Gabriel Rodgers - Digital Media

 Greetings, my friends, and Happy Easter, Ramadan, Passover and Spring Rites! What a great year when all of these things are occurring at the same time. We're rounding the corner of the semester and looking at home plate. Today we're looking at Copyright and Intellectual Property from a digital perspective, so let's dive right in. Ah, Limewire. I, too, joined those who didn't understand what in the world was going on back then. It wasn't until the push to shut down Limewire and Napster that I really became informed about copyright law and how it was beginning to interact in the digital world. The facts are there - the struggle over how to deal with digital download and intellectual property has been around for a while . Both of those articles have been around since 2012 and 2014 respectively. In fact, all the readings are a tad outdated - the other two are from 2012 as well. And ten years has changed the game somewhat. The law still  hasn't appreciably caught u...

 Good rainy afternoon, my friends! So I misspoke last week - the two subjects of A Networked Society were similarly titled. We'll be talking about Copyright next week. This week, we're looking ahead into the future. We're going to look at where we're going digitally. The future is full of a dualistic knowledge - that on the one hand, the UN Assembly declared the internet as a basic human right and that we're moving into a digital age in which every aspect of life could be conducted with a virtual component. On the other hand, there is still a significant portion of the world without access, who may still be in a pre-industrial era. Indeed, even those that do possess access may have very slow access ( source ) or censored access. ( map ) This interrupts the ability of the digital world to evolve, though unfortunately these deficiencies are not surprising.  We look forward into the future of science fiction when it comes to the digital world - working remotely except ...

 Good morning, my friends! I hope you've had a productive week. We're narrowing down towards the end of this semester, and with my Polestari's festival in about three weeks, I'm hoping that the weather calms down. We're looking towards another cold snap, which is unseasonably late. Global warming, am I right? Which leads me (albeit somewhat sideways) towards this week's topic. When we were given this topic, I wasn't sure what it meant. After studying the readings, I have to say I'm fairly certain it deals with Social Networking Sites (SNSs) and their impact on society, which is tangential to other topics we've had, but this time we're going to center in.  I'm an OG internet boi, which isn't quite the dinosaur age, but I remember the early days of Myspace and Live Journal. I wasn't one of the original UseNetters, but some of my friends were. I've watched social networks evolve and change, and their implicit commentary on how societ...

 Welcome back, my friends and only droogs. I hope you had an enjoyable spring break - we certainly jumped back in with both feet. Today we're talking about data, and some of the debates involved in privacy. Now, on reading this week's offerings and doing a little digging, I figured out what the angle was here. We're being asked to critique our relationship to our data and what privacy means to us. The TED talk on the guy's experiment with both isolation and hyper-sharing was somewhat eye-opening. ( source ) I found it particularly odd that he stated that the month he spent in overshare, where everyone knew his activity, was the happiest of his life, and yet railed against it, saying that humanity was disappearing into conformity because of digital devices. I find that odd, and uniquely tied to a completely non-digital concept that I'll come back around to here. It's true. We live in a controlled digital ecosystem. This isn't a secret, and it isn't new. T...

 Welcome back on this sunny Saturday, my friends. It was downright warm yesterday and I am deeply displeased - can we not have some spring before summer rears its ugly head? I do hate the weather here. I used to have a friend in New Zealand who, when she did the conversions from Fahrenheit to Celsius, was abjectly appalled by our weather. I share that.  But, here in the air conditioning that we do not quite  yet need, it's time to talk about Media Ministry. This is the final class that I require to complete my Certificate of Media Ministry, and I just finished the Media Ministry class earlier this semester. I am an ordained minister and I feel somewhat qualified to tackle this subject from an original aspect. And in general, this one's a doozy. When I began the path of adding Media Ministry to my education degree, I believed it to be familiarizing one's self with modern tech and exploring how people and churches are integrating the ubiquitous technology into their wo...

Salutations and greetings to you. Today, we're going to try to put aside some of the worries we're all facing - gas prices, wheat shortage, Russia annexing part of Japan, Florida passing a ridiculous "Don't Say Gay" law, and the general malaise of what's going on in the world to address...social media and politics. Which, unfortunately, doesn't depart from any of those topics.  Social media and politics are intrinsically linked in many ways. For every cat meme and R-rated cartoon there is a political board, sometimes a legitimate exchange of ideas and sometimes...it's Reddit. (My apologies to Reddit, but not really.) One of my partners is a communist who personally has 4 Reddit accounts designed solely to discuss politics, and to "troll" others - that is, to intentionally inflame conversation with no real purpose or merit. This is common in the darker reaches of the internet, where extremism unfortunately finds a deep seat. These digital echo...