Apologies if anyone is offended by the ordinary footage presented in the opening sequence of this video. My intention with this episode was to show that despite the "amateurish" nature of some video footage there are powerful ways to use this medium through the networking potential of groups like Indymedia.
Again, the great theme song I've used comes from ccMixter "Language of My Reality (ft. Colin Mutchler) by Etherdust.

This week's video is a little different. There'll be more to come within the week.

- M.

Welcome to VLOG 2! This VLOG covers the shift from tourists to travelers. What people look for in travel these days has changed, and the search for ‘the real’ authentic destinations has become a common theme in travel these days. Technology has helped facilitate this change as the more advanced our resources have become the more independent we can be - which has afforded us more possibilities for travel.

Text Blog Post 4: The Pros & Cons of Online Communities & the Future

There is extensive academic debate about the pros and cons of online communities and their effect on society. This blog will sum up those arguments and examine some of the social effects of virtual communities.

Text Blog Post 3: The Exclusive Nature of the Internet & the Rise of Exclusive Online Communities

As I have discussed in earlier blogs, the Internet is seen by many to be an inherently inclusive and democratic medium, by academics like Howard Rheingold, John Hartley, Amitai Etzioni and Oren Etzioni.

Despite the rapid growth in Internet users, it is failing to live up to its utopian and egalitarian intentions.

Hi everyone, this is my second vlog on creating digital bodies. The audio is a bit messed up, but i'll try to fix it for the next video.

As I mentioned in my last post, the Internet offers us a liberating space in which we can create and play with new identities, or become more comfortable with our own under the blanket of anonymity. However,the opportunity it affords users is indifferent to moral concerns.This is problematic when we consider that the very freedom that allows Stewart to live out a dream life as Achilles can also allow a con artist to become a doctor. The latter, which occurred in an online community, proved to be traumatic for those counselled by the "doctor" when they discovered the truth, as they had confided in him and established a bond. This is a simple example to highlight the subversive potential of (bodily) sign-less cyberspace, as a place in which individuals can intentionally set out to mislead others or partake in anti-social behaviour.

One of the best things about making this video was looking at all the fantastic sites available where we can explore our political thoughts. Apologies for the poor quality of footage but it is kind of fitting considering that the premise for the first two episodes in this series are exploring both the relative infancy of digital technology and the potentials for political activism. The great theme song I've used comes from ccMixter "Language of My Reality (ft. Colin Mutchler) by Etherdust.

Personal Information in Blogging

It is sometimes astounding to discover the availability of personal information on the internet. Personal data are being made available in online databases, which are accessible to search engines even without our knowledge or consent. It has become the common trend to ‘Google’ your own name to discover what about you the internet has exposed. The inevitable question to consider is whether this information should be so widely available, not just for internet surfers, but also for bloggers.

Most of the information that has become available on search engines once only existed in a public or pseudo-public format, such as phone book or court records. It has now become digitalised and readily available for any blogger wishing to ascertain information. On one hand it is easy to see the benefits in having this information more accessible, especially for media investigations that may further the public interest. Converting information into a more convenient forum seems acceptable.

Blogging and Regulation

The freedom of blogging seems to be endless, whereby internet regulation is explicitly different from the regulatable physical world. The internet defies regulation for several key reasons. Firstly, its distribution and resilience of bloggers and web site designers makes it difficult to control. Packet switching technology for instance; a communications paradigm in which packets (units of information carriage) are routed between nodes over data links shared with other traffic means that information over the web is very hard to contain the flow of information.

Another reason is the constitution of internet technology. The digital technology can be transmitted through cyberspace and stored on a recipient’s hard drive forever. “The information superhighway is about the global movement of weightless bits at the speed of light.”