Before I came to university I wouldn’t have had any idea what the unit ‘Digital Cultures’ would have contained. If I were to give it a shot, I would have thought it was based solely on things surrounding the internet, and how in a way it’s become our culture. If I was to answer with just that, I would have been awfully incorrect…
In fact, digital cultures covers many things, from ethics to gaming and cyborgs to immersion. As well as being taught all these new things, which I’ll go more in-depth with later on in this post, it has encouraged me to question things more and helped me see both sides of certain pictures rather than just one. As I hope you can see in my blog posts…
I would say that I think digital cultures is a very good thing for university students of this day and age to study, because it’s about looking at advances in technology and how we got the technology we have now, as well as being able to incorporate things that young people do on almost a daily basis, such as gaming and logging onto social networking sites.
Facebook - A daily staple for many a student.
The first thing I posted on here was one of the very first things me and my classmates learnt about in digital cultures, Jürgen Habermas’ theory the ‘Public Sphere’. I won’t lie and say that I had heard of this concept before learning about it in class! Although looking back on that first post it is quite rubbish and doesn’t do the subject justice. Although I hope as my blog posts have gone along there is a noticeable improvement on my articulacy and style of writing, and of course not forgetting that I hope my post’s have become more interesting to read as a whole (wishful thinking, maybe?!).
Throughout the weeks of this course I’ve been taught about and how to critically look at digital maps and location detection systems (such as google maps and facebook places, are they invading people’s privacy? etc.). One of the subjects I enjoyed blogging about the most was ‘News Games’. As I’m on a Journalism course, I found it to be a very harmonious mixture of news reporting and gaming, usually put into one lovely comical bundle.
News Games: A mixture of pure gaming, citizen journalism and satire?
Like I mentioned, digital cultures encouraged me to notice the way that particular technological items, such as a mobile phone, have changed in a relatively short space of time. For example, 20 odd years ago a mobile phone was a little bigger than the average brick (an average brick in my mind, anyway), now phones are super tiny and super slim-lined and unlike the ginormous mobiles of bygone days they’re able to text, take photographs, access the internet, download applications and many more things that people wouldn’t have been able to comprehend when mobiles first made an appearance on the digital scene. We (when I say we, I’m referring to my classmates and I, just to make it clear) also discovered the world of augmented reality, which I think is very likely to become the future of gaming, and maybe even other things such as selecting television channels and setting the time on your microwave. We’re already seeing augmented reality being applied to video games, just look at the Nintendo Wii and the xBox Kinect for example.
Beth's perception on a brick.
Another interesting subject we covered was the issue of identity on line. Can you really trust who you’re talking to on line if you don’t know them in the flesh? It was intriguing to study the different forms of identity people create online, people can lie about themselves and who they are, but when people play games, particularly on MMORPGs, a lot of the time they have to pick between a selection of different races, classes and specialities which will then be their identity on that game, it’s still them, but not their real persona.
One of the most complex things we studied with the biggest human impact was the matter surrounding copyright online and access to open source software. We covered things from people getting in serious legal ruts with massive companies over downloading only a couple of songs over the internet and whether it is right or wrong that people aren’t allowed to re-use a copyrighted song, for example, and making it into something of their own (usually in the form of a mash-up, which is most commonly a multitude of songs all mashed into one over a funky beat). We also learnt about the opposing side to copyright, the ‘copyleft‘ camp and what they do. I will also make another shameful confession that I wouldn’t have been able to describe to anyone what ‘open-source’ was before taking this digital cultures unit. Now I know about it, I think it’s a good idea that would prove beneficial to a lot of people, especially people who can’t afford a decent system operator on their computers (Linux), a word-processing program (OpenOffice) and anyone interested in animation, but can’t afford the massively expensive animating suite (Blender).
OpenOffice: The Open-Source office suite
To most people, the world of robots and cyborgs is still a long way away, well, that’s not what we’ve been told after being taught that, pretty much, cyborgs are alive and kicking, and they’re just like me and you. Not so many decades ago, cyborgs were the things of cheesy 1970s American TV series and Sci-Fi programmes. But, what is a cyborg? A cyborg is someone who has some form of technology helping them function rather than the original human body part (for a example, anyone with a hearing aid could probably be classed as a cyborg).
The Real Bionic-Woman?
As this is my very last post (as far as I know, anyway), I look back on digital cultures fondly and I’m glad that I took a subject that is so interesting and diverse.
digital sprog 