am a mass communication student, i had learned that the punctuality is very important to us as time is money. In the mass communication like journalism, they need to fight with the time and get the most interesting and fresh news to met the closing time of that day. Due to the reason we are media student, so we need to get the new update information in different fields to improve our knowledge to keep us away from eliminate from the world.

4.differentiation

The information help nodes survive as long as they can.The different of information and not exist similarity with others to make them stand out among others,so, add more features to make it unique.I agree with the differentiation is the reduction of complexity as if the new connections establish, it will not mix with the old connection and it won't continue expand from the old connection to make the old connection become complex and make people confuse. So, differentiation is very important to some specific area.

As conclusion, to keep up in the time and fulfill the users need, the network or nodes should be keep changing to made the idea fresh and attracting enough to draw the users attention, or else it will be forgotten by the users.