Free Downloads why not?

Yar in "The rhetorics and myths of anti-piracy campaigns: criminalization, moral pedagogy and capitalist property relations in the classroom" notes the many ways in which copyright industries attempt to challenge what they call "copyright theft" especially via the internet.
This highlights just how powerful the internet has become.
Why would people decide to leave the comfort of their homes to go watch a movie when they can do it in the comforts of their homes and if lucky in high quality without spending a cent?
There are two reasons why people would choose otherwise.
1. Is the experience achieved at the cinema which you can not get at home
2. Is peoples choice to not watch illegally downloaded movies
Yes copyright issues especially on the internet are getting worse and companies are losing Billions of dollars but is it mostly due to young people?
A UK based poll in 2004 found that 18-29 year olds owned pirated intellectual property of some type have young people really lost all morals? do they not care about the creative process, time, money and labour gone into making a movie, song or even game?
Most would say that they dont have enough money to buy the physical item from a store so do it illegally via the internet others would argue that everyone else is doing it so why not?
There is also the issue that when you download something from the internet the link is still there, others can download the same file an infinite number of times however when you take a physical object it no longer exists unless ofcourse its replaced but that particular movie or cd can no longer be purchased.
The truth is, downloading property of the internet has become not only easy but people can do so without being punished, why is it that people are less likely to steal a physical object from a store than download information off the internet...its simple there are less risks involved so why not??
Yes downloading other peoples property is bad, illegal and not moral does that mean people will no longer download files from the internet? No.
So until industries find a way to stop people from downloading illegally of the internet copyright issues will be a problem for a long time coming.

Participation and You!

So according to Time Magazine, You are the 2006 person of the year. But how did we all do it, how did we get there?

Of course Time Magazine was calling attention to the increase of user-generated content online. Sites like Youtube, Myspace, Wikipedia, Forums, Blogs, all revolve around user-generated content.

An issue that van Dijck points out in the Users Like You? article is that these sites are all mediators of content. Sure, I can upload a video to Youtube, but will anyone watch it? It depends on what Youtube decides to do with it. Will it be a featured video, or will Miley Cyrus be featured instead? Will it be 'recommended' to certain users? Well, that depends on "high-tech algorithms".

What van Dijck is suggesting here, is that user-generated content is still at the mercy of the commercialised leanings of these sites (well, perhaps not Wikipedia). Youtube, Myspace, Blogs, and much other site hosting is for-profit, either through advertising or data-mining. Even now, as I use InternetExplorer (because Firefox was having issues with Blogger), my default search engine is Bing; even the interface through which the internet is accessed is influenced by commercial, parent company, interests.

I guess what I'm getting at here is the myth of the democracy of the internet. Sure, everyone can have their say, can generate a video, or post a comment, maybe even contribute to a blog. But who is reading? What determines redirections from (default) search engines, to access the site? And once on a site (such as Youtube) how is the user-generated content orgainsed and advertised? We can all contribute online, that is not the problem. The problem is in how the viewers access; who determines how the viewers get linked through the masses of user-generated content.

Online then, where free-speech and user-generated content is widespread, (to the point of 'over-filling' online environments,) power comes not from controlling who says what, but from controlling who hears what.

So according to the Time Magazine cover, we "control the information age". Well, maybe. But if so, it's a control mediated through Google search algorithms, data-mining, user-specific advertising, and economically orientated content promotion.

(But hey, we still made the cover of Time Magazine!)

Land of the Long White Fibre-optic Cable

Auckland is famous for a sprawling transportation network that every government seems determined to add to in order to solve the car-clog crisis. If John Key has his way, the entire nation will sport a jolly nice shiny new fibre-optic-cable-to-your-door communications network. And then we'll all have internet so fast our desktops will burst into flames. Cue fireextinguisher.exe

But will this really improve things? Who will use all that data? Does New Zealand need to be the Land of Milk, Honey and Bit-torrents?

I am a high-data user. I can personally chomp through 30GB of data in a fortnight. 60 in a month if I'm particularly bad. I've seen the American advertisements. for 100GB per month. Relatively cheap too. Personally I am in favour of high data caps. But in our society it would be like having a Ferrari with only 1 km of straight road nearby. Nice to have and shiny too, but you simply never use it. Those in favour of high speed, high data internet say it will benefit all New Zealanders and open up technological avenues that we otherwise never conceived of. Rubbish, says I. Unless you are particularly data-heavy, playing a lot of MMO's, downloading movies and endless YouTube clips and everything else at www.etc.com, having internet so fast that it makes the download box explode won't be of much benefit to you.

Prioritised download plans is an idea that our wonderful lecturer posited. You would pay for certain kinds of data to be prioritised and thus they would download quickly. So, for example, you could pay for a Movies Package and those files such as avi, mpg, mp4 etc, would all download at top speed whereas surfing TradeMe would be comparatively pedestrian. High-speed internet would allow for more dynamic pricing schemes and (God willing) cheaper internet access.

There is a point where the speed and amount of data available would become irrelevant. It would be effectively limitless data at nigh-instantaneous speeds. I think what we want is more fast data. And I think what we need is high media download speeds.

I want my movie downloaded in under 20 minutes. But I don't give a toss about how fast Facebook loads.

Ad Abuse

Just like everything else on the internet, advertisements have been evolving at an alarming rate, with a seemingly constant development of new, more annoying, or trickier advertisements. The old day of the humble 'Pop Up' are mostly behind us. Browsers employed with ad-blockers and newer methods of embedding advertisements mean that instead of opening a page and getting bombarded with five or so annoying, but easy to dispose of windows of random ads that may or may not having anything to do with the page I'm looking at, we instead get advertisements embedded as banners on the page itself, or disguised as important 'System' messages that can trick the unknowing or unwary. Spyware often operates in a similar manner.

I remember when Pop Up ads were the bane of internet existence. Now, they're some of the less annoying and invasive choices that we stumble across. Embedded adverts bug me because there isn't a way to escape them. They are just there and you have to passive absorb them. The animated with music are the worst, because they're distracting and take up loading time I'd rather spend on other things.

Most websites need the funding they provide, and although these days there is more of an effort to tailor them to the 'interests' of the user in question (which makes me uncomfortable enough on it's own), this often falls flat and ends up with rather...amusing results. How many female users have opened up an internet based email account like gmail and found a bold advert at the top of the page announcing 'What Viagra Can Do For You' or something along those lines.

Spam filters are a requirement for email, just like a multitude of mailboxes have 'No Junk Mail' stamped across the front of them, often ignored at will. Still, now most of my spam is from genuine names and email addresses, either hijacked or compiled somehow to trick spam filters and internet users into accepting them. It's especially hilarious when I receive spam from myself.

Also, the freedom of the internet means that unlike advertisements in the real world, where on television they show on certain timeslots for appropriate ages, or in magazines with appropriate subject matter, on the internet ads are much more random and it's no wonder parents are worried about child security on the internet when even a simple email account will track a multitude of spam and ads of a definite adult nature.

Just like we're bombarded in the 'real world' with adverts from everything from television to billboards and magazines, the internet has also cultivated an invasive, inescapable world of advertisements which can range from harmless and annoying, to harmful and on the shadier side of legal.

Much like concerns with personal privacy on the internet, advertisers are becoming more and more invasive and inventive in their methods of attracting hits, and the 'freedom' and 'anonymity' that people perceive the internet to offer seems to be disappearing with the sheer amount of tracking, data and techniques these advertisers use.

Is television news being stood up?

Image source: Author screen capture

Over the past few weeks One News At 6pm has changed their "coming up" segment before the first ad break to include the approximate length of time (in minutes) until an advertised story will screen.

Clearly this is an attempt to lasso viewers into watching further into the bulletin, even if they wander off during the ad break. However, is this an effective strategy in a digitally switched on society?

When I see an interesting story previewed, I've been finding myself drawn to Google News to find out more straight away, rather than waiting the advertised four minutes or more.

If TVNZ aim to up their "Generation Y" ratings by asking these viewers to make an appointment with the upcoming story, they seem to have miscalculated. However, what this example does point out is that different media act as different levels in chains of mediators.

Image source

I don't tend to sit down and watch a six o'clock televised news bulletin, but if my parents have the television news on in the background I may be exposed to an interesting story and pursue it further on the internet. In this way, television is still acting as a gatekeeper, influencing what news I access online.

Television and newspapers may have lost ground as a dominant form of news media, but the interplay between offline and online news is affecting our interaction with news. The message isn't in the medium, it's in the media.

Pornography : Prosumer in our era

Well, who hasn't visited a pornographic websites before?

Recently, there's bunch of news about hollywood celebrities' home-made porno is leaking outwards onto the internet. This is nothing new for us. It seems that internet become the biggest 'exporter' for pornographic materials. Through new media platforms such as the Internet, we get exposed to millions of sexual materials that challenge our sense of morality and the discourse of identity.

As mentioned in class before, pornography is the leading economic driver for internet growth. I am arguing here that how pornographic changes our identity, perspectives and our society today. Sex has always seen as a taboo, and pornography has always been identify as a taboo because it is sex that is divorced from its original emotions, which is 'love' (Geoffrey Gorer). The society before our era treated pornography as something that is shameful, guilty and filthy. But with the invention of internet and its ability to reach billion of people, the discourse of pornography seems to be going through a drastic change. Our world is bombarded with informations, images, topics and conversations about sex. This is due to the change of media platform through out the years; pornography were originally circulated within the public through traditional printing medias, such as books, papers and et cetera. But when it switch to operates on internet, it floods the world and reach out more widely than it was on printed medium.

This widespread effect has an impact on us in a macro and a micro ways: such as our society on a macro level; as well as our identity on a micro level. Pornography are no longer exclusive to be produce only by big film companies, but at this stage, the notion of 'prosumer' emerged and more and more normal, ordinary people in the society started to produce their own pornography materials, and they actually become products that other people can buy online. That links to my second point, where our identity and relationship with online pornography has been re-constructed. The traditional notion of intimacy no longer have the same meaning, as more and more individuals started to share their intimacy relationship online with billions of other people; and individuals in the society are most likely to get their sexual impressions, educations and stereotypes from online pornographies. Thus, online pornography structured our relationship as well as our attitude with and towards sex.

What really struck me was the increasing amount of homemade pornography materials nowadays. Internet can easily circulate products, informations and so on easily. Therefore, individuals in the society get exposed to different materials that they have never encounter before. Internet re-shape our sense of intimacy, and construct sex as something that does not comes with any consequences, and it can be derived from emotions. In the end, sex becomes a product on the internet, and everyone can just buy it without much thinking. The frightening side of this is that, sex no longer seen as something that is just between two person or a private matter; new media platform offered us a way to commodify even our sexual intimacy.

Online pornography have shifted our perspectives and identity in a subtle but drastic way. We no longer view sex as a taboo, and sex can become a commodity to be buy and sell. The anonymity features of internet also contribute to the fact that anyone can buy or sell anything obscene without worrying one's identity getting exposed.

An advise for people that decided or going to publish your intimate moment of you and your partner : once your material get online, it will never go offline...FOR LIFE.

Online Privacy

It seems like privacy is becoming more of a issue with the internet becoming more mainstream. Everyone and anyone can look at someone's profile and know what school they went to, what job they do, who their friends are, what they look like, where they live and even their cellphone number - if they're silly enough to list it.
People need to be more aware of the World Wide Web. That's exactly what it is, world wide.

With profile sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, they allow users to personalise their profiles with pictures and personal information. They also allow people to add and decline friends as they please and by doing this, it means that more friends they add, the more people out there in the wide web can see their information and pictures due to links.
However, it seems as though Bebo and now MySpace are a dying breed, at least in my opinion, people are now moving onto Facebook. I think it may be because of the simple design and it's a lot more private. By this I mean that they allow an option where you can select people to see your "Limited Profile". This is an option that allow users to customise and put things that they want their "weak ties" to see, for example. I think it's a good idea, especially if you're a serial friend adder, i.e. someone who values the amount of friends they have. It allows people to add whoever they want but also keep personal details private and open only to those they know in person.

I do think that people still need to be more weary of their privacy...profile sites such as Facebook can only protect your personal information to a certain point. I think it really is down to the user to make good decisions on who they are adding. Many profiles are fake and only want to be added so they can gain information for marketing purposes or even hacking purposes.

Maybe think twice before you add the next "friend" to your profile, even though they might be the one who will finally achieve your goal of hitting one million friends!

"Think of the Children!"

There is no doubt about how the internet has altered the way in which relationships are formed and how we interact with each other, yet it seems that the general consensus is that the mass distribution of internet porn is purely bad for you. Negative terms like ‘addiction’ and ‘epidemic’ are frequently used to describe the attitude towards internet pornography. Dr. Phil’s free online relationship advice says that users of internet pornography reflect behavior that is “perverse and ridiculous intrusion…it is an insult, it is disloyal and it is cheating”, which is very much the typical conservative view that is regularly reinforced in popular media. Aside from the raging conservatives who claim pornography is ruining adult relationships, the major concerns are related to the vast accessibility and distribution of child pornography as well as the readily available explicit material to anyone at any age material that many critics argue to be corrupting society’s morale. It is easy to blame the internet when increasingly younger digital natives are exposed to such content that feminists against often argue perpetuate the objectification of women and create unrealistic expectations and standards of beauty.

Pornographic materials are merely illusions; fantasies that temporarily fulfill human sexual urges by the repeated act of downloading, watching and fornication. How is this any different from women or men fantasizing about other women or men during sexual intercourse with their partners? Perhaps for some, oblivion is bliss. Despite the allegations against pornography, there are couples who watch porn together to maintain a healthy sexual relationship and marriages that have been saved by allowing mutual playful experimentation. Recent findings by Milton Diamond regarding the correlation between the use of pornography and the reduction in sex-related crimes have also sparked many enthusiasts. Through research on jailed rapists and non-rapists, Diamond discusses relationship between the widespread of pornography and decrease in sex crimes that suggests that recreational users of pornography in its entirety allows for harmless diversion; no STDs, no infidelity and no ‘morning after’ scares. The studies found that many high sex offenders were the ones who had a strict and repressive religious up-bringing, whereby the surveyed rapists and child molesters were found to have consumed significantly less porn than the control group of normal males. Maybe easy access to porn isn’t such a bad idea after all.