My 2nd Niki group, we decided to research ‘THE RESURGENCE OF VAMPIRES AND VAMPIRES FAN DISCOURSE IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR CULTURE’, and we decided to research on Dr Henry Jenkins. Dr Henry Jenkins, born June 4, 1958 is an American media scholar and currently a Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the School of Communication and the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Previously, he was the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program with William Urrichio. He is also author of several books, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. Check out Mardi’s blog

Juan Mata marked his debut for Man United last night, after his record breaking move from Chelsea with a comfortable 2-0 win over Cardiff City at Old Trafford. It was an emotional night for United legend Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, coming back to OT as opposition manager for the first time since leaving United. It took only 6 minutes for them to break the deadlock, with Robin Van Persie scoring on his first appearance of 2014, and Ashley Young adding a second just 15 minutes after half time, with Mata completing 83 minutes of action on his debut.

Based on 4.2 Reading on “The 80/20 Rule”. Outside academia, Pareto is best known for one of his empirical observations. An avid gardener, he noticed that 80 percent of his peas were produced by only 20 percent of the peapods. A careful observer of economic inequalities, he saw that 80 percent of Italy’s land was owned by only 20 percent of the population.

This was a video that I watched in lieu of Monday’s workshop. This video talks about the power of Six Degrees seperation,  where the theory states that everyone on the planet can be connected to anyone in the world and a few and simple steps. I found Tim Chapman’s view on this particularly interesting.

Through this reading by Watts on Six Degrees, one of the main points I could take is that one of the fundamental rules about electric power is that it is extremely hard to store. You can power our phone or a laptop with a battery for a few hours. However, no one has yet developed the technology to build batteries that can power cities. As a result, power has to be generated when it is needed, and shipped instantly where it is needed. The flip side of this rule is that once generated, it has to be somewhere, and that is precisely where the power that had been flowing to Northern California had to go – somewhere.

Congratulations and well done to Australian Open 2014 champions Stanislas Wawrinka and Li Na! What a fortnight of tennis it’s been and what superb display of tennis we have seen from everyone. Both of them winning the tournament for the first time, and what better way to do it than at the first Grand Slam of the year. Given that Wawrinka is 28 and Li Na 31, are we seeing a year of veterans in the men’s tennis? Only time will tell, but what hard fought battling, and gruelling tennis there has been the past two weeks! Roll on the Davis Cup 2014!

During this workshop, my group and I talked about possible interview questions for Howard Rhiengold and his social life, which was how can we tell good crap from bad crap, which of course means disinformation. They are unreliable sources of information. The root question for assessing the credibility of a web page remains, who is the author? Immediately after that, ask what are the author’s sources? A lack of sources is as suspicious as sources with known bias. Learn to use Easywhols or another Whols service to find out who owns a site if there is no author listed; use alexa.com to find out approximately how much traffic a website receives. Once you know a URL, try pasting it into one of the tools on network-tools.com. If the author provides a way to communicate or add comments, turn up the credibility meter. If the author responds to comments, read those responses. Is the site .gov or .edu? If so, increase your estimation of a site’s credibility. Site’s design – but don’t count on it. Professional design should not be seen as a certain indicator of accurate content, yet visibly amateurish design is sometimes a signal that the “Institute of Such-and-Such” might be a lone crackpot. Treat a site’s design not as validation of credibility but instead as one possible clue (along with grammatical errors, suspicious sources or lack thereof, and other people’s negative opinions of the site)

Education for media literacy often uses an inquiry-based pedagogic model that encourages people to ask questions about what they watch, hear, and read. Media literacy education provides tools to help people critically analyze messages, offers opportunities for learners to broaden their experience of media, and helps them develop creative skills in making their own media messages. Critical analysis can include identifying author, purpose and point of view, examining construction techniques and genres, examining patterns of media representation, and detecting propaganda,censorship, and bias in news and public affairs programming (and the reasons for these). Media literacy education may explore how structural features—such as media ownership, or its funding model,  affect the information presented.

Media literate people should be able to skillfully create and produce media messages, both to show understanding of the specific qualities of each medium, as well as to create independent media and participate as active citizens. Media literacy can be seen as contributing to an expanded conceptualization of literacy, treating mass media, popular culture and digital media as new types of ‘texts’ that require analysis and evaluation. By transforming the process of media consumption into an active and critical process, people gain greater awareness of the potential for misrepresentation and manipulation (especially through commercials and public relations techniques), and understand the role of mass media and participatory media in constructing views of reality.

Based on this week’s reading by Adrian Miles on Reconfiguring hypertext. On every digital narrative, we must remind ourselves, does not neccesarily take the form of hypertext. A case in point appears in Christy Sheffield Sanford’s visually elegant World Wide Web function, Safara in the beginning (1996), which the author describes as “a web novel” written in the spirit of the classical tragedy about “a young African princess taken as a slave from Senegal to Martinique”.

Two serbs was sent packing on Day 9 of the AO14. Ana Ivanovic was eliminated by Eugenie Bouchard, coming from a set behind. So much was the expectation on Ivanovic after her victory over Williams, most people expected her to win so it was a shock to see the Canadian teenager pull of this upset. Later on that day, defending men’s champion was knocked out, and his three year stranglehold on this tournament is finally over.  after last night’s epic five set between Stan Wawrinka and Djokovic. Great to see Stan get one over him, after seeing him lose last year’s epic  4th round. The game was pretty much wide open up until the fifth and deciding set where Stan was able to break him at the last game which yielded a overall score of 2-6, 6-4, 6-3, 6 -3, 9-7. Thanks for all the memories Djoker, but it’s time for a new winner this year. I’ll leave it here with a video of the Djoker impersonating his coach Boris Becker at the end of the 4th round match