Common Sense Dictates Policy

The dean of the school came in for a guest lecture and talked about google. The interesting part about google is that it doesn’t generate its own content. Instead it just index them and make them readily available to everyone.

Ah, but the problem arises when it comes to generation of revenue. Who actually earns the money for their hard work? I’m not saying indexing all those websites is not hard work but what happens to the creator of those pages?

Google index the information and creates ad space for advertisers. What happens to the website or page that has more relevance to a specific topic that may interest the advertiser? Would an advertiser place an ad on their site at all since they already place an ad on google?

What happens to the creative geniuses that created those websites in hopes to earn some compensation for their work? They could implement google adsense on their websites but wouldn’t place them under the control of google?

We were in google this week. Google pretty much lived up to what they claimed to be. The working environment seemed to be very conducive to the creative process while the employees seemed happy.

But that’s not what I’m gonna be talking about. We were introduced to various google products. And what I noticed with google products is that none of them are actually one of a kind. I mean they are different yes, but merely improvements from previous failed designs.

In that sense, Google seemed to lack actual creativity in creating new products for its consumers

The title above was meant to be somewhat an irony. Let me explain. We’ve now live in a more open society. We are transparent in whatever we do. We voluntarily report whatever we do on our profiles, messengers and mobile. We work hard so that we could stay visible amidst the flurry of information that keeps accumulating on the net everyday.

And yet, the funny part is that, the information that captures the attention of others would not be the ones we voluntarily publish. It would probably be a mishap recorded or a scandal uploaded on youtube that would acquire attention.

Isn’t it funny, that we are only immortal on the net only when we get caught doing something embarassing or wrong?

Today we look at the term free, with the advent of the internet we can now have almost anything, free. Most of these information we acquire is shelved and indexed by search engines. In this age, we advocate information to be free and unrestricted. But, to what extent? Traditional professions that used to thrive for being creative and unique by selling the products of their creative geniuses are now walking along the sidewalks of the digital age begging for donations.

While people talk about the knowledge economy being the next big thing, what exactly do they mean? Because from where I’m standing it looks pretty bleak

In games, most apparent in MMORPGs, the games’ dynamics depend on the community of gamers.

The virtual economic,social and political shift solely depends on the gamers themselves. However, the shift changes in such a fast pace that problems spiral out of control very easily.

In such a state, we have crackers who create mods and in game items for the games in order to neutralise the impact of the shifts.

THe creators of these mods however mostly do not get paid for their work and yet, continuously keep on creating new mods for the game.

The motivation may vary, but the actions say the same thing: Games nowadays is participatory in order to survive

The gaming community is a community of gamers. These community thrives on competition where either each gamer tries to be better than the other.

It is said that the gaming community is what maintains the popularity of a particular game. This is due to the fact that the replay value of the particular game fading away eventually after a period of time.

However, the games keep itself going through community of gamers that stays together to play the games together in a competitive way.

Now question here is, since gaming competitiveness gives the community life. What happens when the competition turns into pure hostility?

We’ve also talked about the issues of copyright with collaborative media. Saying that there’s a copyright issue existing with the remixing of preexisting works.

Well personally, I think copyright issues only happen when people aren’t making money from the original work anymore.
Well, think of it this way, should remixing be against copyright laws. I think almost every invention after the invention of the wheel, would be sued in court for copyright issues.

After all, a lot of devices were made based on that concept. THe wheel was used over and over again but only in a different, changed and improved form.

I guess my point is, true creativeness do not exist anymore in a sense. While people claim to be an original a lot of their ideas came from bits of pieces of another person’s idea and so on and so forth from the chain of creativity.

As such, an original work is always influenced by a pre-existing idea that the person has learnt from someone or something prior to the creation of that work.

While I understand that a remixed version of your original creation may be a slap on the wrist, it is hardly any real problem as that orignal piece of yours may also be a remixed version of another person’s work.

For this one, I’m going to focus more on youtube based on the lecture itself. We watched a video with featuring youtube mostly anyway. So, youtube gave a chance for people to express themselves and connect with to virtually the entire world but of course through the lenses of your camera.

There are a lot of videos talking about this, that and virtually anything you can think of. While most of these works are an example of self expressionism, some displayed a hefty amount of attention seeking.

Well, it’s not to say seeking attention is bad but what happens if that’s the trend of the contents being uploaded to the net. All of them made with the intention of seeking attention. Everyone’s trying to top another just for the supposed attention and popularity they are gonna get. What happens then?

Would the internet be a place for collective intelligence or just be a dump of shallow materialistic values and permeate the grounds with narcissism?

Social media, what am I to say? Well when someone say social media, I immediately think of applications like facebook, myspace, twitter, dodgeball and etc.

The function of social media is pretty obvious which is to socialise or network with other users. But of course, most people talked about the functions and effects of such media that we neglect to include the business functions behind these forms of media.

While we talk and chat and keep ourselves open (which is a good thing), we also give more and more information about ourselves away to the people that moderate these media a.k.a the company running facebook etc. and what not.

There is a possibility that one day we might end up finding out, everything about our eating habits in an email saying suggesting that we should eat more healthily by some company selling dietary supplements.

What is there to stop the owners of these media to sell our information off to anyone that wants it?

If we were to discuss the differences between personal and mobile media, we could more or less muster up some justifications where one could arguably differentiate between the two.
But, is it really necessary? I have no idea but since I’m going to talk about the personal media anyway, I might as well treat it as a different entity from the other.
Personal media, what is it exactly? Well I suppose, personal media refers to the more intimate relationship between the media and us.

However, is about our relationship with the devices or the contents? Well, the last lecture talked about emphasised the content more than the devices. But in my opinion, is it not both one and the same?

Media according to Joseph R. Dominick, does not only include the content but also the devices and also other influences that are involved in making delivering and receiving the media content.

I pretty much agree with it. So with that, is there a such a thing as personal media? While, the ownership of the device is private, the process of the message transmission is very much a public action.