Tutorial
Now that I have a blog it’s time to join the blogosphere! This week’s tutorial revolved around creating a link list to be featured on my blog, in addition to getting my blog linked to by other users from the class. My “blogroll”, a link list element constructed in the overall page layout, can be found on the menu system to the right of my blog entries.
Now that I am connected to other users there will likely be interaction between myself and other bloggers. Blog etiquette suggests that when someone posts a comment for you, it's usually polite to comment on their blog as well. I hope to leave some comments on these blogs too, and hopefully people will return the favour as a form of blog etiquette. This is one of many ways to create a web-presence and expand my audience on the blogosphere.
BLOGGING TASK: WEEK 3
We were asked to consider our own interaction with new communication technologies to communicate with friends and family.
Do you have friends whom you only know from the internet and have never met in person?
Is this different to people that you know in person?
Describe the difference.
Personally, I am not a fan of using technology to communicate with people I have not yet met face-to-face. On occasion I will be introduced to friends of friends via the internet or telephone but I eventually met all of these people in person.
I feel it is too easy (and definitely tempting) for people to create an entirely new persona for themselves when physical appearance and certain personality traits can be eliminated. How do you know if you are talking to a genuine person or a fictional character they’ve constructed?
I can understand why this happens though… I used to love talking to people I had never met because it’s much easier to open yourself to them in comparison to the people I know in person (they have no direct impact on your daily life). But how risky is that?! Some choose to prey on people’s willingness to open up… a person who says they are a 18yr-old female online could easily be a 56yr-old man.
And if I happened to meet this person, genuine or not, the conversation won’t necessarily be the same as it was through the technological media. It may be fun to talk to them nonetheless, but I often find I don’t have much time to devote to the internet anyway so my #1 priority is my real life friends.
Generally I only use technologies such as the internet or phone to contact people I already know to arrange a face-to-face gathering; it’s much more personal =)
[My only exception to this is friends or family that live quite far away]
How long have you been using these communication technologies?
A looooooong time! Since I was about… 12 or 13 years old? So about 5-6yrs. That’s not as long as some of my friends though.
What influenced you to start using these particular technologies?
In a nutshell: peer pressure. I remember being forced by my friends to create a hotmail account in grade 8, but before then I honestly thought internet chatting was a waste of time. When I saw how many of my friends were talking online (without me!) however, it made it realise that I’ve been missing out on quality talk / gossip / bonding time so I continued using MSN Messenger and email to belong.
Is privacy an issue for you when using new technologies? (How do you deal with issues around privacy?)
Generally with online chat I only talk to people I already know… and most of those people probably know me better than I know myself! But I am quite cautious with websites like Myspace. I haven’t set my profile to private yet (what’s the point of having the darn thing if no one can see it?) but I am very careful with my telephone numbers, home address and email address to ensure they are never posted on the site.
Lecture:
Alphaville (1965), Jean-Luc Godard’s homage to both science-fiction and classic American detective stories, is relevant to our studies of New Communication Technologies because of the theory of a dictatorial computer (Alpha 60) being in complete control of a major metropolitan city. This central computer outlaws individualist concepts such as free thought, emotion, love and poetry in the city. Those who act illogically by expressing emotion are interrogated and executed. All words which are believed to provoke emotion are banned from the “bible”; dictionaries placed in each room which are constantly updated to exclude forbidden words. As a result of all this, Alphaville is an inhuman, alienated society of bar-coded drones.
Perhaps with the ever-increasing presence of technology in our everyday lives Alphaville has become a more pertinent glimpse into the future than ever before. Computers already have such a great stronghold over us because we have developed a need for them. Nowadays we find it difficult to even meet in person without an email, text message or telephone call arranging a time first. What if in the future our dependence on technology extended beyond communication? Internet banking has proven that bank branches may become useless, and with the ideals put forward in the Four Corners report on the virtual world Second Life we may even solely rely on technology (such as computers connected to the internet) to do our jobs and make money to sustain our lifestyles. If this is all possible, and we begin to live our lives through technology, then what use would emotion have? Face-to-face contact would be minimised so why express ourselves?
Readings:
Film and Screen Glossary
University of Waikato: Screen & Media Studies
http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/handbook/glossary.html
General Information
Internet and Movie Database (IMDb)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058898/
Film Review
Channel 4: Cinema Department
http://www.channel4.com/film/reviews/film.jsp?id=100360
Critical Review
Andrew Sarris
http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=25&eid=44§ion=essay
French New Wave Cinema
Craig Phillips
http://www.greencine.com/static/primers/fnwave1.jsp
Jean-Luc Godard
Strictly Film School
http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/godard.html
Wow, so many readings this week and each of them helpful in an entirely different way!
I found Andrew Sarris’ critical essay to be the most useful in explaining and analysing Alphaville. A good supporting text for this essay is the film and screen glossary created by the University of Waikato. The definitions provided helped set the scene for discussions revolving around Alphaville and helped to decode some of the genre-specific language, as did Craig Phillip’s exploration of French new wave cinema. The film review prepared by Channel 4’s cinema department and Strictly Film School’s page dedicated to Jean-Luc Godard both provided a clear synopsis of the Alphaville plot.The general information provided by the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) reminded me of a key quote from the film: “Time is like a circle which is endlessly described. The declining arc is the past. The inclining arc is the future” – Alpha 60. This resonated a new idea of how time philosophically functions, implying that time is simply a repeating force where our future becomes our past and the past repeats in the future.
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