communication

Posts Tagged ‘communication’

Reading reflections: the trouble with mass media

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

Question 1 – In Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks, we read the following statement in chapter 6:

The core role of the political public sphere is to provide a platform for converting privately developed observations, intuitions, and opinions into public opinions that can be brought to bear in the political system toward determining collective action.

The Internet is increasingly becoming that sphere’s platform. However, policymakers have tended to enact legislation which seeks to repress activity that great numbers of people within this sphere otherwise view as legitimate. This is generally perceived as reactive to these activities’ tendencies – they violate previous policy effected for traditional media. In a recent article published in the Times of London regarding online film piracy (piracy being one such example of a violating activity), Becky Hogge with the Open Rights Group observed:

When you have six million people breaking the law, it’s the law that needs changing, not the people.

How do we change policy to better support new public opinion while still protecting the privileges of those whose past rights are becoming violated, essentially, by new public opinion?

(more…)

Tags: aXXo, Barack Obama, CNN, communication, government, law, mass media, new media, old media, Open Rights Group, piracy, policy, social media, The Wealth of Networks, traditional media, Yochai Benkler
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Effective PowerPoint Presentation: Death Star Attack

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

We’ve been discussing what constitutes an effective (or less-effective) MS PowerPoint presentation in a course I am taking this quarter at the MCDM, Evolutions and Trends in Digital Media Technologies, taught by Kathy Gill. We were asked to provide examples of poorly designed presentations for tonight’s class, and I did find a few; the web is rife with them. However, for this blog entry I have decided to share an example of what I think constitutes an unusually effective presentation. Rebel fighters convening at a secret location on a moon orbiting the planet Yavin located in a galaxy far, far away, were given a PPT presentation on how to effectively destroy an interstellar weapon of mass destruction known as the “Death Star”. The presentation, based on plans provided by rebel intelligence, details how to use conventional starfighter weaponry to destroy this WMD. I feel that the presentation delineates the plan of attack in a clear and concise manner, while managing to pepper in some humor to keep the audience interested. If I were to have designed the presentation I would have skipped using the basic red bullet points, but all told, I feel the presentation works effectively. User AskAak at the social sharing and content commodification site YTMND.com captured the event. Follow this link to see his report.

Tags: communication, powerpoint, ytmnd
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Reading reflections: from the telegraph to cyberspace

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

Brian Winston, in the introduction to his book Media, Technology, and Society: A history: from the telegraph to the Internet describes the process of scientific and technological advancement within the social sphere. He profiles how a new technology first goes through the process of ideation, then prototyping, invention, and diffusion to the world. He specifies how certain conditions must be met to enable the successful creation and production of a new invention, particularly a supervening social necessity. For example, he details in the subsequent chapter how the telegraph became a social necessity in that the invention and diffusion of the railroad created a need for a system that could help keep trains from colliding into one another. Prior to that, the ideation and initial types behind the telegraph had more of a militaristic use. Thus, when certain thinkers developed more effective means of telegraphic communication before the railway came about, some governments would suppress the potential of these more effective types because of a lack of necessity. This ‘law’ of suppression has often hampered technological progress. Ultimately, there has to be a need before successful invention and diffusion can take place. Winston’s book dives into communication technologies to see how the process outlined herein has been applied historically, beginning with the telegraph and ending with the Internet. (more…)

Tags: communication, cyberspace
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YouTube Audio Preview: is web communication actual “writing” or something else entirely?

Friday, October 10th, 2008

It’s generally held that teh intarweb pretty much separates itself from other media in that it’s a two-way street. I publish information in some corner of the web, you publish (as in, comment, vote, react, share, etc.) right back. Sure, “long ago” we had ‘Letters to the Editor’ in the paper, but now communication with those who publish information of any kind is taking place in a way planet Earth has pretty much never seen before.

So, the big questions that I am sure are being researched in the halls of academia today, especially in the field of linquistics, are probably these: How is the internet altering language? How is the internet creating new words and new meanings, or even new languages, such as “AOL speak” (think the letters L-O-L, as in laugh out loud) or “1337 speak” (that’s the word “leet” – for example the 3′s are backwards E’s – as in, “elite internet user speak”, something only other nerds are supposed to understand)? Are typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors merely another way people are accepting written communication as the next evolution of the English language? Is all this hurting or helping the English language? And so on and so forth.