Liquid Life, Convergence Culture, and Media Work

Let me guess, while you’re reading my blog post, is your phone just right around you where you can just grab it easily? 

Undeniable, in this digital era, technology has a strong impact on both work and home life. It is very interesting when we always think that smartphones are one of our entertainment but it actually increase the level of stress in individuals. The functions of e-mail actually makes the workers today ‘always available’.

Networks are being more powerful. It has multiple characters that permeating every aspect of our life. The workers today can now bring office wherever they go and so extended their working hour than the traditional business. This will eventually interrupt the family leisure time. Network, is online labour that presented. 

“As work becomes a way of life, life increasingly displays all the characteristics of contemporary work, where we have to come to terms with the challenges and opportunities of contingent employment, precarious labour, and a structural sense of real or perceived job insecurity.” (Deuze, 2006).

 

One of my personal experience with having myself continuously checking my work emails and calls that it damages relationships with my family as I can’t have my leisure time with my family even is our of my working hours. That’s the phenomena when work can be done not only in traditional workplace but everywhere you go. It just blurred the line between work and leisure time. 

A very good example in a TED talk by Sherry Turkle, ‘Connexted, but alone?’ which commented on the audiences in this digital era, and their changing of attitudes of spatial experience. Turkle believes that the human relationships are now getting worst through technology which I agreed. The shift from work centered instead of home centered lifestyle within liquid modern societies is becoming like a boom in human relationship now.

 

References:

Deuze, M, 2006, Liquid life, Convergence Culture and Media Work, accessed 28/08/2014, https://moodle.uowplatform.edu.au/pluginfile.php/279934/mod_resource/content/1/Deuze%2C%20M.%20-%20Liquid%20Life.pdf

TED 2012, Sherry Turkle: Connected, but alone?, accessed 28/08/2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Xr3AsBEK4

 

  

 

It belongs to NO ONE

The world today is connected by the internet. Through internet, information and thoughts are shared in all the social media. It can be in the form of tweet, a video, a status or even a document. However in this digital era, an individual’s actions can always lead to a global implications. 

So the question here is, who owns the internet? Government? Online activism? or not at all? 

Cyberlibertarianism, is a term where we discuss a lot when we talk about online. According to Goldsborough (2000), cyberlibertarianism came out to advocate believe in freedom from interference by government and other institutions. They want to surf and speak unfettered, and they extol the mantra “Information wants to be free”. The idea of freedom of expression without censoring or limitations in internet was nicely shown by Barlow (1996) where it says that “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.” But does all this come true and happening? For the most part, however, these questions are not yet even being asked. 

The sharing and publication of the thoughts, experiences and stories through digital networks can easily lead to online activism and get charge. There’s this example of case happened in Malaysia where a former bank employee was charged with posting obscene blog title to embarrass his former boss back in 2007. 

As what Castells mentioned, networks know no boundaries. It will be interesting to see when will the government stop in an interconnected world. Let’s come together and embrace these challenges. Let’s change the future! 

 

References:

Barlow, J P 1996, ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’,https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

Bernama n.d., “Bank Employee Charged With Posting Obscene Blog Title”, accessed 20/8/2014, http://www.bernama.com/finance/news.php?id=423326

Castells, M. (2004) ‘Afterword: why networks matter’. In Network Logic: Who governs in an interconnected
world? (pp. 221-224) http://www.demos.co.uk/files/networklogic.pdf

Reid, G 2000, “Internet Philosophies”, http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/docview/215546580?pq-origsite=summon

 

 

 

Back to the Olden Days

As the world became bombarded with information and current news sending independently from materiality, we then saw the emergence of technology and systems such as the telegraph or telephone which has the ability to coordinate the movements of goods, and also having control over operation, over long distances. Also in the same time it decouple information and things which is something makes communication different because it used to come in materials format like letter.

Before this, to control people information have to be one side, now , the information has become from anywhere, to control millions of people from 10 thousand miles away from the place.

And when we talk about today’s world. We have Internet. The faster and convenience way for us to get information compared to telegraph in those days. Then, information doesn’t come with the materials anymore, it comes with the code, until today we have instant messaging. Internet is basically a hyper version of telegraph system. People can follow events in real time and the stock market. Using telegraph machine to send information which gives the rise of sports to public interest. Weather reports appears.

 

When I was young, we doesn’t have any WiFi, Unifi or even Streamyx kind of thing, we used to online through dial up from our house phone line.

Remember the Dial-up noise when u connected to the internet? And if you went and picked up the telephone this sound would probably blow out your eardrums and then having to start all over again sometimes if it get disconnected. My mom used to yell at me like this:”HEY GET OFF THE COMPUTER! I NEED TO USE THE PHONE!” 😀 This is something that the kids nowadays will never hear and understand.

Today, the internet is changed a lot in terms of speed, accessibility and much more. It is always too fast for the truth, it is too fast to spread a news in just a minute to be up in all the social media like Facebook or Twitter. We are now connected still, but in a different and faster way.

References:

Sterling, B. (1993) ‘A Short History of the Internet’ File History of the Internet’ accessed 12 August 2014.https://moodle.uowplatform.edu.au/pluginfile.php/245647/mod_resource/content/1/Sterling%2C%20B.%20-%20A%20Short%20History%20of%20the%20Internet.pdf

Willterminus, 2008, The Sound of dial-up Internet, (online video), November 9 2008, viewed August 12 2014.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0