Learning about internet communication on Com125 with Mr Abel Choy has been a very enlightening experience. I’ve always been ignorant and disregarded the brilliance of the Internet. However, this module has actually provided me with a lot of information about the services available on the Internet.
What I’m actually most amazed with about the evolution of the Internet is actually Cloud Computing. It is a genius invention. I remember when I had projects where I had to edit my work on the way to school, it was impossible to do that on the train because. Now, with a smartphone and the availability of GoogleDocs and Dropbox, I can just do my work literally, anywhere. It is very efficient and helpful.
I heard a quote once about how most genius inventions don’t have to be big and complicated, but instead, simple and extremely useful. Like for example, the Internet itself. People wanted to solve the problem of being able to connect two computers together so that they could make their work easier and more efficient, and that’s how they came up with the ARPAnet. Now, we have the simple thing called Cloud Computing where we can save all our information online and access it anywhere we want. Now, THAT is genius.
I couldn’t help but think of Troy and Abed’s Dreamatorium. This is a reference to the TV series Community, so bear with me.
Okay, seriously, if this technology really exists, people might not travel anymore. Well, they will but just not as much. Why pay thousands of dollars to travel when you can just switch on your ‘Dreamatorium’ and walk the streets of Paris for free?
However, I think this technology would be very much appreciated by people who have family living abroad. With this technology, they can communicate with each other and kind of ‘feel’ them even though they are miles away from each other. Although everything would be virtual, they would still be able to experience each others’ presence.
Another big deal about this technology to me is that it can literally help you relive your memories. For example, if you take a video at a concert and you want to try and relive that experience, I guess this technology could really help people out.
Also, imagine you’re watching an event live, like the livestream of the US Presidential Debate. With this technology, you can most likely be ‘present’ at the debate itself.
Well, there are a million other uses and many different ways the Internet will advance and evolve. We can only wait and see how everything unfolds.
Social networking platforms like blogger,twitter and facebook allow users to upload their own content. This allows the individual to have a voice in the discussion of important issues occurring anywhere around the world. As said in the video, journalists that really excel on twitter recognizes that twitter is not just a social platform but instead, a global conversation. Twitter became a mechanism for collaboration.
For example, Andy Carvin who live tweeted the Arab Spring, but added journalistic value to his tweets. We’re still assuming that journalism is not making a product, it’s more about performing a service. So, we as journalist have to ask, when and how we can add value to that.
Journalists are afraid that twitter will cause journalism to die out, but really, twitter and journalism should go hand-in-hand. Information keeps coming in because news never stops. On twitter, all that information could be uploaded because there is no editorial team to edit out unwanted information. This is where the journalists come in. They analyze, synthesize and organize all the information. Before twitter, journalists would probably only have two sources to confirm a story, but now there is a global resource available.
Journalists are required to go through all the information to “filter through all the noise and surface the most important thing”. They have to figure out if the information is significant enough and whether it is actually news-worthy. They also have to think about those who are not on twitter or facebook. They are the ones without a voice in this global discussion, so journalists still have to represent them.
Journalists shouldn’t fight collaborative news sources, they should embrace them.
Many activists use the Internet as a platform for their cause because the Internet is highly accessible. They use it to raise awareness, garner support and mobilize people.
There are many methods to starting a movement. One can create a buzz and raise awareness through social networking sites like Facebook where users can create a page and invite people to ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ the page with their friends. Or they can contribute by signing petitions through websites like change.org.
There are so many examples of Internet activism that have happened in recent history. Below are some momentous events.
MoveOn.Org — Sept. 15, 1998
Fed up with Congress deliberating on how to deal with Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd took to the web to send a message to Washington: “Censure President Clinton and Move on to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation.”
The simple online petition, dubbed MoveOn.org, was originally sent out to about 100 family members and friends — and within a week had garnered 100,000 signatures. Eventually the petition would receive half a million. MoveOn.org is now a 5 million-member site that allows participants to propose ideas for political change.
Arab Spring — December 18, 2010 to present
The Arab Spring refers to a series of revolutions and uprisings throughout the Middle East and North Africa, starting in Tunisia on December 18, 2010.
Since the Tunisian revolution, there has been an Egyptian revolution, civil war in Libya, uprisings in Bahrain, Syria and Yemen, major protests in Algeria, Iraq, Oman, Morocco and Jordan, and demonstrations in several other countries. Much of the information about each event was disseminated via blogs, Twitter, and Facebook Groups, whether it was for the benefit of those organizing inside the country, or those in the rest of the world trying to get news on what was happening inside of the country.
Twitter hashtags such as #Jan25, the date of the Egyptian revolution, are still active on Twitter.
Saudi Women Driving — June, 2011
Women of Saudi Arabia organized to drive on June 17, 2011, one month after Manal al-Sherif — a key figure in a social media campaign against a ban on female drivers — was arrested for posting a YouTube video of herself driving around the city of Khobar.
Activists pushed the movement via Facebook, Twitter and other online outlets before some of those accounts were shut down. Online support for the campaign has lived on through Facebook and Twitter in several forms, including the Honk for Saudi Women viral campaign, which featured videos of women and men from around the world honking their horns in support of Saudi women who drove on June 17.
London Riots — August 4, 2011
On August 4, police fatally shot Mark Duggan, a resident of the Tottenham area of north London. A peaceful protest of about 300 people gathered around the police station in Tottenham. Unconfirmed reports state that violence erupted in reaction to a confrontation between a teenage protestor and a policeman. This inspired violent riots throughout London, coordinated mainly via Blackberry Messenger.
The riots continue, but people are now flocking to Twitter to coordinate clean up efforts. Twitter’s traffic has sharply spiked: One out of every 170 Internet visits in the UK on August 8 was to Twitter.com.
I found a very interesting group of activists that work through controversial methods for political means. They are called Anonymous. They have become increasingly associated with collaborative, international hacktivism. Hactivism is the use of computers and computer networks as a means of protest to promote political ends.
According to Wikipedia,
Anonymous (used as a mass noun) is a loosely associated hacktivist group. It (is estimated it) originated in 2003 on the imageboard4chan, representing the concept of many online and offline community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain.[4] It is also generally considered to be a blanket term for members of certain Internet subcultures, a way to refer to the actions of people in an environment where their actual identities are not known.[5] It strongly opposes Internet censorship and surveillance, and has hacked various government websites. It has also targeted major security corporations.[6][7][8] Its members can be distinguished in public by the wearing of stylised Guy Fawkes masks.[9]
Below is a video they have put out aiming at the Church of Scientology.
I also came across a Youtube video of a user creating his own buzz to raise awareness on Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. Many people critic the bill claiming it as a breach on the people’s freedom, a form of censorship.
However, this user managed to carry out his campaign more creatively, through a rap song. It’s quite catchy. It was featured on the notorious file sharing website, Pirate Bay, which makes sense since SOPA threatens its existence.
The Internet is a vital tool to our society today. It is the most effective tool of communication and it allows us to use it for whatever purpose we desire.
Let me start by saying, oh my god, there is A LOT of sources of good music, movies, videos, games and photos available on the Internet. Seriously.
1. Let’s start with music.
8tracks.
8tracks is handcrafted internet radio. It offers a simple way for people to share and discover music through an online mix, a short playlist containing at least 8 tracks.
Their vision: 8tracks believes handcrafted music programming trumps algorithms. Think radio in the 1970s, mixtapes in the 1980s, and DJ culture of the 1990s through today. DJs share their talent in taste making, providing exposure for artists. Listeners get a unique blend of word-of-mouth sharing and radio programming — long the trusted means for music discovery — on a global scale.
Below is an example of a ‘mixtape’ that you can find on 8tracks. (I picked this mix because I love every song on here and I just had to share it. Please enjoy.)
BandCamp
Bandcamp is an online music store, as well as a platform for artist promotion, that caters mainly to independent artists. Artists on Bandcamp have a customizable microsite with the albums they upload. All tracks can be played for free on the website and some artists offer free music downloads.
Below are a few local bands who have their own bandcamp pages
SoundCloud
SoundCloud is the world’s leading social sound platform where anyone can create sounds and share them everywhere. Recording and uploading sounds to SoundCloud lets people easily share them privately with their friends or publicly to blogs, sites and social networks.
Purevolume
PureVolume is a website for the discovery and promotion of new music and emerging artists. Each artist has a profile that typically contains basic info, updates, photos, shows and music for streaming. Artists have the option of making each of their songs available for free download. Listeners and fans can also create profiles to interact with artists and each other, as well as track and share music they like.
2. Movies
Hulu
Hulu’s mission is to help people find and enjoy the world’s premium video content when, where and how they want it. As we pursue this mission, we aspire to create a service that users, advertisers and content owners unabashedly love. Hulu is an online video service that offers a selection of hit shows, clips, movies and more at Hulu.com, numerous destination sites online, and through our ad-supported subscription service, Hulu Plus.
Sidereel
SideReel helps users find, track and watch shows online. With over 15 million monthly unique visitors and over 4.5 million registered users, SideReel’s library includes something for everyone: popular network and cable TV shows, movies, and hundreds of Web TV series too. If it’s online, it’s on SideReel.
Youtube
Founded in February 2005, YouTube allows billions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small. See our company timeline for more information on our company history.
3. Games
Kongregate
A site where all the games are free. I’m not a gamer, but the games available look quite entertaining for a site that provides them for free.
4. Photo-sharing and Art communities
DeviantArt
As a community destination, deviantART is a platform that allows emerging and established artists to exhibit, promote, and share their works within a peer community dedicated to the arts. The site’s vibrant social network environment receives over 160,000 daily uploads of original art works ranging from traditional media, such as painting and sculpture, to digital art, pixel art, films and anime.
hitRECord
HitRecord (stylized as hitRECord) is an online collaborative production company founded and owned by actor and director Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The production company uses video, music, literature, photography, performance, spoken word, screenwriting, graphic art, etc. from different artists around the world to make various projects and workings such as short films, books, and DVDs.
Flickr
Flickr – almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world – has two main goals:
1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.
2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos and video.
I’m going to stop here because this post has gone on long enough. There are many, MANY resources to obtain entertainment on the Internet. Everything is on the Internet. You can upload your own content or you can consume other users’ content. Either way, you’ll definitely be entertained.
“Your entire life is online, and it might be used against you. Be vigilant.”
I’m very particular about spending money online. I’ve never bought anything online where my credit card details were needed. Call me paranoid, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.
Check out this story written on a NYTimes blog about how some hackers managed to hack into the Sony Playstation Network, and how there are “other hackers who steal credit card numbers and personal identity online and then sell and trade this information in underground markets”.
You can never be too sure where all your private information ends up in. If these hackers managed to attack the elaborate security system in these major corporations, there’s no telling how safe your information is in your own computer.
There is no way to protect yourself except with the help of firewalls, anti-virus, surveillance and most of all, vigilance.
I’m not trying to promote Faronics, but the concept of Layered Security should be adopted, not just by office computers but also by your personal computer. Remember, you’d rather be safe than sorry.
I never dared edit a video. I always thought it was too complicated. After this assignment, I’m pretty much inspired to explore more. The video below is a clip I downloaded. I edited the audio and changed up the effects and messed around with it using iMovie. It has truly been an exciting 2 hours exploring the software.
I’ve also never really made use of my Youtube account to upload videos, so this is kind of my first time. It is very simple to upload a video on Youtube. They made it user-friendly so literally anyone can upload a video. I’m glad this assignment made me explore the iMovie software, if not it would probably never be used.
Anyway, enjoy the video. It’s not much, I was just playing around with the effects. There is no method to my approach.
Okay, for those who don’t understand what just happened, the video above is a video of an introductory class for a module called Computer Science 101 at Harvard which happened in 2010. They put up videos of all the lectures for the semester up on Youtube to be made available for free to people all around the world. Yeah, so you can pretty much can have the same lectures as those Harvard students.
What does this mean, though? Free lessons for all?
E-learning includes all forms of electronically supported learning and teaching, including Edtech. The information and communication systems, whether networked learning or not, serve as specific media to implement the learning process.[1] This often involves both out-of-classroom and in-classroom educational experiences via technology. – Wikipedia
On Youtube EDU, you can access many lessons from many different teachers, lecturers and professors from MANY different universities around the world. Students will now be able to learn more and gain different insights from different teachers. They will be able to gain a more holistic and elaborate education.
YouTube EDU brings learners and educators together in a global video classroom. On YouTube EDU, you have access to a broad set of educational videos that range from academic lectures to inspirational speeches and everything in between.
I think this is a good move by the universities. Education should not be limited to a small handful of students who were fortunate enough to attend some of the most prestigious universities in the world. Education should be accessible to all. Thankfully these elite institutions believe in this ideal.
So, what are you waiting for? There is no excuse to being ignorant about learning. The resources are available to us 24/7. Go on, go learn something today.
Get the full Cambridge experience on Quantum Field Theory here.
Or check out this article if you want to know more about the top 25 Universities that also offer this service.
I think the industry that is really benefitting from the Internet is the E-commerce industry. There is so much you can obtain from online shops, so much more than physical stores. This is because the Internet gives us limitless choices and varieties of stores and products to buy. You can buy clothes from stores that don;t even exist in your own country. Like for example, Primark, which is based in the UK and doesn’t have an outlet here in Singapore.
There is so much you can get online, clothes, books, groceries, and even pizza.
Most of these online shops make use of Paypal for payment. PayPal is a global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders. Paypal is just one of the many online payment sites available online.
They do require credit card information which, to me, is a very sticky issue. I’m very particular about where my information ends up. There have been many news stories about how credit card companies give away their customer’s private information to whichever party that is willing to pay. Check out the story here. Most of the time, the information ends up in advertisers’ hands which results in the spamming of unwanted information coming our way.
I guess the only way you can get around this problem is to ensure the privacy regulations of your credit card companies and the online payment services are trustworthy. This way, you will be able to enjoy your online shopping experience.
Recently, a lot of corporations have joined social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Why? To gain exposure or even to monitor the consumers’ contentment with their products and services. I think these corporations also join these sites so that they can constantly keep their customers updated of their services, like for example, an upcoming sale or a new product just came it.
Monitoring consumers
Imagine a scenario with me.
One day, Andrew went to a Subway outlet at a mall in Tampines. He ordered himself a meatball marinara sandwich without cheese. As he sat down to eat, he realises they still gave him cheese, so he asks for a new sandwich. Irritated, the staff rolls his eyes and grabs the sandwich from Andrew’s hand. Annoyed at the service, Andrew goes home and complains about this on his Facebook update. Then soon enough, most of his Facebook friends share their own experiences with bad service from other Subway outlets. Some even shared the whole feed with other friends on their own Facebook wall. Before Subway could do anything, thousands of people had already seen the post and vowed never to return to the Subway outlet at Tampines.
Information spreads like wildfire on the Internet. Anything can go viral if it’s the least bit interesting. People on social media sites are so connected that information gets exchanged almost instantaneously. So any bad press that a company have will most certainly reflect negatively on their reputation and inevitably, their profit sales. That is why all these corporations have these social networking accounts. They want to monitor their customers and try to have a relationship with them.
Let me show you about my little run-in with Starhub on Twitter. I was tweeting about the new Comedy Central Asia channel and Starhub gave a response! I have to admit, it felt kind of nice getting noticed. LOL.
Keeping the customers up to date
On Twitter:
Walmart:
Starbucks:
On Facebook:
H&M Singapore:
Taco Bell US:
Yeah, they work really hard to let us all be informed of what to spend our money on next…
Social media, the latest innovation in advertising.
The Internetsss 