Lecture Week 5

One quote I found interesting is from the book ‘An Introduction to Cyber-cultures’ and it links in with some of the topics raised in this weeks lecture, where Terranova would say that the internet acts as a “’high-tech gift economy’ where labour is freely given, where ideas and products can be freely circulated in ways that are profoundly anti-capitalist.” (Bell, 2001, 20) Moreover, this is supported by Lessig (lecture) who promotes open source software; manipulation etc providing it’s all free. This could be a contradiction to what was mentioned in the lecture about Chomsky believing that capitalists work in a way to make media work as to not undermine capitalism through the structure of what is put through on the internet, for the use of commercial gain within society. However, this is concerned more with traditional mass media where everything could be manipulated through the one way channel of information. Another point that interested me was this notion of “attention economy.” How the internet is a more complex than other media because there isn’t a direct source of communication whereby the audience are acceptant or not. XXXXX
I would still say that although there is an unlimited amount of freedom on the internet what is shown can still be edited, re-formed and manipulated in different ways. Users are free to write what they want, but it may not always be the case that it stays that way when on the internet. This demonstrates how essentially the internet is democratic - with it being produced by culture, yet there are still controlling elements which come from political production. XXXXX
There are just a few thoughts from this weeks lecture.

Week 3 - The Lecture

After reading through the lecture materials one point stood out for me in particular, in how new media generally “combines the officiality of written text and the informality of the spoken word.” (Lecture 3) There seems to be casualness about e-mails, MUD’s and speaking generally online. I know personally I sometimes have the bad habit of writing how I would speak when it comes to writing essays etc, this is influenced largely from talking on chat sites over the internet, i.e. msn, you get used to chatting online but mirroring a face to face conversation, and this comes through when writing. When speaking online, even in situations where there needs to be a formality, new media interaction I think is labelled sometimes with a more relaxed approach. This links in with one of my previous posts about the convenience of new media, and this could be how it is now perceived as more relaxed because of its expediency.

I just thought I’d blog on this point as it can tie in with last weeks and this week’s forthcoming blogs!