Firstly when I was introduced to Photoshop in the workshop session, I found it quite difficult to keep up of what was being asked to do. I have had previous knowledge of Photoshop before but only slightly and not very detailed. As I found this workshop session quite difficult I decided to print of the bare basics to Photoshop which was accessible to me on the document store. I found this information very useful as when I came to edit my images I was able to play around with it more, creating some fun images which I wasn’t capable of doing beforehand. Overall I found Photoshop an enjoyable part of my learning process and I have since then been editing images in the software.

After producing my images for my data visualisation slideshow in Photoshop, I had to then create a simple web 1 website (html) using the software, Dreamweaver. I had never used the software before and I was looking forward to seeing and doing something new. When given the task to construct  html using div tags and CSS I was quite confused. However, it didn’t take me long to come to grips with the software and in the end I found it enjoyable making my first website, as I could play around with the colours and put any information I wanted on there as I had created my very own first website which I was very happy with.

The only major problem I faced was with Adobe Flash. I followed the stages step by step in the workshops and everything was going fine but it was only until things wouldn’t go the way I wanted then I would start to stress. I had every problem imaginable with my flash, but I managed to solve it in the end. It had taken me three days to get my flash player working and complete. I worked on the flash for six hours straight on Monday and I was really stressed out with the software, this goes to show that technology isn’t stress free at all to me. After working solidly on my flash and playing around with the timelines and key frames I managed to get my flash up and running with the buttons linking to each image. I must have attempted my flash over 15 times in order to perfect it enough for it to even play, those long hours have now paid off and I can proudly say that everything is done and handed in.

After the lecture about virtual worlds and second life being one in particular, i was interested in investigating the world further. Therefore, I took the opportunity to go on the second life official website to find out what it really was about. The definition given is “Second Life is a free online virtual world imagined and created by its Residents. From the moment you enter Second Life, you’ll discover a fast-growing digital world filled with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity”

Reflection

After finding out what it all means it was quite interesting to see the amount of things that you can actually do on there, it is literally a second virtual life because you can do absolutely everything that you would do in your daily lives, from hanging out with your friends, going to a nightclub, travelling, you can start your own business and you can even build your own buildings, its really up to you what you do, just like in the real world. The characters need money to purchase things, as nothing is for free, just like reality. The currency on second life is the Linden dollars, which works out 200-300 Linden dollars to every 1 dollar. Even though you can put your Linden dollars into a bank in second life, it doesn’t mean that your money will be safe, as the banks are not regulated. Therefore, you can put money into the bank and it can disappear overnight.

One thing that I did notice about the second life is that every landscape looks so peaceful and cheerful, it always looks boiling hot and the avatars are usually on the beach somewhere in no man’s land enjoying the sun. Things look really colourful and untouched with no marks or cracks, everything looks perfect, some places and buildings looks quite futuristic but that is a choice someone has made because maybe that is what they want to see in the future, or that is what would be there ideal place.

I was quite surprised to find out that Coventry has a space on second life. After being shown the images of the bought space for Coventry University i noticed that the university didn’t look anything like the real thing. It was based what looked like the middle of nowhere, with trees and water surrounding it. The Lecture room was shown in a sort of coliseum way where the lecturer stood in the middle with a lot of microphones so that students could hear and monitors for the student to see the lecturers face. Everything about this set up seemed quite futuristic and false but someone created this way because that would perhaps be their ideal university environment.

Overall i think who ever came with second came up with a good idea to make money fast, however i wouldn’t use the site as I’d much rather live my own life. More and more things are being developed on the web now, that it’s never going to make people want t go out of their own homes. They will be stuck in their own confinements with just a computer as it holds information and access to everything and anyone.

• Myspace and Youtbe especially.

Briefly- It’s the convergence of all different types of Media- TV on the web- people have so many options that they are not bothering to watch TV.

Web 1

This works on the principle of this module. There is one main server giving the information, whilst the clients are receiving it, but not feeding back to any other person apart from the main server.

 Web 1 hasn’t dramatically changed, as when we request web pages, downloads and images we are still getting information from a main server of that information.

Html – why it’s been successful

• Its simple- can create a small working website unlike other programmes.
• If you make a mistake it will still work
• Anybody can create html from a word document, it’s not complicated and is available over a global mass population. This is the reason why we have so many sites on the internet, with people posting up their own knowledge of information.

The internet used o just be about getting information and resources, but now it’s all about money and people making a living from people who join certain sites or even when shopping online. The internet now is less of a source for information and more of a social networking and business orientated development.

Web 1

As part of the course we created a simple web 1 constructed website. It is very basic and is only really to present information to a client.

Web 2

Whereas web 2 has more options for the client to adjust as well as gain the information. On web 2 websites there are holding templates and you can move things around and arrange everything to the way that best suits you. WordPress is a prime example of a website that allows users to do a variety of things. On WordPress you can insert RSS to your favorite sites e.g. Ted.com, Flickr and YouTube.   By subscribing to different sites that you’re interested in, it will appear in your Google search bar. This meaning that the web 2 is making us the provider rather than the consumer of information.

After watching this video it has made me realise how important blogging is within web 2. It is a way of gaining feedback from a group of people who share the same interests as you. As new blogs can be posted each day, it sends old posts to the bottom, making new posts easy to access, this way people can keep up to date with the most recent news. I think this is a good way with sharing information with people all over the world, if people keep using this blogging network , I do feel that people won’t tend to watch the news, read newspapers, magazines or watch the TV in general.  

 Using the Wayback machine

By entering the BBC 1997 we can see how the website has changed from a simple web 1 to a more useful web 2 site. The bbc.co.uk website in 1997 had a brochure but not a service , at didnt have a great deal of information. Now when we go onto the BBC website we can customise our pages to how we like it. We can decide what categories and stories we want to see. There is audio on the site, podcasts and blogs.

I was really amazed at how Hans Rosling managed to produce something new to the world, as he created a flash player of statistics which was new to technology and which Google later bought. The graph that Rosling created allows people to make sense of statistics without haven’t to understand alot, or be the cleverest person around to interpret his data as he made it as simple as possible. It allows us not to stick to our prejudges about the world but to have the real picture of it.

Another example of digital visulisation that we looked at during the lecture was Stan Cafe videos on youtube.com. The idea of this video was to represent the poplulation of each country with rice with each grain being the equivilant to one person. I found this quite interesting and it was quite shocking to see how much rice was representing the larger countries in comparison to the smaller ones as there was a dramatic difference. I thought that it was a really good concept of coming up with the idea, however, im still debating on whether it was all just  a waste of rice and i was just hoping that they dont discard it all after the exhibition.

General Growth

• More than 175 million active users
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 30 years old and older

User Engagement

• Average user has 120 friends on the site
• More than 3 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 18 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• More than 4 million users become fans of Pages each day

Applications

• More than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 7 million videos uploaded each month
• More than 28 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month
• More than 2 million events created each month
• More than 25 million active user groups exist on the site

International Growth

• More than 35 translations available on the site, with more than 60 in development
• More than 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

Platform

• More than 660,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
• More than 52,000 applications currently available on Facebook Platform
• 140 new applications added per day
• More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

My Reflection

After looking at these statistics I was very shocked to see how many people are members as well as how facebook recognizes each individuals input into the system, which is giving the overall statistic. This means that facebook is keeping track of what people are doing and what types of people they are. Each time we upload an image onto facebook the system is recognizing it and keeping track of it. Facebook is an extremely big social network and a lot of personal information is displayed about each individual. Therefore we need to be aware of what we put onto these sites. I am not a regular user of facebook but when I do go on I like to keep in touch with my friends back home, it’s a way of them and me to keep up to date with one another.

My friend introduced me to facebook and at first I wasn’t too bothered about having an account so she set up an account for me. When I had my account set up i regularly went on and I was receiving a lot of un-wanted messages from people all over the world. I found this quite scary how they had managed to find me in such a short space of time, but then I realised that your profile appears on other people’s homepage if you have the same network of friends. It’s quite scary how it does this as anyone can see your profile. I’m not using facebook at the moment as I don’t really need to publicize my daily life to people otherwise people will know everything about you. I was shocked to find out that my profile was public to everyone at first as that is how the network defaults everyone’s profile. I don’t think this is fair on the user because other people straight away have access to your life basically. As soon as i found out my profile was open I set it to private and i only accept people that are in my social network of friends. Facebook is very personal in the fact that you can literally have instant conversations over the internet without the use of the phone, however, most of your conversations are open to other people to read and see what your saying, so in a way you are being logged by other people. Other users are tracking us, they are tracking what we do and say. People are tracking our lives!

Steve Mann a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto best describes inverse surveillance as the term used to describe the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity. Typically by the way of small portable/ wearable recording devices that stream live video to the internet.

Inverse surveillance

Inverse surveillance is a type of sousveillance. The more general concept of sousveillance goes beyond just inverse surveillance and the associated twentieth century political “us versus them” framework for citizens to photograph police, shoppers to photograph shopkeepers, or passengers to photograph taxicab drivers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

 One of the things that brought inverse surveillance to light was the reactions of security guards to electric seeing aids and similar sousveillance practices. It seemed, early on, that the more cameras that were in an establishment, the more the guards disliked the use of an electric seeing aid, such as the EyeTap eyeglasses, by the public. It was through simply wearing electric seeing aids, as a passive observer, that it was discovered that surveillance and sousveillance can cause conflict and sometimes confrontation. This led some researchers to explore why the perpetuators of surveillance are suspicious of sousveillance, and thus defined the notion of inverse surveillance as a new and interesting facet of studies in sousveillance.

The Office of Community Sousveillance is currently engaged in “policing the police” and a number of “Sousveillance Officers” monitor police conduct and publish reports on police (mis)conduct.

Reference: Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments, Surveillance & Society 1(3): 331-355 http://wearcam.org/sousveillance.pdf

The Office of Community Sousveillance is currently engaged in “policing the police” and a number of “Sousveillance Officers” monitor police conduct and publish reports on police (mis)conduct.

Personal sousveillance is the art of personal experience, processing storage, retrieval, and transmission, such as lifelong audiovisual recording such as, visual memory aids. Even today’s personal sousveillance technologies like camera phones and weblogs tend to build a sense of community, in contrast to surveillance that destroys the sense of community, as people are being watched without knowing.

The legal, ethical, and policy issues surrounding personal sousveillance are largely yet to be explored, but there are close parallels to the social and legal norms surrounding recording of telephone conversations. When one or more parties to the conversation record it, we call that sousveillance, whereas when the conversation is recorded by a person who is not a party to the conversation (such as a prison guard violating a client-lawyer relationship), we call the recording “surveillance”.

Questions and answers:

Do you think about the identifiable trail that you leave whilst using networks? Yes I do and it’s quite scary. My friend couldn’t find me on facebook so she typed my name into Google and there popped up my facebook profile picture with a brief description of where I was from and how old I was. I found this quite scary because it had been placed on there without me knowing as people have access to all of your photo albums etc., so they can easily put your information anywhere. It makes me think, are people doing this or are we programming the machines to do this each time we upload a photo onto a website.

Do you worry about being tracked by your online activity? I do worry about being tracked because a lot of people have had their msn, facebook or MySpace hacked into and it makes you realise that you should be careful with your personal information because you never know who could end up with it. It doesn’t worry me about downloads because I’m not illegally downloading anything so there would be no way of people tracking me through sharing programmes.

Do you worry about being tracked in the real world? This question has been brought to my attention through my working environment, as I know a few people who have had the sack because of something they may have said about another member of staff or the workplace in general. From what could have been just a friendly chat to your mates, turned out to be something else. This tells you that businesses do check up on their staff in order to make sure that there is nothing which is wrongly representing the public. It is about money and businesses don’t want to loose customers or have low ratings.

Has your picture been taken by a government body? Well that’s the thing, you don’t know!!!

What information do you place online? Name, Location and D.O.B mainly. I don’t place anything personal like phone numbers, house address, work address or even information about my family on to social sharing websites. I tend to watch what I put onto website because some people are really open and you know everything about their life. I think this is wrong because there have been a lot of issues raised about young teens placing too much information about themselves, making them easy targets for inhumane people.  

The Panoptican

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) developed a prison design he called the “Panopticon”. It had a central tower for the jailers, with a circular building around it divided into cells. The guards could see the cells without being seen. The inmates could not know when, or whether, they were being watched.

Although the Panopticon was never built, Bentham spent a great deal of time perfecting its design to achieve the greatest possible visibility of the inmates, and complete concealment for the guards. He argued that the prison could employ very few guards, since the prisoners could not know when they were being watched. The project’s key concept, however, wasn’t about architecture or economics; it was about the psychology of control.

The French philospher Michel Foucault took up this theme in his 1975 work “Discipline and Punish”, where he described the link between surveillance and social control. The original French title uses the word “surveiller”, which can mean “to discipline” but also means “to watch over”. He developed the comparison with the Panopticon:

http://www.cartome.org/panopticon1.htm

http://www.skjstudio.com/franck/images/Foucault.jpg 

 Foucault also compares modern society with Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” design for prisons (which was unrealized in its original form, but nonetheless influential): Foucault believes that “visibility is a trap”. It is through this visibility, Foucault writes, that modern society exercises its controlling systems of power and knowledge. Increasing visibility leads to power located on an increasingly individualized level, shown by the possibility for institutions to track individuals throughout their lives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault

My reflection

The major effect of the Panopticon is making the inmates have a conscious awareness that they are being watched but they can’t see that they are being watched so they have to be precautious with everything they do. Basically it’s a sense of power without having a person in authority, it is all psychological.

I think that it is a fair point that Foucault raises about the Panopticon and how acknowledgement of being surveilled is the key issue to power, as the Panopticon would have made inmates unaware that they were being watched at any given time, as they are not totally sure where and when they can be monitored, so they will go to any extreme perhaps until they were caught misbehaving.

As we type in text, the machine (computer) recognises the input and takes us to anywhere we want. We type information into html files and the machine converts it to something more legible to be placed on the web. The more and more information we put about ourselves when we join groups and sites, our Names and location for example, websites like flickr can upload your photos and place you onto a map of where you live in the world. This is quite scary, but we are programming our machines to do this. WE teach the idea and the machine is using us. We organise the data, we are the web. Digital web is no longer linking information it is linking people together!

Napster was the first software for sharing music, it was the ealiest peer to peer model. As you were able to share music, people addresses were easily found out and the man who set it up had to pay huge fines. Napster gave a fall in the music industry by 1 billion dollars.