Whether it is a PC or a Computer...you still connect and socialise!!!

Computers and PC have become so popular and are another way for people to communicate and socialize with people from all over the world without writting letters and making a phone call like the old generation used to. People used to write letters to their Friends and family, as well as sending cards on every special occasions. This way of communication use to take too long for people to get their replies and sometimes letters will go missing or end up not reaching the receiver.But ever since there has been this New Media technology, people can now write to their loved ones and get a reply at the same time through: chatting online or simply sending an email. The email is safer and even though it is not guarantied that a person will get the email all the time but it is much better than a letter sent by post. Even if the person doesn't receive the mail, there is always the message that the sender receive informing them if the mail was received or not. The computers have made it easy for people to find new friends, communicate with the old ones from all over the world, make business deals and so on just by sending each other pictures and see people what other people are up to especially if you haven't seen them in a long time. Also for those who like to take cruises around the world, they can easily access information about that particular place by simply logging in on their website.Many organizations have adopted the use of Internet in order to communicate with their internal and external stakeholders. The internal stakeholders being: the managers, employees and the public practitioners of the organization. This source of communication can be used for various forms for conveying messages to the relevant stakeholders. For an example the organization can use the Internet to advertise their products for the benefit of their customers, as well as to let their target market aware of their services. But they are other factors that could lead to the website to fail or rather not serve the required purpose of the website for the company. This need to be facilitated by a person who has knowledge and skills on how to use the website, because most of the valuable information about the organisation is saved on the computer.The lack of knowledge and how to make use of the facilities provided in the Internet could be one of the reasons that lead to the website to be unsuccessful. And the other reason could also be that some organization turn to abandon their websites and they don’t know how to take advantage of them commercially. Although many organizations still regard a mere web presence as sufficient, there is an increased recognition that a website should achieve specific business objectives for an instance better customer services and relationship. Some theorists argue that some corporate websites are created or designed by specialists who have different views or ideas as how to set the website. Those different ideas might just be different from those of the company. It is also important to assess the specialists’ personal characteristics and attitudes because they may be influenced by the media’s effect in decision making. That can have an effect on the way that they design the website and might share common values on determining content and design of the corporate website."Facebook" this has become the most other popular form of communication for all different types of people. It is way of connecting with different people from all over the world. But most importantly , we get to connect with our high school friends and know more people in and around your area. So it can make you popular. Atleat i think it will!!!But what happens if you do not have a lot of friends???It OK because you can just simply ask people to become your friends. Well chances are they will conform or ignore you. Now that's a bad one. But still does facebook make you popular? I mean to me its simply chatting to my friends or going through their pictures if I'm too far to see them all the time, but claiming to have friends when you don't know them and can only be friends through or only on Facebook doesn't make you popular. I don't know maybe I'm still to learn more about it!!!!!!! All in all, all these mentioned above are a way for people to talk to each other, they may not be seeing each other everyday, but this kind of communication makes it seem like they are together everyday and everytime they want to talk to each other or socialise.

new media technologies: History of Social Networks

new media technologies: History of Social Networks

IDENTITY IN CYBERSPACE

When we participate in virtual communities our sense of self is affected ,in cyberspace it seems almost as if we a constantly performing,we are in a performance medium .Identity in cyberspace is fluid ,in cyberspace one can be what they have always wanted to be and one can even find that people will accept them for who they are which is not always the case in real life .Sarte said in being and nothingness i am my body to the extent that "I am my body to the extent that i am ,"The virtual community is different ,it is composed of information rather than matter .A man can create a female identity ,a child that was known as the biggest nerd at child and was never accepted by his peers can get a chance to sort of start all over on cyberspace as somebody else ,be who they have always wanted to be and finally ''fit'' in ,they get the chance to create an identity ,a world where they can pretend to be the coolest person and everybody can be envious of them,but this identity that you have created online is not real ,it only exists in the cyber world. What happens when you go out there in the real world as yourself and you are no longer this person that everybody on Myspace or Phasebook idolizes.

sOME ARTICLE TO SHARE ON THE DANGER OF USING A CELL PHONE. RETRIEVED FROM THE FOXNEWS.COM

A study by an award-winning cancer expert shows that cell phone use could kill more people than smoking, it is reported that according to the U.K.'s Independent newspaper, the study, headed by Dr. Vini Khurana, shows that there is a growing body of evidence that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer.
Khurana — one of the world's top neurosurgeons — based his assessment on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide. That is three times higher than people who smoke. Smoking kills some five million globally each year. He warned that people should avoid using handsets whenever possible and called on the phone industry to make them safer. France and Germany have already warned against the use of mobile phones, especially by children, it is reported. The study is said to be the most damning indictment of cell phone use. According to the Independent, cancers take at least 10 years to develop, which has influenced earlier cancer studies showing relative safety when using cell phones.

cellphones

Cell phones, cell phones, cell phones and more cell phone!!! If you haven't got it, then you don't fit. Is this what the world has come to be. Cell phones have created a lot of problems in our country, society, our health, safety, our homes even in church. There is a story that one Priest was feeling tired and he did not want to wake up for church and he just simply sent sms's to all the church members with a script saying that God has spoken to him today and that is what he should do. I mean seriously, it seems like we all losing it. Where have you ever heard of a priest sending sms's to the worshippers because he cannot wake up. Not that he was ill or something. But because of our new advanced technology, that is allowing us not to take responsibilities and avoid our duties because we all want simplicity and convenient.

Another story is that there are people apparently who have named their children by any cell phone model like: Nokia Mkhize, Alcatel Khumalo, Voice mail Ndlovu. Well i don't know how true this is but it still feels like people are loosing their values and adopting this new way of living. Not only does cell phones makes us to become what we are not (Fake living standards), but it is also very expensive. This on its own demands a lot out of people's pocket and it has escalated the rate of crime in our country. If you don't have a cell phone you don't belong in the today popular groups, especially teenagers who are still in school and in the University. They end up stealing cell phones from other students or simply rob people their cell phones so that they could also own a camera phone.

These camera phones have put some other students in trouble at their schools because they don't use them in an appropriate manner.For an example, in one of the schools in KZN, there is a young boy who was taking photos of their teacher during a lesson and started distributing it to all the other students. These picture were of the teacher's butt. Many people love camera phones, and yes they may be of good use, but as far as I'm concerned, i only need a cell phone too receive my calls and to send an sms. Beyond that I don't really see why there should be camera phone. Not only have they corrupted kids everywhere, but they have made people to become unfaithfull and untrustworthy.It is so easy for people to lie about their where abouts if they are using a cell phone. I for one have become the biggest lier of note. If you ask me where I am and i know that you will freak out if I were to tell you that I'm still about to take a shower when you already waiting for me... I'll tell you I'm 5 minutes away.

The worse scenario about cell phones are those people who first of all are drunk and then use theri cell hpone whiles they are driving, not to mention at a higher speed. This has passed with a whole lot of people's live due to the neglegent that is around our continent. Road accidents are mostly coursed by people who do not follow the right procedure of answering cell phones when driving on the road. A driver is to use the hands free if answering a cell hpone on the road, if it is asfe to do so stop to avoid accidents. If all the drivers could exercise this, then we might just decrease the rate of roads accidents...

our mobiles

let us explore the new face of our mobile phones. Can they really give you status within a social context?

i will let you comment on that before i give you my insite as to what i think!

surfaces surfaces allover the show

Wth the new media and virtual reality everthing is surfaces that must be explored and no surface has any reality or legitimacy than any other .The embodied life that people live on a day to day basis seems to me to have more reality than the games that we play on the internet.A vitual community is a social network with a common interest ,idea ,task .Differnt virtual communities have different levels of interaction and participation amongst their members .This ranges from adding comments or tags to a blog .On the internet people do not know who you really are,because we cannot see eachother on cyberspace.In the disembodied world of cyberspace identity is so ambigious.Many of the basic cues about about personality and social role we are accustomed to in the physical world are absent .In a virtual community a person can be whatever thay want to be .One can have claim to as many electronic persona's as one has time and energy to create .In a virtual community a blue carrot can communicate wtha red mouse ,our identities are transformed ,there is a sense of artificiality ,technological elements become extentions of our bodies .MUD stands for Imaginary world of computer databases where users uses words to build worlds and all the subjects in them ,identity is the first thing one creates in MUD .People whose physical handical make it difficult to form new friends ,find that virtual communities treat them as they have always wanted to be treated as thinkers and as individuals and feeling beings .The internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and resonstructions of self that characterize postmodern life.Identities on line are infinite

cinema

Lights , Camera, Action!
Let us go into the new world of cinema, grabbing our roots from the past from where it first begun. I want to explore the world of cinema of attraction, the Classic Hollywood Cinema also know as CHC, the French Cinema Nouvelle, the Spanish wave, ohh, there are just too many to mention! But then the most important one, being, the South African films and how they are being received by us here at home and how the outside world has recieved them!

Lets start by here at home. The South African film industry has been experiencing problems in the past years, stemming from the apartheid era, whereby films that were being produced were regulated by the government so that they don't act as a way of trying to overthrow the government. This really left the film industry in this country very much under developed as directors, particularly african directors were not given an opportunity to voice their opinions and express their views. Films that were directed by black directors only started emerging post apartheid, which was in the mid 1990's. One of the first was Mbongeni Ngema who directed the famous Sarafina also using international actors such Whoopi Goldberg. This film aimed to tell a story about the education system during the apartheid times and how the students tryed to revolutionalise this system into something that would be beneficial for all people.

but then those are just some of the stories that remained untold during that time in apartheid South Africa.
ps: will be edited even more! there is stil more to come. pls leave your comment as to what else can be added on to this!

vitual communities

A virtual community, e-community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as letters, telephone, email or Usenet rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes. If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community. Virtual and online communities have also become a supplemental form of communication between people who know each other primarily in real life. Many means are used in social software separately or in combination, including text-based chat rooms and forums that use voice, video text or avatars. Significant socio-technical change may have resulted from the proliferation of such Internet-based social networks. furthermore, online or virtual community, can they really be regarded as a communities where people base their lives?
First, lets attempt to describe some of the discourses of a community.
A community is made of of people, who live together geographically, they interact with each other almost on a daily bases, they interact with each other socially, physically and verbally. This is thus a traditional distinction of a community. When Don Ihde describes an online community, he describes it as a community where people don't necessarily have to interact physically in order for them to be called a community. They are called a community because of the social interactions that occur between them all. He further goes to argue that, within the traditional definition of a community whereby there is also physical contact, he says that, "it is possible for one to feel a lot more closer to someone in cyber space whom they don't necessarily have a relationship with them or rubbed shoulders, than to a stranger sitting next to you in on the subway and yet you are there physically"; can one then really not give the online community the benefit of the doubt, and give it real existing space. These communities have transcended globally, and the world has become one global village, through communications using the new media. Cyber relations form part of the new media and new technologies have made it possible for people all over the world to be able to interact with each other using text or email, video calling or even using the multimedia. The global village being all the continents and their coutries comming together to form one whole big global village where they interact with each other using means availed to them by the new media.

We also refer to cyber space as hyper reality. This term has been created by the American population whereby they have used their over active imaginations to create spaces whereby they use their imaginations and they immitate the real thing tho make their own thing. It is also said that they are proud of their 'fakeness' and they say that if you can't have the real thing, then why not fake it? One would then consider that and then come to a conclusion that virtual communities are fake! but can you call someone's original work fake, since it did originate from their intellectual span, and though it is in hyper reality?