Convergence- NGP

A perfect example of a convergence. Sony have created a handheld gaming device, which plays videos, you can listen to music, take pictures and surf the web.

Release date Mid-Summer

Campaign- Obesity Kills

For this project I was required to create a media campaign, to raise the awareness of a particular issue of my choice. I decided to work within a group of four and create a 3-5 minuets video that would consist of my chosen campaign. As a group we decided to also create poster, to help increase the awareness of obesity.
The rationale for our campaign was to make people of our age aware of the severalty of obesity within our society, and give them advice on how to maintain a good and healthy lifestyle for people of our ages and above. Rather than focusing on the older generation, that has often been seen on television documentary such as “Supersize Me” and “Fit Club”, we decided as a group that our target audience would be people that are attending university or younger, as we are the future of tomorrow.

During the research stage of the campaign, we came across a number of remarkable facts, which was related to our topic of interest. This included the vast amount of statistics of obesity we discovered. ‘About 46% of Men in England and 32% of Women are overweight’ and ¾ parents fail to realise that their children are overweight’. Obesity has been a hot topic recently, whether it is been discussed within newspaper articles, or shown through programs broadcasted via the internet or terrestrial television, it is something that everyone is talking about and trying to figure out how to concur it, as it is costing the economy a lot of money. Jamie Olive has been one countries most well-known and influential nutritionist. He has made a great impact on British schools and healthier eating schemes to try and change the bad habits of children today. Many people debate whether Jamie Oliver popular or influential? This has been one of many debates that have been discussed and brought up. Despite Jamie’s good intentions to change the eating habits of children in Britain, it has somehow gone wrong. Students now use alternative options of either bringing a packed lunch filled with goodies and treats or starving themselves until school is over and then spend their lunch money on chicken and chips and full by the time they reach home.

After gathering our research that we obtained, we decided that we would use Flipscams and Final Cut Pro to record and edit our campaign, and used Adobe Photoshop to create posters, to help increase the awareness of our campaign. When we finish creating our campaign, we decided to post our campaign onto World Wide Web via YouTube to enlighten and inspire other people, as G, Lovink says within his article blog, MyBrain, ‘Web 2.0 has three distinguishing features: it is easy to use; it facilitates the social element; and users can upload their own content in whatever form, be it pictures, videos or text’.

This project has helped to boost my knowledge on obesity and illustrate to me how it has had a vast affect on people within my culture and the NHS. There will be a staggering 2.3 billion people that are overweight in 2015. Of the 2.3 billion, 700 million will be obese. NHS obesity currently cost the NHS £ 1 Billion annually. This money could be spent elsewhere such as improving hospital equipments and raise employment, rather than spending it on people that are suffering from the side effects of obesity.

Campaign - Obesity Kills

Posters

Convergence-iPad 2

The long waited Apple Ipad2 has been released today, in the UK, on all 4 leading UK traffics, T-mobile, Orange, O2 and Vodafone. The new Ipad 2 has a new sleek cutting look, thinner and lighter to the previous model. The previous Ipad cannot compare to the new ipad 2 new technology. The new Ipad 2 has plenty of new apps available. It has a front and rear camera, which allows you to use motion time on the go, finally it is very easy to use. There has been complaints about the Ipad 2 as their is not any flash support, complex task are fiddly and take time to get use to and finally, it is difficult to transfer non iTune content back and forth. But this doesnt make the Ipad 2 a bad purchase.

iPad vs iPad 2

Campaign/The Colonization of Real-Time

The internet has become a significant marketing tool for many campaign companies. Reason being is due to how easily the internet can be accessed across the world, by many different people. Videos, images, sounds clips, and text can be posted online within seconds, informing the internet community of their current events and activities. As the internet is a free publishing and production platforms, it helps to reduce cost for charities and companies that choose to publicize through the web.

For example Battlefront is an organization that is all about campaigns. Their aim is to change the world. They show their campaigns online and through the web, to increase awareness. Recently I viewed a campaign on their website about knife crimes. This campaign was created by a girl called Eliza Rebeiro. The campaign was just created to increase the aware of knife crime. She has created a number of video, interviewing famous people, asking them on their views on knife crime. She has also fashioned an event show within local school within her area to educate young kids and show them knife crime is not right.

After viewing this campaign I have decided to support the cause, there has been a huge increase in knife crimes within London and it needs to stop. ‘Lives Not Knives’ visit the website for more information.

http://www.battlefront.co.uk/the-campaigns/lives-not-knives/#//

Psychogeographical Project

Over a period of three weeks, I was told to work in a group, to create an online project using the Situationist theory of psychogeography. The idea of psychogeography was to investigate the connection between the geographic and the human mind.  The plan was we would investigate the way a built environment, Leicester, affects us as well as explorations into aspects of the cityscape that are often ignored or remain unnoticed in our everyday life for example sensuous aspects, imaginative connections. One of the main investigative methods that psychogeography uses was derive. Derive is an attempt at analysis of the totality of everyday life, through the passive movement through space. It is translated as drift. Guy Debord is widely recognized for the development of the idea of derive.

Based on the background research my group and I did, we decided that we would base our project on how friendly Leicester was for people that are not locals. We decided that we would symbolise how friendly certain areas were by hugging random people that were walking on the streets of Leicester. We would do this by asking individual people for hugs and mark it off on a map where we received the most hugs. We would also tally the gender as well, so we present more information to the This would help people that are not familiar to the area, to know where the friendliest areas are in Leicester.

As group we decided that it would be unrealistic to film every area in Leicester, as it is a very big town and we do not have means of transport to do so. So, we decided to choice the focal points around the town centre, such as Highcross, Leicester Market, HayMarket and Town Centre.

Before we started to film, we bought props to help to aware the public of what we were doing. We wrote on some props ‘Free Hugs’ or ‘Xmas Hugs’, to encourage them to give us hugs. When began our filming in Highcross, at the beginning we were not successful, a number of people just walk passed us and about 1 or 2 people hugged us within the shopping complex. This led us to believe that people in Highcross were not very friendly. We then left HighCross and continued in Haymarket. In Haymarket we were very successful, majority of the people we asked hugged us. This shows that Haymarket is a friendly area. We then went to the town centre, were we received 5 hugs, which was ok, not great. Finally, we went to the Market, were we received the most hugs. A random ealderly woman told me that I smelt nice and wanted another hug. This signifies that the friendliest area in Leicester centre is the market, we are aware of this by the amount of hugs we received.  

This projects has allowed me to use the media and combined it with geography, to map out certain facts about Leicester, which I felt has been very successful. To improve this project, I would have gone to more areas within Leicester to base our topic on.

Here is the outcome of our project;

Copyright

During network media, we have been discussing into depth about copyright laws and how it affects the media industry and cultures, and the cultures opinion. Apart from our media lectures, copyright laws have been a topic that has been in everyone’s mouth recently. Reasons being is that the government are placing new laws on illegal music and video downloading. The new law states that if people who illegally download films and music are caught, there internet will be cut off by there internet provider. Personally I feel that copyright law are old and out dated. The fact that the internet was given to us for free, why should we have to pay for any of its content? I will be discussing this late in my blog. To start off with I will be discussing about copyrights and remix culture.

To start off with, I am going to define the term remix culture. Remix culture was a term used by a man called Lawrence Lessig, he feels that ‘remix culture is the way that our culture evolves,’ for example Amen Break and Dangermouse. In 2004 Dangermouse created an album which was had tracks from the white album (The Beatles) and the Black Album (Jay-Z) to create an album called Grey Album.              

Here a clip of the song 

After this song was released Dangermouse were being enforced by copyrights by the Beatles, as they used their song without there permission. This was a big issue, it was so big that it result in a day called grey Tuesday in February. Grey Tuesday was an online protest for copyright reform. On grey Tuesday websites would post illegal works online, to support the cause.

When searching for this video, I found it very hard to find a video without the music being disabled, due to copyright infringements, as you can see in the image below. 

By the government placing these acts upon music, it has limited what can be re-created and making our culture to be only consumer, whereas we want to be prosumer, as  we want mutate it, play around with it and cut up. 

Here another video of a mashup by RiP : A REMIX MANIFESTO.

 The government are trying to stop illegal downloading by a new act called the Digital Economy Bill.

This is how the bill works;

·         You get 3 strikes

·         After the 3 strikes if it carries on, the offending site is blocked.

But there are many questions about the bill, which concerns me. How is evidence collected?, is it enforceable?, Howe is it financed?, Do they really understand technology? Because if they did they would realise files can be encrypted, so they can be tracked back. And finally if they do criminalize it, would it encourage people to buy the music? I doubt it!!

To an extent I understand were they are coming from, they are losing money through people remixing there songs and downloading them. But we are in an era were that the internet has lead us to be a prosumer and lead our culture to participate more. So things that already exist are going to be remixed and changed. That is just how we are as humans, we find a way to improve things to make things better.

FOLKSONOMY

Folksonomy was coined in 2004, by Thomas Vander Wal. Folksonomy is described as ‘personal free tagging of information and object for one’s own retrieval, by Louise Spiteri in his article ‘the Web and Search Engines’ (Louise Spiteri, 2008). Folksonomy has been widely popular in social website such as Facebook, Tageworld, Myspace and Fickr. Social networking websites have used Folksonomy as another device or tool that’s allows the end users to interact with one another. They have done this by tagging users within images, tagging friends within video, so that you can discuss as a group regarding issues within the video clip. Folksonomy is a tool widely use in today ‘Particpatory Culture’, which Tim O’Reilly mentions in his Web 2.0 conference.  Folksonomy hasn’t only been useful in the social networking realm. It has been widely used to improve the efficiency and relevance of their search efforts, within search engines such as Google, yahoo and Bing.

Folksonomy is not only used to tag friends and family within images, as I initial though. It is a way to organize text and information, making it easier for the end user to collect information to refine searches. 

Biblography

Vander Wal, T. (2007, February 7). Folksonomy. Message posted to http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html