Monday 19 September 2011

Week 7 What digc has taught me

I find my self always learning new things in this subject that are quite relevant, rather than other subjects that can some times be full of jargon and complication of simple stuff. What i picked up on this week was the idea of cloud storage and its possibilities. Since the tutorial i have signed up for the free 5gb that amazon gives out. As soon as i entered my email i was of course bombarded with the daunting and over worded "end user agreement" and thought to myself after learning about what rights facebook has to the content we up load i better have a skim through it, two or three lines i decide to brush that idea. I swear thats how they rob us blind, by making the most cumbersome and boring bit of writing that even a ridaline junkie would not even be able to sit down through. Never mind that i signed up and have been using it ever since. It is so easy now, i was always pretty good at loosing USB's with important work on them, so now i just throw it all up on the sky drive. Im not sure if i would trust it, (or be bothered to read through the end user agreement ) to store my personal goods on it just yet. I like the idea that if you physically loose your storage in a fire or something else its kind of safe somewhere else.


Also what intrigued me was the idea of the "hit driven model" being modified into a modern version where there is still a basic "hit = popular" idea but now instead of a mass hit it is more a "niche hit model". This is evident in sites like reddit.com where the user can give their approval or disapproval to stories if they think its not worthy. I think its awesome that we, the consumer now has a much better way of picking and choosing what we want to read. 

Monday 12 September 2011

old school and new school wk6

The idea of our broad culture becoming converged into one melting plot intrigues me. It is obvious that with this convergence our lives are becoming more convenient but at what cost? In the lecture there was a slide that stated “convergent technologies are more than the sum of their parts”. I like this notion as it rings true in so many various elements of our lives. Look at the mobile phne for example. Once apon a time mobiles where used simply for ringing people. They where large and cumbersome but now we cant basily do everything under the sun with our smart devices. God knows how we used to find our way around with out GPS technologies in our back pocket, also how would you be able to tell your hot date your running ten minutes late to the date.
The idea that all this content, that was only once accessible by going out on your own time to each place where you could find it is now merging into more accessible platforms. This means that we have now old and new media content. There is a divide between the older generations who are not using the iphone to read the head lines and those that who are. We also talked about these companys like the newspaper printers who are finding it hard to sell papers now, what if they went broke and could not print papers. How would our oldies get their news? This is why the future of technology is very unclear, better go and catch the latest news lines on reddit.com