What is the future of Digital Cultures?

In this week’s blog I will be looking into the future of Digital Cultures. I will be discussing the advances in technology that could be made in the coming years.

One form of technology that looks like it is becoming popular again is 3D television. With broadcasters such SKY starting to show sport in 3D it would appear that it could soon be in people’s homes. There are also more and more films being made in 3D such as Avatar and Disney’s Up.

However this isn’t the only change that looks likely to happen to Digital Cultures in the coming years.

According to chip giant Intel by 2015 more than 12 billion devices will be capable of connecting to 500 billion hours of TV and video content.
Intel has said its vision of TV everywhere will be more personal, social, ubiquitous and informative.
"TV is out of the box and off the wall," Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer said.
"TV will remain at the centre of our lives and you will be able to watch what you want where you want."
Mr Rattner said: "We are talking about more than one TV-capable device for every man and woman on the planet.
"People are going to feel connected to the screen in ways they haven't in the past."
Speaking at Intel's Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, he said the success of TV was due to the growing number of ways to consume content.
Today that includes everything from the traditional box in the corner of the living room to Smartphone’s, laptops, netbooks, desktops and mobile internet devices.


Intel have launched the Atom CE4100 system-on-a-chip (SoC) that can be used to bring internet content and services to digital TVs, DVD players and advanced set-top boxes.




It certainly looks as though the old TV world is fading fast and the future is here.



It is not only televisions where technology is developing it is also mobile phones. With the emergence and increasing popularity of Smartphone’s such as the iPhone and BlackBerry it is interesting to see what the future holds.





It certainly looks like over the next few years as smartphones will start behaving more and more like laptops. In June, DoCoMo started offering the Toshiba T-01A in Japan, a super-fast phone that uses an advanced Qualcomm chip. With these fast processors, smartphones will finally run full-blown apps such as Adobe Photoshop – and not just with the limited features offered in the current Photoshop app. There are already signs of other forthcoming power apps on the horizon as well, including tools that can handle photographic effects and process large, high-res images and videos.



There is now technology being developed that enables tourists who don’t know the language abroad to use portable translator and dictionary. This means tourists can overcome language barriers with instant and live translation tools online.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/8640862.stm


The future of Digital Cultures looks very exciting. I am sure that there will be brand new forms of technology that we have never seen before and old forms of technology such as 3D televison being developed to make it better than ever.

Digital Divide

In this week’s blog I will be looking into the topic of the digital divide. I will explore what the digital divide is and then I will try and answer the question, should the digital divide be closed or maintained?

The term 'digital divide' describes the fact that the world can be divided into people who do and people who don't have access to modern information technology, such as the telephone, television, or the Internet. The digital divide exists between those in cities and those in rural areas as well as between the educated and the uneducated, between economic classes, and globally, between the more and less industrially developed nations.

The advantages of closing the digital divide are that there becomes an increase in business trade across the world if everybody across the world has access to information technology. There is also an increase in job opportunities. These factors enable there to be less poverty across the world as everyone will have the latest information technology.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/mar/22/gordon-brown-superfast-broadband

Gordon Brown has said that he wants people to have superfast broadband in their homes to help bridge the digital divide. He says: “the world available to those with superfast broadband will be unimaginably richer than to those without."
He believes that "Faster broadband speeds will bring new, cheaper, more personalized and more effective public services to people; it will bring games and entertainment options with new levels of sophistication; it will make accessing goods and services immeasurably easier,"



However there are some disadvantages with closing the digital divide. For example the cost of computers and other forms of technology is high and less developed countries may not be able to afford such technology. There is also an issue in places such as Africa where people are sacrificing food and clothes to keep their mobile phones running.

It is my opinion that something does need to be done about the digital divide. In England alone there are people who do not have access to information technology. The government’s new scheme goes a long way to reduce the divide. However on a more global scale it is difficult to solve the problem. The main reason for this is cost; the less economically developed countries are always going to struggle to afford the cost of new technology. Therefore I feel that larger, wealthier countries need to do more. This could be by donating technology or build places where people can access the internet easily. The closing of the digital divide will be advantageous to everyone across the world because surely a world that is better for the global economy and reduces poverty will be a good thing.

Twitter the new Blogger?

In this week’s blog Iwill be developing my ideas on the topic of the impact social media is having on blogs.

In the first ever post i explored what the impact social media is having on blogs. http://digitext09.blogspot.com/2009/11/digital-cultures-lecture1.html
The aim in this blog is to see how many people are using social networking sites like Facebook and twitter. I will then discuss what I believe the future of these sites to be.

Statistics according to Mashable show that Facebook "counts more than 250 million active users, 120 million of which they claim login at least once daily." While Twitter statistics count users aged 18 and older who visit or use Twitter at least once per month:

• 2008: 6.0 Million Users (11.1% of adult Internet users.)
• 2009: 18 Million Users (3.8% of adult Internet users.)
• 2010: (Projected) 26 Million Users (15.5 % of adult internet users.)

60% of Twitter users abandon their accounts within their first month of use.
However Twitter's retention rate is only 40% compared to MySpace and Facebook who enjoy a 70% user retention rate.

These statistics are interesting and they show how popular social networking sites are. It also shows that Facebook is more popular than Twitter this may be because it hasn’t been established for so long. However another reason for this could be because Facebook can be more interactive between people due to Facebook chat. It also enables users to have a status with as many characters as possible, because twitter restricts the user to 140.

In the original blog post I felt that social networking sites were having an effect on blogs because more and more people were using them. Although people might not be blogging as much as they once were they are still used by journalists to discuss their opinions on matters such as politics and sport. People will visit the Twitter profiles of friends, family, or their favourite celebrities, and access that information in different ways, whether it’s through clients or portals that attempt to aggregate it. With that in mind, it actually might be best to start thinking of Twitter as the new Blogger.

Long Tail

The topic of this week’s blog will be Long Tail. I will be looking into what Long Tail is and then answering the question, Is Long Tail a good or bad?

Long Tail was popularised by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com and Netflix as examples of businesses applying this strategy. Anderson says that: “The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers.”





One person who opposes Long Tail is Andrew Keen. Keen has written a book called The Cult of the amateur and in this book he is looking into: “How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy.”
Keen complains that blogs are “collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture”.
He goes onto say that Wikipedia perpetuates a cycle of misinformation and ignorance, and labels YouTube inane and absurd, “showing poor fools dancing, singing, eating, washing, shopping, driving, cleaning, sleeping, or just staring at their computers.”

So is Long Tail Good or Bad?
In my opinion Long Tail is a positive thing because it is encouraging niche markets to use the internet. The major companies and mainstream markets are always going to be at the head of the demand curve, however people should be able promote their own products or companies on the internet because even if only one person is interested, there is still an interest in the product. There are aspects in which I agree with some of Andrew Keen’s views because some internet sites are created for personal benefit (see my post about blog spamming.) However I believe that it is beneficial to the internet and to the people who use the internet if niche markets are encouraged.

What I have found interesting and not so interesting in Digital Cultures

In this week’s blog I will be look back on some of the previous topics discussed in this digital cultures blog. I will discuss the areas that I found interesting and others that weren’t so exciting.

The first blog studied what impact social media is having on blogs.

http://digitext09.blogspot.com/2009/11/digital-cultures-lecture1.html

I found this topic interesting because social networking sites such as Facebook and twitter are growing increasingly more and more popular. I learnt that these websites are encouraging journalists and broadcasters such as the BBC to use social networking as a way of breaking news. It also showed me how the development of technology has enabled us to change the way we live our lives. For example if you wanted to keep in contact with someone 20 years ago you might write a letter but these days we can use Facebook to search for old friends and see what they are up to. It will be exciting to see what the future of these social networking sites will be.

Another topic that I found interesting was whether Ray Kurstweil’s theories will ever become reality.

http://digitext09.blogspot.com/2009/12/will-ray-kurstweils-theories-ever.html

This was a topic that I found interesting because it focused on the relationship between humans and robots. If Kurstweil’s theories were ever to become reality then the world would be a completely different place to how it is now. The development of new technology makes his prediction that humans and machines will merge together in the physical and mental realms possible. Therefore this blog enabled me to learn about the ways in which robot technology is developing and becoming increasingly more likely that Ray Kurtweil’s theories can become reality.
However one area that i didn’t find particularly interesting was second life and simulators.

http://digitext09.blogspot.com/2009/12/do-second-life-and-simulators-serve.html

The reasons i didn’t find this that interesting was due to the fact that I don’t really believe that second life serves a purpose. I can see why simulators exist because they can help teach airplane pilots how to fly because its better to train in a safe environment where mistakes can be made. However second life doesn’t offer that much to society and it will never really develop. Some companies may like being able to hold meetings in second life so everyone can attend and this from a business point of view does make sense. I do feel that the reason many people use second life is purely to create a version of themselves that they like and live a life that they want to.

Overall the topic of Digital Cultures has been interesting as I’ve looked at the ways technology has developed and adapted over the years. In my opinion the future of technology is exciting and it will be interesting to see how the topics that I have discussed in my blog develop.

eGovernment

In this blog I will be looking into the concept of eGovernment. I will then try and give an answer to the question, is eGovernment useful?

What is eGovernment?
eGovernment is the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve the activities of public sector organisations.





There are three areas that eGovernment focuses on are:

eAdministration
The purpose of eAdministration is to improve the internal workings of the public sector. For example these are things such as, managing process performance and cutting process costs. The government does things to strengthen productivity.

eCitizens and eServices
These initiatives deal particularly with the relationship between government and citizens. To do this the government listens to citizens on topics such as improving public services. The government will then try to go about resolving any issues.

eSociety
Such initiatives deal particularly with the relationship between public agencies and other institutions - other public agencies, private sector companies, non-profit and community organisations. The government will try to build partnerships with organisational groupings to achieve economic and social objectives. The public sector is almost always one of the partners, though occasionally it acts only as a facilitator for others.




So is eGovernment useful?
I believe that eGovernment is useful because it is convenient and cost-effective for businesses, and the public benefits by getting easy access to the most current information available without having to spend time, energy and money to get it. The future of eGovernment looks to be positive

Blog Spamming and Link Farming

The topic of this week’s blog is blog spamming and link farming. In this blog I will be exploring an answer to the question what is the effect of blog spamming and link farming having on the internet?



Blog spamming is creating non-value comments on somebody blogs to refer to their own site. The reason for this is to give the creators own site higher ratings in search engines. This is similar to "Link Farming " because it is the process of exchanging links with Web sites in order to increase search engine optimization.





Blog spamming shows how the internet can be controlled and manipulated by individuals interested in personal gain. Issues such as blog spamming and link farming enable people to give themselves higher ratings in search engine and I feel that this has a negative effect on the internet. This is because the internet becomes full of information that is not important or relevant to what the user has searched for. It also means that the search engines such as Google become less reliable because they are filled with people who are only interested in having their website number one in Google’s search engine. The concept of net neutrality proposes that there should be no restrictions on content, communications allowed or attachments on internet sites. However I don’t believe that this can be possible when some internet users continue to create fake blogs and exchanging links with other websites just to give themselves higher ratings in search engines.

There are ways to stop blog spamming for example disallowing multiple consecutive submissions. It is rare on a site that a user would reply to their own comment, yet spammers typically will do. Checking that the user's IP address is not replying to a user of the same IP address will significantly reduce flooding. This however proves problematic in the fairly rare instance when multiple users, behind the same proxy, wish to comment on the same entry.

With this is mind I feel that it is important that search engines such as Google cut out as much blog spamming and link farming to enable users to have more accurate internet searches.