Week 11 — Last (of this subject) blog post

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Here’s to the first milestone of DIGC202 and BCMS — Semester A is complete!

The internet holds more than meets the eye, and everyday it helps us more and more in our daily lives. Before we would just get notifications on our phones whenever we would get an email but now there’s so much more — like using Face ID to access our bank account on our phones and even the use of QR codes to pay our electric and water bills! Who knows what’s next in the future, maybe we won’t even have a phone… maybe it will all just be built into our ‘system’ aka our bodies.

Image taken from trendsmap.com

A great example of the rise of IoT technology is the concept of self-tracking, basically a consistent practice of gathering data of oneself on a regular basis to record and analyse then produce statistics of one’s daily habits and body functions (Lupton, 2013). Common forms that these may come in are watches — like an Apple watch or a Fitbit, a Fitbit can track a person’s heart rate, steps walked, stairs climbed and even the quality of sleep. An Apple watch can do almost all the same things just through the means of an app that can be connected to your iPhone in which you can track your daily statistics.

Image taken from technoblogzine.blogspot.com

We don’t have to be glued to our computers at home anymore because now the existence of smart phones has made big benefits in our daily lives (Dentzel, n.d.). Smart homes, those exist already. We have smart phones, smart TVs, smart watches, well… yeah there’s homes now too and they’re pretty cool. You’re able to sync up your alarm clock with traffic apps, when it’s cold outside; your heating system will be able to detect the temperature through sensors and even whenever we enter a room — the lights can turn on (ICS, n.d.)!

I can see what the future of IoT could potentially turn into if we keep relying on technology to help us function in our daily lives; we could have a memory chip implanted in our brain that allows a visual camera roll in our brain that allows us to scroll through, replay memories or delete them, or for the kids of the future — there might be a chip made that parents would want to inject into their children that functions as a live GPS, tracker for their vitals and has the ability to censor certain people, objects or places from their lives. There could even be a chance where we would have to live in a world where everyone has their own ‘social credit,’ and everywhere you go you would be able to see everyone’s social rating and the only way to climb up the ‘social ladder’ is if you surround yourself with people of higher social credit.

Sounds pretty scary doesn’t it? Well unfortunately, these ideas were already somewhat curated into our heads.

References:
  1. Dentzel, Z. (n.d.). How the Internet Has Changed Everyday Life. Retrieved from https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/articles/internet-changed-everyday-life/.
  2. ICS. (n.d.). 5 ways the Internet of Things will affect your daily life. Retrieved from https://www.ics.ie/news/view/1729.
  3. Lupton, D. (2013). Understanding the human machine , Ieee Technology and Society Magazine (4th ed., Vol. 32). Intel Free Press/Wikimedia Commons. doi: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=6679313

Week 10 — I got black, I got white; what do you want?

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Hacking has been around since the 1960s and has always been a form of crime — never will you find an article or a story that says that hacking is a good thing, I mean getting hacked is even a lot worse. Although, I have found something interesting about hacking, turns out there are many types of hackers but I will be talking about two main types of hackers — the black hat and the white hat hackers. These two hackers have been in feud for a long time, to put it in short — one’s the good guy and ones the bad guy.

Image taken from searchsecurity.techtarget.com

The Black Hat
These hackers are the darkest ones, the ones that are illegal. They are the people that you should really look out for. Unfortunately it’s not that easy to look out for them because they can attack at any given moment and you wouldn’t be able to retaliate back since they are hard to track and almost entirely anonymous — they are highly skilled and can hack to steal personal data like credit card information, where you live and your whole name. They are known for spreading malware and basically shutting down and destroying an entire computer system, and to tie it altogether they frequently work on or with the black market — whether it’s selling or communicating with people from the inside. The most notorious black hat hacker is Kevin Mitnick, in the 90s he went on a hacking spree for two and half years conducting wire fraud and stealing millions of dollars worth of data from telecommunication companies and even the National Defense warning system (Tripwire Guest Authors, 2016).

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The White Hat
The White Hat hackers are the polar opposites of the Black Hats, they are the legal and ethical ones. These hackers are typically hired by companies and are also working for governments, they help their employers to find holes in their company’s network and security with the use of hacking (Ruesink, 2017). White Hat hackers are specialists that protect their company’s data secured and unhackable from the Black Hat hackers — one of the world’s famous white hat hackers is the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds; he experimented on operating systems for years on his computer before he released the secure open-source operating software we all know today (Lee, 2012).

Image taken from thesun.co.uk

Just from these two descriptions you can clearly line out who commits cybercrimes and who is the ‘cyber police,’ one of the biggest cyber attacks there is happened to the most renown web service in the world… Yahoo! In 2014, over 500 million user accounts were affected by the attack (Outpost24, 2018) — names, telephone numbers, birthdays and passwords were stolen. But that wasn’t the end; fast-forward to three years after the 2014 cyber attack Yahoo! got hacked once again, this time losing 32 million more accounts in the fire — this lead to the Department of Justice reopening the investigation from the previous cyber attack and this time come up with a lead since they found that a tool that the hackers have stolen from Yahoo! in 2014, which allows for them to produce malicious cookies and log in without the need of a password. Four suspected culprits were also taken into questioning — two Russian spies and two hackers (Larson, 2017).

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This incident and many cyber crimes plays a big part as to how cyber warfare will play out in the future. Technology is constantly changing which means that it will get harder to break into networks and systems, a more higher level of skill and material would be needed if anyone is even thinking about trying. But if four people were capable to get a hold of one of the biggest web services in the world in the year 2014 and again 3 years later, who knows what potential threats there are in store for us in the future?

References:
  1. Larson, S. (2017, October 4). Every single Yahoo account was hacked. Retrieved from https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/03/technology/business/yahoo-breach-3-billion-accounts/index.html.
  2. Lee, J. (2012, July 13). 5 Of The World’s Most Famous And Most Influential White Hat Hackers. Retrieved from https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-worlds-famous-influential-white-hat-hackers/.
  3. Outpost24. (2018, December 3). TOP 10 of the world’s largest cyberattacks. Retrieved from https://outpost24.com/blog/top-10-of-the-world-biggest-cyberattacks.
  4. Ruesink, M. (2017, February 22). Types of Hackers: White Hat vs. Black Hat & Every Shade in Between. Retrieved from https://www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/technology/blog/types-of-hackers/.
  5. Tripwire Guest Authors. (2016, August 17). The Evolution of Hacking. Retrieved from https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/security-data-protection/cyber-security/the-evolution-of-hacking/.

Week 9 — That’s… fair

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YouTube; a video-sharing platform where anyone and everyone can post and share videos, but there’s a twist — posting original content.

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Releasing original content on YouTube can be difficult, so many people have done so many things it’s almost as if there is a video for anything on YouTube. That is why YouTube has decided to add a new copyright rule/claim which is Fair Use — this is to allow content creators to reuse copyright-protected material under certain rules and regulations.

What has been an on-going controversy in the YouTube community is copyright claiming, where one content creator can claim something from another creator’s video as their own (Bailey, 2019). Let me paint you a picture; there is a channel on YouTube called Fine Brothers Entertainment (FBE), they’ve been making videos for almost a decade and have earned a spot on the list for most subscribed YouTube channels. In 2010, the React franchise/series was birthed and the following years after was when a lot of controversy arose — the concept of “reacting to” has already been a part of YouTube even before FBE created the entire series, however in 2014; in an attempt to control other people’s content (Green, 2016), they tried to trademark the word ‘React’ on YouTube.

Screenshot taken by me from YouTube

Now what’s this about the ‘Fair Use’ rule on YouTube then? Well for starters it was implemented in order to improve some aspects of being a YouTube content creator, however, not long after a much larger problem occurred where instead of a big time YouTuber trying to claim copyrights for something controversial — a smaller YouTube channel was trying to claim copyrights infringements against a larger YouTube channel and even filed a lawsuit against them (Eordogh, 2017). This all happened to the YouTube channel h3h3productions in 2017; the h3h3productions YouTube channel was sued by another YouTube channel Matt Hoss Zone — Matt Hosseinzadeh (creator of Matt Hoss Zone) tried to sue h3h3productions because the channel created a 13-minute long video critiquing Hosseinzadeh’s video on a scripted parkour challenge. But wait… they got sued for copyright infringement, how does critiquing = copying?

Image taken from reddit.com

To put it in short, Hoss couldn’t take comedic criticism and ordered Ethan and Hila Klein (creators of h3h3productions) to take down their video about him in which Hoss truly failed as little did he know, the Kleins were the ones to implement the ideology of Fair Use on YouTube thus using that as a staple argument in the lawsuit which brought the Kleins to a successful win against Hoss (Zelichenko & Levy, 2019).

Now what does that show? If it weren’t for the Fair Use rule on YouTube, a lot of YouTube channels would lose their content let alone their whole channel. Without being able to copyright claim on YouTube means that there won’t be any original content put out and everything will just be a copy of a copy of a copy — the value of the original content will lose face and YouTube wouldn’t have a ‘successful YouTubers list’.

References:
  1. Bailey, J. (2019, January 10). YouTube’s Copyright Insanity. Retrieved from https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2019/01/10/youtubes-copyright-insanity/.
  2. Green, H. (2016, February 3). The Fine Brothers Controversy Explained. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@hankgreen/the-fine-brothers-controversy-explained-long-version-42d3285581d1.
  3. Sterling, B. (2017, September 23). The Blast Shack. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@bruces/the-blast-shack-f745f5fbeb1c.
  4. Eordogh, F. (2017, August 28). H3H3 Productions Scores Tentative Win For Fair Use Online. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/fruzsinaeordogh/2017/08/25/h3h3-productions-scores-tentative-win-for-fair-use-online/#4b1100b04d56.
  5. Zelichenko, R., & Levy, M. (2019, April 16). h3h3 Productions Strengthens Fair Use on YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.creatorhandbook.net/h3h3-productions-strengthens-fair-use-on-youtube-41ab690909c9/.

Week 8 — Connectivity is power

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I’m pretty sure that most of the world is aware of what’s happening in Hong Kong at the moment, and I’m even more than certain that the way that the world is aware is through the use of social media.

Image taken from wired.com

Social media is one of the biggest contributors on how word gets out to anyone and everyone, from live updates and live videos on Facebook or Instagram to point-to-point communication to individuals or large groups through WhatsApp or Telegram messages (Chiu, 2019).Actually if you’re up-to-date on all the latest news in Hong Kong, you would know that for a fact the world didn’t know much about what was happening in the early stages of all the protests in Hong Kong.

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From a distance you could see that the people of Hong Kong were protesting for their freedom, and it goes as far as to people who are from Hong Kong that are residing in other countries (like the UK and Canada) to be protesting with their fellow Hong Kongers in Hong Kong as well. It wasn’t until people in Hong Kong started projecting what was happening through their social media accounts; using different hashtags like #standwithHK and #FreeHK, this phenomenon made people from all around the world realise what has happened and what is happening in Hong Kong today.

Will history consign Twitter and Facebook to much the same fate 20 years down the road?

Morozov, E. (2011, March 7)

It’s safe to say that anyone can easily make a big difference from a mere tweet, just as Morozov mentioned in the quote above; I definitely think that in the future, most of the upcoming events in history won’t be broadcasted on a radio anymore but rather on someone’s Instagram story.

References:
  1. Chiu, P. (2019, October 12). How older Hongkongers are taking to social media for protest updates. Retrieved from https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3032496/older-hongkongers-taking-online-apps-and-social-media.
  2. Morozov, E. (2011, March 7). Facebook and Twitter are just places revolutionaries go | Evgeny Morozov. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/07/facebook-twitter-revolutionaries-cyber-utopians.

Week 7 — Tweets or Articles… who will win?

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Traditional Media and Social Media… what do these two have in common? Well, for starters they both have the word media in them! Jokes aside, these two are the main mediums of how information and media gets across the world.

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To give you a small rundown: traditional media is the use of newspapers, radios and television which typically allow mass broadcasting through filters or as others may call it gatekeeping (Bruns, 2009). Gatekeeping is a way for journalists and news reporters to filter out specific information before broadcasting it live, kind of like wearing rose-coloured glasses — you only see everything as the same colour — but in this case, you’re only seeing news/information that has been edited/filtered rather than the raw version of it.

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That’s why whenever you read any ‘news’ on social media, it sounds like a completely different story — this is because the information on social media is abundant, there is a large audience which calls for a large amount of content (Bruhn, Schoenmueller, & Schäfer, 2012). But then again, you still wonder which form of media has the more valid facts and content; is it verified news aggregators that produce and broadcast content on radios and television? Or is it just the small icons on your smartphone that are just at fingertips reach with their so-called ‘posts’ and ‘tweets’.

References:
  1. Bruhn, M., Schoenmueller, V., & Schäfer, D. B. (2012). Are social media replacing traditional media in terms of brand equity creation? Management Research Review35(9), 770–790. doi: 10.1108/01409171211255948
  2. Bruns, A. (2009). News Blogs and Citizen Journalism: New Directions for e-Journalism. In e-Journalism : New Media and News. Retrieved from http://produsage.org/files/News Blogs and Citizen Journalism.pdf
  3. Welbers, K., & Opgenhaffen, M. (2018). Social media gatekeeping: An analysis of the gatekeeping influence of newspapers’ public Facebook pages. New Media & Society20(12), 4728–4747. doi: 10.1177/1461444818784302

Week 6 — iOS or Android?

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Image taken from getvoip.com

For many years now, iOS and Android have been in a feud for who’s better than the other — with one being almost 95% personalised and the other being ready-made. I can say for myself that I can agree that Android phones are more flexible and customisable although I’ve had Apple products for almost my whole teen life. Despite that fact, the two platforms will always be comparable with one excelling in certain aspects more than the other.

When it goes down to affordability; Android definitely takes the cake. Apple phones are the only smartphones that hold the iOS operating system and they sell their products for a pretty high amount — their most recent phone which is the iPhone 11 Pro Max goes from US$1099 — while on the other end there are many phones that use the Android operating system, such as; Samsung, LG, Google, Sony etc and since there are different companies that use the Android operating system, there are more of a variety of prices for each product (Hill, 2019).

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Image taken from geeksoncoffee.com

One key thing you have to remember is that Apple is a software company — Apple cares a lot about producing their own hardware therefore creating iOS subsequently to run on their products (Bajarin, 2011). Android on the other hand, like I’ve mentioned has many phones (and products as well) that use Android’s operating system. Android uses and operates with various different types of components to adjust processing power amongst different Android devices — the biggest controversy is fighting over who has the better camera quality. I’m pretty sure you all have heard that Android is notorious for having… well a-not-so-great camera quality on their devices and Apple’s is always known for being close to perfect (Eadicicco, 2019).

In my opinion, it’s difficult to choose a winner between both systems because overall they both function in the ways they’re supposed to as well as both exceed and fall short in certain areas more than another — but that doesn’t define who’s better at their job.

References:
  1. Bajarin, B. (2011, October 19). Android and iOS: Two Very Different Philosophies. Retrieved from https://techpinions.com/android-and-ios-two-very-different-philosophies/3471.
  2. Eadicicco, L. (2019, September 12). How Apple’s new iPhone 11 Pro compares to its biggest rival, Samsung’s Galaxy S10. Retrieved from https://amp.businessinsider.com/apple-iphone-11-pro-vs-samsung-galaxy-s10-specs-camera-2019-9
  3. Hill, S. (2019, October 2). Android vs iOS: In-Depth Comparison of the Best Smartphone Platforms. Retrieved from https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/android-vs-ios/.
  4. Reed, B. (2013, January 24). Why the iOS-Android feud is so intense: It’s about core philosophy more than products. Retrieved from https://bgr.com/2013/01/24/apple-google-rivalry-analysis-304928/.
  5. Ved. (2018, January 8). Interaction Design patterns : iOS vs Android. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@vedntha/interaction-design-patterns-ios-vs-android-111055f8a9b7.

Week 5 — Walled Garden Theory

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The way the internet works will always change throughout the years, whether it would be through adaptation or improvement. iFeudalism is a term that can be used to describe one of the phenomenons that occurred to the internet in this day in age — it originated from the term used in medieval European history that is; ‘Feudalism’. According to Wikipedia, Feudalism is a system of land ownership and duties — every bit of the land belongs to and is controlled by the king/lord, however within the land; the lord can have vassals that reside on their land. But just like how I mentioned, the lord is the only one who controls all aspects of the land — that means that once you are committed to the system and are living on the land; you are to obey and follow the rules that the lord gives.

It sounds pretty familiar doesn’t it? Treat the mainframe of the internet as the lord and all of us that use the internet are the vassals. The difference about today’s generation is that instead of being on a manor/land we are all in a walled garden (Chen, Feamster, & Calandro, 2017) — it sounds pretty scary actually; what this means is that whenever we are on the internet going about our daily businesses, what we don’t realise is that the internet is constantly watching and listening to our every move (Nichols, 2018). Let me give you an example; I’m scrolling through my Facebook feed while talking to a friend (in person) about how I really want to buy new clothes. The next day I’ll be scrolling through my Facebook feed again and an ad that’s advertising about Zalora giving student discount if you use the code (blank) for (x)% off! I don’t know about you guys but this has happened to me multiple times and I still get the creeps every time it does happen.

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These signs of a walled garden can be seen on majority of social media platforms nowadays, especially the ones that most people use like Instagram and Facebook. Since this phenomenon is still happening and is getting more complex as the years go by, most of our information about our personal details are and can be floating on the internet because it’s easier and cheaper to store information than to erase it — which causes there to be multiple copies of copies of the original (Lessig, 2015).

References:
  1. Chen, A., Feamster, N., & Calandro, E. (2017). Exploring the walled garden theory: An empirical framework to assess pricing effects on mobile data usage. Telecommunications Policy41(7-8), 587–599. doi: 10.1016/j.telpol.2017.07.002
  2. Feudalism. (2019, November 9). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism.
  3. Lessig, L. (2015). Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. Retrieved from http://www.authorama.com/free-culture-4.html
  4. Nichols, S. (2018, June 4). Your Phone Is Listening and it’s Not Paranoia. Retrieved from https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/wjbzzy/your-phone-is-listening-and-its-not-paranoia.

Week 4 — Are you sure that’s not the same as mine…?

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Imagine a world where the internet doesn’t exist and we would have to wait for a specific time and go to a specific channel to watch our favourite TV shows and movies… oh wait, that did actually happened. Well now I got you to think about the past, think about the present — like literally right now. Where are you reading this? Your smartphone? Maybe your laptop, or your desktop computer? Heck, I’d say you could be even using a tablet! Okay so here’s what I’m trying to say; in today’s generation, technology is constantly upgrading and changing both in efficiency and in value. We can easily differentiate the types: legacy media channels and the internet.

Gif taken from creshendo.co.vu

Legacy media channels are typically paid subscriptions or cable TV — stuff like Netflix, FX and HBO. Subscriptions for online streaming sites/apps and cable TV usually are on a monthly payment and are sometimes a bit pricey, considering the user who will subscribe to the content is basically paying for amount that producers use to even publish the content. Also a common feature of legacy media channels is that there is always a strong quality filter, this means that what you see on cable television and TV networks are of ‘good’ quality and sometimes are censored or filtered to cater certain audiences. Let’s say you have a Netflix subscription with your family and you have a little sister that likes watching cartoons and child-friendly content, but Netflix has all kinds of movies and TV shows that aren’t really suitable for children; there is an option provided on Netflix to create an account specifically for kids or if you are really worried about your little sister discovering Orange is The New Black, there are parental controls that can be accessed through settings.

Now, the internet is more self-explanatory. It’s the complete opposite of TV networks and cable TV. It’s completely free and can be accessed anytime and anywhere! Since it can be accessed freely, the amount of data and information is unlimited and in abundance.

You may think that the internet is the better option which I mean, don’t get me wrong, I can somewhat agree on that — it’s just… if you can access basically anything and everything for free, why should you pay for anything in the end? Here’s where there can be some problems with the idea of having an abundance of information, there is a theory called “long tail,” when put into perspective of the idea of having an abundance of information — there is information that is higher and lower/uncommon in demand. So what I’m getting from this is that the internet, well there’s too much information on there, there’s so many options and things to do or find that people tend to lose interest fast.

Unlike back in the past, you are always anticipating for that one show or that one movie at exactly 8:30pm in the evening. Something that can also happen on the internet is repetitive information, and once there’s multiple of the same thing online then the original producer of the content or work loses money and face value, millions of copies would’ve been made and put out on different social medias, websites and platforms — what’s the purpose of the original?

Gif taken from giphy.com
References:
  1. Dr. Teodor, M. Into the Cloud the long tail and the attention economy [PDF document]. Retrieved from: https://moodle.uowplatform.edu.au/pluginfile.php/1849255/mod_resource/content/1/week%205.pdf

Week 3 — Water, coffee and tea labour

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As the world is constantly changing, majority of the things that come with it are in process of change too. People either choose to adapt to changes or stick within their comfort-zone — companies are the perfect epitome of the phrase constant change. There are many modern characteristics of workplaces and how they function today; in the book Liquid Life, Convergence Culture, and Media Work, Mark Deuze explains that there is such thing as “new capitalism” where there is always constant change, permanent flux as well as structural indeterminacy. According to Zygmunt Bauman, just like the title of this blog post — he argues that we are now living a ‘liquid’ lifestyle where life is in a constant uncertainty and is usually precarious.

So just from those two examples I can already foresee that liquid labour and the idea of ‘liquid’ being incorporated into lifestyle is becoming more common, I personally think it is a good idea to continue this movement. We can all guarantee that we don’t know yet what the future holds, but we can know for sure that the future won’t be the same as the present — taking into account the idea of a ‘liquid’ life — things will always be constantly changing whether we like it or not. Things may get more difficult or simple it really depends on the situation, thus resulting in people having to adapt into different methods of handling a situation either making it easier and effective in the long run or affordable yet time consuming.

Workplaces are slowly changing and adapting all the time, in this case they do this because of the economy. Either a company has a centralised network where there is a main source that has the information and passes out the information to all the nodes, or the company has a more distributed network where there is no main source that holds information — instead all the nodes are equal. This is why companies have decided to use liquid labour as their new method of working, information is always free flow thus making things more fluid and flexible. Although despite being able to reach high scalability and good control, having a distributed network means that information may get repetitive because unlike the centralised network; a distributed one is not able to detect information that is repeated.

Image taken from knowyourmeme.com
References:
  1. Deuze, M. (2006). Liquid Life, Convergence Culture, and Media Work. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/3343/Liquid Life Deuze 2006.pdf
  2. Gregg, M. ‘Function Creep: Communication technologies and anticipatory labour in the information workplace’

Week 2 — Free Flow (drinks) Information

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Don’t be fooled by the title, honestly when I first heard those 3 words together (free flow information); I instantly thought of free flow drinks. I mean it make sense considering the meaning behind free flow information is just to have information running freely — having free flow drinks means exactly the same (just substitute the information for drinks).

Image taken from Metropolis Magazine

Cyberspace, what is cyberspace? It can be anything and everything you want actually — it really doesn’t matter. Just keep in mind that information floats all around cyberspace and that it is free flow information. I guess one way to conceptualize cyberspace is to try and see it as a… chameleon! Chameleon’s change their scales and skin to match their surroundings and they constantly do that all the time — cyberspace is forever in a constant state of change; things will be added, removed, expanded, created and defined (Dyson, Gilder, Keyworth, & Toffler 1994). The whole purpose of cyberspace is to be able to have a world where everything and everyone is equal, no one has special privileges, no one has higher or lower economic power than another; basically everyone is at the same level (Barlow 2018). Imagine living in a world with no limits and no rules, that would be a trip!

In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth — in the form of physical resources — has been losing value and significance.

(Dyson, Gilder, Keyworth, & Toffler 1994)

When I first read this quote I instantly agreed with it, I realised how much stuff is being sent and received through the online world and how more convenient it is to do so. But then it hit me (not literally), although in the far future I can envision that there may or may not be robots and ‘flying’ cars — physical resources still play a part that is significant. How else would you be able to meet up with that friend you’re talking to through text? Transportation is still something that exists and something we definitely still need to use, even if the year is 3009; transportation will most likely still be in use — just in other forms — maybe, possibly teleportation! You still need physical resources in order for that to work!

References:
  1. Barlow, John Perry. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 8 Apr. 2018, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence.
  2. Dyson, Esther F., et al. Cyberspace and the American Dream: a Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age. Progress & Freedom Foundation, 1994, http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/futureinsights/fi1.2magnacarta.html.