Category: Symposium

Week 6 Symposium

  • Can technology progress independently of art and culture?
  • What is the untapped potential of hypertext?  Will we ever be satisfied with it?
  • Have internet users lost a sense of privacy?  Is blogging a form of narcissism?

The 11th Symposium

Today’s lecture was opened by Adrian who told us about an app he purchased for $4.50 that produces posters, and how, as a result of this app, he is satisfied with the results and doesn’t require a graphic designer to do the work for him. I thought this was really interesting –  that an app can produce quality and take away the job of a professional. When you think about it – that’s what mosts apps are. They take away the “physical”. Maps App means you don’t need to carry a map around. A pay wave app means you don’t need to carry credit cards around, and the Passbook app means you don’t need to take your passport around. Sure, it’s streamlined, but hey, we’d all be in a difficult situation if we lost our phones.

The focus of today was “DATABASES” which Aravinda described as “An organised collection of information that otherwise has no meaning”. All of our blogs are nothing without their Database. They are the structure that makes things work.

Adrian also spoke about stories and how they have an amazing ability to colonise. He said that as a species we make all these eccentric assumptions that stories are culturally fundamental and that they account for all these other shapes and structures in the world. He said that there is nothing wrong with books but they are different to networked media. The way I interpret this is that we tend to allow stories to be reason why “things are the way they are” – like what happens in stories can be an explanation of the structure of our world. I couldn’t agree more. I think anything that’s fictional is totally unrealistic and unreliable and is indeed a “fairytale”. We’re all in search of our own prince charming, but it’s sad to admit that’s wishful thinking in reality.

A bit of privacy, please! Symposium Week 6

Have internet users lost a sense of privacy?

The other week my friend and I were at a party, in typical girl fashion we had separated ourselves from the rest of the party so we could discuss something that was really bothering us. Both of us are, what is deemed to be, “tumblr famous” a.k.a some misconstrued idea that having several thousand followers makes you “famous” (I totally disagree, I believe in quality not quantity).

Anyway, we were discussing the way we are subject to a lot of criticism on Tumblr, a space where we want to, and used to, feel comfortable discussing   things in our lives that are both good and bad. Both of us are aware, that for some unknown reason, our peers (friends, classmates etc) do what we call “stalk our blog” whereby they don’t follow it, they just read our personal posts, have a critical opinion of what we do with our lives, and often let that form their opinion of us.

With that being said, I don’t believe we have lost our privacy, we have just lost our freedom. “Privacy” implies that there is a rulebook, of what you can and can’t do online. Of course, legalities exist for things like under-age pornography which do create certain rules, but as for a 19 year old girl simply wanting to say on her blog “I had a big weekend and here’s the fun I got up to”, well, that’s internet freedom – that I feel I just don’t have.

A quality my friend possesses is that she mightn’t be aware of is that she is very strong. My response to this situation was “I don’t feel I can post my own opinion because I don’t want people to judge me”, whereas she has a more “I don’t care what people think, they should learn to respect my decisions”. What neither of us can work out is WHY?. Why do people feel the need to invade our personal space? For someone to judge who you are, solely based on one webpage is totally unfair.

A lot of what we face is anonymous criticism, all thanks to the “anonymous” function on Tumblr, where people can say what they like to us, without revealing their identity. These faceless people think that it is O.K to vocalise a strange kind of hatred towards someone they don’t know. So why not turn it off, you may ask? Well, therefore we’d also be blocking out those who want to say nice things to us without revealing their identity.

I feel like the “freedom of speech” totally exists, however I feel on the internet, people abuse this right, and that needs to be stopped.