Reflections

This semester has been a hectic, stressful and busy one. Amidst all the chaos, dance practices, assignments and research papers, I was glad I managed to learn a few skills on handling the internet. At first when I knew I had to take COM 125, my first thought was: what? Do I have to? What’s there to learn about the internet?! Have I not been using it for years already? However, as the lessons went by, I must admit I picked up several essential skills. I learnt how to create a video with the help of Windows Movie Maker. I learnt the importance and extent to which the internet has become a pervasive force in our everyday lives. I learnt how the internet could be used in e-learning such as the creation or an academic portal or forum for teachers to interact with students outside the classroom. I learnt how the internet could enhance business and that anyone can set up a trade - even you and I. COM 125 was indeed useful. I have changed my mind.

Future of the Internet

Humans are always looking toward the future, depending on it for everything. Hope. A chance at seeking achievement and glory for oneself. Fulfilment. We also look to the future for technological advancements that will provide us with a better lifestyle.

Ten years from now, I see the globe as an interactive digital network with criss-crossing connections extending its web as far as the eye can see. Many cultures, one community.

Ten years from now, I see the virtual world and the physical world merging as one, where computers can create an avatar, complete with an individual personality and physical appearance unique to each computer, projecting the avatar into the physical world as a life-sized human being.

Ten years from now, I see the computer as a meta-human complete with an infinite ocean of knowledge and internet data at your disposal, an entity that can walk beside you in the physical world while keeping you logged in constantly, everywhere, anytime. A teacher, an entertainer, a friend.

Take for example the recent launch of the Apple iPhone, a pure ingenuity that revolutionized communications in the 21st century. Users are introduced to a multitude of location-aware services available with the iPhone, helping you to keep a lookout for sales as you walk through your local mall, or getting recommendations to a good pub or restaurant to let your hair down and chill with your friends on a Friday night.

Ten years from now, perhaps the upgraded version of the iPhone would still be providing you with the latest entertainment information but instead of the rectangular device you hold in the palm of your hand, it will be the virtual entity standing beside you, talking to you like how a real companion would.

With the US elections that propelled Obama to the oval office, the internet starred in its first major role in the campaign trails with politicians utilizing it to create an interactive political hub for Americans to be immersed to a greater extent in the voting process. This was because the internet provided politicians with the opportunity to create blogs or personalized websites allowing voters to keep track of their rallies, listen to their speeches on video and participate in their popularity polls.

Ten years from now, instead of watching your favourite senator in a video on a monitor, perhaps his life-sized image could be projected in mid-air, presenting you with your own personal rallying speech to win your vote.

Ten years from now, what do you see?

Internet and Politics

The recent US elections sparked off a political revolution that had the world buzzing about it. It was a political revolution in many ways.

Not only did the first ever African-American president slide into the top most seat in the White House, the Internet was credited, also for the first time, as a major player in the campaign trails of the election hopefuls.

In my opinion, the power of the internet is a force to be reckoned with in the world of politics. News, polls on a particular politician’s popularity and updates on his campaign trails can be obtained with a click of a mouse. The bottom line: Instant gratification is the current trend and this can be provided with the convenience of the World Wide Web - the global political archive at your fingertips. Thus it is to nobody’s surprise that the recent US elections was also the pivotal point in which the internet was thrusted into the limelight as an alternative medium to reach out to the masses.

Examining the factors for such an expansion into the virtual world, it is a logical and plausible decision to tap into the vast domain of resources that which is the internet for political campaigning. People from all over the world would have access to the campaign trails of the election hopefuls. From the young and impressionistic to the political junkies who crave for all the action that can be possibly published, different age groups are exposed to the happenings of the election process. In addition, foreigners would also be able to gather their own opinions and perspectives with regards to the individual candidates.

In addition, the US media might possibly be skewed and having opinions from one perspective would never be convincing. Hence, having other viewpoints, which can be found while trawling the vast information landscape of the internet, might contribute to the added dimension of objectivity or perhaps provide a fresh perspective to certain issues.

However, along with the power of the internet comes its limitation for political campaigning. The web has made digging up dirt on a particular politician easier than ever before. While it may be easier to monitor the campaign trails, especially with personal touches added thanks to the introduction of political blogs dedicated to a particular presidential hopeful, the internet is also the place where gossip can be found. This malicious slander in turn can be uploaded and then spread like wildfire everywhere, causing scandals and marring the reputation of the politician involved.

Multimedia and the Internet

Multimedia is the new synonym for marketing communications. With the enhancement of visual and audio aids such as animation, still images and the click of the mouse for interactivity, companies have found more effective ways to reach out to their target audiences, imagining a myriad of creative ways to advertise their products, presenting information on its special features in ways the masses would never have seen before. Providing a multi-sensory and multi-dimensional world that a potential customer can immerse himself into, the multimedia is the crux to interpersonal, relational advertising, bestowing a higher level of informed decision-making on the customer.
I am the most impressed with Samsung’s method of using multimedia to market communications. For one, they promote Samsung not as yet another electronics brand but as a lifestyle; as an experience to behold. For example, in their website targeted at an American audience, it features an interactive exhibition of rotating LCD screens, developed in collaboration with the Parsons School of Design, presenting curated exhibits on New York related themes and personalities.
Customers can also create and send a personalised postcard online, discover how Samsung products work and try them out within the context of everyday life. Samsung’s concept is to engage with visitors, rather than sell to them. The environment, wholly designed by Imagination, has retail design cues, but it is not a store. Since its opening in 2004, it has also been used as an event space for product launches and press conferences. I feel that this is very effective in attracting an informed market who is probably sick and tired of having salesmen extoll the virtues of Samsung products. This alternative method of avoiding the explicit in-your-face advertising and focusing on ensuring an enjoyable customer experience in the Samsung world is much better.

Google Tools

In my opinion, the creators of Google, Surgey Brin and Lawrence E. Page are geniuses. Between the two of them, they have made what was initially an academic search engine to become a lifestyle and a household name.
Google, their brain child.
There are many tools provided by google, one of which I will be discussing, is Google Spider. It is an automated software program that travels all over the web network, going from link to link, storing text and keywords from the pages in a database. This process of building lists of key words is called web crawling. The usual starting points of web crawling are lists of webpages with high viewer traffic. The spider will begin with the popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within it. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most widely used portions of the Web.
"Googlebot" is the name of Google's spider software. Through my research on this google tool, I cae across this diagram which sums up the web crawling process.
Some advantages of Googlebot include the ability to generate information for users literally at the blink of an eye. I am not exaggerating. The system was built to use multiple spiders, an average of three at a go. Each spider could keep about 300 connections to Web pages open at a time. At its peak performance, using four spiders, Googlebot could crawl over 100 pages per second, generating around 600 kilobytes of data each second.
A disadvantage of using google spiders is encountered by e-business users. Google spiders contribute to the limited reach of paid Uniform Resource Locator (URL) inclusions which is a service that search engines offer, allowing users’ webpages to be indexed for a fee. However, daily viewer traffic to your site does not depend heavily on the search engines you choose to pay an inclusion fee to. This is because major search engines, some of which are the most widely used ones by netizens such as Yahoo, AOL or Google, do not offer paid URL inclusions. Instead, Google usually updates its index only once a month. Regardless of how many times you update your website, you would have to wait for the Google spider to index your new pages no matter how many other search engines you have paid to update their index daily. It is only after Google updates its index that your pages will show up in Google, Yahoo, or AOL results.

In my internet communications class, I also learnt how to make a video clip with Windows Movie Maker. Enjoy the fruits of my labour!

The Digital Classroom

The future classroom will have neither walls nor ceiling.

The future classroom will lack blackboards, dusty chalk fumes, school uniforms and tables and chairs.

The future classroom will no longer have pen and paper, heavy cumbersome textbooks or teachers to pay attention to.

Virtuality (virtual reality) will replace reality.

Instead of time wasted stuck on buses and trains, squeezing with commuters during peak hour traffic jams, you will reach school in a mere second - the time taken to flick on the switch that will deliver you into the education matrix of the future - the digital classroom. Some might bemoan the loss of the age-old excuse: “I can’t hand in my homework because my dog ate it” with the arrival of the futuristic classroom and the subsequent digitization of all school materials but on the other hand, there will be no teachers breathing down your neck, monitoring your homework progress like a hawk.

Rather, the digital classroom will replace teachers with education facilitators, altering the formulaic teach-and-learn method with a revolutionary facilitate-in-learning method. The latter allows the student to take charge of his own learning journey, providing him with a virtual chest filled with an assortment of gems of internet data, awarding him a place at the helm of his own boat to navigate the high seas of knowledge.
There are both benefits and hazards with e-Learning.
On one hand, there are no commuting costs to contend with as all classes are attended in the comfort of the student's own home. Classes can be conducted in a digital classroom regardless of where one is located. While critics may charge that virtual reality shuts down - no pun intended - human interactions, student communication can still be strongly encouraged and supported through discussion forums, video conferences and emails.

On the other hand, most educators dislike having to make up separate curricula for their online students. They prefer face-to-face interaction and would prefer to meet in person than via email or discussion forums. Besides, schools have to rely on their students’ honour not to cheat or have someone else sit down at their computer and do the work for them.

e-commerce

This week I learnt about e-commerce and the wonders it can achieve in helping your business take off, reaping sky-high profits and gaining a network that reaches far and wide.
According to9 the iSoS.com, a website
Through research, one advantage I learnt that e-commerce can bring is the breakdown of geographical barriers when it comes to gaining a pool of clients hailing from a myriad of cultures and possessing various interests. Since e-commerce involves deals done on the internet which has a ready-made pool of existing clients from every nook and cranny of the world, geographical hindrances or narrow markets which are hard to reach would be made much easier hurdles to conquer. Once a netizen posts an advertisement or attempts to reach out to narrow markets traditional markets have difficulty accessing, he would have no problem connecting to potential customers of different cultures because as long as one has a computer and an internet connection, one would be able to access his advertising.
A disadvantage of e-commerce includes the lack of accessibility to Internet, which came to be known as the Digital Divide. Internet connection can be unstable, expensive and insufficient in particular areas such as third world nations who have more pressing problems of hunger and poverty than to worry about getting computer access. This will generate limitations for business in accessing wider markets.
Despite its setbacks, I feel that e-commerce still has very much to offer. Its potential to increase one's business ventures overrides its weaknesses.
E-commerce lives!

Second Life offers me a second life

style="font-family:georgia;">.

I have learnt a lot of new things about the internet from this week's lessons on internet communications. My lecturer showed a few videos of how Second Life (SL) works and truth be told, I'm amazed and fascinated at the huge potential of SL! This alternate universe truly has a promising future.

At first when I heard about SL I wrote it off as yet another social media whose fad would die down in a couple of years but since its launch by Linden Lab on june 23rd 2003, I have only witnessed its meteoric rise to internet superstardom - its fall (if there is ever one) has yet to come. Besides, the fact that users could create every detail of their avatar's looks and personality set off warning bells in my head about the danger of meeting internet prowlers on SL.

However, when I found out how Harvard set up a school portal on SL to provide its students with an avenue to interact and share ideas through independent learning, or that even its professors use that portal as a forum to discuss difficult questions students might have regarding the lessons, my impression of SL started to change.

Second Life truly can become the alternate universe - a parallel portal to our real world. I learnt that it enables me to be aware of my sense of self; to establish an unique identity in the form of an avatar. It kills the principle of distance because it brings people from every nook and cranny of the globe together in the form of conversation exchange between avatars. I think that this in turn is one of the numerous ways that web 2.0 condenses the world into a global village.

In my opinion, there is a lot of advantages we can glean from this condensation. When A meets B who hails from halfway around the world, there will be a cultural exchange of lifestyle, philosophies and beliefs as both avatars communicate. Each would be influenced by the other and it means one can look at the world from a different perspective than whatever one sees outside one's window.

I am also amazed at SL's capability to co-create, meaning that users are allowed to construct anything in that portal. They can build grids, set up separate worlds within that big virtual world and establish connections or social groups amongst the millions of personalities dotting the map of Second Life. For example, architecture students can apply knowledge gained from their lessons to practice constructing building structures in SL.

The power of Second Life. It truly offers me a second life.

Web 2.0 = Privacy in Peril?

My friend just sent me a link to this particular Asiaone forum, discussing the incident where a couple from Tampines Junior College were caught on camera indulging in heavy petting at the back of a bus.




Apparently a passenger photographed them and posted the pictures on Stomp, The Straits Times online forum, describing how the girl was even heard moaning while her boyfriend hugged and kissed her.




When I saw this, the first thought that popped into my head was: so much for internet privacy.
Sooner or later, Web 2.0 might just become synonymous with the intrusion of privacy, with this issue overriding the other virtues of the internet.

Of course, this is not something we want to have. Such postings are already spawning the beginnings of a world of voyeuristic web leeches that feed on the public furore that ensues when they pass off incidents such as these as news-worthy material on the internet.




Comments on this forum and on Stomp questioned the wisdom of the passenger who posted the pictures and the sense of decency of the couple - or rather the lack of one.




However, I think many are missing the larger picture here. Rather, they should consider the danger of the lack of privacy the internet can bring.




Nowadays, it does not have to take a rocket scientist to know how to make videos or post pictures on the internet. Besides, the world wide web spins a huge intricate tapestry of many networks, creating easy access to just about anything that is posted.

Snap a picture, upload it through the numerous mediums provided for that purpose such as photobucket.com and voila, you have scored a sensational hit on the web, spawning a variety of subsequent comments and opinions on forums.




How alarming to think there is a risk of your behaviour being deemed unsightly by another person, recorded on a mobile device and easily uploaded online.




Congratulations, your life has become entertainment fodder for countless of unknown faces living in the virtual universe.




The "world wide web" is no longer merely an alternative adjective to refer to the internet, but has also attained an uncomfortable intrusive connotation - a far-reaching (literally spanning the globe) tangle that threatens to obliterate your privacy with the click of a mouse.