The free culture
movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and
modify creative works, using the Internet as well as other media. The movement
objects to overly restrictive copyright laws, or completely rejects the
concepts of copyright and intellectual property, which many members of the
movement also argue hinder creativity. They call this system "permission
culture".
In 1998, the United
States Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act which
President Clinton signed into law. The legislation extended copyright
protections for twenty additional years, resulting in a total guaranteed
copyright term of seventy years after a creator’s death. The bill was heavily
lobbied by corporations like Disney, and dubbed as the Mickey Mouse Protection
Act. Lawrence Lessig claims copyright is an obstacle to cultural production, knowledge
sharing and technological innovation, and that private interests – as opposed
to public good – determine law. He travelled the country in 1998, giving as
many as a hundred speeches a year at college campuses, and sparked the
movement. It led to the foundation of the first chapter of the Students for
Free Culture at Swarthmore College.
In 1999, Lessig
challenged the Bono Act, taking the case to the US Supreme Court. Despite his
firm belief in victory, citing the Constitution’s plain language about “limited”
copyright terms, Lessig only gained two dissenting votes: from Justices Stevens
and Breyer.
In 2001, Lessig
initiated Creative Commons, an alternative “some rights reserved” licensing
system to the default “all rights reserved” copyright system.
IT (information technology) is a term that encompasses all forms of technology used to create, store, exchange, and use information in its various forms (business data, voice conversations, still images, motion pictures, multimedia presentations, and other forms, including those not yet conceived). It’s a convenient term for including both telephony and computer technology in the same word. It is the technology that is driving what has often been called “the information revolution.”
Introduction:
Over the last two decades, the Internet has delivered tremendous economic and trade benefits. It has driven record increases in productivity, spurred innovation, created new economies, and fueled international trade. In part this is because the Internet makes geographically distant markets easy to reach.
Information technology has impacted the economy in a number of ways. The most noticeable changes involve e-commerce, marketing tactics, facilitation of globalization, job insecurity, and job design. There are variety of concepts pertaining to the changing economy, including downsizing, outsourcing, the use of cookies, the benefits and costs of globalization, and the impact of e-commerce. The last decade has seen incredible changes to the economy due to the World Wide Web. Entrepreneurs have harnessed technology and changed the way we conduct and transact business. Fortunes have been made and lost. Some experienced huge success and became dot-com millionaires or billionaires overnight, while others became dot-bomb failures. Information technology has redefined organizational boundaries. No longer are businesses confined to brick and mortar stores. Transactions such as payments can be conducted over the Internet. Relationships with customers, suppliers, and partners can be strengthened and streamlined. Inventory can be kept electronically. Purchase orders can easily be exchanged among different companies electronically.
User generated content has never been as easily
accessible for both brand marketers and consumers as it is today. The
prevalence of smartphones and tablets makes it easier than ever to take photos,
make videos, draw pictures, and otherwise broadcast our thoughts and opinions
instantly through numerous social channels
From social media to video games and from online fan production to machinima the phenomenon of user-generated culture has secured its position in the mainstream during the last few years. This shift has resulted from the blurring boundaries between media production and consumption as well as between professional and amateur authorship. The phenomenon is claimed to be characterized by collaboration, accessibility and democratic potential. During the You, Me, User Conference we approach the user-generated culture, or in other words, multiple situations where culture becomes modified, produced and distributed through everyday practices, social and new media
Technological developments and changes in the communication through Internet have produced significant changes in production and fruition processes of cultural objects as well as, more generally, in the relationship between both the private individual sphere and the participatory collective dimension. From some of the most reliable theories about new media and Internet, the author intends to focus on some reflections and questions that affect the sociological research applied to the study of cultural practices through new media and Internet. Furthermore, one specific attention is given to new forms of artistic and musical creativity fostered by the development of online participatory culture and characterized by the spread of user-generated content, by which concepts such as “producer”, “product” and “user” have lost their traditional boundaries in favour of new types of actors and new forms of culture.
User-generated content (UGC) covers a range of media content available in a range of modern communications technologies. It entered mainstream usage during 2005, having arisen in web publishing and new media content production circles. It is used for a wide range of applications, including problem processing, news, gossip and research and reflects the expansion of media production through new technologies that are accessible and affordable to the general public. All digital media technologies are included, such as question-answer databases, digital video, blogging, podcasting, forums, review-sites, social networking, social media, mobile phone photography and wikis. In addition to these technologies, user-generated content may also employ a combination of open source, free software, and flexible licensing or related agreements to further reduce the barriers to collaboration, skill-building and discovery(“‘UGC’”) has also gained in popularity over the last decade, as more and more users have begun to flock to social media and “‘content-based’” sharing sites.
India of Convergence:
Media convergence is more than simply a technological shift. Convergence alters the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres and audiences. Convergence refers to a process, but not an end point. Convergence will be a relation between view technologies rather than an integration of systems. It represents a reconfiguration of media power, and reshaping of media aesthetics and economics. The French cyberspace theorist Pierre Levy uses the term “Collective intelligence” to describe lage scale information gathering and processing activities that have emerged in web communities. http://453.stilled.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Eessay-user-generated-content.pdf
User generated content (UGC) is not a new concept,
but for digital marketers, UGC has never offered as many exciting possibilities
for engaging with consumers and building brand loyalty.
With the recent billion dollar acquisitions of
content companies like Instagram and Tumblr, tech giants are further demonstrating
the immense value of content today,and the opportunities are apparent for
marketers.
In a January 2013 Econsultancy/Adobe report on
digital marketing trends, over 700 digital professionals identified content
marketing as the single most significant trend in marketing today.
Content, in short, is king, so it’s incumbent upon
brands to make good use of it.
With its many shapes and forms, identifying the
right content to engage the customer and doing it at the right time on the
right channel, requires strategic planning and resources.
One compelling solution is to allow consumers to
create content for your brand. The rise of social media and mobile technology
has made every consumer a potential broadcaster, and it is easier than ever for
brands to solicit, collect, promote, and analyze content that comes directly
from your customer base.
The OECD has defined three central schools for
UGC:
Publication
requirement: While UGC could be made by a user and
never published online or elsewhere, we focus here on the work that is
published in some context, be it on a publicly accessible website or on a page
on a social networking site only accessible to a select group of people (e.g.,
fellow university students). This is a useful way to exclude email, two-way
instant messages and the like.
Creative
effort: of creative effort was put into creating the
work or adapting existing works to construct a new one; i.e. users must add
their own value to the work. UGC often also has a collaborative element to it,
as is the case with websites which users can edit collaboratively. For example,
merely copying a portion of a television show and posting it to an online video
website (an activity frequently seen on the UGC sites) would not be considered
UGC. If a user uploads his/her photographs, however, expresses his/her thoughts
in a blog, or creates a new music video, this could be considered UGC. Yet the
minimum amount of creative effort is hard to define and depends on the context.
Creation
outside of professional routines and practices:
User generated content is generally created outside of professional routines
and practices. It often does not have an institutional or a commercial market
context. In extreme cases, UGC may be produced by non-professionals without the
expectation of profit or remuneration. Motivating factors include: connecting
with peers, achieving a certain level of fame, notoriety, or prestige, and the
desire to express oneself.
Google runs on a distributed network of thousands
of low-cost computers and can therefore carry out fast parallel processing.
Parallel processing is a method of computation in which many calculations can
be performed simultaneously, significantly speeding up data processing. Google
has three distinct parts:
Googlebot
: a
web crawler that finds and fetches web pages.
The
indexer : that sorts every word on every page and stores
the resulting index of words in a huge database.
The
query processor : which compares your search query to
the index and recommends the documents that it considers most relevant.
1.
Googlebot, Google’s Web Crawler
Googlebot is Google’s web crawling robot, which
finds and retrieves pages on the web and hands them off to the Google indexer.
It’s easy to imagine Googlebot as a little spider scurrying across the strands
of cyberspace, but in reality Googlebot doesn’t traverse the web at all. It
functions much like your web browser, by sending a request to a web server for
a web page, downloading the entire page, then handing it off to Google’s
indexer.
Googlebot consists of many computers requesting
and fetching pages much more quickly than you can with your web browser. In
fact, Googlebot can request thousands of different pages simultaneously. To
avoid overwhelming web servers, or crowding out requests from human users,
Googlebot deliberately makes requests of each individual web server more slowly
than it’s capable of doing.
Googlebot finds pages in two ways: through an add
URL form, www.google.com/addurl.html, and through finding links by crawling the
web.
Unfortunately, spammers figured out how to create
automated bots that bombarded the add URL form with millions of URLs pointing
to commercial propaganda. Google rejects those URLs submitted through its Add
URL form that it suspects are trying to deceive users by employing tactics such
as including hidden text or links on a page, stuffing a page with irrelevant
words, cloaking (aka bait and switch), using sneaky redirects, creating
doorways, domains, or sub-domains with substantially similar content, sending
automated queries to Google, and linking to bad neighbors. So now the Add URL form
also has a test: it displays some squiggly letters designed to fool automated
“letter-guessers”; it asks you to enter the letters you see — something like an
eye-chart test to stop spambots.
When Googlebot fetches a page, it culls all the
links appearing on the page and adds them to a queue for subsequent crawling.
Googlebot tends to encounter little spam because most web authors link only to
what they believe are high-quality pages. By harvesting links from every page
it encounters, Googlebot can quickly build a list of links that can cover broad
reaches of the web. This technique, known as deep crawling, also allows
Googlebot to probe deep within individual sites. Because of their massive
scale, deep crawls can reach almost every page in the web. Because the web is
vast, this can take some time, so some pages may be crawled only once a month.
Although its function is simple, Googlebot must be
programmed to handle several challenges. First, since Googlebot sends out
simultaneous requests for thousands of pages, the queue of “visit soon” URLs
must be constantly examined and compared with URLs already in Google’s index.
Duplicates in the queue must be eliminated to prevent Googlebot from fetching
the same page again. Googlebot must determine how often to revisit a page. On
the one hand, it’s a waste of resources to re-index an unchanged page. On the
other hand, Google wants to re-index changed pages to deliver up-to-date
results.
To keep the index current, Google continuously
recrawls popular frequently changing web pages at a rate roughly proportional
to how often the pages change. Such crawls keep an index current and are known
as fresh crawls. Newspaper pages are downloaded daily, pages with stock quotes
are downloaded much more frequently. Of course, fresh crawls return fewer pages
than the deep crawl. The combination of the two types of crawls allows Google
to both make efficient use of its resources and keep its index reasonably
current.
2.
Google’s Indexer
Googlebot gives the indexer the full text of the
pages it finds. These pages are stored in Google’s index database. This index
is sorted alphabetically by search term, with each index entry storing a list
of documents in which the term appears and the location within the text where
it occurs. This data structure allows rapid access to documents that contain
user query terms.
To improve search performance, Google ignores
(doesn’t index) common words called stop words (such as the, is, on, or, of,
how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters). Stop words are
so common that they do little to narrow a search, and therefore they can safely
be discarded. The indexer also ignores some punctuation and multiple spaces, as
well as converting all letters to lowercase, to improve Google’s performance.
3.
Google’s Query Processor
The query processor has several parts, including
the user interface (search box), the “engine” that evaluates queries and
matches them to relevant documents, and the results formatter.
PageRank is Google’s system for ranking web pages.
A page with a higher PageRank is deemed more important and is more likely to be
listed above a page with a lower PageRank.
Google considers over a hundred factors in
computing a PageRank and determining which documents are most relevant to a
query, including the popularity of the page, the position and size of the
search terms within the page, and the proximity of the search terms to one
another on the page. A patent application discusses other factors that Google
considers when ranking a page. Visit SEOmoz.org’s report for an interpretation
of the concepts and the practical applications contained in Google’s patent
application.
Google also applies machine-learning techniques to
improve its performance automatically by learning relationships and
associations within the stored data. For example, the spelling-correcting
system uses such techniques to figure out likely alternative spellings. Google
closely guards the formulas it uses to calculate relevance; they’re tweaked to
improve quality and performance, and to outwit the latest devious techniques
used by spammers.
Indexing the full text of the web allows Google to
go beyond simply matching single search terms. Google gives more priority to
pages that have search terms near each other and in the same order as the
query. Google can also match multi-word phrases and sentences. Since Google
indexes HTML code in addition to the text on the page, users can restrict
searches on the basis of where query words appear, e.g., in the title, in the
URL, in the body, and in links to the page, options offered by Google’s
Advanced Search Form and Using Search Operators (Advanced Operators).
How
Google processes a query
1. The web server sends the query to the index servers.
The content inside the index servers is similar to the index in the back of a
book--it tells which pages contain the words that match any particular query term.
2. The query travels to the doc servers,
which actually retrieve the stored
documents. Snippets are generated to
describe each search result.
The term “viral video” refers to
video clip content which gains widespread popularity through the process of
Internet sharing, typically through email or instant messages, blogs, and other
media-sharing websites, such as YouTube
The use of
viral videos is becoming an international phenomenon. Whether it is to promote
a film, video game, or for other marketing purposes it is more commonly seen
now than ever before. When most people hear the phrase ‘viral videos’ their
first thought is the use of YouTube or other video-sharing website to rapidly
generate fame and interest in a particular person or action. With the ability
to easily share and post these videos across websites and social networks it is
becoming an increasingly popular way of attempting to attain celebrity status
or just putting out your footage for the general public to either recognize or
enjoy. Take the videos posted by Libyans during the Arab Spring to exemplify
the hardship and anguish they were faced with, these were just as much viral videos
as Justin Bieber’s YouTube post.
Facebook has played a big part in
this, with the ability to share videos among your friends, more people are
likely to be exposed to certain videos and and in turn are more likely to make
a simple video viral where normally you would have to find it yourself on the
video-sharing website. Facebook being more likely to promote the talent side of
viral videos.
Twitter is another big player in the social networking business in modern
Internet, although Twitter is more celebrity centered or news centered as
opposed to Facebook's more personal bonds between users, this allows for even
more mass communication. Making the videos shared on the website even more
likely to reach larger audiences, and since news channels play a big role in
Twitter, political movements and marketing is the biggest example of viral
videos that come out of the 'Twittersphere'.
YouTube, arguably the most
important factor in this current trend, what many believed to have start the viral
video craze, a video-sharing website that allows anyone to post anything
including amateurs and professionals, with access to the general public.
Innovations
in technology are changing the tactics of modern-day conflict. There are new
tools in today's arsenal of weapons. Helped by advances in electro-magnetics
and modern information and communications technology, a new form of electronic
warfare has been created. It is called cyberwar and is increasingly recognised
by governments and the military as posing a potentially grave threat.
"If
you have a few smart people and a good computer, then you can do a lot. You
don't need an aircraft, you don't need tanks, you don't need an army. You can
penetrate another country, create huge damage without even leaving your
armchair."Alon
Ben David, military analyst for Israel's Channel 10
And
it is not just cyberwar that is a growing phenomenon. The internet has
empowered cyberactivism, allowing people to share information and mobilise
support to take direct action - both online and on the streets.
Social
networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been at the
forefront of this new wave of cyberactivism, helping to galvanise the protests
that have recently spread across the Arab world.
The
so-called Arab Spring has been described as an electronic revolution.
Protesters were turned into citizen journalists - taking frontline images on
their mobile phones and uploading them via their computers for the world to
see. The regimes may have jammed the signals of satellite news channels and
banned international reporters from entering their country, but they were
unable to prevent citizens from becoming reporters in their own right.
From
cyberactivism to cyberwar
Using
the internet as a platform for political action is one thing. But infiltrating
and disrupting computer networks and databases takes cyberwar to another level.
American security experts have warned that a cyber-attack could cripple key
governmental and financial systems and it is a threat the US is taking
seriously.
"Cyberspace
is real. And so are the risks that come with it. From now on, our digital
infrastructure, the networks and computers we depend on every day, will be
treated as they should be, as a strategic national asset." Barack
Obama, the US president
In
recent years a cyberwar has been brewing between China and the US, with both
countries accusing each other of running an 'army of hackers'.
A
key battlefield in this war has been the case of Google.
The
US internet company partially withdrew from China in 2010 after a tussle with
the government over censorship and government-backed hacking.
China
accuses the US of using Google to spy on the country, while Google accuses
China of hacking into the email accounts of some of its members.
"We
must differentiate between independent hackers and those of the state. We must
understand that in some countries the authorities hire hackers with excellent
technical knowledge to serve their interests. Everything is possible and states
shouldn't accuse each other since all options are open in this war." Han,
a Chinese internet hacker
The
US also appears to be engaged in a cyberwar with another erstwhile enemy: Iran.
It
appeared to begin in 2009 following Iranian anti-government protests - sparked
by the disputed presidential elections which saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win
another term in office.
Seeking
to deprive the opposition of its main means of mobilising the masses, the
Iranian authorities sought to choke off internet access.
But
the protestors continued to use sites such as YouTube and Twitter and when
Twitter planned some routine maintenance that would have taken it offline for a
few hours, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, asked the site to stay
up and running while the protests continued.
Electronic
eyes and ears
In
the Middle East, Israel has set up a cyber command to secure the country
against hacking attacks on its key networks.
Israel's
immediate neighbourhood is the place where it puts into use much of its
technical know-how. Along its northern border with Lebanon, Israel deploys a
large network of electronic eyes and ears.
And
in the ongoing intelligence war between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah,
increasingly sophisticated electronic equipment is being used.
In
February 2010, Lebanon arrested a man who reportedly confessed to being a
Mossad agent. It was claimed that he had used sophisticated surveillance
equipment that sent signals to his Israeli handlers via a mobile phone and
computer located in a hidden compartment inside his car.
It
may all sound like science fiction, but a global spying network does exist that
can eavesdrop on every single phone call and email on the planet.
Eavesdropping
on phone calls and text messages has become increasing easy for those with the right
equipment, especially with the development of GSM networks - the technology
used on the vast majority of mobile phone networks around the world.
"Give
me your mobile phone for 30 seconds, give me 30 seconds alone with your mobile
phone and I can install software that would make your mobile phone a travelling
microphone. From that moment on, even if it is shut down, your mobile phone
will broadcast everything that goes on around you, through a number that I
determine."Alon
Ben David, military analyst for Israel's Channel 10
A
brave new world?
Many
analysts are amazed at how internet users voluntarily hand over vast amounts of
personal data to social media sites.
And
planting software into a person's phone or computer to steal data has become a
new tactic of warfare in the fifth dimension.
"Our
entire life is now on the internet: personal information, emails, credit cards.
We give all this information on the internet to sites like Facebook, Google and
Amazon. Governments impose pressure on these sites as they know how much
information they have. These governments have asked for personal information
from these sites, and they gave them what they needed."
The
internet is touted as one of the most important inventions in the history of
modern man, and like the discovery of the atom, its ability to benefit mankind
is matched only by its potential to unleash massive destruction.
Web
Warriors is a one-hour documentary that offers an unprecedented glimpse into
the world's newest and most vulnerable frontier: cyberspace. This
CBC documentary explores the world of cyber warfare. It talks about how the
Internet has evolved to become a heaven for crooks and criminals who are now
stealing people's money and identity online using trojans, worms and viruses.
Once of the main characters isMafia
Boy, a 15 year old high school student who launched a Distributed Denial of
Service Attack on Yahoo!, Ebay, CNN and Dell. He was finally caught after
bragging too much about it on online forums. Also, the author traces the
evolution of worms and viruses and how they have evolved from just pranks to
organized crime.
Hackers like Donnie is interviewed who goes on a journey into the Russian cyber
underground as he searches for the creators of a computer virus with the hopes
of collecting the $250,000 bounty being offered by Microsoft.
Just
as in nature, computer viruses have rapidly evolved and now have the ability to
control millions of computers unbeknownst to their owners, thereby creating
massive illegal computer networks known as "Botnets".
These
"Botnets" are being put to a variety of illicit uses including
identity theft and cyber extortion, but they are also the latest and most
potent weapon being deployed in military conflicts. Web Warriors dissects the
massive cyber attack against Estonia in 2007 which virtually shut down the country
and resulted in NATO deploying its cyber response team.
Web
Warriors offers rare interviews with cyber sleuths from the FBI, the Pentagon,
NATO, and the Department of Homeland Security who explain how cyberspace has
become the latest battle ground between nation states and how terrorist groups
are already plotting their next move.
Web
Warriors offers a fast-paced never-seen before glimpse into the cyber trenches
of a world wide battle. Some reports say the cost of cyber crime is now on par
with the illegal drug trade.
Web
Warriors was produced by Edward Peill for Tell Tale Productions Inc.
Stuxnet: An
Effective Cyberwar Weapon
In
2010, Iran reported that as many as 1,000 of its centrifuges at the Natanz
nuclear facility, used for enriching weapons-grade uranium, were destroyed by a
computer virus. The virus allegedly wrecked the electric motors by accelerating
them to damaging speeds and setting back the Iranian nuclear program for at
least two years. Iran blamed the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies for the
attack.
According
to the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, the
weapon used for the attack was probably a virus called Stuxnet. But unlike
other computer viruses, Stuxnet is designed to attack only networks with
specific configurations.
Stuxnet
is a type of computer program called a "worm" that can be inserted
into a computer or a network of computers, where it replicates itself infecting
other machines. Once inside a computer, a worm can corrupt or damage files, causing
malfunction of programs.
Stuxnet
is designed to attack computers with Microsoft Windows operating systems, and
it can be most easily inserted through infected removable drives - pocket-size
memory banks that connect to standard USB ports.
After
the damage is done, Stuxnet is designed to self-destruct so it is very hard to
trace. According to experts studying Stuxnet, it is a very complex program and
only government agencies are capable of designing it.
Technological
evolution is the name of a science and technology studies theory describing
technology development, developed by Czech philosopher Radovan Richta.
Hollywood
is a district in Los Angeles, California, famous for its commercial area and
entertainment industry, and a name used to represent the motion picture
industry of the United States. Let us see how and why technological evolution happened in Hollywood.
Media
audiences are changing. The dynamics of how audiences consume (and now, even produce)
media are changing, as are the ways that media industries make sense of, and
define, their audiences. New technologies are at the heart of all of these
changes. New media technologies that
give audiences increased control and increased choice over when, where, and how
they consume media are transforming the relationship between audiences and the
media. At the same time, new technologies for measuring and monitoring audience
behavior are revealing aspects of how and why audiences consume media that
previously were unknown. These technological changes are
compelling media industries to think differently about their audiences,
undermining traditional conceptual and analytic approaches, while at the same
time opening up new dimensions for conceptualizing audiences. Thus, while in
some ways audiences are becoming more elusive and more unpredictable, in other
ways, new systems of measuring media audiences, of gathering feedback from
them, and of anticipating their tastes and preferences, are making it possible
for media industries to fundamentally redefine what media audiences mean to
them and how they factor into the economics and strategy of their businesses.
George
Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American film producer,
screenwriter, director, and entrepreneur.
Steven Allan Spielberg is an American film director, screenwriter,
producer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades,
Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres.
At a talk at USC, the pair agreed that it’s on track to have a
“massive implosion”. At the core of their argument: there just isn’t enough
time in the day for consumers to support all the films released in theaters.
Films are competing with all the content and options that the Internet
provides.
Studios
in Hollywood are the equivalent of venture capital firms of Silicon Valley.
They live and die on the home runs. Each movie could be thought of as a start up.
It all starts with an idea and grows into a team that creates and releases some
piece of content out into the world where it’s loved or hated. When loved, you
get Christopher Nolan’s Batman, and when it’s hated, you get any Ben Affleck
movie from 2000 – 2010.
The
summer is filled with the biggest bets. The cost to produce and market a single
film these days can balloon to over $300 million. The studios need a film to
pull in nearly a billion in box office revenue, the same on DVD and have a
good, multi-year sale to television for it to be considered a success. Sprinkle
in some airplane viewing rights and that’s a win for them.
Lucas
and Spielberg don’t think that’s a sustainable model. Soon, a couple of those
megabudget films are going to nosedive, and everything will change.
They suggest the marketplace will contract because there
isn’t enough time in the week for us to go to the movies anymore. With Netflix
producing top quality content, and video games cutting into weekends, it leaves
little room for date night out at the Cineplex. It’s getting so bad that Lucas
complains about how hard it is even forhimto get afilmin a theater.
This should probably make producers of films nervous.
The duo says that the studios will be forced to
reevaluate how to distribute films. Perhaps a film like Lincolnwill
cost less to see than, sayIron Man? Or perhaps,
we don’t even get movies likeLincolnin
theaters anymore. They will come straight to our homes. And actually going to
the theater? It’s going to change to a model where a movie will cost $50+, but
it’ll become a higher end experience with movies staying in the theater for a
year or more. Or, just don’t make shitty films.
For over a decade, the films that can’t find an audience
in the theater have found their niche on the internet where they can be marketed
and sold on iTunes to those who will love them. Companies like Netflix and Hulu
are able to focus on these niches and program specifically for them, for much
cheaper than the $300 million it cost to release a summer film.
That translates to these Internet companies being able
to take bigger risks on content, similar to HBO’s model. And technology
winning
In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich
proposes five “principles of new media”—to be understood “not as absolute laws
but rather as general tendencies of a culture undergoing computerization.” The
five principles are numerical representation, modularity, automation,
variability,and transcoding.
1. Numerical
representation: new media objects exist as data
Because all new media objects are composed of digital code, they
are essentially numerical representations. That is, all new media objects can
be described mathematically and can be manipulated via algorithms. According to
Manovich, the key difference between old and new media is that new media is
programmable. The closest we can get to the ‘materiality’ of a new media object
is to talk about the numbers and formulas that constitute it. In new media
compositions, the opposition between visual and verbal is bridged in the sense
that both are code—both image and text are programmed and programmable.
2. Modularity: the different elements of new media exist independently
Pixels, images, text, sounds,
frames, code—independent elements like these combine to form a new media
object. These elements can be independently modified and reused in other works.
The modularity of new media is related to the modular character of structural
computer programming.
3. Automation: new media objects
can be created and modified automatically
Automation is seen in computer programs that allow
users to create or modify media objects using templates or algorithms.
4. Variability: new
media objects exist in multiple versions Different versions of same programmes is usable
in all programmes. Manovich writes, “a new media object is not
something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different,
potentially infinite versions” For Eg. Documents can be read in all versions of adobe reader i.e. Adobe 7,8,9. But the reading experience in each case differs. Adobe Version 7 and 8 has fewer features than Adobe 9.
5. Transcoding: a new media object can be
converted into another format
Transcoding refers to the translation of a new
media object from one format to another (for example, text to sound) or the
adaptation of new media for display on different devices. Broadly, transcoding
designates the ways in which media and culture are being reshaped and transformed
by the logic of the computer. The computerization of culture is a process of
transcoding, as “cultural categories or concepts are substituted, on the level
of meaning and language, by new ones that derive from the computers
ontology, epistemology, and pragmatics”
The history of internet is simplified and explained in the above video.
While
computers were not a new concept in the 1950s, there were relatively few
computers in existence and the field of computer science was still in its
infancy. Most of the advances in technology at the time - cryptography, radar,
battlefield communications - were due to military operations during World War
II, and it was, in fact, government activities that led to the development of
the Internet.
On
October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, man's first foray into outer
space, and the U.S. government under President Eisenhower subsequently launched
an aggressive military campaign to compete with and surpass the Soviet
activities. From the launch of Sputnik and the U.S.S.R. testing its first
intercontinental ballistic missile, the Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA) was born. ARPA was the U.S. government's research agency for all space
and strategic missile research. In 1958, NASA was formed, and the activities of
ARPA moved away from aeronautics and focused mainly on computer science and
information processing. One of ARPA's goals was to connect mainframe computers
at different universities around the country so that they would be able to
communicate using a common language and a common protocol. Thus the ARPAnet --
the world's first multiple-site computer network -- was created in 1969.
The
original ARPAnet eventually grew into the Internet. The Internet was based on
the concept that there would be multiple independent networks that began with
the ARPAnet as the pioneering packet-switching network but would soon include
packet satellite networks and ground-based packet radio networks.
A
brief timeline highlighted below mentions some of the major occurrences over
the past 49 years that have shaped the Internet of today.
1958 President Eisenhower requests funds to create ARPA. Approved as
a line item in Air Force appropriations bill.
1961 Len Kleinrock, Professor of Computer Science at UCLA, writes
first paper on packet switching, "Information Flow in Large Communications
Nets." Paper published in RLE Quarterly Progress Report.
1962 J.C.R. Licklider & W. Clark write first paper on Internet
Concept, "On-Line Man Computer Communications."
Len Kleinrock writes
Communication Nets, which describes design for packet switching network; used
for ARPAnet
1964 Paul Baran writes, "On Distributed Communications
Networks," first paper on using message blocks to send info across a
decentralized networktopology(Nodes and Links)
Oct.
1965 First Network Experiment: Directed by
Larry Roberts at MIT Lincoln Lab, two computers talked to each other using
packet-switching technology.
Dec. 1966 ARPA project begins. Larry Roberts is chief scientist.
Dec. 1968 Arpanet contract given to Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) in
Cambridge, Mass.
Sept.
1, 1969 First ARPANet node installed at UCLA Network
Measurement Center. Kleinrock hooked up the Interface Message Processor to a
Sigma 7 Computer.
Oct.
1, 1969 Second node installed at Stanford Research
Institute; connected to a SDS 940 computer. The first ARPANet message sent:
"lo." Trying to spell log-in, but the system crashed!
Nov.
1, 1969 Third node installed at University of
California, Santa Barbara. Connected to an IBM 360/75.
Dec. 1, 1969 Fourth node installed at University of Utah. Connected to a DEC
PDP-10.
March 1970 Fifth node installed at BBN, across the country in Cambridge,
Mass.
July 1970 Alohanet, first packet radio network, operational at
University of Hawaii.
March
1972 First basic e-mail programs written by Ray
Tomlinson at BBN for ARPANET: SNDMSG and READMAIL. "@" sign chosen
for its "at" meaning.
March
1973 First ARPANET international connections to
University College of London (England) and NORSAR (Norway).
1974 Intelreleases the 8080
processor.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish
"A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," which details the
design of TCP.
1976 Apple Computer founded by Steve
Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
Queen Elizabeth II sends out an
e-mail.
Vint Cerf joins ARPA as program
manager.
1978 TCP split into TCP and IP.
1979 Bob Metcalfe and others found 3Com (Computer Communication
Compatibility).
1980 Tim Berners-Lee writes program called "Enquire
Within," predecessor to the World Wide Web.
1981 . IBM announces its first Personal Computer. Microsoft creates
DOS.
1983 . Cisco Systems founded.
Nov. 1983 . Domain Name System (DNS) designed by Jon Postel, Paul
Mockapetris, and Craig Partridge. .edu, .gov, .com,
.mil, .org, .net, and .int created.
1984 • William Gibson writes "Neuromancer." Coins the term
"cyberspace".
• Apple Computer introduces the
Macintosh on January 24th.
March 15, 1985 . Symbolic.com becomes the first registered domain.
1986 . 5000 hosts on ARPAnet/Internet.
1987 • 10,000 hosts on the Internet.
• First Cisco routershipped.
• 25 million PCs sold in US.
1989 • 100,000 hosts on Internet.
• McAfee Associates founded;
anti-virus software available for free. Quantum becomes America Online.
1990 . ARPAnet ends. Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web.
1992 "Surfing the Internet" is coined by Jean Armour Polly.
1993 . Mosaic Web browser developed by Marc Andreesen at University
of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.
. InterNICcreated.
• Web grows by 341,000 percent
in a year.
April 1994 . Netscape Communications founded.
• Jeff Bezos writes the
business plan for Amazon.com.
. Java's first public
demonstration.
Dec.
1994 Microsoft licenses technology from
Spyglass to create Web browser for Windows 95.
May 23, 1995 . Sun Microsystems releases Java.
August 24, 1995 . Windows 95 released.
1996 . Domain name tv.com sold to CNET for $15,000. Browser wars
begin. Netscape and Microsoft two biggest players.
1997 . business.com sold for $150,000.
January
1998 . Microsoft reaches a partial settlement with
the Justice Department that allows personal computer makers to remove or hide
its Internet software on new versions of Windows 95.
. Netscape announces plans to
give its browser away for free.
1998 US Depart of Commerce outlines proposal to privatize DNS. ICANN
created by Jon Postel to oversee privatization. Jon Postel dies.
1999 •AOL buys Netscape; Andreesen steps down as full-time employee.
• Browsers wars declared over;
Netscape and Microsoft share almost 100% of browser market.
• Microsoft declared a monopoly
by US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.
•Shawn Fanning creates Napster,
opening the possibilities of peer-to-peer file sharing and igniting a copyright
war in the music industry.
2000 . Fixed wireless, high-speed Internet technology is now seen as a
viable alternative to copper and fiber optic lines placed in the ground.
. The Dot-Com Bubble bursts. A
majority of the dot-coms ceased trading after burning through their venture
capital, often without ever making a net profit.
January
10, 2000 • AOL Merges with Time-Warner. AOL
shareholders take 55% stake in newly formed company.
February
2000 . A large-scale denial of service
attack is launched against some major Web sites like Yahoo! and eBay, alerting
Web sites to the need for tighter security measures.
. 10,000,000 domain names have
been registered.
September
2000 There are 20,000,000 websites on the
Internet, numbers doubling since February 2000.
July
2001 A federal judge rules that Napster must
remain offline until it can prevent copyrighted material from being shared by
its users.
The Code Red worm and Sircam
virus infiltrate thousands of web servers and email accounts, respectively,
causing a spike in Internet bandwidth usage and security breaches.
November
2001 The European Council adopts the first
treaty addressing criminal offenses committed over the Internet.
First uncompressed real-time
gigabit HDTV transmission across a wide-area IP network takes place on
Internet2.
January 2002 name
begins resolving
January
2003 The SQL Slammer worm causes one of the largest
and fastest spreading DDoS attacks ever, taking only 10 minutes to spread
worldwide.
The Internet celebrates its
'unofficial' 20th birthday.
September
2003 The RIAA sues 261 individuals for
allegedly distributing copyright music files over peer-to-peer networks
December
2003 The Research project "How much
information 2003" finds that Instant messaging generates five billion
messages a day (750GB), or 274 Terabytes a year and that e-mail generates about
400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide.
2005 YouTube.com launches
2006 There are an estimated 92 million Web sites online
May
2006 . A massive DDOS assault on Blue Security,
an anti-spam company, is redirected by Blue Security staff to their Movable
Type-hosted blog. The result is that the DDOS instead knocks out all access to
over 1.8 million active blogs.
August
2006 . AOL announces that they will give for free
virtually every service for which it charged a monthly fee, with income coming
instead from advertising.
October
2006 There are an estimated 92 million Web sites
online (some stats say over 100 million)
Google Inc. acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion
in a stock-for-stock transaction.
January 2007 . Microsoft launches its
various consumer versions of Microsoft Vista.
February 2007 . Apple surpasses one billion iTunes downloads.
March 2007 . 1.114 billion people
use the Internet according to Internet World Stats.
April 2007 .
Search engine giant Google surpasses Microsoft as "the most valuable
global brand," and also is the most visited Web
