Internet History Podcast

If you’re like me and you do your best learning via sound, then the Internet History Podcast will be a huge resource to you throughout this course. I stumbled upon it after the first lecture, as I was exploring more in depth some of the topics discussed in class.

The Internet History Podcast was founded by Brian McCullough, an Internet pioneer who founded many successful sites, such as Resumebuilder.com. McCullough wanted to learn about the Internet Era in 2014, but realized that there was no book the accurately summarized this. This is why he set out to create his own archives about how the Internet came to be.

The podcast covers topics from Netscape to eCommerce to the birth of Internet porn. This resource does a great job of getting first-hand accounts on each topic, which makes it different than simply reading a Wikipedia article. I loved hearing interviews with important figures such as Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. And the best part about this podcast is that they are releasing new episodes every month! Check it out!

 

A brilliant website in Today’s life- TED TALK

 

Everything is easily accessible online today, on google, wikipedia etc. But an actual website that features inspirational speakers speaking to you

TED is a platform for ideas worth spreading. Started as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, TED today shares ideas from a broad spectrum from science to business to global issues — TED invites Motivational speakers from around the world to speak on current issues and ways to improve them. Brilliant speakers e.g, Stephen hawking, Bill clinton, J.J abhrams have spoken in these conferences and brought it to life.

I personally think this website is unquestionably useful for students touching topics which are further taught in the course ‘Campaigning, Social Movements and Activism’ accessing daily current issues, be it gender dilemma, to economic crises, social media, activists, country propaganda, the best part: these conferences are easily available on youtube.
One of my favourite speaker, Jean Killbourne has talked about the way advertisement’s depict women and male role’s, women are often shown as objects or just an entity to be seen as “beauty” but actually are downsized by men, portraying a particular role expected by the audience, this embedded a social farce creating years of misjudgment and misunderstanding. Jean goes into detail’s at the core of the issue.

Not only famous revolutionaries, but thinkers, doers, idea-generators get an opportunity to discuss and share their opinions.

Online Resources – blog

An online resource that I found quite interesting was called ‘New media and internet activism’ which is a journal article by Kahn & Kellner (that I found searching into Google Scholar). The chapter I found the most fascinating was ‘Blogging: Virtually Democratic’ as it talks about how blogs are seen by Google and how the writers believe that blogs are the “ultimate killer application” of email.

The writers go into a lot of detail about points they raise as they are able to back it up with the evidence and offer a link to the website. An example would be ‘Google Bombing’ which apparently revealed that the popular search engine had a special affinity for blogs. Because of this, bloggers would take advantage in popular search topics and use the tool as a ‘justice bomb’ where the example given is searching ‘McDonalds’ into Google and a blog post called ‘Lies About Their Fries’ pops up.

However they do not just talk about bombing search machines, but also different types of blogs such as political and mainstream. And at the convenience that we all happen to have a blog, I feel that this could be an interesting read for those who are interested in knowing a little more about blogs other than posting something to WordPress every week.

Online Resource

A source that I believe is very useful for this module is a book written by Manuel Castells titled, ‘The Network Society from Knowledge to Policy.’ I have selected this book as gives an in depth insight into network society. There is also a very interesting chapter which talks about the myths associated with network society. Another very interesting point made in this book outlines that due to technological advances we in a sense worship the internet and technology. As a result of this ‘the digital divide increases social exclusion.’ Following on from the point made by castells are we worshipping technology and the internet as if it were some sort of higher force, due this I fell that many especially those who are excluded by the digital divide fear the power that technology has. Castells talks about how politics has had to evolve with technology, as politics is so largely dependent on public space of socialized communication he goes on to state; ‘the political process is transformed under the conditions of the culture of real virtuality.’ Overall i feel this text raises some interesting questions and definitely useful for those studying this module.

 

REFERENCE: http://www.umass.edu/digitalcenter/research/pdfs/JF_NetworkSociety.pdf

Everything you need and more!

Click Here >> Resource Link << Click Here

I feel that it’s necessary to listen or read other people’s opinions, and where better than from a blog dedicated to Digital Media and Society? Although the blog hasn’t been updated in sometime, it has some useful information to help understand the module, which will benefit all students studying this subject.

In addition to the author blogging his own thoughts, they have included links to other relevant blogs and websites which gives you even more information to help understand what Media and Society is and how you can be a part of it.

A particularly interesting post that I found is about Media Production without content. This blog post explains the shift to online media and how you may be missing out from traditional or outdated content.

As well as blogs, this website also includes resources, syllabus information and links to similar subjects.

Let me know what you think of it.

Focus on the feed

Having dozens of tabs open while trying to keep track of a news story is not ideal. Sometimes they are so many that you can’t even see the website’s logo and have to click all of them to find the one you want. But with Feedly, which also has an app, you can create categories and add as many websites as you want. I first heard of it thanks to a guest lecturer in Journalism. With suggested categories, such as Marketing, you can even find new sources you may never have encountered. Other people’s collections are also available, having topics that instead of “Fashion” or “Food” are less broad and more suited for a certain niche, like “App Design” or “Analytics”. You can get to whatever theme you’re interested in thanks to the “Add Content” feature, where you can search by Title, URL or topic.

The app and the website can also work together; if you were reading an article on your desktop before going out, you can access it later on your phone from the same point where you left off on your computer.

I find Feedly very helpful if you are interested in reading the news in general, or in staying updated on a certain area of them. It’s specific and won’t make you waste time scrolling from a general feed like Facebook.

Online Resource

This is a book titles “The Network Society” edited by Manuel Castells and Gustavo Cardosa.

ONLINE RESOURCE TO BE FOUND HERE

I find this link quite interesting as it covers a wide range of topics to do with our society and its connections to the world. As the book title is a very broad subject, i find it helpful that it breaks down that it talks about and gives you an idea of type of topics they want to go through in the book.

Some of these are:

• Information, Technology and the World Economy
• Challenges of the Global Information Society
• Societies in Transition to the Network Society
• Television and Internet in the Construction of identity

In particular to television and internet in the construction of identity, i think this is quite an important part of the book as it shows us how we construct our identity in this modern age and what the internet has done to be a part of this.

This also labels an issue about trust that a lot of people on the internet face on p.257. It has an aspect of citizens relationship with the state which could be interesting in terms of the privacy aspect of the module, as well as “online visibility.” Nonetheless, theres an topic in each of these pages that highlights a specific topic for the module, which is why this resource will definitely help others.

Online Resources

There are many great online resources that may be very useful for students on this module. One I found that may be useful is this BBC editor’s blog whereby editors from across the BBC share their thoughts and dilemmas. The general public can also contribute by adding comments which gives the blog a more understandable quality to it. – Which I think would be helpful because you not only get a professional editors opinion on a topic but also a myriad of comments from everyday people who come up with ideas and solutions to issues that industry professionals may not have. Although not all of the blog posts on the site are relevant to this module, a great deal of them are and offer interesting views on many subject areas.

The particular page I have linked to, entitled ‘how has social media changed the way newsrooms work?’ I found especially interesting, not only because, as a journalism students it is interesting to see how media developments affect my chosen profession. But this page is broken down into different sections, with graphs and bullet points making it especially easy to understand. Which may not be the case, if a similar topic was discussed in an academic book for example.

Furthermore, the specific blog post I have linked to relates particularly well to week four’s lecture on ‘The transformation of News’ as well as week eight’s lecture on ‘Regulation and social media’.

 

Click=information

We are in a multimedia world, that all the information we have today is just a “click” away.

I found this really good blog, don’t  just talk about the subjects that we learn, but also other interesting subjects, as political economy, software, marketing, small businesses and a lot more

The name of the blog is Stuff I think and is the co-founder of BuildZoom Jiyan Wei, it starts his career in a small PR agency, where he built products to monitor and analyse online activity for a large number of corporations, he has a lot of articles in Magazines as Visibility Magazine, Search Engine Watch, and a lot more.

This is really a good blog, the information is easy top find, and for us media students theres a part in the menu, it cals mediapedia and there all the information that fulfilled our needs, but theres a lot of usual information all over the blog.

I chose this blog because he is really interesting person, that knows how to write and put the subjects in a easy way to understand, putting the resources there to what is amazing, as so the other subjects are cool if you want to know about it.

Seochat – Trust In Sites.

As media students, we are always trying to find articles, books, videos or images to help us with research weather it be for essays, blogs or just in attempt to expand an idea/theory. I came across a website called seochat, a website containing various articles and links to books relating to certain media subjects, threads and discussions about problems occurring everyday on social media sites. I feel this website can be very useful when trying to find various opinions on subject matters, relating to media society and networking when a lot of what you’re looking for is in one place.As an example, here is an article I found after searching media effects on today’s society :

http://www.seochat.com/c/a/social/social-media-and-society-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/

After searching what I did, I was provided with various options with the top being most relevant and so on. The article that I selected contained a lot of interesting points, solutions and related articles on similar topics.Topics which could also be useful in further research. Although this website seemed to provide a lot of access to certain articles from authors with various perspectives/backgrounds. Do you have trust for similar sites like Seochat, where information can be selective, or is this something that wouldn’t bother you when there is the amount of resources there is available?  also would you say using sites like this is being lazy with your research?