Last week at the Celsa, Bob, my English teacher, asked us to contribute to Wikipedia, the free web-based collaborative encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Firstly, I had to find something to write about. And that wasn't easy because there was already something written on Wikipedia for every single subject I wanted to write an article about.
I finally decided to write about Guilherme Marconi, a brasilian artist I like, who is not yet on the free encyclopedia. I easily created an account and I wrote a short text without difficulties. But unfortunately, like some of my wormates, I posted a text in English on the French wiki and my contribution has been deleted without explanation... I worked for nothing.
I didn't know that Wikipedia was so controlled. The free encyclopedia imposes its rules and I think that it's the only way to become more reliable. Indeed, how can I trust an encyclopedia if anybody can post anything without control ? If your article doesn't perfectly satisfy requirements...well... it will just be deleted.
Internet is a jungle of good things and bad things. Here are several rules that you should respect if you want to survive on the I-land.
- Be present on the web and create new content as often as possible. Don't be afraid to innovate !
- Protect yourself ! Install an anti-virus software, it's the main defence against online problems.
- Share your videos, photos, music, articles and interact with everybody. - Illustrate your articles if you want them to be read by Bob.
- Master the internet slang and learn how to use such stupid expressions as "BWL" "ROFL", "LOL", "IRL", "IMHO", "BFN"...
- Understand how to search and you will find what you're looking for in this great database.
- Create a network and be connected to many people, using all the micro-blogging tools and social media networking like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and so on. Enter the web 2.0 !
- Control your image, protect your privacy and stay aware of the Internet's risks. Don't post any link which could harm your own image in the future. Let your private life stay private.
- Stay up-to-date and be ready to experiment new things. Break your habits and learn how to use some of the new tools which appear everyday on the land of the New.
- Remember that the web is transparent. Tracing an IP address is actually pretty straightforward. You cannot do whatever you want and you cannot say anything thinking that the web is totally anonymous.
- Get a real life sometimes...
I have to admit that, if I'm very interested in technology and media transformation of our time (especially when it comes to the future of books), I don't think that the existing ebooks can compete with the traditionnal book which remains, in my opinion, a quasi-perfect technology.
Notwithstanding, strides are made and some devices offer a good reading experience. The brand new Nook designed by Barnes & Noble calls itself the planet's "most advanced e-book reader." Measuring 7.7- x 4.9- x 0.5-inches and weighing 11.2 ounces, the device includes a top e-ink display from Vizplex and a color touchscreen (3.5-inches) below for an easy navigation. Of course, it supports highlighting passages, bookmarking and making notes.
One day you think that you know everything about the Internet (am I a media student or not?!) and the day after you discover the extent of your ignorance. I will deal in this post with several things that I recently learnt about the web.
I am a little ashamed of myself but I have to admit that until a few weeks ago, I didn’t know precisely how to use RSS feeds. Thanks to RSS (translated as "Really Simple Syndication"), it becomes possible to distribute up-to-date content (blog entries, audio and video, news headlines...) from one website to many other websites around the world. And it works great !
Here is a short explanation of RSS working principle by the great website www.commoncraft.com
I have always tought that the famous social networking and micro-blogging service Twitter was useless and over-hyped. Though, our english teacher Bob forced us to sign up for an account. I had no choice : I had to figure out how to tweet and re-tweet correctly. So I took this opportunity to really understand what this tool was about. It's quite simple. All the webnauts know its working principle. Twitter users send and read short messages limited to 140 characters or fewer. That's the SMS of the web 2.0. Tweets are displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers (his followers).
Then, little by little, I realized how a simple micro-blogging service like Twitter can be used for educational activities. It enables real-time interaction between learners who use it to announce projects, to promote their blogs, to ask their instructor for directions, advices and so on or to discuss their ideas with the others while engaged in classroom activities. To me, this kind of digital tools can change classroom dynamics.
I am student in a communication school and e-class is a new experience for me.
Do you need to take courses that your local school doesn't offer? I recently learnt that you can sign up for classes at accredited learning institutions like the Virtual High School for instance, and take courses across a wide range of topics. What about learning online?
To me, the Internet provides a lot of advantages like for example its ability to facilitate research, providing access to many archival materials, databases and so on. It helps to spread knowledge, it challenges the idea of personal intellectual property and encourages collaborative learning and interactivity between learners. The instructor can submit assignments with emails and he can receive immediate responses.
Though, each week in Celsa’s English classes, we encounter several difficulties (a monitor which doesn’t work, a shitty connection…). I think we have to be prepared for frequent problems with the technology. Moreover, internet sites and softwares change so rapidly that we always have to refresh our skills. E-learning is more time consuming than traditional teaching and the loss of human contact is still one of its greatest challenges.
But still, it's probably the first step for a society in which education is accessible to everyone and that is why we have to figure out what is the best we can do to optimize the conditions for the teacher, and the learner. Incorporating internet technology into the structure of the course today is a necessity, especially in the fields of communication and the faculty should bring the fruits of internet use into the classroom. We also have to think about how these technologies can enable the class to do something new, or something old in a better way. What can be improved?
Right now, 600 millions of computers are connected on the Internet.There is a police in charge of the surveillance of the web but there are so many crimes to control…
According to a report analysing internet crime in 2008, put out by the FBI, the number of complaints from victims of cyber crime rose by almost a third since 2007. The total number reached 275,284, amounting to $265 millions in money lost. The most popular scam is the “card trick” and the ebay fraud. The consumers buy goods which are simply not delivered. The same report explains that two out of every three of the recorded perpetrators of the crimes are Americans but I think that one of the most famous and spectacular is what one calls the Nigerian scam. The victim is persuaded to advance sums of money in the hope of realizing a significantly larger gain.
A good example is better than a long explanation :
Does somebody want to transfer millions of dollars into your account?
Don’t be fooled !
An opportunity is a good chance, a possibility due to a favorable combination of circumstances. It’s all about making the right thing at the right time, making the most of what comes your way. The web gives to an artist many opportunities to put himself on the map. By interacting and learning from other webnauts, I think that we can constantly be exposed to opinions that we‘d never have come across otherwise. Moreover, a blog enables the artist to explain his art, in his own words. For instance, I’m a musician and I set myself very high standards. That’s the reason why so many songs I wrote never saw the light of day. I think this brand new blog is an opportunity (thanks Bob…) to introduce you a tune I recorded six years ago when I was in high school. Without this blog, it had never been listened to.
The Internet embodies a real revolution in our way of thinking. It is irrevocably leading all of us to adopt several new habits. For instance, digital technologies and particularly the Internet, deeply impact our reading habits. Indeed, reading on the web suggests a very different sort of reading to that which we were accustomed to. Indeed, everything is connected nowadays thanks to the hypertext. Contrary to the book, which is a closed object with a beginning and an end, the web isn’t limited and every text, image or video may lead us to other texts, images and videos…
I don’t work anymore like I did before having a computer connected to the whole knowledge of the world. In that way, I can say that it broke my working habits. When I do some research for a school project for example, I spend a lot of time collecting pieces of information, whereas in the past, I used to restrain my preliminary researches to a few books. Moreover, needless to say that I rarely move to the library since I can get almost everything I want on my screen.
But we can’t neglect the fact that such an abundance of information may affect our analytical ability. When we read an article on the Internet, we scan the headlines, maybe a paragraph or two to get an idea of what’s new. The articles are short and get to the point. That’s the web’s working principle and according to me it might become our “working principle” if we don’t pay attention. Thereby, Internet is a powerful tool which represents not only an evolution but a real revolution in the way we think and work.
The internet is a powerful marketing tool used since its early days in order to promote artists. Now more than ever, music seems to be prevalent in our society of immediacy as attested by the growth of blogs, webradios and musical social networks. Notwithstanding, for some time, the web has been blamed for being responsible for a crisis within the entertainment industry, particularly in the music industry.
On Tuesday, September the fifteenth, French Deputies voted in favor of Hadopi 2, a law project which shows a profound lack of understanding of what the Internet actually is. The proposed measures and sanctions aim at eliminating illicit downloads considered as a serious threat for the music industry by the French Ministry of Culture. "There is no reason that the internet should be a lawless zone" according to President Nicolas Sarkozy, convinced that the web is nothing short than the potential killer of musical creation. Emphasizing threats from file sharing systems, the law project which is in line with what one calls the "graduated response" gives to a specific court the possibility to decide to cut the internet accesses that are known for being used to download data protected by copyright. With this project, the government, which only wants to protect the producers backs, contravenes to the presumption of innocence and gives the possibility to exclude someone from the information society.
The major music labels (Sony-BMG, Universal, Warner, EMI) dominate the music industry and they want to stop at all costs the ever-growing phenomenon of free sharing of music, claiming that its impact on their business has been devastating. I think that it is funny when we know that Sony is one of the most important producer of mp3 players, blank CDs and CD burner, isn’t it? Then, who are the ones to blame? If illegal downloads have such an impact on the CD sales, Sony has dug his own grave… They just refused to accept that the industry they work for is in a state of profound change. Instead of punishing the ones they call “thieves” or "pirates", the system itself has to evolve. If they really want to make money with music, the majors will have to offer satisfactory alternatives to illegal file sharing.
They can decide the cut of the web subscription to internet users known for downloading illegally but according to me, they won't be able to eliminate such a well-spread activity. One must move with the times, after all. With the advent of peer-to-peer which was popularized by file sharing systems like Napster, the act of downloading music became extremely frequent for millions of webnauts. Everybody has an mp3 player and file sharing and streaming providers offer immediately good quality music. It seems difficult to evaluate the specific impact of free sharing on the recording business. Though, Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Stumpf looked at a sample of albums sold in the US in the second half of 2002 and showed in the Journal of Political Economy that the effect of downloads on the sales was “statistically indistinguishable from zero.” There are less and less people ready to pay for albums they can get simply and freely thanks to the Internet. Why should we pay? To support the artist who gets at best $2 per album? It’s extremely hard for composers to earn a good living purely off their music. That’s not new. Recording labels always have promoted the most bankable artists and a very small number of the albums released are actually profitable.
That's a fact that Internet and the audio compression technologies such as mp3 music format deeply transformed the music industry. They have profoundly impacted the recording business. They have made information sharing much easier and the web is without a doubt the future of recorded music.
As a musician and a composer, I want my work to be easily available to most people and Internet seems to be an incredible opportunity for an artist to put himself on the map. Myspace, last.fm, Youtube, socials networks... The artists don’t need middlemen anymore. The Internet is going to change the way we consume music but it is not going to kill the entertainment industry. The producers want us to believe that music is dying with CD’s but the music isn’t actually limited to an object. The web will continue to increase variety and to lead to the appearance of more new artists, questioning a system when only four labels record, distribute, and promote the music.
