Digital with Culture

There’s a difference with viewing culture on a computer or tablet screen and actually experiencing culture in person and partaking in it. Also it is a statement about the person and their social standing. In his article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Benjamin talks about the Aura of the piece.…

Safety vs Privacy

In the article by Preston C. Russett he talks about the way in which the digital world today invades on the privacy of the individual. He says that through the use of our profile and online identity advertisers gleam an understanding of who the individual is through email and other online activities of their targeted…

Knowledge is Power

In his article The archive and the processor: The internal logic of Power Robert Gehl talks about the immediacy of Web 2.0 and the archive of the sites the addictiveness. How the users inability to view their archive provides a “totalitarian regime” in the sites. In the article Sherry Turkle argues. We live a contradiction:…

Copyright and The Pirate Bay

I remember lime wire where the user would search for the music and could download it onto iTunes. It was beautiful because for the first time the music was for “free” you did not have to pay for the CD or the CD players where a person would spend lots of money versus an iPod…

Social Networking and Twitter for Czech Politics

As I think about the current situation in Czech Politics my mind goes to the Velvet Revolution and the fact that back then the students who started it all had great contact with each other and communication. In relation to how today’s youth communicate through social networks, the face to face interaction is lost but…

YouTube User

In his article, The institutionalization of YouTube: From user-generated content to professionally generated content, Jin Kim talks about the way YouTube has effected older media networks like ABC, NBC, Warner Music Group, and Disney. Interestingly he mentions that YouTube has not totally removed the older media networks but rather that from it´s creation they have…

Gesture vs Digital Interfaces

The use of gestures for us as humans is a big part of how we communicate with other people. Hand gestures help articulate what we are talking about, Mussolini was the most famous for his grand gestures when addressing large crowds. Facial gestures convey emotions without having to say what we are feeling. Since digital…

Fantasy Online and Race

Tanner Higgin in his article “Blackless Fantasy The disappearance of Race in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games” he talks about how the representation of a black avatar in the MMORPG’S is non existent and focus on the white characters. As well as the preconceptions about black masculinity and the fact that it is not something…

The Missing Gender

In the paper by S. Craig Watkins he talks about the way in which video games educate the kids that play them about race and race culture in the society. He argues that video games can be an effective tool for learning but that they expose the users to “popular view of urban culture” along…