Campaign Project - Citizen journalism

The aim of our project was to create a short campaign video illustrating how easy it is for anybody to film, edit and post a video addressing anything.

We chose our campaign to be about the current health issue rising in the United Kingdom, trying to promote being active and taking a different approach to get our view across. Generally, the majority of health campaign videos such as 'Anti-Smoking', 'Binge Drinking' are created to make the audience feel guilty. For our video, we felt that giving the project a light hearted and humourous feel hasn't really been done and could be much more effective than the 'Guilt Campaign'.

Looking over youtube, there are tons of campaign videos which are simple, effective and have been filmed using a variety of equipment; which is most commonly a camera phone. For our video, we used a flip camera and filmed myself explaining the point of the video. This took us 25minutes. I then ripped my dvd of Dodgeball onto my USB, and downloaded some music and using finalcut pro edited the video. Within 4hours I had a finished campaign video and had uploaded it onto youtube.

This shows how revolutionary Web 2.0 is, and how easy it is for the general public to post videos and other things onto the internet to either inform, entertain or enlighten others. This follows on what Lovink, G writes about in his article about 'The colonization of real-time'; "Web 2.0 has three distinguishing features: it is easy to use; it facilitates the social element; and users can upload their own content in whatever form, be it pictures, videos or text. It is all about providing users with free publishing and production platforms". This just shows the development of citizen journalism, and how we can be apart of the source.

Health Campaign Project

CopyRight Reform

We were given an option of essay questions to pick for our latest assignment, I decided to pick the essay question about Copyright reform. During my research, I read in John Alderman's book ‘Sonic Boom – Napster, P2P and the Battle for the Future of Music’ some interesting stuff about Napster. Now, when Napster was around I was too young to use it and at the time I had never heard about it as I was 9 and busy laughing at my feet (I don't know why I found them amusing, but it would kill several hours of my day). 


Here is an extract taken from my essay, these two paragraphs are explaining the rise of Napster and the change within the record industry: 

In the late 1990’s a peer-to-peer file sharing service was created called ‘Napster’. This service allowed users to share their MP3 files with other users easily, avoiding the market for receiving songs and most importantly it was all free. As Napster was user friendly, the popularity grew. By mid-2000, Napster had around 500,000 people using it every night, a third of the number that typically used AOL at any given time (Alderman, 2001). Songs and artists were rediscovered by listeners (Alderman, 2001) as many users would share files of classic songs to people who may only have the song on record or cassette. What understandably drove the labels, as well as many artists, crazy was that there was no mechanism in place for them to get paid for this frenzied consumption of music that they either created or held the rights to (Alderman, 2001). Napster was able to do what it did because the internet made it possible for the creator Shawn Fanning. It is bad for the music industry as they would be losing money because their songs are being transferred for free, thus making them lose out in potential buyers, however file sharing benefits the public because it is free and avoids consumerism.

As Napster was spreading with college students, it was clear that baby steps weren’t working for the record industry (Alderman, 2001). So each major label commenced efforts to reach out to consumers online, not just as experiments in community or fan sites, but in actual distribution of their prized catalogues, the music that was the base of each company’s profits (Alderman, 2001). Clearly the music industry recognised that they were missing out in a whole new market, as most consumers want the latest news and entertainment as soon as possible moving onto the Internet was the best move. Companies such as Bertelsmann purchased the failing CDNow service, which had tried to be the Amazon.com of CDs, while also joining with Universal to create GetMusic, another online distributor (Alderman, 2001). Other major companies, such as EMI began talks with Liquid Audio to digitize a chunk of albums (Alderman, 2001). Slowly, action took place and the momentum was there for a big industry move into a workable position online (Alderman, 2001). However large the move was for the music industry, Napster beat them to it and because they were so far a head they had an extremely large fan base, not to mention file sharing will always be popular as it is free.

The problem with the music industry was that they wanted to replace the CD format as it lacked copy protection and was so easy to burn a disc, at a very low cost, and potentially make hundreds of copies to sell. BGM tried to find a solution and partnered up with an Israeli firm Midbar to release two albums using its Cactus Data shield technology, which prevented owners of the CDs from copying them with burners (Alderman, 2001). 100,000 discs were released in this new format, however, the problem of compatibility meant that they received a high rate of return. Thus resulting in the cancellation of this experiment and replacing the returns with non protected disks (Alderman, 2001). These experiments were a great chance for the music industry to try and tackle the problem of people copying CDs and sharing files across the internet, however, as personal computers have the capability to rip CDs, store them on their memory and play it back; most people will want to use this aspect of their computer. So taking away the chance to put music from our CD onto our computers would not make people buy CDs as MP3 files were growing in popularity.

In the United States, MP3 files were growing vastly popular with devoted and enthusiastic users making Napster a very big hit. Free file sharing was growing at an exponential speed, and it wasn’t too long before a record label or artist would challenge the legality of Shawn Fanning’s creation.

Psychogeographical Project (Group Work)

View Trip To High Cross, Whilst playing the 'Do you know them' game. in a larger map 


We played a game called, 'Do you know them?' This involves you to ask your opponent a series of question relating to how they know a random person you've pointed out in the public.

The Theory:
I've taken a theory from Guy Debord's book 'Bureau of Public Secrets'; "One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive,(1) a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones." So in summary, he is saying that every individual gives their own meaning and emotion to what architecture they see around them.

With our project, we decided to take photos which fits in with our game but at the same time encompasses Debords theory and shows specific land marks, so we know where we were. This will then help us mark ourselves down on google maps, which was used on my phone. This is what we did:

What my group and I decided to do was to create a route using Google Maps, and take a SLR digital camera with us and take photos of random people and play the questions game (explained below) and following the rules. The Map above shows the route, and the people with the questions and answers if you hover over the marked icons with your cursor. We played the game until we reached high cross, and decided to continue the game in high cross only to be told that we were not allowed to take any photographs inside. We were also told that any photos that were taken inside are to be posted on the web, we would then get into trouble. So we didn't add any photos from inside high cross, which is a shame because they were hilarious.

Rules for 'The Random Questions Game:
1. Question 1 must me 'Do you know them' and your opponent must answer 'Yes.'

2. Question 2 must be 'What's his/her name?'

3. Then you can ask a series of questions which help justify if your opponent does 'know' them.

To gain a point, your opponent must not hesitate or take too long to answer.
Once you have asked one question, it will be your opponents turn to ask one and then it will switch back to you.

Final Rule:
You must make sure you swap genders each go. So you will be asked questions about a male, then female then male ect.

Copyright: Where to draw the line?

Reading up on Why I Copyright by Cory Doctorow, I agree with his general point that the law needs to change and adapt with our current times. As technology is improving at a fast pace, the Internet is available pretty much everywhere and 24/7 due to broadband. File sharing is one of the most common things which happen through the Internet. This is due to the fact that it is so easy to download a music, film or photo file.

The question is, where can the law draw the line. I feel if somebody is watching a TV show, or has listened to a song and wants to share it with people who may not know about it, I say it is acceptable for them to share the file as long as they are not making personal profit.

The argument against my point would be the fact that music and film industries would be losing out in money, as people are watching/listening to their products for free. However, sharing files is one way of informing people about these companies products and as more people share these files the more popular it will get. Thus, resulting in the spread of the product and potentially creating a higher fan base.
A great example of this would be the way 'The Arctic Monkeys' became well known. They used my space as a way to share their files, and offered a free download to some of their music for people who are signed up to my space. Once a few people would download it, they would begin to share it with their friends or family and slowly the word would spread. This shows us the benefits of file sharing.

My first Presentation in Network Media!

Hiren, Sharon, Thandie and Rupi

View more presentations from Hman90.

Information to go with my slides, these are for the first few:

Slide 1: Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. It is present in a wide variety of forms of consensus decisions making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks.

Slide 2: Wisdom of Crowds. James Surowiecki explores how a group of people can make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or experts.

Slide 3: Four elements to create a wise crowd. Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known fact.

Independence: Peoples Opinions aren't determined by the opinion of those around them.

Decentralisation: People are able to specialise and draw on local knowledge.

Aggregation: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgements into collective decisions.

Slide 4: Failure of crowd intelligence. Surowiecki believes when crowds produce very bad judgments, it's due to their cognition and co-operation. He argues that members of the crowds were too conscious of the opinions of other members and began to conform rather than think differently.

Final Slide: Essential. Collective intelligence is a huge part of our society. Without collaborative work our society wouldn't be moving forward, it would be at a continuing stand still. Although under great criticism, without a doubt it is a vital part of our growing society.