technoculture203-09

nsIt was quite interesting to learn in today’s lecture how Google has become a “Corporate Power”. Google has grown immensely since its birth in 1996 as a research project. To this date, Google has become the default search engine, image finder, email client, map locator and news source for some people. Think….. How many times have you heard someone say to you “I’ll Google it”? I have yet to hear someone say “I’ll Yahoo! it”.

I believe that Google’s image will grow bigger and bigger as the years go on due to its dominance in the internet world. Even Apple’s iPod Touch is helping to spread Google’s image and services to become the internet superpower is it currently known as. The Apple iPod touch comes with Google Maps and Youtube applications. Both applications are owned and operated by Google. In addition, the Google mobile search page was the default homepage when I first logged onto the internet from my iPod Touch.

It seems that our internet worlds are run by Google. It now seems that there is even a Google Phone, which is said to rival the iPhone, oddly enough. Who knows what Google may attempt to do next. They might even branch into becoming an internet service provider or even launch their own operating system to challenge Microsoft’s Windows operating systems and Apple’s MAC operating systems. I guess we will have to wait and see what Google’s future holds.

This morning a talk show, Rachael Ray, caught my attention. A guest on the show had her own online blog focusing on people's hairstyles. It made me realize we can become whoever we want to on the internet. This lady was not a professional but, through this blog, she helped people find their perfect hairstyle by posting photos of celebrities as examples. People on the blog would vote which celebrity had the best haircut for the blogger, and some got over a 1000 votes. It makes me think, do people actually care about a random person's haircut? And if the answer is yes, then could we not make a similar blog where the topic of conversation was more important than people's hairstyles? I would think that it was the hairdresser's job to tell people what haircut suits them, and not a woman with a blog who has nothing to do with the profession.

Could some random person also start a blog and become a doctor without knowing anything about medicine? Wouldn’t it be dangerous for people to rely on a blog like this?

Nevertheless, I find it interesting how the internet is allowing people to become whoever they want even pursue any career they want. It can even lead to fame for some people. However, this also means the internet is increasingly becoming a substitute for the real thing, and people who actually are educated within a specific field might find themselves without a job. With this, the internet is encouraging more of a "do it yourself" attitude, where one can for example search for how to unclog the drain, and it will give you the answer so that you can do it yourself, instead of having to call a plumber and pay a lot of money to have it done. Does this then mean that more businesses across the world will lose customers for the internet?

Recently my little sister (she's 12) has had a problem with being cyber bullied by some of her girl friends, they were so persistent texting her multiple times in short periods of time, and when that failed ringing our home phone non-stop! They weren't being particularily nasty but just hounding about a boy she had a crush on etc etc, typical kiddy stuff. It got me thinking about the effects of new media on children, because this is a problem that even my generation (I'm 20) did not have when we were young, and is something that we are yet to see the long term effects of.


What is worrying is the avenues now open for bullying, especially cyber bullying, gone are the days when bullying stopped as soon as you walked out of the school gate. Luckily for my sister she doesn't belong to a social networking site, yet she is a member of an online gaming site for kids (Miniclip) where there is a chat element enabled, allowing her to talk to, or in this case be bullied by friends. What are we meant to do? Ban children from new media until a certain age? This is obviously an overreaction but until things calm down between her and her friends this is what Mum has done, and currently seems to have solved the situation.


When looking into the issue of cyberbulling I found that in fact a New Zealand website is right at the forefront of net safety for kids: the aptly named Net Safe. They have great sections such as: 'What's Twitter', 'What to do if I am being text bullied', 'I am being cyberbullied what can I do?' and 'Don't believe everything you see, read or hear online', as well as a section for Parents which is good to check out if you're interested in this.

I've just come back from seeing We Live in Public at the NZ International Film Festival. Besides being by far the best film I've seen at the festival this year, it uniquely charts the social and cultural significance of the Internet in our lives over the past decade by focusing on the life of one individual.

Here's the synopsis:

On the 40th anniversary of the Internet, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC tells the story of the effect the web is having on our society, as seen through the eyes of “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of,” visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner (DIG!), documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade, to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives.

Josh Harris, often called the “Warhol of the Web,” founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network during the infamous dot-com boom of the 1990s. He also created his vision of the future: an underground bunker in NYC where 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days over the turn of the millennium. (The project, named QUIET, also became the subject of Ondi Timoner’s first cut of her documentary about Harris. Her film shared the project’s name.) With Quiet, Harris proved how, in the not-so-distant future of life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire. Through his experiments, including another six-month stint living under 24-hour live surveillance online which led him to mental collapse, he demonstrated the price we will all pay for living in public.

For me it raised far more questions than I have answers and I've found doing a fair bit of future gazing and looking very closely in the rear view mirror. Reflecting on the future that theorists and media/technology commentators predicted a decade ago, many of those visions have been realised, just not always quite in the fully utopian or distopian ways that were predicted. Personally I think the development of the technology itself feels quite slow relative to our adoption of it, which I do find slightly disquieting.

If anyone else has seen the film I'd be keen to hear your thoughts. If you haven't seen it I'm fairly sure it will get a general release here soon.