Sadly I was at home in Echuca due to illness on Tuesday so I could not attend this week’s symposium. I did speak about it with a couple of my friends though and they were both a little.. perplexed? Shocked? I don’t know how to describe it. I think they found it a bit confusing and said there was quite a large debate going on. Interesting. I guess I don’t really have a lot to say so ahhh.. here’s a photo of a presidential debate. See you next time.
Something Adrian raised at the end of our symposium today was regarding being network literate. Knowing simply how to change the theme of your blog, does not make you network literate, nor a cyberspace mastermind. Who knows how many hundred/thousand lines of code are behind that. Lines of code of which someone very tech savvy has previously created (not you!). He also used this analogy. If your tyre goes flat, and you jack up your car and replace it, you are not instantly a professional mechanic. Highly trained engineers were the ones who designed the mechanics behind those steps and made it oh-so-simple for you. Without them, you would have been in struggle town. In the exact same way, it’s the very intelligent IT technicians who make the internet a tool that is accessible for everyone, even for your 82 year old grandma who grew up playing marbles, not Minecraft. Food for thought.
Something that was raised in the lecture was that we would all know how to write and publish a book, by going to a publisher to get it printed and bound. However, most of us don’t even know how to write our own web page! We, the children of the digital age, wouldn’t know how to do that. Actually, two of us in our lecture could. Luckily we are learning how to create HTML pages in class this week (:
The question of validity on the internet was also discussed. This is something I often wonder about. For instance just this morning I saw a post claiming Robin Williams had committed suicide. I was skeptical about its validity at first but after finding a number of articles reporting the same thing, I accepted it as truth. I don’t know if that’s how you should determine truth but that’s what I do anyway! I suppose I also take into account the source to determine whether it’s reliable or not, because anyone these days can chuck whatever nonsense they like up on the internet for the world to see.
In today’s symposium we firstly discussed a question raised by another student. It was: How much freedom do we have when writing critically of others work before we become liable for defamation or copyright infringement? This is something I have thought about also. You can’t exactly jump on your blog and badmouth whoever you please.
Someone asked if it’s okay to link a Youtube video to your blog, for example. Adrian answered that this is okay, as in most cases they (Youtube) are accepting the liability for that. He also mentioned that there is no such thing as freedom of speech in Australian media law. The only country that does have it is South America I believe.
There is a difference between opinion and criticism. Criticism is informed by a position of knowledge. So basically, “If you don’t know what you’re talking about, shut up.” Simple!
Our Networked Media lecture, or symposium, this week was very interesting. We discussed the idea of stories, even considering the three act structure coined by Aristotle. Our lecturer, Adrian, even got us to explain what reading is, beginning with how to use a book, which was quite comical in itself.
He went on to explain that a book always has a first and last page. There in no avoiding this. There are pages inside; of course, right – it wouldn’t be a book without them. The internet however, is a whole other story. There are no pages, no beginning, no end. It is just a screen that can transform into a multitude of information. The internet is limitless. What an exciting world we live in. It is our role as media students to take advantage of this and use it in the most innovative way possible.