Week 2, Task 2

I am actually a very recent arrival to the world of modern communication technologies. Only three years ago I did not have Facebook, my own Email address, regular access to the internet or even a mobile phone. The reason for that is the draconian restrictions and utter disregard for privacy imposed and displayed by my father, who did not consider it necessary for a teenager to have access to any of those. However I escaped, I escaped as far away as I could. With the new found freedom in my life I also slowly, one by one, discovered the various possibilities of modern communication technologies. The mobile phone was the first one and the most unsuccessful as I still forget to reload the batter of the "stupid thing" on a very regular basis. However living far away from my sister made it necessary to establish an Email address as well as a Skype account. Finally one and a half years ago a friend of mine more or less ordered me to get a Facebook account. I ghave regretted none of these decisions.
I have to admit I don't feel comfortable with neither Skype nor the various chat programs offered by Facebook or MSN, it simply can't replace the satisfaction provided by social interaction in real life, however Emails are just like letters and I always enjoy to receive, read and answer them. Facebook helps me a lot during the lonely hours in the evenings, it is nice to come home to find a few nice messages by friends or laugh about whatever happened at their homes. I do not have any friends over the internet which I don't know in real life, I am a very social person who needs to be among people regularly and do not believe that an Email friendship counts as social interaction.  What Facebook is also very useful for is planing meet-ups or activities with your friends, my RPG groups would fall apart without that.
About the privacy settings of things like Google and Facebook I could not care less, I have nothing to hide, I am not ashamed of anything I do online or in real life and do not care who reads or collects data about me or who looks at my photos on Facebook. I do not do things that could throw a bad light at me and do honestly not care what complete strangers think about me. The thing I do not do is giving away bank information, which, while it does prevent me from playing MMORPGs, is not required for anything I do on the Web.
Altogether I find the communication technologies very much a blessing, of course you have to know how to use them and always be careful, but it makes interaction with your friends so much easier and more constant.

Week 2 Task 1

a) The Blogs I found are:

http://jcrab.tumblr.com/
http://gabriellamzb.blogspot.com/
http://paige-maree.blogspot.com/
http://blakebirt.blogspot.com/
http://newcommtechmusings.blogspot.com/

b) The video I found is "The Future of Communication" from 2007


A very unsettling  depiction of our future that declares "man is god" (a statement I, as a Christian, find very offensive) It goes on recount how New Media slowly replace Old Media and then gives a vision of the future where virtual life completely replaces real life, in traditional Cyberpunk fashion it even places us under the rule of a single, almighty, worldwide company ( a fusion of Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Second Life, but strangely not Apple) However the horror this depiction causes is quickly dispersed when we look around us and realize that it is 2011 and we still don't have the promised virtual newspapers on plastic paper and books still exist. Let's hope they are wrong with all their depictions.

c) http://againbutslower.com/  is a wonderful website that, without registration or any download simplifies complicated wikipedia sites for you. I as a person who finds it difficult to understand Physics and Mathematics finally get what entropy means, or what a fractal is. However the main purpose of the tool seems to cut out the walls of texts these articles are often laden with.