Week Two App Lab

Umm this didn't work out well at all, I had flat in the bike so cycling didn't work well, so then I had to get the bus. And so I ended up late, in fact too late. So I decided to leave it and not bother going over to the lab, instead I did some messing around with MIT app inventor myself. Well it's very jigsaw like, I kinda get it. It breaks down the idea of object oriented programming ( So java with objects and classes etc,) so that anyone doesn't  need to know any of that. Instead it has made Android app development accessible for anyone with a computer and internet access.  

After having a quick look on the developer it was clear that you are limited in the ability of what you could do, which meant that us as a team had to rethink our ideas, as to be able to make the developer work for us. It does offer scope but we were thinking too much into it and so I feel that the concept of the app will be way more important that the actual app itself, which is true if this was a real world situation and you were planning an app. 

There are a good few videos on you tube that can help explain how things work which was useful considering that I missed the lap. Also some members of the group were able to demonstrate what they had learned. 

True or False week 2

I think we have a problem, perhaps a big one? So this week’s reading was about how we need information forensics. With the internet personal information decimation is cheaper, quicker and easier. However is this information true or false; can information that is wrong be called information? And so digital judgement is need to make sense of information online.

 So lets go back a bit, back perhaps to before text, and what do we get. We see people with information (knowledge) stored in memory, passed through the generations through stories et; essential little or no external memory. Now go forward about 1000 years and we get text, it means that people must have been able to write and read, and also had the materials to write. Anyone who can now read something can learn, but not directly from the source as it is external memory. This creates the diffusion of time and space with information dissemination (Emanuel Castels talks a lot about this in the Information Universe Galaxy idea)  

However go back in history and online the rich have access to knowledge thus

we only have few gatekeepers of information, these are high up people how have the power to control the flow of info to the masses and so they had the power in many respects. You can swing society’s understandings of what the world is like etc. A very good example of this is all of religion – The Roman Catholic Church! (the last comment was personal)

Now let’s get to 21^st Century, the #internet with web 2.0 (from our last reading) can have nearly anyone with access to a computer upload content. And as the internet can be seen as the wildwest one has to ask, was the content that others placed true or false.

There is no publishing house over the shoulders of the internet blogger, so the internet blogger in his bedroom can write anything and get away with it  (to some extent).

And this is the great thing about the internet is the freedom of voice, however this is also the biggest problem!

How I see Social Networks Based Online

 Friends and Social Media?

When Mark Zuckerberg  created the social networking site, Facebook he used the term friends to describe people to who you add and like and share content to. This notion of ‘oh everyone is a friend’ however isn’t really Zuckerberg’s fault. Consider this the English language is extremely poor at describing the attributes of relationships that people have with other people. The best we can come up with is friend, colleague, best friend, (I can’t think of anymore).

However the point I am trying to conjure is that we all consider ourselves connected to one another, and perhaps the word friend is wrong, but that’s not our fault, we just haven’t established a method of description for levels of friendship.

The reason why I brought up this notion was the whole idea of social media, after some thinking one can say, it is not really about friends at the end of the day. Instead it is a goal orientated environment. So for example tumblr, instagrame, and other blogging sites are about creating information and disseminating it. Be it for intrinsic emotional rewards, or extrinsic money etc rewards. What makes blog platforms of interest is that they are places that are not all about the person such is that with the social networking sites. Instead they offer the chance of users to express thoughts or information about topics, with others giving feedback hence the social aspect. The social network is much more egotistical with the notion of this is a profile of me, and here is my ‘friend’ number. I think that peoples friends number is not a count of friends but in essence just a number that represents there social network.

It should be noted that online social networks are incredibly interesting as the user is open to so much more connections than that of offline social networks. According to  Scott L Feld  who wrote a paper titled ‘Why your friends have more friends than you do?’, one can say that the chances that their friends friends have higher amount of friends you have. Now place this into the online social context setting, and one soon realises how fast a social network grows.

These social networks should be considered to be made of actors not friends. Social networks  can be consisting of enclaves of actors who consider themselves friends, but only if the notion of friends is reciprocated between the dyadic understanding of both actors.

And so in conclusion, the internet is in nature social, but not to the extent of friendships, instead it is just a large collection of people creating a massive social online network.

Week One

This is annoying I had something here and then I think I lost it, anyways it's was about how do we describe what social media means. The reading had suggested that it is closely related to the change from Web 2.0 to web 3.0. The idea from where the internet had moved from static pages of information to pages that can be manipulated by viewers with ease, be it they want to comment or been blog. How did this happen? Though the improvement of tech, with the likes of JavaSCript and flash. We now have platforms for social media such as blogger, Facebook, and you tube, all can have user content placed upon it.