Week 9, Task 1

As I love the cyberpunk genre I have chosen the William Gibson themed question. While I have yet to decide which other short story I will include I have been given some recommendation by my tutor and many of my friends. Also as a Literature student I feel more comfortable with this question than the more sociological, biological or technological questions.

Comparing two literary works is very easy, especially if they have common elements, such as the setting of the cyberpunk genre. As cyberpunk has over time grown more flexible it was no problem to find a work suitable for this task, but it rather is a problem to decide which one would be the best to compare to William Gibson and the most enjoyable to read. Perhaps post-cyberpunk would be the most effective sub-genre to contrast to classical Gibson-style, gritty cyberpunk.  

Comparing a literary vision to reality is also common in literature studies and even causal readers will often compare situations in books to real life. It is easy to see how many of the gadgets introduced by cyberpunk are already in everyday use, even some of the sociological changes are either happening or loom in the near future. Of course about other things the authors of cyberpunk were completely mistaken.

Overall I am looking forward to this assignment, as I do to any other.

Week 8, Task 2

Yes, I own this production I have not used any content that was not produced by myself, as I rather stay away from anything that could get me into trouble for giving the wrong credits or giving the wrong kind of information on what to do with the content. The only problem is music; I am no good with composing and still have to decide whether or not risk it and include some CC available track into my video or leave it without sound.

Week 8, Task 1

It is not illegal to share food or clothes or recipes, why should it be illegal to share software?

Sharing is caring. That is true, it is completely normal and acceptable for friends to share a meal in a restaurant, for a young woman to share clothes with her sister or for cooks to exchange recipes. The difference between this small-scale sharing and the sharing of software across the internet is that while it won't hurt the clothing industry if two sisters share the expensive skirt one of them bought it will hurt the software industry if one user creates a torrent containing an expensive cutting-edge program and then makes it freely available for thousands, potentially millions of other people who have never paid for it. Many hours of work and hundreds of dollars in production costs are wasted this way. Most expensive software has the option for small-scale sharing by offering multiple licenses with one CD (Norton is installable on multiple PCs as is Microsoft Office). However, the price for this is that we can't install the product indefinitely anymore, meaning that, should Microsoft go out of business in a few years Word-files would quickly become useless if the Office line was discontinued.

Week 7, Task 2

The production of my video is a rather easy task which I happen to greatly enjoy. As I don't like to post photos or videos of me or my friends on the internet, no matter how safe it is claimed to be I had to produce a small number of pencil sketches to include into the video, provided I have the time I would like to colour them using the freeware program "PaintNet".
Meanwhile I have also familiarized myself with the usage of Windows Movie Maker. It is really very useful and user-friendly, I am unable to complain about it. I have already put together a string of screens containing text (similar to a silent movie) and all that is left to do is including the pictures.  

Week 7, Task 1

Of course Wikipedia is useful, it is a impossibly vast collection of information on every topic imaginable. While there are of course the dangers of misinformation, the better articles provide sources their authors have cited while writing them, and expanding one's research beyond Wikipedia is always advisable. It is actually not that easy to permanently edit a Wikipedia article, even more so as a non-registered user. As the database has a save backup of all its pages, acts of vandalism or changes that are seen as unnecessary or wrong by the administrators can be easily reversed.Sometimes even right information is erased, such as when I tried to correct a translation of a German word and found the change gone the next day, most likely because I am not registered.

It requires more work for the industry, but yes produsage can be profitable, sponsoring popular produsers for instance or charging fees on creative databases (Deviant Art is very successful in this field) Already shows and people have managed to jump from YouTube to regular TV and dozens of talented people have been discovered on the net before earning fame in the real world.

I am not a big fan of the concept of produsage, as to me it just sounds like a million people producing so much bad media that it is impossible to find the good stuff beneath all the garbage. The same I think is true for citizen journalism and I am very afraid that it will replace traditional journalism in the future, after all it is so much cheaper for a news website to provide space for people then for a newspaper to hire a journalist. Not only destroys this jobs, but it reduces the news, or source of information on recent events, to an unreliable pile of misinformation written by a myriad of uneducated, or simply not eloquent, people. While it is true that news agencies are not perfect either, I find it dangerous to make people rely on forums and user-edited databases for their information.
 

Week 6 Task 1

On first glance, one would think that the protection of copy right is the biggest issue Hollywood has with the internet; as of today, there is simply no stopping internet piracy of movies. The services provided by YouTube and BitTorrent are too convenient for many people to resist them, the punishments not widespread enough, only a small percentage of the people who download movies illegally ever gets caught, the anonymity of the web does pose a problem to the police. Hollywood makes less money and is thus less eager to produce movies that aren’t boring, badly-written crowd-pleasers. Online distribution of movies is slowly gaining popularity, but as a person without a credit card and weary of online-banking I can’t really appreciate that. There has been live-streaming of movies into theatres and maybe the theatre experience will be lost completely if the industry changes to simply providing the movies in online data-banks where customers can stream the movies for a fee.  

However, beyond the copy right issue, there is the fact that the internet with its easily accessible movie making and distribution tools make it, in theory and, much more seldom, in practice, possible for everyone to realize their vision and call themselves a film producer. Hollywood with its customs, established systems, studios and famous actors/directors is threatened in a world were over night everybody can become famous for their movies, completely outside of the established film industry. All this crowds the market, making the Hollywood producers again afraid to lose money. The result is that Hollywood tries to imitate the lacklustre, unsophisticated production techniques and often surreal, post-modern themes of many popular internet short and feature films. These results too tend to be rather bad (at least in my eyes). Overall the internet, with its tendency to provide everyone with the means to follow their dreams (without regard of any existing talent in other to achieve them) can be blamed for an overall drop in creative media (writing, music, movies).

Week 6, Task 2

1)To produce a short video I shall use Windows Movie Maker. The concept of the video will be something of a small fairy tale. It is very easy to add pictures into Movie Maker, all you have to do is dragging them into the window, same with music.

2)Of course, copyright is a very serious issue in this age and if I would use content I have not created in my video, i would risk having it, or the whole blog, taken down.

3) Defamation is a serious crime and someone could actually sue me if her or she feels that I have insulted them in my video, the easy way to avoid is simply not using real people in your video.