Week Six

Lecture Review

In this week's lecture, the topics of New Media and Social Media were discussed by Adam Muir. This lecture gave an insightful overview of what new media is, how it has developed, and also how the internet has created and contributed to the phenomenon of social networking. Muir stated that technology and the media have very close link to each other especially in today's society. Muir focused on two important themes from early internet studies in the first half of the lecture, the virtual community and individual identity. He described the virtual community 'as groups and people communicating via the internet'. He explained that individual identity was how people expressed who they are via the internet'.

The second part of the lecture Muir talked about the transformation of the internet from web 1.0 to Web 2.0 after the dot com crash post 2000. With Web 2.0 there was much talk of how the social community via the web could change and develop. He discussed economic aspects of the development of Web 2.0 but he also brought up ownership and privacy. In the lecture he asked us who owns the photos and the personal content we upload to social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace.

Culture Jam- Parking Increase at Griffith University?

After a lot of thought and discussion between Jay, Sherie and myself we finally came up with a brilliant culture jam that did create quite a bit of attention and controversy. We came up with the idea that the parking fees at Griffith were going to increase dramatically in 2011. Our idea was that Queensland Government had acquired a majority of the parking at the university, including the undercover carpark. This was because they needed car spaces for the construction workers at the Gold Coast University Hospital. We started off a group on Facebook titled " that caught the attention of several people and it nearly grew to 200 people within a couple days. To stir the pot further, we even got in touch with a journalist at the Courier Mail, who wanted to publish a story about the group we had created. In the end we were strongly advised by our tutor to pull the plug on our jam by shutting down our Facebook group, incase we got in trouble off the university. I can fully understand why we had too, because an issue like this would cause alot of havoc for the university through the media. However, I'm really glad that our culture jam did catch some attention.

Below are some screenshots of our Facebook group:

Tute Spark- Social Networking

Facebook, Myspace, Bebo even Flickr are great social networking sites where you can share your life with friends, family, co-workers and the wider community. However doing this can involve risks. Privacy is one big risk. People have been able to commit fraud by stealing people's identities through social networking websites such as these. Though fraud isn't the only big issue here, ownership is. The photos, videos even publications that you post on social networking sites such as Facebook belong to the website. So those personal images that you took and posted up on your page can become automatic property of sites like Facebook and Myspace. They virtually can do what they want with anything on your page that you or your friends have posted. Recently this sort of issue has raised question and caused much confusion and controversy. There have even been stories of people trying to file lawsuits against companies and individuals for stealing their photos and infringing on their privacy.

Sources:

http://www.facebook.com/terms.php

http://consumerist.com/2009/02/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever.html