False identity.

Identity has always been a complex concept. Goffmans work on identity to me was always quite clear and I could relate and understand it in relation to my vision of my own identity. Identity, Goffman argues, is played out through a variety of roles which all make up the self. I can understand this as I see my self as a sister, a friend, a daughter, and how all these different roles make up who I am. However the internet has made this a whole lot more intrinsic as we are now able to play these roles all at once. Also we are not limited to the physcial aspects which are attached to our identites, such as race or gender. I think games such as second life are really interesting in the fact that they give people the opportunity to completly create their own identity with out any restrictions, and its great being able to explore who one wants to be. However, from my own experience with the game I would have such a blast accessing a wide range of my many selves when I got off and came into the real world i started to realise the many restrictions which were in it. A documentary I watched really highlighted this point with people finding that they like the identity they had created so much online that they had become discontented with their real life identity. The people got addicted to playing out a false identity online. So maybe having this option to become who ever you want on the net is not such a good thing. It may just be giving people false hope and really teasing them with a fantasy and you become disheartened by your real life identity.

Facebook in the 21st season.

I think Facebook is such a good way to keep up with everyone's birthdays, events and even last names.
Me and my friends Vlers have the same friends , we've grown up together and this 21st season everytime I ask her if shes coming to XX and YY party she says " no Im not invited". Thats not becuase they don't like her , or that they don't want her to come but she is not on Facebook. Some people aren't sending traditional ivitations in the mail anymore, or if they do its to the ones who have confiremed they are ' attending' on Facebook. With the assumption that everyon is on Facebook majority forget who went ot their highschool or friends they haven't seen in a while.It's easy to keep track of events on Facebook for people like Vlera with no Facebook its a major social disadvantage.

Every party , event and show is now on Facebook first, it's easy to find out whats on this weekend on Facebook if you don't have much on or forget who's birthday is on that weekend. With Facebook I know peoples birth dates that I would have never known or even wanted to know( 'connections' on Facebook that I've seen once in my life).
Facebook is a great calander , even though I don't go on it daily its a perfect weekend and birthday calander ; especially for the 21st season.

Is technology a means of social control?

Reading Kingsley Dennis's article "Opening Oandora's box: How technologies of communication and cognition may be shifting towards a 'Psycho-Civilized Society' one thing came to mind which is none other than social control, Dennis notes that the use of wireless technologies have been developed to target an individuals biological body, with specific focus upon the neuronal functioning of the brain. This is a scary concept to take in there is no doubt that we will reach a point in our lives where technology will dominate every sense of our being from chips placed into our skins to track our every trace or even the new passports which now have chips placed in them. One has to stop and think if this is another ploy for the government to control the world we live in. Such as the example given in Dennis's article the "Active Denial System" which is a non-lethal energy weapon which sends direct pulses into target subjects. This causes a painful burning sensation designed specifically for crowd control. To have the most powerful tool in our body (the brain) controlled means we lose all functions of freedom of choice we are left to depend on technology alone. Dennis notes that Technology will be so advanced that it can even detect if a driver is getting tired through the eyes alone or the wireless-brain technology that goes beyond the sphere of gaming and has been developed to stop people from over-gaming it works by sending acoustic sound wave signals to the brain which tells gamers to stop playing. If all these concepts noted by Dennis comes true and technology reaches a stage where it can control our subconcious than there is no doubt that technolgy will subsequently be used to control the consumer society. If technology can be used to stop people from playing, buying or doing any particular behaviour in general than it can consequently also be used to do the opposite.

So should we as a society support the advancement of technology?.....is technological advancement a positive driving force in the world we live in? ... either way there is no way to know but to wait and find out...

Privacy vs. Curiosity

The best thing about Facebook is the ability that it gives you to watch others without their knowledge. This is a somewhat hypocritical feeling however, as most users, myself included, would love nothing more than to know who is frequenting their profile while at the same time enjoy the anonymity gifted to us while we innocently (or not so innocently) browse the profile of someone we fancy, dislike, are jealous of or are just generally interested in.
We simply can’t have it both ways, so which is better?
I believe we would all (deep down) prefer the privacy factor…

Amidst rumors of a new Facebook application which allowed users to view and display the top five other fb users that view their profile the most frequently, I did some digging as this rather bothered me. Not because I often spend large amounts of time on particular people’s profiles because I want to track their movements and begin some serious illegal stalking, but because I still believed that if this were application were real, some people may have been surprised to see my name pop up on theirs. This is because, and I’m not sure if I’m alone in this, the people whose profiles I visit the most are not my close friends but slightly more removed contacts who I’m not in regular contact with and therefore are not already aware of what they’re up to, this makes them far more intriguing to me. I hope that doesn’t sound too ‘stalkery’.
However my mind was put at ease when I discovered a comment on Facebook’s Help Centre which confronted this question by saying that no such application was allowed by Facebook and that if anything similar ever eventuated it would be quickly removed.
According to the Help Centre this kind of application would simply be a breech of policy and anyone who comes across a ‘dodgy’ application should report it to speed up the process.
I urge everyone to do this for dignities sake.

This subject brings up the debate about the difference between simply killing boredom by trolling a random profile and the act of stalking. For some, the former can quite easily slip into the latter.
In actuality there really isn’t a lot preventing someone from viewing your profile if they are determined.
Even if there is someone who you have not accepted as a ‘friend’, it is likely they will know someone who knows you and allows them to view you from their account. The only real way to counter this would be to limit you contacts list to close friends that you are in contact with on a regular basis that you trust implicitly not to allow anyone else to abuse their Facebook account. According to the Dunbar Number this would mean that we would only have around 5 friends. How many of us would let that happen? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of Facebook?

Perhaps we should all just accept the nature of Facebook for what it is, in Mark Zuckerberg’s words “The age of innocence is over.” Besides surely if you’re that worried about someone wanting to stalk/kill you…DON’T have Facebook!?

The iPad.

Apple is responsible for many of the technological enhancements we have seen. The iPod which has changed how we listen to music, and in turn has changed the music industry with a decline in CD’s and therefore an industry dependent on sites like iTunes. We now see artists pre-releasing songs and videos on Apples popular site, allowing fans to buy the mp3’s instead of a tangible CD. Recently Apple have taken technology to the next level by digitizing paper.

The Ipad it seems is the only digital devise which resembles a piece of paper, and it is said that this technological invention is one that will change the world as we know it. The Ipad has all the capabilities as a computer or iPhone (email, downloadable applications, iTunes etc) and new functions the others don’t offer. The only thing the iPad lacks, is a print button therefore allowing it to be a digitized version of a paper.

This remodelling of paper is bringing one of the most basic items in society into the new technology driven medium. Allowing another part of society to grow, and become more sophisticated. Although the iPad is a new technology, experts say that there will be many modifications to the devise, and it will an item to watch when looking to the future.

Internet killed the Newsprint Star?

Well not exactly but it definitely has made an impact on the way we access our daily news. There are pros and cons of this format of the news, as there usually is with the shifting of traditional forms of media to technological mediums.

An aspect of online news which I think has an advantage over hard copy newspapers is after reading an article on msn or nzherald you can then look at the 'related articles' attached to it unlike newspapers which are limiting. Newspapers subscribe what they think is relevant to you as a mass, it is not individualised. You can choose what is relevant. Accessing news online gives the user more selectivity, you can read what you want and easily ignore what you don't want to read. I guess you can do that with newspapers as we all have skipped certain sections to read the more 'interesting' news but by being able to just search and 'google' what you want to read about you have more control and greater accessibility, such as viewing more than one article by different authors and more photos than what is in the paper. Facebook and other SNS has made news faster to share and more selective as well because we can see what news our friends are interested in (on their walls or the links they post in the newsfeed.) Supposing we are like minded to our friends this can be useful as social currency for discussions and share information. Many online articles now have the option to 'Share' straight onto facebook so that the link to the article will appear in the newsfeed and person's profile. Online news sites are adjusting into the facebook phenomenon by encouraging the sharing and 'liking' of articles, the readers are deciding if the stories are relevant or hold their interest.

We are definitely in a culture where news (like mostly everything else) is on demand. This is what gives internet an advantage as News breaks faster online as it doesn't need to be printed off or have deadlines, the news is always available and updated and we can read whats happening all around the world in a click of the mouse. Alot of newspapers are constructed by the 'higher powers' e.g. corporations and conglomerates, usually with an agenda or bias views, although what we read on the internet can be bias but we get a more diverse range of sources and opinions.

Blogs are also a useful way to hear people's opinions on current news issues or share your own view as they are a personalised and user-generated medium. But with this freedom to express online people need to watch out for inaccurate information or bias views, it becomes a matter of judgement. Blogs and facebook can make breaking news stories more personal because people who share their experiences may have been there at the time and have their own input. Their own experiences creates a sense of exclusivity and intimate look to events, but in some cases looking/hearing from a distance can be better sometimes.

While the internet has its perks of being a convenient and diverse medium to get the news I do not think it can ever replace the nostalgia of opening a newspaper delivered to the doorstep on a Sunday morning. But as Marshall McLuhan said the Medium is the Message and the social context of gathering our news on the Internet signifies the shifting culture that we are the medium.

Crack up Facebook events

Hahaha found this online super crack up which in some context talks about facebook and surveillance and privacy to an extent..

A Picture's worth a thousand words so i'm wondering if i should submit this entry anyway...check it out ...
Oh images found online cant remember what site...




Touches on many contexts which might create some ideas and yeah a picture is worth a thousand words.

A+ blogpost hahaha