Lecture 7 summary

today's lecture focused on the relationship between Politics and new Media;

• politics and new communication technologies interact together
• Cyber politics: means the politics of the Internet that exists predominately on the Internet
• Edemocracy: the Internet's intervention in and contribution to real world politics that exists predominately off the Internet. Eg, political campaigning on the Internet and the governments use of the Internet to raise awareness and debate on issues to the people's use of new communication technologies to criticize the government and reveal their mistakes. In Edemocracy people use the Internet to intervene in standard politics. People can write a letter to their local members and their local members can respond. An example of this can be seen in the political sphere in regard to climate change, and the party changing their vote on the emissions trading scheme due to mass internet (emails) from people who oppose it.
• Example of this relationship is the Facebook "friends" connection and "Secondlife"which are examples of political structure in person to person relationships.
• the use of the Internet in politics was first used in the Obama campaign.
• As voting is not compulsory in the USA, new communication technologies is used to get the message out and get people to vote.
• an example of this is a CNN program that supposedly lists the person as the single defining vote that led Obama to not be in power and for Gorge Bush to remain for another 4 years. This is portrayed as being the case because that person did not vote.
• An example of this can be seen in the Kevin'07 and John Howard campaigns where Kevin Rudd used Facebook etc and stayed in touch with new communications technologies, whereas Howard put a video up on Youtube which looked outdated.
• Example of contemporary use of new communication technologies in politics is "Obama girl" video
• video's made on YouTube attacking the opposition with satire can become embraced by that attacked party as a funny joke, defeating the purpose.
• participatory or direct democracy: based on the ancient Greek model where all citizens have a right and a duty to be involved in all decisions made.
• the Internet could provide a return to the participatory approach where everyone can be involved in political processes.
• there is an issue with people not having the technology to do this.
• eg can be seen where politicians are "twittering" from inside the party meetings, which is a change from previously where mobiles were banned from use in the party meetings.
• introduced "transparency" into the party room, whereas before this sort of information would have been kept secret to stop the opposition from briefing the media on their take on the party's minutes.
• the Internet will show a new form of politics emerging , it is the future of politics.
• new technology allows people to work later, at home and at night if needed and wanted.
• "cyberpunk" is a form of science fiction based genre based on the possibilities inherent in computers, genetics, body modifications and corporate developments in the near future.
• Cyberpunk developed as a reaction against the safe spaces of movies such as Starwars.

day 7 Tutorial Task

Task 1- sign an e-petition

E-PETITIONS CONFIRMATION
Thank you Ms Kellerman
Your name has been added to the Supporting the decriminalisation of altruistic surrogacy in Queensland E-Petition as specified below
TO: The Honourable the Speaker and Members of the Legislative Assembly of Queensland
Queensland residents draws to the attention of the House that under current legislation Queenslanders are at risk of fines and imprisonment for undertaking altruistic surrogacy arrangements. This is despite the fact that altruistic surrogacy is a long held tradition of some Queensland cultural groups and is not a criminal act in the majority of Australian States and Territories. The current laws do not allow Queenslanders with medical and fertility issues to make their own decisions about accessing current medical methods to have a family. It discriminates against those women who, for medical reasons, are unable to carry a child to term and therefore cannot use other legal methods of assisted reproduction (eg. IVF and AI). The current Queensland laws send surrogacy practices underground, force families to move interstate to access the treatments legally, and place children born of these arrangements in precarious legal and guardianship situations. The laws also restrict the rights of women who wish to be a surrogate, for no monetary gain or personal benefit. Your petitioners, therefore, request the House to implement the unanimous recommendations of the investigation into altruistic surrogacy committee tabled on 23 April 2009.

http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/view/EPetitions_QLD/CurrentEPetition.aspx?PetNum=1290

Task 2.

Task 3. What is Barack Obama up to today?
http://blogs.america.gov/obama/

Changes to Afghanistan strategy in store
— By Michelle Austein Brooks, 30 November 2009
President Obama plans to speak to Americans via a prime-time address December 1 about new plans for the war in Afghanistan, which has now lasted about eight years.
His top political advisors and military commanders are aware of the upcoming changes, as President Obama met with them Sunday evening in the oval office. This comes after months of reviews of current Afghanistan policies and meetings with top officials.
The new strategy will likely include an increase in troops and plans to further strengthen the Afghan and Pakistani governments’ involvement. Before announcing it to the American people, the president plans to talk to leaders of some of its greatest allies, including Great Britain and France.
For more on the upcoming speech, see “Obama Addresses Afghanistan Strategy December 1.” What role should the United States continue to play in Afghanistan?

Task 4.
Find out who your local, state and federal representatives are.

Federal:
May, Mrs Margaret
MP



+ adam asks: What do you think of the Australian Government's plans to censor the internet (the so-called "Clean Feed")???

I think that that the QLD government's plans to censor the internet is outragous. It seems that this is just another blatent attempt to monitor people's use of the internet and remove any negative remarks about the government. It is taking away people's right to free speech!

Tutorial 6 task- Essay Research

Write out the question that you would like to answer for your essay, find at least 5 references and write 50 words on each.

The question that I chose to research was "In what ways is the virtual world and the real world merging?".

Mixed Reality: Future Dreams Seen at the Border between Real and Virtual Worlds
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, November/December 2001 (vol. 21 no. 6)
pp. 64-70
Hideyuki Tamura, Hiroyuki Yamamoto, Akihiro Katayama


Mixed reality (MR) is a kind of virtual reality (VR), but a broader concept than augmented reality (AR), which augments the real world with synthetic electronic data. On the opposite side, augmented virtuality (AV) enhances or augments virtual environment with data from real world. MR covers a continuum from AR to AV.

Virualized Reality: Constructing Virtual Worlds from Real Scenes.
1997
T Kanade, P Rander, PJ Narayanan
IEEE Multimedia

A new visual medium, Virtualized Reality, immerses viewers in a virtual reconstruction of real-world events.The Virtualized Reality world model consists of real images and depth information computed from these images. Stereoscopic reconstructions provide a sense of complete immersion, and users can selecttheir own viewpoints at view time, independent of the actual camera positions used to capture the event.

Augmented reality: linking real and virtual worlds: a new paradigm for interacting with computers
AVI archive
Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces
Wendy E. Mackay
Publisher: ACM New York, NY, USA
Pages: 13 - 21
Year of Publication: 1998

A revolution in computer interface design is changing the way we think about computers. Rather than typing on a keyboard and watching a television monitor, Augmented Reality lets people use familiar, everyday objects in ordinary ways. The difference is that these objects also provide a link into a computer network. Doctors can examine patients while viewing superimposed medical images; children can program their own LEGO constructions; construction engineers can use ordinary paper engineering drawings to communicate with distant colleagues. Rather than immersing people in an artificially-created virtual world, the goal is to augment objects in the physical world by enhancing them with a wealth of digital information and communication capabilities.

P Milgram, H Colquhoun - Mixed reality-merging real and virtual worlds, 1999
Chapter 1- A taxonomy of Real and Virtual World Display Integration.

The primary objective in this paper od this paper is to present a number of fundamental display integration and orientation issues related to the nascent eld of Mixed Reality. The approach is motivated rst by the need for a more encompassing term to supplement the existing denition of Augmented Reality (AR), which leads us to propose definitions of the associated concepts of Augmented Virtuality (AV) and then Mixed Reality (MR). Following our discussion of the breadth of Mixed Reality displays in Section 1.1, we discuss the associated issues of viewpoint centricity and control- display mapping in Section 1.2. Finally, in Section 1.3, we present a taxonomy which we hope will be useful for dierentiating between several of the issues raised with regard to the dierent classes of Mixed Reality display systems.

Roomware: Toward the Next Generation of Human-Computer Interaction Based on an Integrated Design of Real and Virtual Worlds, chapter 25, 2001
Norbert A. Streitz, Peter Tandler, Christian Müller-Tomfelde, Shin’ichi Konomi
pp. 511-602

The next generation of human-computer interaction (HCI) is determined by a number
of new contexts and challenges that have evolved during the last five to ten years and will be evolving more rapidly in the next five to ten years. They are rooted in new, emerging technologies as well as in new application areas asking for new approaches and visions of the future beyond the year 2000.

Webblog Part 2- Week 2 lecture 6 summary

This lecture focused on 'the academic study of video games'.

• video games were around before the internet, and began approxamatly 50 years ago.
• Steven Pool wrote the book "trigger happy", exploring the field of video games and their appeal. This was released on creative commons, and made into a documentary as well.
• Video games are evolving at a rapid rate.
• video games are extraordinary because you are interacting, changing and emersing yourself within the game.
• Video games are different from any other cultural untertaking because unlike books and films ect, you as the player can experiment and 'see what happens when I do this'.
• computer/ console game use is widespread and is the equivalent of back in the times when it was common to own a television.
• the BAFTA awards show how video games are becoming mass.
• it is a struggle for games to compete with other films/books narratively.
• games such as the 'sims' allow for some emotion to be brought into the gaming characters.
• people use real money to buy 'imagenary' objects for thier online game's character.
• are the real world and the cyber world merging?
• video games include the following;
• arcade games, consoles, mobile handheld consoles, computer games, MMD's (text based games), MMOG's (Eg- Everquest, world of warcraft).
• in the 1960's, spacewar was an early video game..
• However, it has been recorded that video games were around as early as 1954. These games however, were hidden so as to not be in the spotlight.
• Video games have been intertwined with the development of computing technology since this game (Spacewar).
• military interest in video games have been in the form of simulations ect.
• Theoretical Considerations:
• media effects and games- the impact of the game on the audience)
• the persistence of effect- games can have lingering effects on how people experience reality
• Games and utopia- in video games we can create a perfect society.
• new form of cultural practice? - what does this allow us to express that we cannot anywhere else?

• Narratology: is the study of video games from the perspective of them being stories of literary works eg- Janet Murray, Lev Manovich
• Ludology: in contrast, is concerned with the game play element.
• Platform studies: tracing a history of video games according to their hardware platform.

lecure 5 Summary

This lecture focused on 'Virtual Philosophy'

• virtual philosophy poses the quesion 'what is reality'
• virtual has come to mean 'almost the same' so that virtual reality is 'almost the same' as reality
• Plato from 2000 years ago came up with the idea that there are things in life that can be considered essential to somethings nature (or an ideal form- which is something in nature that has this)
• this idea came along before people new what the atom was
• it is a 'perfect' form of this subject
• which is subject to everyone's personal subjectivity

• Plato's essences were played out through 'the cave'
• the main idea of this (as a metaphoror concept) was that if everyone was sitting and looking at a cave, behind everyone are the 'essences' which people cannot see. The essences are replicated as the 'fire of life'. The fires shadow is our reality. We dont always experience the full essence of our reality

• Guy Debord thought of the 'society as spectacles' and the mediation of society.
• he thought that this was (as reality tv) to entertain us.
• we as people dont like reality because we ahve become so bored with it.
• we have been trained by everyday media just like classical conditioning.

• Umberto Eco created 'hyper reality'
• this means that reality is not just real, it is hyper-real
• our reality is media oriented
• thanks to extensions of our body, we can suddenly experience reality like never before

• J Baudrillard wrote of the similar or 'simulacrum'
• meanging that everything that we experience is a copy of that thing (philosophical)
• we approach computers as the 'mediators of reality'

• two french philosophers came up with the theory in thier book 'what is philosophy' (below)
  

ACTUAL (1 direction) VIRTUAL (many directions)
------------->
---------> ------------->
------------->
PRESENT MOMENT
(Plato's essences)

Savenger Hunt part 3

Search engines rank the stuff they find on the Internet by word match and relatedness. The closer the word or phrase is the more useful the site will be to you, so that closely matched phrases appear first. My favourite search engine is google, just because i am used to using it and it simple.

Tutorial 5 task

What are the differences between the regular IM program and a 3D environment?



There are many differences between the regular IM program such as MSN/Facebook as compared to a 3D chat-room environment such as Second Life. Firstly, the regular IM programs are alot less complex compared to that such as second life. There are basic rules to follow in the regular IM programs, whereas the 3D environment such as second life has limited rules that are loosely governed if at all. The 3D environment has significantly more visual stimuli, as each person that is involved in the virtual world has a visual physicality, such as a body, hair, a face etc. of their choosing. The 3D world involves the 'player' holding a unique identity, also of their choosing. This differs to IM programs such as MSN in that the player portrays limited information about themselves and their online identity other than what is in the written text and perhaps a photo or picture. Another difference is that in programs such as Facebook you can choose who you communicate with, via 'friend adding' and exchanged messages. In Secondlife however, the player interacts with many others that they don't know. These people can communicate with eachother as they wish, without having to officially "add" them as friends.