Tuesday, November 9, 2010

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.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

My first Presentation in Network Media!


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.