ENGL 303: Multimedia Writing , Spring 2012 » 01

Is This Real Life??

Andrew — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:31:15 +0000

Ever since the Internet has been introduced to the world, people have been trying to understand how much power, and information the Internet is capable of handling. “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges compares the universe to a hexagonal-infinite library, that’s so large, that it is impossible for one person to comprehend. Borges’ piece is written through first-person, which presents his tone as having a diary feel to it. Throughout the majority of his narrative the only philosophical view I could come up with was comparing his universal library to our present day Internet. Now I admit that I am not much of a philosopher, unless I free my mind in an illegal way, so to comprehend Borges writing took a couple of re-reads. A main point that stuck out to me was an example of when Borges says that people in the Library (librarians) theorize that the Library contains an infinite number of galleries. I contrasted his infinite number of galleries to our Internet which contains information and resources that seem to stretch out infinitely.

How might this contribute to multi-media writing you ask? The only conclusion I can come up with is when Borges says “ it is true that a few miles to the right the tongue is dialectical and that ninety floors farther up, it is incomprehensible”. Now any average Joe can learn how to make a website with the help of WordPress and sites like it, but not many of us know how to use binary codes, or how to program with all this fancy computer jargon. I’m trying my best to theorize that in order to be better at multi-media writing, you must research your own path to find the fundamentals of multi-media writing. ”The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library”. Maybe we are all trying to discover the fundamental law of the Internet, and by researching different resources on the web, we can learn examples and variations of multi-media writing and how it created the expansion of the Internet. Once the language is learned, you are permitted to contribute your own examples and variations (blogs/articles) to expanding the Internet, as one would write a book to put in Borges library. I got a D in philosophy 147, so hopefully I didn’t sound too retarded in trying to comprehend Borges writing, but that’s the best I could do.

Restricting the Un-Restrictable

Andrew — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:16:07 +0000

In the reading Blown to Bits, the author goes into detail about the present dangers that the Internet can create. I remember back in the late 90s to early 2000s when I would log in to AOL, and go to those Nickelodeon chat-rooms where the only questions being asked was “a/s/l”. I did not think to myself at that age that the majority of the people in those chat-rooms were probably 40 year old men creeping around on the Internet. Blown to Bits presented many examples of how the Internet is a powerful tool and how it is almost impossible to restrict it. I would love to have a law in place that would stop 40 year old men from trying to contact little kids but unfortunately the Internet is too strong. In chapter 7 of Blown to Bits, it provides the example of how it is almost impossible to restrict the internet. One of the first court cases was in 1998 when a mother and her minor son, sued AOL for harm inflicted on her son. They alleged that AOL chat rooms were used to sell pornographic images of the boy when he was 11 years old. The Florida courts held AOL blameless saying that online service providers who knowingly allow child pornography to be marketed on their bulletin boards could not be treated as though they had published ads for kiddie porn.

Laws like DOPA have been stuck in Congress to try and combat these child predators. The belief about laws like DOPA is that they would probably do more harm than good. Chapter 7 also says that In requiring libraries to monitor the computer use of children using sites such as MySpace, would likely make those sites inaccessible through public libraries, while having little impact on child predators. The congressional sponsors have succumbed to a well-intentioned but misguided urge to control a social problem by restricting the technology that assists it. It is impossible to control the Internet even if you’re trying to control it for a good cause. The technology of the Internet is so vast that who is to say what needs to be restricted? Should it be just social network sites, chat-rooms, and other interactive websites or should they restrict search engines and torrent sites? I like the proactive approach to try and contain child predators, but at what cost of our Internet freedom will it take to have a marginal impact.

We’re Watching You

Andrew — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 01:54:25 +0000

Nothing on the internet is private. People wrestle with the question of how to protect their personal information on the web. There has been advancements in personalizing your security settings for whatever social network you belong to but there are still ways for people to find pictures, comments, and information you don’t want to share. Which brings me to the chapter I read for this blog post titled Ubiquitous Surveillance – Somebody is Watching You “Video Surveillance” chapter. This section collected the majority of my interest because it showed me the alarming technological advancements being made in video surveillance. Much like Facebook and other websites data mine for your personal information to product place things that you “should” like, video surveillance is starting to make headway in determining personal info based off of watching your actions. For example, Benabbas says, “It consists of extracting usual or repetitive patterns of motion, and this information is used in many applications such as marketing and surveillance. The extracted patterns are used to estimate consumer demographics in public spaces or to analyze traﬃc trends in road traﬃc scenes,”. The thought of privacy now becomes more distant with the overloading of technological advancements hindering peoples attempts of protecting their personal info. I personally don’t like being under the watchful eye of “the man” and this chapter honestly put some fear in me. With surveillance cameras becoming more elaborate, I feel that in the future there will be too much control, and too much surveillance. Artikis states, “More precisely, we employ EC to express the temporal constraints on a set of short term behaviours that, if satisﬁed, lead to the recognition of a long-term behaviour.” More sophisticated surveillance technology means an uhappy Andrew, and nobody wants an unhappy Andrew.