I caught up with a friend last night and we were having a chat about art and he mentioned some street art in Canberra which I’ve passed plenty of times and I realised that we are now so accustomed to the internet and social media being a public sphere of information and art, however, there are other ways of things coming into your attention without you seeking it out.

The artist is known as Abyss .607 and does everything anonymously. His art is awesome and can be seen around Canberra.

So while realising that I should really do the post referencing 4 other people’s blogs, I went down the list and clicked on Luke Egan – I want to do a shout out to his blog, as it provided me with a few good minutes of entertainment. I particularly like the sneaky photos of Elliott!

Another post that provided me with much needed laughter was Seonaid’s blogging about Josh Thomas. (thumbs up to Josh Thomas for that QandA episode – by the way!)

I also really liked Nethaniel’s post with the street art in it.

And of course, Sam’s blog is a good read as per usual.

Sam talked about gatekeepers and linked it back to Thom Yorke which was really fascinating.

Nethaniel found a great image describing the 80/20 rule and the long tail.

Kiralee talked about the week 10 reading in much detail.

I thought that I could do a post this week ticking two things off at once! So here is a photo of my notes from the symposium!

As the average high school students, we had way too much time on our hands for procrastination so we used to sit in class and choose two pages eg. Hawaii and The Plague or ‘Black Death’ (off the top of my head) and then try and find all the links between them and time how long it would take us on Wikipedia to get from one page to the other using only the links on the pages.

This was my little example of how wikipedia is full of all these connectors.

I thought to give it more legitimacy I would try the game myself with the random example I came up with and these are the steps I took to get there:

Hawaii – The United States – Small Pox – Infection – Black Death

So my life has been very difficult in the past few weeks and I hate the reason why.

I HAVE NO INTERNET AT HOME.

One, it’s caused my phone bill to rise to ridiculous figures (which is painful enough as it is). But secondly, it is so hard to conduct anything without internet (including writing blog posts for this course). We as a society and especially in my generation have become so dependent on the internet it is hard to function in day to day life without it.

I can’t get my shifts from work. I can’t contact my mother who is overseas. I can’t book my tickets on the Spirit of Tasmania for my holidays. I can’t submit an essay for university. I can’t see that event I was invited to on Facebook. I can’t email that tutor about a missed tutorial. I can’t access that cake recipe that I was going to make for my friend’s birthday.

These things all seemed so simple before but now without internet I realise how much I actually used it and how dependent I am upon it.

I just wanted to make a note of something I particularly agreed with from the Symposium – that as much as networks exist online and it is important to be a part of these. I think it can be easily forgotten that networks in the physical world are also very important. Face-to-face contact is a great thing about being alive and I just don’t believe in living from behind a computer screen without experiencing everything the physical world has to offer as well.

I have 602 friends on Facebook. Do I talk to them all on a regular basis? No. So why do I keep them there? For me, I like the security of having these people I am able to contact for particular things if need be and it’s nice as a history of who you have met over time. These relationships or simply this network is very different to the one I have in my (physical) world. The people I spend my time with or talk to regularly I have no connection or contact with them on Facebook or online in general because it isn’t necessary and it definitely is a different relationship between the two platforms.

I do connect with multiple networks online, Facebook was just an example, but I also have LinkedIn and my email as well as other creative paths such as polyvore, pinterest, sound cloud etc. All my connections on these are very different as well and they are different ways of communicating with these people in various areas of my life.

Just me trying to keep up with these trends online! The next thing infiltrating my news feed this week is people posting a selfie with a line about preventing depression and suicide awareness. This is fair enough and certainly a topic that people should be aware of.

For me, I just don’t understand the need for people to publicise their personal affairs on Facebook, just because you don’t choose to post it doesn’t mean you are ashamed of being a patient of depression. It’s one of these things about the internet and social networking that still baffles me.

Check out this hashtag trend for #stopsadshaming and see what you think about these posts.

Depression is a major issue in society and there are many great things that provide support, so don’t get me wrong, I’m not questioning the cause but just the way of people expressing their support of it.

In this weeks Culture and Technology reading the bit that sparked questioning I’ve always had in regard to the internet is the idea of government regulation. This may be (and probably is) due to my ignorance of the internet in general but I’ve never understood how the internet can be controlled and regulated by governments. Obviously North Korea and China to a certain extent (and I’m assuming every other country) put controls on what can be seen online and certain websites that can and can’t be accessed, although I can’t work out how they do this.

I also get ridiculously confused over how law is enforced online, especially considering it involves many countries and that I am aware of, there is no international governing body beyond the UN and especially nothing that is controlling the internet.

I just wonder if there are all these mechanisms that I’m oblivious to working behind the scenes or the internet is really as open as it feels.

I vaguely remember my year 9 teacher saying that she got blocked from certain sites or her email turned off or something (my memory is obviously failing me with the details here) because she had so many google searches and emails coming in with the word ‘terrorism’ – because she was teaching a course on terrorism and then her account got disabled for a certain period of time. Therefore, there must be something, right?