Much like Web sites, blogs have become ubiquitous virtually overnight. As most blogs are interactive and invite feedback from readers, the blogging dichotomy has emerged as a viable alternative news medium. The growing impact of bloggers ultimately comes in their antagonistic approach to correcting or supplementing reports given in the mainstream media. Many blogs provide a unique and unconventional perspective on the local and national news.

The wall street journal recorded that “the number of Americans reading blogs jumped 58% in 2004 to an estimated 32 million people…with about 11 million looking to political blogs for news surrounding the presidential campaign.”

Critical Analysis of Text and Video Blog Series

Online Communities and the Arts

Hana Parkinson 10404608

This blog project was about how the prevalence of virtual communities is functioning to assist people working in the arts. Online forums, including MySpace, deviantART and fuel4arts.com, are enabling artists by allowing them “free” exposure to an almost unlimited audience.

“The model provided by the Internet- with power at the edges and in the connections between them, as opposed to vested in one centralized hub- makes intuitive sense in the political arena, where the aim inevitably is to reach out- to voters, to local organizers, to donors. The puzzle is to pull apart what’s real from what’s hype”. John Palfrey (2004)

This excerpt from John Palfrey’s (2004) article on the outcomes of Internet Politics clearly articulates the premise I had hoped to explore with my Vlogovists series of video blogs.

In Episode 1, I wanted to establish a broad overview of how political activism plays out on the internet by showing images of different activist websites such as Crikey, New Matilda, Future Farmers and the Chaser. These are all sites which allow grassroots activists to take part in political debate. I also included footage of the Kevin07 website to show that it is not just activists but also politicians who are engaging with the internet and digital technology.

In my first post from a few weeks ago, I wrote with the illusion of being able to break Ulysses into a new medium, projecting it from a text into a distributive narrative. Facebook offered itself as the perfect closed network; by being able to control who can take part, I can manipulate the online space to align with the landscape of the narrative. Yet, my delusion in wanting to explode the text entirely were realised only in theory. I feel as if I have failed. Despite my best efforts, Ulysses is still very much a universe stuck inside a novel, no matter what I try and do to it on Facebook.

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” Mark Weiser [1]

Mark Weiser’s statement on the notion of “invisible technologies”, that technology can become invisible to people to the extent that we are no longer aware of it, is pertinent as we think of the ways we use the internet in our daily lives; we respond to online surveys, download software extensions and forward on emails, images and videos to friends without even a second thought as to the interface we are using.

The Impact of Technology – Portable Gaming Consoles: Nintendo DS Lite VS PlayStation Portable (PSP)

Portable gaming consoles provide entertainment to consumers on the go. There are many brands of portable consoles, but we will focus on two main consoles that is popular in 2007, the Nintendo DS Lite and the PlayStation Portable (PSP). Both provide interactivity with regards to the games that require user input, have the ability to support Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) and connect wirelessly for multiplayer gaming both locally and over the Internet. The DS Lite can connect wirelessly to a Wii console, which is meant to be used in conjunction with a television for game play. The lower half of the DS Lite has a touch screen that enables the user input, as opposed to a PSP that only has buttons.

Name: Teong Jin Hui
Student Number: 10450242

Title of project: Partculfafic

Word Count: 1158

Synopsis of project in 20 words:
This video blog aimed to explore the various ways in which technology convergence and media consumption influenced fan culture.

Introduction: (discussing initial aims for project)
This project aimed to introduce people to the growing participatory culture, a contemporary cultural phenomenon in today’s society. Still recognised as a subculture rather than an integrated part of the wider culture, I hope to explore the different ways fan culture is starting to get integrated into different forms of contemporary media. For example, the game industry – The Sims and Warcraft; the film and television industry – blockbusters spoof movies and parodies; and various published works that include fanzines. In the first episode, I introduced fan culture as part of participatory culture and during my research, I’ve learnt that fan fiction now exists in many forms – song fics, chat fics; script fics and in literary text. In the second episode, I paid attention to the doujinshi phenomenon in Japan and also looked at the commercial educational short films that were inspired by Star Wars and The Matrix. In the third episode, I looked at the game industry and how game developers are encouraging fan participation within the field. As a conclusion, I researched on how the grassroots community thinks of fan culture as part of the society, and also the fundamental benefits of participatory culture. Using semi-formal documentary style, this project was created by incorporating videos that illustrate the ideas mentioned above, together with interviews conducted with people.

Video blog Critical Analysis

The Internet’s Adventures in Wonderland: The Inclusive and Exclusive Nature of the Internet and Online Communities

Bryony Worrall

The idea for this digital project was loosely based on Alice in Wonderland and its principle theme of a fantasy realm verses reality. Encompassing the theme of Alice and Wonderland, this digital project broadly questioned the fantasies and realities associated with the Internet, and examined the relationships formed in ‘fantasy’ online communities versus those formed in ‘real’ life communities.

During the US election campaign in 2004, Democrats senator Howard Dean raised nearly $40 million in online donations from bloggers. [1] Dean’s use of the internet in political campaigning has been described as revolutionary in the way he brought politics and digital technology together. [1] His campaign has also been labeled as innovative because it “revolutionized another facet of political campaigning … getting people involved”. [1]

With this in mind, in this episode of Vlogovists, I want to take a different approach and explore the notion of politicians as vlogovists, or rather, explore how politicians are actively using use the internet to “get people involved” or engage with their voters.

This blog began with the focus on how people can adopt and manipulate different identities when they enter cyberspace, but my focus in my final post is on how the identities we create therein can affect our futures outside the space of the Internet.

When I was researching this topic for this project, I came across the term 'digital tattoo' on a random blog. I think it’s a really great way of describing the identity or identities we leave on the Internet, every time we create a profile or digital body to represent ourselves. The ‘tattoo’ is imprinted on the cyberscape and is pretty much impossible to remove, which leads us to question how the online identities we create at one stage of our lives can affect us in the future.