Com125 Assignment9: Jame Oddo, a YouTube politican star

Personally, until couple of years ago, subjects about politics are not one which I am interested in as well as articles about politicians. Unless a political article published on the first page of the newspaper, I would not bothered to know about politics. However, now the articles, stories and even gossips about politicians are available not only on newspapers, but online web blogs. As I surf the web, I read an article about politics and get to know more about it. The sphere of politics is not an enervated and boring story anymore, is an easily accessible and interesting topic on the net to people.

Com125 Assignment8: 'MSN web messenger' review application

The site: MSN Messenger
URL: http://webmessenger.msn.com

Functionality

MSN Messenger is a freeware instant messaging client that was developed and distributed by Microsoft in 1999 to 2005 and in 2007 for computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system (except Windows Vista), and aimed towards home users. It was renamed Windows Live Messenger in February 2006 as part of Microsoft's Windows Live series of online services and software. MSN Messenger is often used to refer to the .NET Messenger Service (the protocols and server that allow the system to operate) rather than any particular client (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Msn_messenger).

A discussion of the site’s design

Unlike other websites, MSN messenger provides a small screen sized a quarter of normal websites which makes convenient to open up the web browser while working on other websites. While you talk to others, you can customize the chat screen to whatever you want to make and send it to web-chat partners. Also, there is a number of emoticons available using IM such as smiley faces, winks and nudges which you can use on web chats by a click. On MSN messenger, you can see a lot of links which connect to the websites, so that you can check emails while on MSN messenger, easily link to the internet shopping website, or a game website. This is how it is designed for MSN Microsoft to advertise their products.

Social aspects

As soon as I get home, the first thing I do is turning on my laptop. While doing it, I am logging onto MSN messenger automatically. Also, after meeting a friend from a class or anywhere, one thing that I ask before I go home is, “Do you have a MSN ID?” Since the internet have provided a place to interact with people online, MSN messenger became so popular among friends and colleagues. We can talk online after classes and works. It gives us a different pleasure to communicate online with people compared to offline interactions. In that sense, MSN messenger keeps going our social ties and relationships interactive.

Not only keeping interactions with people, but MSN messenger is productive. While you log onto it, you can share mutimedia files between friends. Also, as soon as logging onto MSN web messenger, a little screen pops up and show news headlines of current hot issues. Thus, everyday MSN messenger provides somethings productive for me.

Beneficial aspects of MSN messenger

One of the great benefits of MSN messenger is a fast and convenient communication with others online. Even more, the conversations between me and others can be saved in computer hardware as well as all instant messages. Even if the message receivers are not online, you can still send instant messages, and they will be stored until the friend logs on and checks them out. At once, people can have multiple conversations with many friends. I have friends who I do not meet often physically, but I can still keep in touch with them for years through MSN messenger. MSN messenger is not only an online software which keeps people interactive, but it is where people share files and interests in the global wide.

Com125 Assignment7: Online community: where people build their relationships

The meaning of friendship

How can we define the term, friends? As we live in the society where people are able to connect to each other online, the meaning of friendship is getting blurry. In the past, about 10 years ago, friends mean a lot to each individuals, which indicates friends are people forming relationships with us doing physical activities. However, now in 2007, we can easily form a relationship based on the online network though a number of online blogs and an internet access across the world.

“When I see somebody with a large number of supposed friends, I suspect that they’re using the term ‘friend’ to mean ‘acquaintance,’ or that their motives in getting Friendster-recorded friends are not really about the relationships for the their own sake.” — Bob (danah boyd 2006: Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites)

When we go on our friends' web blogs, we see lists of friends, or celebrities who are linked to people's web blogs. We think that they are cool with bunch of friends' list. As an exmaple of Facebook, we can go on others' blogs and find out who they are, what univeristy they go to, and who they hang out with mostly and so forth. From what is represented on blogs, we think that we know a lot about someone and become a 'friend'. Through my friend's friend, and their friends' friends, we keep expanding our social relationships online for the sake of popularity. Are they really 'friends' or just 'colletors of acquaintances'?

Online Community: A place to maintain social relationships

A virtual community, e-community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media rather than face to face (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_community). The fact that people can interact with others and moreover, form social ties without face to face relationships, attracts online users to join the online communities. Because it is online community which is linked through Web browswer, it can be spread out so quickly. This is one of the attactions why online communities are becoming more popular. You can just go online and type friend's ID to add him/her as my 'friend'. Compared to offline community, online community is a lot simpler to contact to each other between friends. If someone leaves a message on my Facebook blog, I can simply reply to the message. Whereas, to communicate in offline communities, people should make a time and get together which involves time consuming.

Online communities offer more chances to get involved in relationship with friends than offline communities. Though I've been travelling and studying abroad for years, I could still keep in touch with friends from my old schools. A website called, 'www.iloveschool.co.kr' provides a place for people look for their friends and teachers from their elementary schools, middle schools and high schools. Once I join the website and add my schools and the completed year of the study, I can see friends/teachers who joined the website and message them. Sometimes, I can even talk to them online on webchats. So far, I've found a lot of friends and teachers from my high school through the website. Not only looking for friends online, but online communities keeps maintaining relationships with people by emailing and messaging to eachother no matter where they live. Therefore, online communites are now located in us playing as a webmessenger role for our social ties and relationships.


Reference:

danah boyd 2006: Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_community

Com125 Assignment 6: ‘Second Life; Self and Online Identity’

What is online identity?

Wikipedia clarifies an online identity as a social identity that network users establish in online communities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_identity). Donath mentions that a single person can create multiple electronic identities that are linked only by their common progenitor, that link, though invisible in the virtual world, is of great significance (Donath, 1996). In the reading, Donath also tries to find out the relationship among multiple personas sharing a single progenitor. Considering the fact that we are living in the information age, a lot of people start their daily routine start with checking the emails, and webpages and finish their days with checking the emails and the web pages’ posts. By experiencing the online life as a big part of their lives, people can find their new identities in a new space called cyberworld, and moreover, they try to generate multiple identities and keep developing them as parts of themselves. This phenomenon can be looked at as a challenge of their stable identities in a real life. Therefore, we all can have new ‘me’ in online community using avatar though it is a completely different self as compared to who I am in a real life. Avatar, which is a graphic icon presenting myself online for web chats, 2D or 3D online games and even more for cyber-shopping and cyber-education. The use of avatar becomes broad and various on the cyber world. In the past, people were attracted only for anonymity, but in modern days, they feel like expressing themselves more in the cyber world through the avatar. Thus, this popular graphic technology called avatar was only available as Ready-made characters which we could only combine with few online items, but now more various types of avatars are available, thus users can make their unique avatar in virtual communities.

Trans-gendered Avatar

By using the avatar, people can show themselves as a completely different self as their real lives. Interestingly, many of online users even present themselves as a different gendered avatar. A male web user make up a female avatar online and interact with other web users online. He tries to talk like a female online and express the avatar with pretty and girly accessories. The problem which could be occurred here is the confusion between his real identity and virtual identity. As much time he spends online as a girl, his real-world identity can get influenced by the virtual identity. One of my gay friends, he actually does this gender swapping a lot in cyber world. In the real world, he does not look like a gay at all, but on the web, he totally turns himself as a girl. I do not think that gender swapping means bad at all, but this certainly is a shocking thing for me. When I first met him at my previous work, I did not know that he was a gay, but after I looked at his online webpages like Myspace, Facebook and Friendster, I found that he was a gay or a person who has a little mental problem. I see this phenomenon with a pretty positive view. Everyone has different personalities and perspectives. Genuinely, they are sensitive and introversive, they can be extroversive and outgoing online if that is what they want to be presented at least in cyber world. Therefore, cyber world can be seen as a new second life for us, and this fact can show our society as a new open world which offers various types of opportunities.

Com125 Assignment5: Privacy In The Information Age

Internet Privacy Issues

What is privacy? Wikipedia defines internet privacy is the ability to control what information one reveals about oneself over the internet, and to control who can access that information (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_privacy). Since the internet access have become pervasive globally, privacy issues has been brought up as a significant part of the side effects in the information society. As an extreme example of Hollywood movie stars, their privacy is so open to the paparazzi and public. We can even know their personal daily lives through their photos and gossips on the magazines and the internet. The gossips of the Hollywood stars are not just open to the public, but also spread out through the internet world widely. The author of the book called Invasion of Privacy, Michael Hyatt says that the invasion of technology affects the whole US society; a credit card crime, an illegal use of others’ name, stalking and the surveillance of the government can bring a serious social conflict. All these serious privacy issues can erode both at work and at home by new technology. Therefore, the privacy issues caused by the internet technology should not be ignorant as an inevitable problems in the information age.

Spam mail and Internet Privacy

Spam mail is one of the most efficient tools for advertising within the digital media age. Every single time, when I check my email, I see at least about 5spam mails in my mailbox. I guess I receive more than 10 spam mails every single day. The types of spam mails vary such as advertising their products like cosmetics and clothing, promoting personal loans, persuading me to join social clubs and even pornographic pictures with the source of websites. Just deleting these spam mails are annoying, but even more, sometimes I cannot even recognize if the mail that I received is spam, or an email from my friend. The advertising strategy of spam mails is becoming more tactful and tricky. Sometimes, the tile of the spam mail starts with my name, or asking me an urgent favor; ‘Hi, Jennifer!’, ‘Urgent!’ or ‘Hey’. These types of titles trigger me to open up the emails at the end. This often freaks me out to know that someone can actually see my personal information from somewhere. Thus, after all my personal information is available out there somewhere to be picked by marketers or whoever wanting to use my ID. My age, gender, university, homework address, phone number and social number are ready for someone to use my identifications. This is what I feel every time when I end up opening the spam mails in my personal mail box. This common phenomenon can certainly defined as a case within invasion of privacy.

To avoid these types of cases on the internet, lately many popular websites provide the vaccine programs. However, there still is a problem with the vaccine program as well. As an example of well know Korean search engine called ‘Daum’ provides a virus vaccine program for spam mails called, ‘Spambot’ which filters spam mails and send them into the spam mail box. But, at times, I see my email from my friend is in the spam mail box. I see that this is the other type of invasion of privacy. Under the name of surveillance and protection from spam mails, the website is actually invading my privacy by filtering my personal emails. Not only ‘Daum’, but data from major Internet companies, including Yahoo! and MSN (Microsoft) have already been subpoenaed by the US and China even provided a chunk of its own search data online, allowing reporters to track the online behavior of private individuals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_privacy). In anyways, as long as we are connected to the internet, our privacy can be tracked down somehow through programs such as Cookies or ISPs(Internet Service Provider) on the purpose of avoiding damages from invading privacy on the web. Therefore, in the age of the information society which we are in, the people should be able to define an appropriate level of privacy based on their lifestyle, financial resources, and personal values.



Reference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_privacy
http://www.daum.net
http://www.powells.com

Com125 Assignment3: 'Music Downloading; Sharing? or Stealing?'

Since MP3 becomes to play an important role for majority people’s daily lives, filesharing issue became a controversial matter. On one side, file sharing is not necessarily illegal . On the other side is focused on issues predominant proportion of material shared subject to copyright. Napster, Kazaa, iTune, UGRE, Spiralfrog and Qtax are well known existing websites for downloading audio files on the web. Internet users can access and download all various genres of music at home sitting down in front of the computer, instead of going to music store and looking for a CD. Since there are numerous music downloading websites are available, this topic is worthwhile to discuss about. In recent days, it has become a necessarily significant issue to think about if music downloading can be regarded as sharing files, or stealing copyright in the virtual network society.

What is music downloading?

Music downloading can be defined that it refers to the transferring of a music file from an internet facing computer or website to a user’s local computer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_downloading). Lately, it is so common to download song files to our personal computers and store them in MP3 players. We can get songs for free. Music downloading encompasses both meanings of legal downloads and downloads of material without permission or payment which people break copyright laws. Most of people like music thus; music downloading was started from the concept of file sharing based on peer-to-peer networks.

Music downloading: Copyright infringement

Copyright infringement is the unauthorized use of approved files which is covered by copyright law, in a manner that breaks one of the original copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make copied material that build upon it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement).

There are many cases of copyright infringement globally. It has been brought up in many different countries such as the US, the UK, Australia, South Korea, China and Japan. Copyright infringement became an issue about all countries who has the internet access for people. In 2006, South Korea, the most popular music download website called, ‘Monkey3’ was sued by the Association of Korean music producers and singers for providing free music files to download. It was a shock among young people especially, due to no more free music downloading access. However, what people did was looking for other websites offering free audio file downloads. The internet is unlimited information storage, and there exists billions of URLs that people can access anytime. At the end, more free music downloading websites were sued after ‘Monkey3’ was charged for their illegal music downloading offers. Once ‘Monkey3’ had to change their policy to download music files to charge for the songs using online cash. Since this change, ‘Monkey3’ have lost quite a number of users, and now they charge only for new released songs, not the entire audio file downloads.

According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), illegal music downloading can damage the music industry and a series of law suits led to many of these networks being closed down. In the US, the illegal downloading of music from the internet websites has influenced music industry billions of dollars loss in revenues to publishers and artists. This fact shows how the music downloading can be an inevitable economical threat to music industry. The linked webpage below shows a great moving image called 'Fighting Music Piracy'.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=vEkhkBGnrYo

Music Downloading: Ethics of sharing files

“I think it’s OK to download files from the Net, even it is illegal.”( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_file_sharing). According to a poll, 75% of young voters in Sweden (ages 18-20), support file sharing, even if it's illegal. Ethics of file sharing is a subfield of ethics specifically relating to the ethical implications of file sharing over computer networks and the internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_file_sharing). Though the internet network, people can share files by downloading visual and audio files which are copyrighted and non-copyrighted to each other. One of the popular peer-to-peer file sharing websites called Kazaa became legal after paying a $100 million in reparations to the recording industry. It still offers a download on its official website for Kazaa 3.25 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazaa#Current_state). There are many file sharing advocates are out there and they see free music downloads are a part of consumer culture to have a sample before getting an original product. Through downloading music files, people can reach the music artists easily and get to know more about them and their music. Also, from the downloaded music over the internet, people can start feeling interested in certain songs and become a fan of the artists. Overall, music downloading can activate the music industry not only nationally, but also globally. Me as one of the file sharing advocates, downloading music files for free from the internet is an inevitable phenomenon in the technological society. Normally, the files available on the web free do not offer a full quality of the music. People who want an original product will go out and buy the full legal product with all great bonus features. Therefore, downloading free music files on the net is about freedom for the internet users over the peer-to-peer networks.


Referece:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=vEkhkBGnrYo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_downloading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_file_sharing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazaa#Current_state

Com125 Assignment2: A new "Dot-Com"Boom and the current society

What’s a “Dot-com” boom?

YouTube has 100 million video downloads a day, and 73 million viewers a month, and by acquiring it Google has increased the amount of video streams it controls by a factor of 10.
MySpace has 14 million viewers a month - mainly young people, a group that the traditional media is finding hard to reach. And Skype has 53 million users, with its technology widely perceived as a threat to traditional telecoms companies. Many of the acquisitions are about acquiring online communities, the fastest-growing section of internet use. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6036337.stm)

Youtube, Google and Skype are all familiar internet websites which we use often. These websites seem to dominate the market on the web.


‘Historically, the dot-com boom can be seen as similar to a number ofother technology-inspired booms of the past including railroads in the1840s, radio in the 1920s, transistor electronics in the 1950s, computertime-sharing in the 1960s, and home computers and biotechnology in theearly1980s.’(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.phptitle=History_of_the_World_Wide_Web).

How “Dot-com” boom influenced youth culture in recent days?