Persuaders

I think that overall we are exposed to advertising a lot. On a daily basis we probably see thousands of advertisements and I think this can be a little overwhelming. I think that for some people this results in confusion. But massive advertising is also a good thing because it presents consumers with a lot of choices and the competition between companies for brand loyalty encourages the manufacturing of higher quality products. There is a huge difference in the amount of advertising we see today and what was around 20 years ago, especially because of the internet. I think this has increased materialism in our society to some degree. With so many new products constantly coming out and greater awareness of them because of advertising people want more and are constantly buying new and improved technologies, new styles of clothing every season,trying to keep up with the latest trends. A good example of this is with Apple iPods. Apple comes out with new and updated versions all the time and people buy them to keep up with what is new. In this way apple has catered to many people's needs with the different iPod products. There's the shuffle for people who don't need a lot of music but need it to be very portable, different memory sizes depending on the needs of the consumer, colors, and now even touch screen and applications.

Digital Nation Part 2

After further viewing of the Frontline documentary "Digital Nation" I was even more surprised about how far technology has come and the way it is affecting lives. One of the most shocking parts was about the United State's use of aircraft drones. I had no idea about this before watching this documentary. I think that in a way its a great invention because it prevents American casualties and they can fly under radar. However, I think this depersonalizes war to a great degree. For people who are controlling the drones, they don't see first-hand the devastation it can cause so for them it becomes more of a game and makes it a lot easier to kill and destroy. From this video I think I've learned a lot more about technology, and while it can greatly facilitate life and give us a lot of new opportunities and more efficiency as a society, it can also be poisonous in that it causes, at least to some degree, a disconnect between people and society, people and their families, and can be very isolating and desensitizing.

Frontline: Digital Nation

The Frontline documentary about our "Virtual Frontier," provided a very interesting look into how the digital revolution is changing our lives. It is amazing to see how reliant we have become on digital media and its many functions. I found the section about the students in China especially fascinating. From a young age they are taught about safe internet use, and how the internet is their friend. Also, the segment about MIT students and they're ability to multitask really caught my attention. I was not surprised to find out that they were less able to focus and be successful on a single task and they actually turned out not to be very adept at multitasking at all.
This documentary so far has really opened my eyes to the degree to which people are addicted to digital media. We need constant stimulation from cell phones, computers, the internet, PDAs, iPods, etc. to keep us from becoming bored or idle. It's a little scary to see how the addiction is impeding our ability to interact on a personal level and is even affecting families like the story at the beginning of the documentary where every member of the family was sitting at the table together yet engaged in different worlds.

Definitions

User-generated content- Various types of media content, publicly viewable, created by any end-user

Long Tail- Retailing concept used to describe the process of selling a large number of unique items in small quantities usually in addition to selling a few popular items in large qualities

Web operating system- Used to describe network services for internet scale distributed computing

Folksonomy- A system of classification derived from collaboratively creating and managing tags in order to annotate and categorize content.

Web syndication- Form of syndication in which website material is made available to multiple other sites.

Mass Collaboration- Form of collective action that occurs when large numbers of people individuals work collectively on a product

Computer-supported collaboration- Focuses on technology that affects groups, organizations, communities, and society.

Social Software- A range of software systems that allow users to interact and share data.

Web Application- Application that is accessed via a web browser over a network such as the internet or intranet.

Hosted Services- Delivers a combination of traditional functions such as infrastructure, applications, security, monitoring etc over the internet or other wired area networks

Blog- Type of website usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, depictions of events, graphics videos, etc.

Video-sharing- Allows individuals to upload video clips to an internet site, then the video is stored on the server

Wiki- A website that allows easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked pages via a web browser

Mashup- digital media content containing any texts, graphics, audio, video, and animation taken from pre-existing sources to create a new derrivative work.