Derek's Blog

VoIP

2005-05-23T03:07:00.000-07:00

I can forsee two possible options with regards to how VoIP will affect the phone industry and phone companies. One possibility is that VoIP will gain momentum and popularity and more people with computers will start to use the free VoIP software, rather than the paying the phone company's charges, which will force more and more phone companies to drastically lower their fees. The other scenario is that VoIP doesn't catch on and that it has no affect on the phone company. However, with more phone companies starting to use VoIP for their long distance service, this scenario is not going to be the likely outcome.

Technology and Political Activity

2005-05-11T03:22:00.000-07:00

How is technology impacting political activity? Technology affects politics in a number of ways. For example: many politicians are starting to use blogging software to chronicle their lives, both personal and political. These politicians are using their blogs to spread the messages of their party, keep their constituents informed about their political moves, and show the American public a more intimate view of themselves through stories of their personal lives.

Public Cyberspace

2005-05-07T16:56:00.000-07:00

What does the concept of public space in cyberspace mean to me? To me, cyberspace should be an open and free place for people to exchange communication and information. The Internet should be used as a public forum where the entire world can engage in discussions on important matters. It should serve to unite the people of the world, whereas from the articles, it seems that the leaders of certain countries want there to be borders on the Internet so they can continue to stifle the people in their country. The Internet was not created to be used as a way to promote propaganda.

Mid-term report

2005-05-06T16:00:00.000-07:00

As far as my individual project is coming along, I am doing pretty well on it. I have gotten some photos for the webste, as well as designed how the entire site will look. I have also gotten the band members to write short, musical autobiographies of themselves to go on the website. All I need to do is finish putting it together on the computer, get some songs on the computer to have available for download from the website as well as videos, and post it all online.

For the group project, I am compiling information on my portion (cars and convergent technology, such as carphones, dvd players in cars, car stereos, etc.) and writing up my portion of the website. I will then give it to our coder who will put it on the website.

Blogs and Community

2005-05-02T01:31:00.000-07:00

Blogging software helps foster community because it allows people of common interest to find one another and, through diary-like postings; users are able to have conversations that take place not in real time. Through this, people with common interests can have dialogues and can form bonds and relationships across the globe, whereas before this technology, it would have been very hard for these people to meet with one another.

WiFi and Commnications Scholars

2005-04-27T02:20:00.000-07:00

As WiFi begins to spread across rural areas, and even in metropolitan areas city-wide, the opportunity to develop community networks increases more and more. As communities network themselves together, there will form new types of relationships people have with machines and with each other through machines. This will open up a new style of communication for communications scholars to explore and study. The expanse of WiFi will also bridge the digital divide, giving access to those in more remote areas. I'm sure communications scholars will be interested in what will happen when everyone has the potential to be connected to the Internet or other networks.

Open Source Movement: Should Com Scholars Study?

2005-04-24T14:48:00.000-07:00

Should Communications scholars study the open source movement? Of course they should. I think communications scholars should study any new media/communication technology that comes out when it comes out. You wouldn't have an invention like the television come out and wait 5 years before studying it and the effects it has on society. It is important to research new technologies when they make their debut, even if we think they may not stick around, because we never know what the future will bring and it isn't a good idea to have to play catch-up if the technology does last.

Electronic voting?

2005-04-20T00:45:00.000-07:00

I do not think we need electronic voting. As was said in class, optical scan voting is much more cost efficient and easy to use, as well as something that could easily be put into mass use, since the technology is already here. I was surprised to find out that it still isn't used in the majority of the country. I think that electronic voting might just end up causing more trouble than it is worth.

As far as the design of ballots, I think that the entire country should have a similar format for ballots, but with obvious changes made for candidates names, initiatives, etc. When I voted last November, I thought that the Washington State ballot was fairly easy to follow and use. It was of basic design. I also liked the looks of some of the ballots in the article from Slate by Jesse Scanlon. I think if we could provide the American public with attractive, easy to follow, easy to use ballots as well as an inviting environment with which to vote, we could boost voter turnout...or at least reduce voter misvoting.

Being Analog

2005-04-18T00:34:00.000-07:00

I never would have thought that humans were analog beings. I didn't know that being analog meant that we could, in a sense, filter out "noise" and still make sense of the whole picture, whereas machines get completely lost if one little thing is wrong. I knew that, for a machine to run perfectly, things had to be exactly in order, but I never would have considered that this would be a reason human functioning and machine functioning are so different. The article made me see that , while we have created machines to be digital so that they can operate and recreate with precission and accuracy, we ourselves are not digital beings and are not able to do the same.

Riedel, et al. Article

2005-04-12T23:56:00.000-07:00

I disagreed with the article when it said that newspapers are the most effective in educating people about politics. I think that, if done well, television or Internet sources can do just as good a job as a newspaper, if not better. The Daily Show on Comedy Central does an excellent job informing a younger demographic about current political events. The combination of entertainment and information helps viewers maintain interest and therefore pay more attention to the information the show is presenting. If more media were to adopt a similar format, the amount of information getting through to the reader/viewer/surfer would be greater. This would be a good idea, as long as the entertainment aspect didn't jeopardize the informative aspect, which sometimes happens when media entities try to combine the two.

One "ah ha" I had was that, while I know that the Internet has helped people become more aware of national and international news because of mainstream news sites like cnn.com and nytimes.com, I did not know that it had as big of an impact as it does on informing people of local news events.

Information

2005-04-10T21:19:00.000-07:00

I, personally, love having a lot of information at my fingertips. My life has been made easier by it. For example, this last Tuesday a co-worker told me that my left eye was really red, so I got online and looked up the symptoms of pink-eye. I was able to find out that what I had wasn't pink-eye and wasn't contagious. I still had to go to Hall Health to see if it was a burst blood vessel or a scratch on the surface, but I knew that what I had wasn't contagious and I would be able to go to work and classes the next day.

Being able to find any information I want easily and quickly has made my life more relaxed. I don't have to spend as much time looking it up in a library or calling people to see if they know the answers tomy questions. For things such as papers, however, I still will go to a library and look up information there because usually more academic in nature, whereas the Internet has more general knowledge type information.

Articles for 4.6

2005-04-06T01:48:00.000-07:00

I had a hard time understanding just exactly what McLuhan meant by “the medium is the message”. The only way I can make sense of it in my head is if I think about it like this: when a normal person sees a painting or hears a song, they can appreciate the beauty of the image or sound, but when a painter or musician sees or hears the art, they can appreciate the techniques used to create the piece. I’m not sure if this is what McLuhan means, but it is what I got out of the article. As a musician, I completely agree with this point. I have other musician friends who will listen to songs and rave about the change from a minor chord progression to a major progression and how it affects the feel of the song. Before I read this article, I never really thought about how those with insight into the creation of art have a deeper appreciation for it when it is made by someone else.

I never thought that, like a sentence, the Internet could be broken down into separate units that are able to stand on their own. A Web page is like a sentence, full of text, pictures, audio, video, etc., much like a sentence has nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on. Then you put multiple pages together to get a Website, just like a group of sentences make up a paragraph, and so on and so on.