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Looking forward to Sweden

Byrichard

In about 23 hours I’m going to be ready both physically and mentally for a trip to the city of Malmo in Sweden. There I expect to find a city I have already been to twice in the past. It is there that I may find a cold wind, blankets in the piccolina Piazza… Lilla Torg and enjoy pear cider.

I take the tube towards central London and the bus from there to Stansted. I board a plane that will fly for around 1hr and 20 minutes, land in Copenhague, get to the train station, catch the Oresund train across to the city of Malmo and look at the big waves in the sea below the tracks. It’s a short enough trip.

I haven’t spent more than five weeks at a time in the same place since the beginning of the academic year. I love traveling and seeing other countries and their cultures. It may be the last time I drop by for cheap since the friend will be moving from Sweden within a short amount of time.

Three nights in Sverige

It may be time for me to learn some Swedish other than “what are you doing” or “you are cute” and learn more relevant sentences.

Thursday will make these decisions for me.

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On social determinism and the media

Byrichard

My week started at 10 this morning and was over by 1300 this afternoon. It was a lecture and a seminar about Brian Winston and social determinism in relation to the media. It’s a theory which is exploring whether social factors affect the technology that we use. I was taking notes during that lecture but not with pen and paper and without a laptop. Instead I was using the O2 XDA minis. It’s a really nice device and I’ve had it for over two months now.

What I love about it is it’s size, being about the size of my palm it’s large for a fun but tiny for a laptop. It’s got a big display and a sign out keyboard. It’s also got a good scribling interface which makes handwriting notes just as easy as typing. It’s a friend that played with this feature and I’m quite impressed.

The reason I love it is that it’s got all the features you’d expect from the i-phone but in the windows operating system and for a European market. The fact it’s got a keyboard makes it ideal for fast typing of sms. I often find myself writing over 200 characters because it’s so simple.

Checking e-mail is a doddle. Simply download the gmail interface and connect to the web. The download of messages is easy and intuitive. It’s a shame that data transfer over gprs is still expensive otherwise it’d be perfect.

I’ve made a skype call with it and it’s worked well. I was able to make a phone call to a mobile phone and talk and hear myself at the same time. Being alone that’s complicated but I know it works.

I bought a program and that makes the synchronisation extremely straight forward. I have contacts, pictures and some word documents synced on the ibook and the mobile phone this way.

It’s perfect for students and I really enjoy using the device.

I’m speaking as someone who’s owned at least 5-10 mobile phones over the past few years.

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Why I am happy that youtube is being sued

Byrichard

I am happy that youtube is being sued because out of the hundreds of video sharing websites out there it is the most devious. It has taken hundreds of hours of content produced at great expense by teams of professionals and offered them in poor quality for nothing on their site. To make it worse it’s made them billions of dollars.

How can the mega corporations, through the intermediary of the RIAA give so much trouble to those who share music let allow youtube to thrive. It doesn’t make sense.

What about all those video sharing websites that went about making content and distributing it the right way? What about those who decided that they would provide a service at no cost to themselves. I’m speaking of those guilty of unlawful distribution of video material.

It’s a website about deception, look at lonelygirl, look at the coke and mentos adverts. Look at the ball in groin laughter. It’s all a form of sadistic pleasure. Why would you want to be manipulated in such a way.

On the positive side it was fun to see the world cup celebrations and I uploaded some video of my own in response to other people’s content.

When it’s used as a video version of flickr it’s an excellent website because it’s an audiovisual window onto the world where a vast wealth of video content may be accessed. Good snowboarding, post it, good party, post it, personal work you’re proud of, post it.

Everyone of us is a content producer and distributor and everyone of us is challenging himself to create something that other people will enjoy. Geocities was about websies, the original sixdegrees was inspired by the film to show that everyone is related throough less than six people to everyone else. Blogging allowed people to reount their lives to anonymous audiences, flickr allowed the sharing of instants and video sharing websites allowed for the sharing of moments.

Is it voyeuristic to look at online videos and photographs made by friends and random strangers and is it exhibitionist of them to show that content? Is it wrong to look at it?

I would participate in this more actively were it not for the droit d’image. I don’t want others posting pictures of me without my consent and I won’t post pictures of others without their consent.

Doesn’t mean I won’t keep looking. It’s fun to constantly refresh the most recent pictures on flickr and see all the events that have been taking place around the world.

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Enjoy the stairs

Byrichard

Myspace was used to advertise a pyjama house party and I went for a number of hours. It’s amusing when you’re at a party in your pyjamas. It makes a change from all those fancy dress and I began wondering about the walk of shame and whether wearing pyjamas on the way home constitutes the walk of shame.

The party was good although it did not really begin till later on when everyone arrived. There were lots of people I’ve known for two to three years by now. The stories were good and the conversations too. Some were interesting whilst were some left you a little confused.

I went to central London with one friend and we stayed in a night club till the first tube in the morning. The club was quite full of people because the top musical act of the week had played there an hour or two before we arrived. I don’t know the group so I’m left indifferent.

This part of the night continued till the early hours of the morning. We caught the first tube home. I gathered my stuff from the friend’s place. Two people were sitting in the stairwell chatting, saying that they had not gone to sleep but that everyone else was trying to sleep. I encouraged them to enjoy their stairwell before continuing on my way.

Back to halls where I encountered some french-speaking friends. Conversations and random activities continued until around 7 in the morning.

It had been an 11hr night/party for me and I’m surprised at how quiet everything is today. It must be the calm after the chaos of a good night out.

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Why the bookshop survives whilst the record shop disappears

Byrichard

Whilst reading an article about the music and book industry I was surprised by what was written. They say that the music industry and the record shops were expected to survive the digital revolution whilst the bookshop was expected to die with the advent of sites like amazon.

There is one possible reason for this. The nature of the medium. A song is a work that takes five minutes to listen to in it’s entirety and can use other supports to be consumed on. The book on the other hand is a medium that requires for people to sit down and thumb through various pages to assess the writing style before deciding on whether to purchase it. As a result they’re far more likely to go into a library and check that product than a cd shop.

At the same time myspace, among other websites is the new music shop. Go there, browse the categories and find various obscure acts, discover them and purchase what you enjoy.

It’s not quite that easy with books.

I’ve bought quite a few books and dvd in the past few months but no music in physical form.

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I’m dropping by Sweden for the weekend

Byrichard

You should always visit friends in their country of origin because it’s fun. Within a week I’ll be in Sweden enjoying Swedish hospitality. I booked the flights today so within a few days I’ll be flying off once more. It’s not that being in a country for too long bothers me but simply that this opportunity won’t last very long.

I liked Sweden the previous two times I’ve been there so I’m going again.

It’s a bit of a misnomer because although I’m a full-time student I only have 2hrs a week of tuition with the rest of the time left for dissertation work, work experiences, and of course the technology module.

I’ve been listening to this week in media, power user tv, Net at Night, and This week in tech for several months by now, therefore, it’s part of my culture to think about tech.

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snow fight at 3am

Byrichard

Snow began to fall this morning at 3 am and a group of those living in halls went out to enjoy the fresh snow. it was falling for several hours and everyone was enjoying it. There were snowball fights between the premiums and the standards.

That’s Premium block and standard blocks.

Some people were continuously pelted with snow whilst others simply enjoyed being out in the snow.

A remote-controlled car was there driving around but struggling. The tires were skidding. When will these people learn that you accelerate slowly in snow and gradually build up speed?

I’ve got a video of this morning but I still have to capture it.

Much clearer

Byrichard

I went for a meeting today and the documentary idea is far clearer now than before. Thanks to the help of the tutor I’ve got a far more focused way of looking at the question I wanted to ask. I still need to write a third draft of the proposal and get it approved.

In the meantime I can already start writing the introduction to the dissertation explaining the context and setting the scene for the remainder of the document.

Going to be fun from now on.

Technological determinism

Byrichard

We had to listen to three hours of this subject today and discuss it. It’s amusing how the discussion focused on the iPhone, iPods, and what apple, in general, was doing.

Several years ago I was downloading music and copying it to minidisc in the days before the mp3 player and iTunes. It was a time when bandwidth constraints were greater therefore patient people would get the content they desired. Over the years bandwidth increased and BitTorrent and other software came which made the experience much faster.

I-tunes came along and gave one of the legal alternatives to access music. They also sold the player. Did they create a revolution or simply see that there was a market and take this as an opportunity to specialise in that? Now members of the older generations would say that Steve Jobs had a wonderful idea of providing this service and that he was innovative.

Others, such as myself, are more skeptical. I believe that the mp3 format made the sharing of music without too much loss in quality much easier and smoother than it had been before. As people had more and more music in this form they began to see the need for adapted players like the minidisc and earlier mp3 players. More efficient ways were found but it was the realm of early adopters, power users. Those for whom technology is as easy to use as the pen to calligraphy.

Apple did nothing more than realise there was a market and offer what people had been demanding.

In the US apple TV is a great product because you’ve got the content to purchase and view. In Europe, the market is still too far behind on this particular issue therefore the device is not interesting.

How soon will it be before Europeans can legally buy the most recent American shows? in two months or two years? With today’s media infrastructure we see everything that’s going on everywhere therefore the old way of dividing the world into media zones has to be rethought.

By the way, I’ve finally understood McLuhan after my lecture today. It took a while and since no one had explained it to me so clearly I had been under the wrong impression.