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Week Ten

Week Ten  Hello all,  This week it's onto the relationship between producer and consumer. This is very relevant as of this moment in which you reader, are reading this piece of writing which I have produced. Neither action would be verified or possible without the other. So let's delve into the idea that the internet has galvanised a world in which the dynamic between consumption and production is being blurred and altered at a great speed.  In collaborative communities the creation of shared content takes place in a networked, participatory environment which breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as well as producers of information and knowledge.  Produsers engage not in a traditional form of content production, but are instead involved in  produsage  -  the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement . Participants in such activities are not p
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Week Eleven

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Week Eleven This week was very interesting as we delved into the topic of the anthropocene. I knew the basic definition of this word beforehand, but I had yet to learn the manifold complexities of this topical issue. Here I have included some fascinating facts and figures for you all! On a 4.6 billion year old earth, us humans have been present for 200,000 years, and in that time have altered 50 percent of it's land and changed our atmosphere drastically.  In fact the atmosphere is currently being affected by both the emissions from the beginning of the industrial revolution and the emissions since that time and this buildup will last for tens of thousands of years. Half of the world's population has moved to urban areas so it doesn't seem likely that these emissions are going to cease anytime soon. Some cities are taking action though. Edinburgh is planning to hold a transport free day once a month in which no vehicles will be allowed to travel on the road. Since Pau
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Group Update

Hi everyone,  Just wanted to update you all on the group project we've been working on. We've held a few meeting now which at one stage I thought would never happen. For a long time, I had only been able to contact one member of the group-very friendly and we got along well but it was a slow beginning. After deciding our theme and what roles we might play we decided to wait until we had our full group together before moving ahead. A little while later we were informed we had a new member to the group and finally we could beginning planning!  We decided to work on the theme of automation, and what that means for creativity. We were going to explore the roles technology might play in human evolution, for better or worse. This changed however when we decided that in fact, this didn't totally meet the brief and we could perhaps choose a topic more in line with what we were being asked about.  So back to the drawing board! After some discussion and rereading of the brief and
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Week Eight

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'Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive'  That's a very powerful quote I took from this week's class in which we read Ursula Le Guin's short story, Omelas. Ursula Le Guin is a well known-though previously unknown to me- American anthropologist and writer. Her speciality was science fiction, and she was renowned for breaking new ground with her ontological writing.  Ursula Le Guin This story, Omelas, is really powerful . It depicts the world of the inhabitants of an idyllic seaside town full of happiness and fulfillment. This fulfillment however, is hinged on the shared knowledge of a child who must suffer indefinitely for the town. This child knew happiness, but is now locked away underground, given sparse food and left to rot. Every member of the town must visit the child, and  those who do are horrified, but mostly go on to enjoy their lives and put the child out
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Week Seven

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Hi everyone!  Hope you're all well and enjoying Spring wherever you are.  This week we had a really exciting week in class as we had the privilege to meet with group in Second Life called  Virtual Ability.  First off this is some information provided from their website that I found helpful in getting to know them, so you might too: 'We are a cross-disability peer support community of nearly 1,000 members from 6 continents. That means our members who have disabilities may have a physical disability, a mental or emotional or developmental disability, or a sensory disability (deafness or blindness). About ¼ of our members do not (yet!) have disabilities.  Our community has been in Second Life for over 7 years, and we won the first Linden Prize for a project that has “a tangible impact on the real world.” We are supported by an RL nonprofit, Virtual Ability, Inc. Our community assists people with all kinds of disabilities to enter and thrive in virtual worlds like Se
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Week Six

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Hey guys, hope you're all well. I've been under the weather this week, believe it or not vampires can get colds too! Being bed bound however I have been doing some interesting research into various topics and found our theme for class to be a good way to spend some time researching. So this week we had some really interesting topics raised that revolved around consciousness and the self. I would like to focus primarily on two men who discuss these topics very articulately and raised some interesting points. The first is David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher who's tedTalk proposed various existing, theoretical ideas on consciousness.  He began by stating; without consciousness nothing in our lives would have meaning or value. This I know to be true from a first person perspective but I don't know how effectively it leads into the rest of his speech which is much broader than that. He states that consciousness is an anomaly we need to fit into our world view.
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Week Five

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Week Five Hi all, welcome back! This week we had a really interesting discussion of Marshall Macluhan's work. He was a Canadian philosopher who had a strong ontological understanding of how mans creations have shaped man. He is quoted a saying'We shape our tools and in turn our tools shape us'. This is a very interesting topic to me as we now exist in a society that funds itself by creating ever new products to sell, often with no longevity or need apart from their ability to make money. Another phrase Macluhan is noted for coining  is 'The medium is the message'. This is a deliberately paradoxical statement meaning what has been communicated throughout history has been less important than the medium used to communicate it.  For example, Macluhan believed the print culture puts an emphasis on the visual whereas in oral tradition of communication placed emphasis on the ear. This was something we discussed in class and found that it is easier perhaps to
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