-Videos-
There are a few interesting videos that I used in helping me with my blog research that I thought were both very interesting, useful and informative... some are even quite commical. Check them out!:)
Save the Internet!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt0XUocViENet Neutrality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9jHOn0EW8UBuy Nothing Day Ad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zNwWrtVoCIMaster Chief's Guide to Culture Jamming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8eRY_uxWt0
Just a little Something...
Through out the duration of our time in Mass Communications I found we were constantly talking about Facebook and how dangerous it really was. Meanwhile the whole time I denied the fact to myself that it was as dangerous as everyone made it out to be, until I came across a group on Facebook itself entitled Things you Didn't Know about Facebook. This group labels everything that is bad about Facebook and after reading it I realized that everything our teachers were telling us about facebook is actually true. Here are just a FEW of the points that are listed on the group: Did you know..- that during the last year FACEBOOK’s worldwide growth has been 118% monthly!- With more than 10 billion private photos FACEBOOK is the no. 1 photo sharing application in the world. Agreeing to FACEBOOK Privacy Policy means that you waive all your rights, as they can use all your photos freely. (Nobody knows whether this claim would be actually legal in court).- That FACEBOOK reserves every right to register and keep all kind of your private information and FACEBOOK activities – even after you eliminate your profile” (see Facebook Privacy). You are immortal.- That the owner of FACEBOOK Mark Zuckerberg has rejected offers in the range of $975 million to hand over Facebook. If FACEBOOK is sold, all registered private information will be handed over to the new owners – even after you have deleted your profile! It means you have no control who will end up with your personal data.- because FACEBOOK has its headquarter in the USA it can only be sued according to US legislation. If the FACEBOOK headquarter was located in the European Union the FACEBOOK Privacy Terms would definitely be illegal.- that by using FACEBOOK you are an essential part of the global cyber economy. Personal information about you is being transferred between partners you probably never heard about.- that recently a number of serious viruses which attempt to infect users by promising free videos have been tracked (October 2008). Take care and don't follow strange links.Scary huh? I know i sure thought so. The internet is a very large community with facebook being just a very small part of it. Be careful and make sure to take everything that is incorporated within the media with a grain of salt.-Brittany.
Activist Project: A Window Between Worlds
AWBW – A Window between Worlds is a non-profit organization that is dedicated to using art to help support victims of domestic violence. With the help of creative expression, battered and beaten women and children gain a sense of renewal and power after their experience at home. Since 1991 AWBW has provided creative expression as a healing tool for over 40,000 beaten women and their children, the art helps empowers survivors to transform how they view themselves and allowing them to see past their abuse and gain self-confidence. A Window between Worlds is solely a U.S company and has opened over 100 exhibits in nineteen states. They put together different exhibits in different locations such as museums, art centers, colleges and department stores. One of these exhibits is called Monster in Me which gives children and women a safe way to explore some of the difficult feelings that result from living with abuse, by creating a ‘monster’ that represents the different emotions from the events that occurred before arriving at the shelters, survivors can honour their feelings by dealing with them in a healthy way to help cope with them and move on with their lives. It allows them to break the silence that keeps them isolated, afraid and ashamed. AWBW has been a great success, in 2007 alone they provided over 6,440 workshops for women and children in shelters, in women’s programs 96% found they felt more positive after workshops and 98% of children said that the workshops helped them express themselves and deal with their past in a non-violent way. Art can be very therapeutic, whether it be through drawing, painting, making music, singing, dancing, any type of art form that allows someone to express themselves is very important for someone to have. Having that is very important for them to feel good about themselves by releasing the hidden emotions inside because they need to find some way out of their darkness. This organization is very important because it focuses in on one form of weakness, everyone involved in these workshops have all come from situations of domestic violence which helps everyone to feel more comfortable with their surroundings. When someone comes from a situation involving any type of violence or abuse there are many different feelings, emotions and fears that the individual will have, it is easiest for them to get support and confidence from people that have also dealt with similar situations as them. It is a very different organization where victims of violence are physically doing something such as drawing or painting; they can be creative and deal with things at their own pace and in their own way because everyone has different situations to deal with. This organization was very appealing to me, they have a great support group and they are different from all the other groups because there is a physical aspect to the whole support side. I think more attention needs to be paid to those suffering from domestic violence so that the victims will have a place to go and thankfully AWBW has done that.
Works Cited
‘A Window Between Worlds; Art as a Healing Tool’ AWBW
Facebook & Msn Stand Hand-in-Hand in Participatory Culture
Today, people of all ages are getting involved in gaming, gorilla art, amateur videos and of course online communities such as dating communities and social networking communities. Social networking and online communities such as Facebook, MySpace and MSN seem to be the popular forms of communication these days for people of all ages. These websites are places where someone can communicate with people half way across the world and they can catch up with old friends or family members, but they really are places where we as social beings are broadcasting ourselves all over the internet. The minute you add your name to a website like Facebook, msn, hotmail, YouTube, etc is the minute you are welcoming yourself into the world of cyberspace. Personally I believe that MSN chat and Facebook go hand in hand because they are places where people can interact, they are done over the internet and they can both be very dangerous if not monitored properly. Sometimes I hate to say it but I am a pretty big part of both MSN and Facebook communities, I have family in England that I am able to keep in touch with regularly as well as friends in different schools in different parts of Canada and the U.S that I unfortunately do not get to see all the time. When used safely and appropriately, these online communities can become very reliable to whoever is using it, although when used inappropriately with a sense of carelessness these places can become Extremely dangerous!
PC’s N Dreams is a website that allows web surfers to read recent articles on different categories concerning the internet, such as Chat Nightmares, Porn Nightmares, Virus Nightmares, excreta. When reading the articles I noticed one thing, that they were all very similar situations: young girls being lured away by older men over MSN or other chat rooms to be used for sexual purposes. For example one of the cases was a 28 year old Montreal man who gained access to his victims by getting a hold of their contact lists through the internet. He would first pose as a friend and then would blackmail the girls for sexual purposes and after this incident he will be facing a total of 111 charges containing threatening, extorting and corrupting the morals of these young girls. The one thing that Facebook has that MSN doesn’t is security, with Facebook you can always check if you know the person before you add them, while MSN you cannot do that, the person doesn’t have their first and last name in their email address and so msn users usually just accept them without knowing or even caring who they are. This is where it can get very dangerous and where it is time for the parents to step in and take control over the uses of these websites for their children. If there is one thing that I have learned in this Mass Communications class and the Internet Survey and Research class is that the internet is ridiculously scary, it is a very big place where information is constantly being thrown around. Many people do not realize this and need to take the time to learn about the dangers of the internet so they are able to teach it to their children, (who are the generation growing up in the world of technology) precautions they need to take when using the internet.
Works Cited
‘Internet Predator Chat Nightmares’ PC’s N Dreams
Whirl-Mart. Oh the Art of Culture Jamming!
The event known as Whirl-Mart is an event that is part of what we like to call culture jamming. Culture jamming is characterized as a form of activism, generally in opposition to commercialism and the vector of corporate image which sometimes entails transforming mass media to produce ironic or satirical commentary about itself. Whirl-Mart is a culture jamming ritual aimed at retail superstores, it consists of a group of supposed shoppers who get together at a large superstore and push empty shopping carts silently through store aisles. They will not purchase anything and seek to form a large line of non-shoppers who continually weave and whirl through a maze of store aisles for up to an hour at a time, they seek to mimic and mock what they perceive as the absurdity to the shopping process. When these participants are confronted by security or store management they simply state that they are ‘engaged in a peaceful consumption awareness ritual and when employees approach, Whirl-Mart participants generally scatter to various store aisles.
There are also different variations of this “awareness ritual”, some involve filling carts but then simply abandoning them or when checking out, claiming to have forgotten the money to purchase the items in the overflowing cart, leaving the cart and the items within it for the employees to clean up. Personally if I was a store clerk I would probably be very annoyed with the people who participate in this event although reading about it does actually sound quite comical. A Youtube video titled Master Chief’s Guide to Culture Jamming explains that with the help of the internet culture jamming has become very well known, “cyberspace has given a voice to those previously unheard, and it seems like these voices are not going to run out of things to say any time soon.” Which is very true, these ‘unheard voices’ have finally gotten a chance to voice their opinions over the internet for example, Ron English has a reputation of changing advertisements on billboards, changing the meaning in seconds. In an interview with Stephen Duncombe conducted by Henry Jenkins, Duncombe talks about YouTube videos in relation to politics and elections. “[The] accessible media production of technology, the semiotic tool box we’ve built in our life-long immersion in pop culture and the new distribution apparatus like YouTube have immense political potential.” (Duncombe) When someone is involved in culture jamming, whether it is through gorilla art, amateur video or re-facing billboards they are making not only a personal statement but a political one as well and voicing your opinion is never a bad thing. “Culture jamming is not something that is restricted to gorilla art, it isn’t something hidden deep within the internet, it can be found in mainstream media as well. Prime time television shows such as South Park, Family Guy and Futurama are expressing as many instances of culture jamming.” (Master Chief)
Works Cited
‘Whirl- Mart’ Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirl-Mart‘Manufacturing Dissent: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe (Part One)’ Confessions of a Aca-Fan by Henry Jenkins
‘Master Chief’s Guide to Culture Jamming’ YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8eRY_uxWt0
Buy Nothing Day!
Buy Nothing Day is an informal day where people all over the world protest against consumerism observed by social activists. It was founded by a Vancouver artist named Ted Dave; the first Buy Nothing Day was September 1992 and was promoted by the Canadian Adbusters magazine. It was then moved to the Friday after Thanks Giving in America which is one of the busiest shopping days in the United States. Adbusters magazine states that it “isn’t just about changing your habits for one day, but about starting a lasting commitment to consuming less and producing less waste”. Which I agree with, we should not just be using this one day as the day where we are concerned with our over consumption, we should be considering it everyday. Although it is difficult to do so for a lot of people especially when it comes to holidays such as Christmas or other high holidays and the days following them such as boxing day in Canada. A Youtube video explains that the average North American consumes 5 times more than a Mexican, 10 times more than a Chinese person and 30 times more than a person in India! That’s Crazy!! When I heard that one side of me couldn’t believe it, while the other side of me was actually not that surprised, Americans and Canadians are large consumers in all areas, clothing or food or different products and the amount of things we throw away is even more ridiculous!
We live in a changing world due to the media and the mediums within it; we can use the media with the help of online videos and the support of magazines to make people around the world aware of Buy Nothing Day and to announce their protests world wide. Campaigns for Buy Nothing Day began to show up in the Unites States, UK, Israel, Germany, New Zealand, Japan, the Netherlands and Norway all with the help of technology and with the voice of the media. Technology is changing our world but when it comes to something such as making people aware of how things are affecting this us and how we can help change that, we thank the power of technology for making it possible to publicize this announcement.
Works Cited
‘Buy Nothing Day’ Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Nothing_Day‘Buy Nothing Day, Nov 28 Black Friday Protest YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zNwWrtVoCI
Net Neutrality
Ever wonder how the internet is so fast, or how some search engines such as Google or Yahoo can work so quickly that in seconds thousands of different hits are available concerning the search? Well that is all thanks to a little something we like to call Net Neutrality, which is defined as the principle that basic internet protocols should be non-discriminatory, all content providers should get equal treatment from internet operators. A Youtube video from savetheinternet.com explains the way the internet works today is that everyone is connected to each other through the same level playing field, the internet is run by different phone or cable companies who now want to change the way everyone receives equal internet service. They want to do this by locking down parts of the web in addition to make sites pay them more money to use it, while everyone else will receive slower service. An article from
www.neutriality.ca explains that “a year ago, the net neutrality debate focused on whether rules were needed, while today the debate is changing from whether there should be rules on network management to what those rules should be.” As Ursula Franklin explains in her book The Real World of Technology “the fact that citizens are more and more stringently controlled and managed is often considered as normal and fundamentally beyond questioning, as a necessary feature of technological societies. Technology has been the catalyst for dramatic changes in the locus of power.” Meaning that technology has been the basis of change for many years now, the internet was working fine, everyone was happy with the service of the internet until major cable and phone companies had some reason to think that they should change this. For some reason, in today’s society everything seems to be a big scam there is always more than what meets the eye when it comes to technology or companies or almost anything that we rely on today as a society. As the economy continues to loose money, the world seems to be getting more and more expensive, every where we look and everything we use is constantly raising their prices. It’s difficult to see the world changing in these ways for everyone, its getting harder and harder to live in this world.
Works Cited
CRTC Denies CAIP Application on Throttling, But Sets Net Neutrality Hearing Neutrality.ca
http://www.neutrality.ca/index.php?option=com_extcon&task=view&eid=1&cid=3530‘Save the Internet’ YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt0XUocViE‘Net Neutrality’ YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9jHOn0EW8U
