An introduction to new media for South African

An introduction to new media for South
African students
AF
T
Petrus H Potgieter
www.potgieter.org
29th August 2009
DR
This text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. All other rights are reserved by
the author.
1
Contents
3
2 Media convergence
2.1 The Internet and media convergence . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.2 Analog and digital media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.3 Newspapers and the new media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3
4
5
8
3 Web 2.0
9
AF
T
1 Introduction
4 Weblogs and the blogosphere
9
4.1 Blogging basics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.2 Blog aggregators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4.3 Getting started in blogging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5 Wikis
5.0.1
12
Editing the Wikipedia entry on your hometown . . . . 13
14
7 Streaming content
7.1 Streaming as an adjunct to broadcasting . . . . . . . . . . . .
7.2 User-generated streaming content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
7.2.1 Time for TV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
14
15
15
16
DR
6 Podcasting and vodcasting
8 Social networking, social bookmarking
16
9 Mashups
17
10 Subvertising
17
11 Peer-to-peer networking (P2P)
11.1 How P2P networks promote the spread of information
11.2 P2P and copyright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11.3 Economics of P2P networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11.3.1 Legally download a film using BitTorrent . . .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
17
20
20
22
22
12 Virtual worlds
23
12.1 Avatars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
12.2 Second Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
13 Conclusion
24
2
1
Introduction
AF
T
In this document, we discuss forms of new media that have emerged – basically since around 1985 although most of the examples mentioned here are
much more recent – and some of the impact that these new forms of communication have had for the consumer, especially in the South African context.
Any text on new developments in technology and uses of technology, is almost guaranteed to be outdated by the time that it is written and the best
guide to the latest events and trends will always be the world itself. This text
will gradually become (at best) a historical guide and the reader is advised
to embrace and explore the world of human interaction and knowledge as it
becomes available to him or her.
A word of caution is required. Treat online interactions with the same
circumspection that you would apply to meetings and persons in the offline1
world. You would not give your banking details or other confidential information to any person in the street or in the shopping centre unless you
have
• established the utility to yourself of divulging this information; and
• verified the identity and fidelity of the person(s) concerned.
DR
You should, likewise, take extreme care in how you divulge possibly sensitive
information online. You are also devised to extend and expect normal rules
of courtesy. Be polite and honest but do not hesitate to be direct when the
situation requires it. The online world and the new media offer a plethora of
opportunities for extending and sharing your experiences but it is subject to
rules and conventions that make up the present-day digital culture (Deuze,
2006).
2
Media convergence
Media convergence is simply the phenomenon where the evolution of technology and of services has made it possible for consumers to access content
that had previously been available only through strictly separated channels
(such as newspapers and television) in more unified and flexible ways. An
early example of this was South Africa’s Beltel system. This system was
relatively widely used in the 1980s – although not nearly as widely as the
Internet is employed today. Up to that time, if people had access to ICT at
1
For lack of a better term, offline will also be used – in this chapter – to denote
interactions and events that do not require the used of a telecommunications channel.
3
DR
AF
T
home, they might only have had a fixed (landline) telephone and a television
set. As today, people with access to both were a minority in the society and
not much more than 2% of these used Beltel (Walker). However Beltel – like
its hugely successful counterpart in France, Minitel – gave a significant number of people an early experience of almost instantly retrieving up-to-date
information in text format. Among the early benefiaries were investors and
people in the agricultural business, who benefited from being able to access
market prices near-instantaneously. Even Unisa had a page2 on Beltel, with
the number 3002. Pages were addresses by numbers and there was also an
e-mail system. The network was restricted to South Africa, indeed to the
users of the South African telephone network – then run by the SA Post
Office and later by Telkom – and was shut down at the end of 1999 (Walker).
Why do we consider Beltel to be an example of convergence? Well, using
Beltel a subscriber could use their television and telephone (together with a
Beltel device or an ordinary computer with an analogue modem) to access
newspapers, for example. There were even online shopping pages on Beltel
and it was possible to access some banking services. Today, of course, the
Internet provides a richer experience in ways that extend far beyond the fact
the a modern computer can present more attractive graphics and a more
sophisticated user interface. One can use a computer which is equipped with
a simple headset (or speakers) and microphone to make voice and video calls,
to receive live video data and interact with a number of users in many online
environments.
2.1
The Internet and media convergence
One of the important reasons why the Internet is so flexible and extendible is
that it really belongs to no-one. Although there are authorities that regulate
certain aspects of the Internet, such as
• technical standards; and
• addresses by names (e.g. www.cnn.com) and by numbers (e.g. 157.166.
224.25 which belongs3 to www.cnn.com),
it is many millions of different companies and individuals that build the
physical infrastructure of the network and provide its content (Jenkins, 2004).
Below, we give a brief overview of some of the most significant developments
to date.
2
3
According to http://home.intekom.com/intekom/beltel/isp.shtml.
Please use your browser to visit 157.166.224.25 when you next use the Internet.
4
2.2
AF
T
What is the difference between the Internet and the Web? Nowadays many people refer to the pages that appear in their web browser
(typically Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera or Safari) as “the Internet”.
Those pages, however, actually represent the “World-Wide Web”, or simply – the Web, which is a specific kind of Internet traffic. E-mail is the
basic example of a kind of Internet use which exists independently of the
Web. When we use an e-mail client such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Novell
Groupwise or Microsoft Outlook to access our messages, the Web is not
involved. Of course, many people nowadays read their e-mail in a web
browser and this is properly called webmail of which the pioneer was a
startup company called Hotmail.4
Analog and digital media
DR
The transition to digital media, starting – from the point of view of most
ordinary consumers – with the CD disc in the early 1980s, has been crucial
in media convergence and other aspects of the information economy and
a globalised information society. Analog media, like long-playing (vinyl)
records (LPs – see Figure 1) and magnetic cassette (see Figure 2) and video
tapes did not allow for high-fidelity reproduction of their content. Although
it was very usual in the 1970s and 1980s for people to copy the content of an
LP to cassette tape, for listening in their car – for example, the quality of the
copy deteriorated each time it was reproduced. Furthermore, these analog
media suffered a moderate amount of decay each time they were played.
In Figure 3 you can see an example of digital and analog information.
Strictly speaking, of you are viewing this text as a PDF file, both are digitally
represented but the analog signal on the left represents the sound of the
author enunciation a part of the first line of South Africa’s national anthem
whereas the binary digits on the right represent the same line but as ASCIIencoded binary digits. Note how easy it is to copy the sequence of zeroes
and ones but how it is almost impossible to make an exact copy of the sound
represented on the left.
Sounds can also be represented digitally, for example as a series of zeroes
and ones, and this is what makes it possible to make exact copies of digital
media. The content of a CD or DVD disc can be copied exactly and then
transmitted over the Internet, for example. This is not to say that digital
media are always superior to analog media. Many music lovers still prefer
the sound of vinyl LPs over that of the digital CD or music downloaded from
the Internet or to a cellphone. The latter is, of course, always in a digital
5
AF
T
DR
Figure 1: Long-playing (vinyl) record (LP), from the 1970s – a typical analog
medium
6
AF
T
Figure 2: Music cassette from the early 21st century.
Analog signal
Digital signal
DR
01001110
01101111
01101001
01110011
01101011
01101100
01101100
00100000
01000001
01110010
01101011
01101011
01110011
00100000
01101001
01100101
01100101
00100111
01101001
01100110
01101001
01100001
Figure 3: The first line of South Africa’s national anthem, as a digital and a
fraction as an analog signal.
7
format.
2.3
Newspapers and the new media
• television, and
AF
T
The precursor of the modern newspaper was the Acta Diurna (in English,
“Daily Events”) which appeared more than two thousand years ago in Rome,
displayed on stone or metal in public places in the city. The first newspaper
in English is believed to have been published in Amsterdam in 1920, as a
translation of the Dutch Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c. The oldest
newspaper thought to have survived to modern times is the Chinese Jing
Bao (or, “Capital Report”) which would have been published for more than
a thousand years, until 1912.
The business plans of traditional newspapers have been challenged over
the past few decades by
• the profusion of free content on the Internet.
DR
Television has, in many countries, virtually eliminated the evening newspaper
as a separate publication. In Johannesburg, for example, the Rand Daily
Mail was a morning newspaper up to its close in the mid-1980s whereas The
Star had been an “evening” newspaper which appeared in the afternoon. In
the UK there and elsewhere, there are still a few evening papers but many
are in steep decline (Franklin, 2008).
The advent of the Internet has mounted an even more formidable challenge to the newspaper business. Newspapers themselves compete in the
market for online content and only very few (the US Wall Street Journal
and London’s Financial Times among them) have successfully implemented
a strategy of paid readership on the Internet. In other markets, such as
South Africa and Australia, newspaper groups announced during 2009 that
they would curtail their free content and implement an Internet subscription model. It remains to be seen whether this could be successful at all for
mass circulation titles – as opposed to premium papers aimed mainly at the
business community.
The challenge to traditional titles is not, however, only from their own
online content or online-only newspapers and news sites such as those operated by Google or Yahoo. Citizen journalism, through weblogs (about which
more, below) and other non-traditional channels also poses a challenge to
the paper publications we know (Domingo et al., 2008). It is worth noting
though that in Asia, Africa and South America – where literacy rates are still
increasing – there is still an increase in newspaper sales (Franklin, 2008).
8
3
Web 2.0
According to computer guru, publisher and activist Tim O’Reilly,
AF
T
book subtitle “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer
industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an
attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that
harness network effects to get better the more people use them.”
(O’Reilly, 2006)
By this definition, converged media applications would definitely be classified
as “Web 2.0” althought this term is not longer applied with the same relish
and enthusiasm that accompanied its introduction. In lay terms, Web 2.0
is about interactive applications on the Internet that do not merely display
information to a passive viewer but rather offers the user an opportunity to
interact with the applications residing on the web server of the website owner
or operator. Skeptics about this jargon, have included Sir Tim Berners-Lee,
who has remarked that
DR
“Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive
space, and I think Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody
even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis,
then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was
supposed to be all along.” (developerWorks, 2006)
For this reason, you should be aware of the term Web 2.0 but we shall not
be using it any further in this text.
4
Weblogs and the blogosphere
A weblog (also – blog) is a special kind of Internet website consisting of
consecutive dated entries (like a logbook), possibly with comments by readers
of the entry (Herring et al., 2004). The entries are often referred to as posts
or postings and a weblog can have single or multiple authors. The activity of
writing a weblog is called blogging and weblogs are now a mainstream tool
of journalists (Robinson, 2006), politicians and many ordinary individuals
who write about there hobbies, education (Shim and Guo, 2009), interests
or personal lives (Baker and Moore, 2008). The collective world of weblog
writers (also called bloggers) and their weblogs, often goes by the name of
the blogosphere. It is in important new tool of self-expression and social
commmunication.
9
4.1
Blogging basics
AF
T
Bloggers usually use blogging environments provided by commercial operators such as WordPress and Blogger – both located in the United States
and the latter now part of the company Google. For this reason, people in
countries where the right to free political expression is not recognised5 but
where Internet access is reasonably widely avaible, use weblogs as a way to
communicate their difficulties and ideas to the world. This blogging is, of
course, done anonymously using webmail accounts and anonymous (actually, pseudonymous) accounts with Blogger or WordPress. For this reason,
attempts – such as South Africa’s recent Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act – to
force providers of Internet access to register the identities of their users, is
particulalry disturbing. One can imagine, for example, a blogger from Zimbabe6 visiting an Internet café in Musina to write a political post which
could, in principle, be traced by the authorities in Zimbabwe to the café and
they could ask (formally or informally) their South African colleagues to retrieve the identity of the person. Of course, such an action would not be
legal under South African law but many illegal things happen every day and
the recording of the identity of the blogger by the café would actually enable
such illegal oppression. The world of work is also not free from controversy.
In the United States, a Delta flight attendant called Ellen Simonetti lost her
job because of the content of her blog (Sprague, 2006; Cote, 2007).
DR
[Example of a weblog entry7
2009-07-01
SpringbokRadio.com – broadcasting daily
Because television was introduced in South Africa mercifully late (1976),
many of us still grew up with an excellent selection of radio dramas
and serials. The most popular station was Springbok Radio, the “commercial” bilingual broadcaster (all stations were state-owned). It had
fantastic radio versions of The Avengers; Father, Dear Father as well as
local classics such as Test the Team and Só maak mens. Many will remember the serials Wolwedans in die skemer or My Name’s Adam Kane
and the more high-brow Tuesday Theatre or Castle Playhouse. Now,
many of these shows are available again on the streaming audio service
5
6
Notably, recently, Cuba, Zimbabwe, China and Iran.
At the time of writing, Zimbabwe was still under the Mugabe régime.
10
of SpringbokRadio.com, courtesy of the Springbok Radio Preservation
Society. Highly recommended!
posted by Petrus Potgieter 10:33
0 Comments:
DR
AF
T
As you will be able to see in the example, the style of writing in weblogs
is often somewhat informal and the postings can be relatively short. It
is possible to modify a post after it has first been published but normally
bloggers would do so only when it is really urgently required because the
essence of the blog is that it is a chronological record of the author’s ideas.
This blogger has received angry comments saying that two or three year old
postings are out of date and should be fixed. Of course they are but they do
not necessarily need fixing! One appropriate way of noting corrections is to
post a comment to a weblog entry, noting the updated information.
Comments to weblog entries can be handled in a number of distinct ways.
Some weblogs have unmoderated comments where anyone may leave a message – possibly after simply logging in using a (possibly anonymous) e-mail
account. This is appropriate for smaller weblogs. Others have moderated
comments where each comment has to be approved by the author(s) before
it will appear on the website. Yet others do not allow comments at all. The
comments policy is completely at the discretion of the weblog authors. In
order to avoid spamming by software robots, most weblogs will now require
that person wishing to leave a comment should enter a CAPTCHA (a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart)
which would typically be an image of some jumbled letters that are easily
identified by the human mind but not so easy for a computer program to
parse. Unless the CAPTCHA has an audio equivalent, it will inhibit the
placing of comments on the blog by persons with sight impairments.
4.2
Blog aggregators
An important component of the blogosphere, is the aggregating sites where
users can view headlines and/or extracts of posts from very many weblogs.
These aggregators also usually allow searching and filtering for specific topics
or may collect postings on a specific topic. Notable examples include the
following, which are clickable in the electronic version of this document.
Technorati claims to index over 100 million blogs and is one of the oldest
aggregators in the field.
11
ThoughLeader by South Africa’s Mail&Guardian online is “an editorial
group blog of quality commentary and analysis” which is essentially,
because of its selective nature, an extensive online editorial supplement.
amatomu.com which is a weblog aggregtor for South Africa.
blik has a focus on Afrikaans bloggers and other local content.
4.3
Getting started in blogging
Wikis
DR
5
AF
T
The best way to learn about blogging is to spend some time reading weblogs
and to start your own! Please keep in mind that what you will write, will be
visible to everyone but that dedicated readers will require excellence on the
writer’s part (Du and Wagner, 2006). Refrain from writing defamatory or
otherwise illegal or embarrassing posts. Although you will be able to delete
your blog from the server where it is hosted, it is more than likely that your
post will already have been indexed and archived elsewhere and – like most
things once placed on the Iternet – could very well persists indefinitely.
It is not strictly necessary to use a commercial bloggin service provider,
although they make things quite easy. If you have your own Internet server,
you can easily host a weblog or even a weblogging service. Many technical
and social aspects are worth further exploration and research (Mishne, 2006;
Mishne and Glance, 2006; Herring and Paolillo, 2006).
Wikis have been around since about 1995 when Ward Cunningham, an American programmer, published the first software for running a wiki website
(Leuf and Cunningham, 2001). The work wiki originally means “quick” in
the Hawaiian language and Cunningham’s intention was to create an environment in which editing a website would be quick. The essence of a wiki is
that it allows for the collaborative editing of articles, easy expansion of the
wiki website and often for contributing images and other material. Often,
anybody is allowed to edit the website simply by clicking on the button labelled Edit. It was surprising to many that on this basis, one of the most
useful Internet resource, the Wikipedia,8 has been created Giles (2005). In
the author’s experience, the Wikipedia is a very reliable resource in certain
areas, especially on technical topics where there is a small, dedicated and
informed community of writers and very little other interest in the particular
8
http://www.wikipedia.org/
12
5.0.1
AF
T
Wikipedia entries. When it comes to topics where the ratio of interested
individuals to informed individuals is very high (for example, politics), the
quality of Wikipedia entries is much more variable. Vandalism of wiki articles
is repaired as easily, or more easily, than vandalism can be caused and this
has perhaps been on of the chief reasons for the Wikipedia’s success (Denning et al., 2005). The Wikipedia actually has versions in many languages
although that in Enlish is the most extensive. Among the version in African
languages, the Swahili and Afrikaans Wikipedias are already in the second
tier (having more than 10 000 entries) and Amharic and Yoruba in the third
tier (more than 1000 entries) of Wikipedias.
Although there are providers of wiki websites, it is more usual for individuals to participate in existing wikis. One can install wiki software on
ones own server and host a wiki. Instructions, for the technically minded,
can easily be found on the Internet. Wikis can be an excellent tool for the
collaboration of closed groups (Boulos et al., 2006) and it is quite usual nowadays for documentation on software projects, for example, to be maintained
in a wiki. Naturally, there is scope for the expansion of the wiki format –
specifically to make content more easily processable by software and to allow
for better indexing and cross-referencing (Völkel et al., 2006).
Editing the Wikipedia entry on your hometown
DR
Go to a Wikipedia of your choice, e.g. in
English
en.wikipedia.org
Afrikaans
af.wikipedia.org
Simple English simple.wikipedia.org
Swahili
sw.wikipedia.org
and find the entry on your hometown or suburb, e.g. Pretoria, Sandton
or Kibera. Contribute something that you know about the city, suburb or
settlement by clicking on edit this page (or equivalent in the language
you have selected). For a beginner it is easiest to start by correcting a
small mistake or making minor additions or changes to the text. Keep it
simple and read the instructions carefully!
13
6
Podcasting and vodcasting
AF
T
A podcast is a downloadable audio file (typically in MP3 format) which is
intended to be heard at the listener’s convenience and on a device of the
listener’s choice. It is typically published on a regular basis (e.g. weekly).
Podcasting is the activity of creating podcasts and making them available
for download over the Internet. By definition, podcasting undermines traditional copyright restrictions as the user is required to make a copy of the
audio material. Nevertheless, podcasting is now widely used not only by individuals but also by traditional broadcasters such as the BBC and the SABC
– for whom it has become a new distribution channel. On a smaller scale,
podcasting has become an excellent tool for small groups, such as school or
university classes (Boulos et al., 2006). The creation of a podcast requires
some technical skill since an appropriate audio recording has to be made and
uploaded to an Internet server (Morris et al., 2008). There is also an analogous video concept, called vodcasting but it is not yet as widespread an will
perhaps never be. Among the notable podcast directories, where one may
download or subscribe to podcasts, include the following.
• PodCastAlley.com
• bbc.co.uk/podcasts/ (BBC material only)
• Potgooi.org (mainly Afrikaans content)
DR
Try it out – at least once! Podcasts have also contributed significantly to
social globalisation by giving people all over the world access to news, current
affairs and entertainment programming produced elsewhere.
7
Streaming content
Streaming content is related to podcasting in the sense that it allows users to
receive audio and video material directly from the Internet to their computer
or other Internet access device, e.g. a mobile phone. The intent of streaming
content is however not for the user to permanently store the material on their
device but to view it in real time as it gets delivered to their computer or other
device. The user has to be online and streaming content typically requires
quite good Internet access. In South Africa this is so far problematic since
most home users (and streaming content is mainly for entertainment) have
very limited bandwidth and low monthly data usage caps. In North America,
Europe and the developed countries of Asia, streaming services are however
fairly commonplace and allow viewers to use their Internet connection as a full
14
substitute for conventional radio and television. Many South African radio
stations already offer Internet streaming and anecdotal evidence suggests
that these services are particularly widely used by expartriate South Africans
residing in countries where more advanced Internet capacity is available to
ordinary consumers.
7.1
Streaming as an adjunct to broadcasting
7.2
AF
T
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), a public broadcaster which is
not required to make a profit, has invested substantial resources in their BBC
iPlayer – a software delivery platform for the BBC’s audio and video content
in the UK. The iPlayer offers many of current documentaries, shows and
series on a streaming platform for viewing on personal computers, cellphones
and other compatible devices. The BBC has managed to increase viewership
for much of its content in this way although destreaming (the recording of
streaming content on a user’s computer, usually by deliberately bypassing
certain security measures) has probably made much of the BBC’s content
available on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks earlier than would otherwise have
been the case. In South Africa, MultiChoice offer a similar service under the
name KuduClub but it is targeted mainly at expatriate South Africans and
priced in US dollars9 and requires the use of the Microsoft Media Player.
User-generated streaming content
DR
The spread of high-quality Internet services, especially in the developed world
and in the advanced emerging economies, has made it feasible for individuals
to stream content from their homes or offices – often, relatively high-quality
video. In 1996, Jennifer Kaye Ringley started to broadcast some of the most
intimate (and mundane) details of her life on a website called JenniCam. At
the height of its popularity, millions of people were thought to watch her
live video stream. There are now very many individuals broadcasting most
or part of their life live and the pratice has become known as lifecasting.
Non-synchronous streaming content is also a popular means of expression
for amateurs. In this case, videos are uploaded to a server (for example,
YouTube) and streamed to viewers on demand.
9
At the time of writing, a limited amount of content is available for free, upon registration.
15
7.2.1
Time for TV
Visit justin.tv to view some live lifecasting. Also try www.zoopy.com for
some mainly South African mode-made streaming video on demand. Pay
attention to your bandwidth use as video requires many more network
resources than other activities.
Social networking, social bookmarking
AF
T
8
DR
Social networking includes websites like the widely used Facebook10 on which
users maintain networks of friends and publish personal information, photographs, videos etc. The main social networking tools are all essentially
websites with very extended functionality, including messaging. These websites have been instrumental in maintaining social networks spanning the
globe. Many families currently use Facebook to stay in touch, no matter
where its members are. Many individuals use Facebook, its competitor mySpace or similar sites for professionals such as LinkedIn11 to make new acquaintances and friends. All of these networking websites have privacy options but
these options are not always adequately understood by their users. A typical
small privacy conundrum is caused by chatting individuals not realizing that
their text conversation is publicly available to all registered users. Individuals should also know that employeers, students and teachers may visit their
Facebook profiles and find information that they would not necessarily like
to reveal to all. Stalking through Facebook is also an emergent phenomenon
and users should be somewhat cautious about how much information they
publish!
Social bookmarking12 and commenting provide another form of interaction where users can share websites that they visit and comment on these
sites, within a small community. This is very useful because one can share
in the discoveries made by one’s group. Shared bookmarking also provides a
valuable tool for researchers (Hughes et al., 2005).
10
http://www.facebook.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/
12
For example, http://www.stumbleupon.com/.
11
16
9
Mashups
10
AF
T
A mashup constitues a novel remixing of data and services already available
on the Internet to produce a useful new tool (Butler, 2006; Wong and Hong,
2007; Ennals and Garofalakis, 2007; Jhingran, 2006). Mashups are made
possible by the very open and flexible nature of the Internet. It is unlikely
that earlier or proprietary technologies would have allowed innovation of this
kind. A typical example of a mashup is where Google maps13 are integrated
into website providing accommodation searches. Another useful and nice
mature mashup isWikiMapia.org which combines GoogleMap data with a
wiki environment. Its functioning is best illustrated by visiting the website
and searching for your home city, village or neighbourhood! Searching for
Soweto, for example, will bring up several entries of interest as shown in
Figure 4.
Subvertising
DR
Subvertising is an art form where corporate or governmental advertisements
are edited and touched up in order to subvert the original messages. This
applies especially to very well-known images and slogans and constitutesAustralian Computer Society a form of cultural jamming, the informal use
of mainstream icons to deliver social and political commentary. An example
is shown in Figure 5.
11
Peer-to-peer networking (P2P)
Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are virtual networks that use the Internet to
establish connections directly between users. Some of the very well-known
ones include Limewire and BitTorrent. Often, these network – which might
include encryption of traffic and anonymisation of users – are used for the
illegal (in many jusrisdications) exchange of copies of copyrighted materials
such as music, films and books (Entress, 2009). P2P networks have proven
very difficult to control and it seems likely that they will constitute a significant challenge to owners of copyright in mass media productions. It should
however be noted that it is frequently only very popular works that are exposed on these networks and that the copyright of lesser-known works is
generally intact although this is by neglect and not by design. The Internet
13
http://maps.google.com/
17
AF
T
DR
Figure 4: Image from WikiMapia. The labels on the institutions have been
contributed by WikiMapia users. Reproduction here believed to constitute
fair use.
18
AF
T
Figure 5: Subvertising that mocks pesticide sparying of agricultural products sold in a British supermarket chain. The original slogan was “Try
something new today.” Used by permission of http://thesietch.org/
mysietch/keith/subvertising-gallery/.
DR
telephone provider Skype14 also employs P2P networking and its proprietary
algorithms for routing audio and video conversation have proven to be quite
robust and to deliver high-quality connections.
One of the currently more popular P2P systems is BitTorrent. Technically, it is simply a file sharing protocol, in other words a description of a
standard by which independent computers can exchange files. BitTorrent
is neither a service nor a server – it is simply a standard for information
interchange, similar to the English language itself! Two computers running
BitTorrent software can, should they connect to each other, exchange files in
a prescribed manner. Such a connection takes place over the public Internet
or a private network15 and allow for the (usually, anonymous) exchange of
files hosted on the respective machines. P2P traffic, especially using BitTorrent, is now reported to be one of the largest single sources of traffic on the
Internet (Basher et al., 2008; Pouwelse et al., 2005).
Most P2P file-sharing networks are based on the principle that all downloaders are uploaders at the same time. Files are split into small pieces and
when a user is busy download a large video, for example, they will at the same
time act as a source for those parts of the videa already on their machine and
other users will download from them. This makes it possible to share material with a large number of people without investing in costly servers. It is,
14
http://www.skype.com/
Typical suitable private networks would include campus residence networks or wireless
community networks like the Johannesburg Area Wireless Users’ Group (JAWUG) in
central Gauteng.
15
19
in fact, a co-operative approach to delivering content on the Internet. Users
in countries like South Africa, with strict usage limits on normal Internet
accounts, should take great care when using these services since the uploads
contributed from one’s computer – when running a P2P application – can
amount to many, many times the amount of traffic generated by downloading
a specific file. Upload traffic can be limited by adjusting the settings of the
software but P2P network ethics would suggest that users try to maintain,
at least, symmetric traffic volumes.
How P2P networks promote the spread of information
AF
T
11.1
DR
In mid-2009, the P2P software LimeWire suggested to its users that they
support the anti-government protestors in Iran at the time by assisting in
circulating video material of apparent police brutality in that country. This
represents a form of citizen activism that is tremendously easy given the
widespread use of P2P technology. Activists in Iran (or elsewhere) no longer
need to invest in media platforms in order to distribute a message or get
material out of the country. Volunteers from all over the world can contribute
their computers in order to help distribute the material as far and wide
as possible. Political dissidents in many countries use similar networks to
communicate and spread their ideas anonymously (Clarke, 2009).
The Onion Router (Tor) is one P2P type network used for securely encrypting messages where this is required (Camenisch and Lysyanskaya, 2005).
The Tor network consists of a web of so-called Onion Routers that route traffic securely in order to protect the identity of users as well as the content
they are accessing. Since even some traditionally free societies such as Australia have started to regulate Internet traffic (Bambauer, 2008; Maurushat
and Watt), the use of anonymizing networks such as Tor is almost certain to
increase.
11.2
P2P and copyright
The nature of digital media, especially the ease of making perfect copies of
original products, means that digital audio and video is especially suited to
online distribution. The traditional commercial media tried at first to employ
digital rights management16 (DRM) in order to prevent the possibly illegal
16
Usually, DRM amounts to the encryption of content, such as that on many video
DVD discs, and relying on specific software or hardware – controlled and licenced by the
copyright owner(s) – to play the content. If you have found that you cannot play a US
20
DR
AF
T
copying of content but this has generally been a failure because knowledge of
how to circumvent such measures, has spread very quickly and widely – using
the Internet. The Content-Scrambling System (CSS) which was implemented
to attempt to protect commercial video DVDs from home copying but the
computer code for breaking this protection was released in 1999 by then
Norwegian teenager Jon Lech Johansen. Johansen, who was not the sole
author, was put on trial in Norway and acquitted in 2003. By that time, the
code was widely available.
The decentralised nature of P2P systems also makes it quite hard to
prosecute the use of P2P to circumvent copyright and intellectual property
restrictions because the actual violations (sharing of files) happens between
different individuals and each of them is typically not responsible for a huge
amount of sharing and does not make a profit from it since it is all voluntary. Nevertheless, clear copyright violations do occur and the this has
attracted the attention of the owners of the intellectual property as well as
the authorities in many countries (Adrian, 2006).
In fact, four of the operators of The Pirate
Bay, a tracker and indexer of BitTorrent
files, were found guilty of assistance to copyright infringement in Sweden in April 2009.
Towards the end of August 2009, the website of Pirate Bay was still running, however,
and the judgement was being appealed. Pirate Bay did not in fact itself host any illegal
copies of copyrighted material but simply
acted as a repository of information about
where to find (legal as well as illegal) material. People with, say, a digital copy of the
latest James Bond film, might publish the
information that they have a copy for P2P
sharing on Pirate Bay where this information would be found by people wishing to download the film. The downloaders (called leechers) would then download this illegal copy directly from
these seeders. At no time would the servers of Pirate Bay contain an illegal
copy of anything.
The case of Pirate Bay highlights many controversial aspects related to
copyright in the digital age. It is legal for an individual to play a song from a
commercial CD to friends who visit but it is not legal (in most jurisdictions)
American (Region 1) or Brazilian (Region 4) DVD in South Africa (Region 2), you have
encountered DRM.
21
for the same individual to e-mail a copy of the song to the same friends.
In many countries, it is not legal to make a backup copy of a DVD you
own on your own computer, even if you will be the only one watching it.
Little wonder, therefore, that many regard the traditional and current legal
manifestations of multimedia copyright to conflict with natural notions of
justice and property rights (Balestrino, 2008).
11.3
Economics of P2P networks
DR
AF
T
Since P2P networks make it possible for the burden of providing content to
be shared among the users, it is a very co-operative and fair way of using the
Internet. Nevertheless, as in all ventures based on voluntary efforts, there
is a distinct danger of free-riding. That is, that someone might download
(or, leech) exclusively, without seeding the material to other users (Jun and
Ahamad, 2005). On BitTorrent networks, such free-riding is definitely rife
but seems possible that it is more than cancelled out by unintentional seeding.
Many BitTorrent clients have default settings that allow quite a lot of seeding
to take place during each download and thereafter. Users who do not have
metered Internet usage and who do not pay attention, typically seed quite a
lot. In countries like South Africa and Australia, where Internet use is often
metered (or, capped ), potential BitTorrent users should take care not to seed
excessively as this could incur hefty charges.
11.3.1
Legally download a film using BitTorrent
Steal This Film (in two parts) is a controversial film abou the some of
the controversies surrounding copyright and P2P networks. This film has
been distributed online throught Pirate Bay and other sites. Install the
Vuze client (previously known as Azureus) on your computer and use any
of the following tracking sites to find a BitTorrent copy of the film. All
three sites were in operation at the time of writing.
• thepiratebay.org
• isohunt.com
• www.mininova.org
Use Vuze to download a copy of the film, making sure that you limit the
upload (seeing) speed and set a limit of, say, 200% for seeding activity.
22
You will need to use a PC which is not behind an aggressive firewall and
this activity is performed entirely at your own risk. When done, sit
down and enjoy the film on your computer!
12
AF
T
P2P networking has been likened to a hypothetical gift economy. This comparison is valid only to the extent that the files offered for downloading may
legitimately be made available. When you use P2P, please respect the rights
of others!
Virtual worlds
A virtual world is a computer simulation in which, typically, very many
individual actors exist and which usually runs independently of the logged
on status of any specific user. An extreme example of a virtual world is
depicted in the 1999 film The Matrix. Other depictions exist in text fiction,
among them Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash.
The world of Internet gaming has given rise to games in which substantial
numbers of people interact in virtual environment, 24 hours per day. These
are massively multiplayer online games.
DR
Fun and games
Multi-player games require an account on a server, which coordinates
the gaming in the virtual world. Running servers for games is a major
business in the world today, with typical monthly subscriptions at $10
to $20 per user. The game OpenArena is a free and open source firstperson shooter game, resembling the commercial game Quake. Go to
openarena.ws to download and install OpenArena for your computer.
You can play on your own computer, local network or against strangers
using servers on the Internet. You can use
• www.guerrillamail.com, or
• www.zoemail.com
in order to obtain a temporary, disposable e-mail address for use while
registering – if you do not want to protect your privacy by not using your
23
real address. Download and playing OpenArena might require the relaxation of your network’s firewall rules and the use of substantial network
bandwidth.
12.1
Avatars
12.2
AF
T
In an online gaming environment, the players normally appear not as themselves, but as avatars. An avatar is a divine incarnation of a deity in Hinduism
(Sanskrit: avatāra) and the use of the word in online gaming was probably inspired by the very large number of avatars in the Hindu pantheon. An avatar
is the online gaming personality of the player and it need not resemble the
player’s real-life appearance and personality at all. Their are estimated to
be at least 200 million avatars “on earth” (Ondrejka; Meadows, 2007).
Second Life
DR
In operation since 2003, Second Life is an online environment where he object
of the game is to live in a simulated world that resembles the offline world.
Avatars look like normal people and the virtual world of Second Life (SL)
can interact with the real worlds in many way, not the least of which is
the conversion of real-world dollars into the virtual currency of SL, so-called
Linden dollars. SL, like the real world, requires money for most things and
offers many opportunities for entrepreneurs, some of whom have become
millionaires in the real world, based on their SL businesses. Many businesses
and instituttions of the real world now have a presence in SL as well, including
educational institutions (Boulos et al., 2007; Ritzema and Harris, 2008).
13
Conclusion
The new media offer a wealth of opportunities for accessing information,
accumulating experience and establishing new businesses ventures. Furthermore, the cultural effects of media convergens and online worlds have only
begun to be felt (Bruns, 2008). Any writing about this topic is bound to be
left behind by events quite quickly and the reader is strongly encouraged to
turn to online sources for the latest information and trends!
24
References
Adrian, A. (2006). The Pirate Bay deep-sixed. Computer Law & Security
Report, 22(5):392–401.
Baker, J. R. and Moore, S. M. (2008). Distress, coping, and blogging: comparing new myspace users by their intention to blog. Cyberpsychology &
Behavior: The Impact of the Internet, Multimedia and Virtual Reality on
Behavior and Society, 11(1):81–85. PMID: 18275317.
AF
T
Balestrino, A. (2008). It is a theft but not a crime. European Journal of
Political Economy, 24(2):455–469.
Bambauer, D. E. (2008). Filtering in Oz: Australia’s foray into Internet
censorship. SSRN eLibrary.
Basher, N., Mahanti, A., Mahanti, A., Williamson, C., and Arlitt, M. (2008).
A comparative analysis of web and peer-to-peer traffic. In Proceeding of the
17th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 287–296, Beijing,
China. ACM.
Boulos, M., Maramba, I., and Wheeler, S. (2006). Wikis, blogs and podcasts:
a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education. BMC Medical Education, 6(1):41.
DR
Boulos, M. N. K., Hetherington, L., and Wheeler, S. (2007). Second Life:
an overview of the potential of 3-D virtual worlds in medical and health
education. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 24(4):233–245.
Bruns, A. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Peter Lang Publishing.
Butler, D. (2006).
439(7072):6–7.
Mashups mix data into global service.
Nature,
Camenisch, J. and Lysyanskaya, A. (2005). A formal treatment of Onion
Routing. In Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2005, pages 169–187.
Clarke, R. (2009). Dissidentity. Identity in the Information Society. http:
//www.springerlink.com/content/273829u634861073/.
Cote, M. (2007). Getting dooced: Employee blogs and employer blogging
policies under the National Labor Relations Act. Washington Law Review,
82:121.
25
Denning, P., Horning, J., Parnas, D., and Weinstein, L. (2005). Wikipedia
risks. Commun. ACM, 48(12):152–152.
Deuze, M. . (2006). Participation, remediation, bricolage: Considering principal components of a digital culture. The Information Society, 22:63–75.
developerWorks (2006).
developerWorks interviews: Tim BernersLee.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cmint082206txt.html. Accessed 2009-07-12.
AF
T
Domingo, D., Quandt, T., Heinonen, A., Paulussen, S., Singer, J. B., and
Vujnovic, M. (2008). Participatory journalism practices in the media and
beyond – an international comparative study of initiatives in online newspapers. Journalism Practice, 2(3):326.
Du, H. S. and Wagner, C. (2006). Weblog success: Exploring the role of
technology. Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud., 64(9):789–798.
Ennals, R. J. and Garofalakis, M. N. (2007). MashMaker: mashups for the
masses. In Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD international conference
on Management of data, pages 1116–1118, Beijing, China. ACM.
Entress, L. (2009). Ripped: How the wired generation revolutionized music.
Christian Science Monitor.
DR
Franklin, B. (2008). The future of newspapers. Journalism Practice, 2(3):306.
Giles, J. (2005). Internet encyclopaedias go head to head.
438(7070):900–901.
Nature,
Herring, S., Scheidt, L., Bonus, S., and Wright, E. (2004). Bridging the gap:
a genre analysis of weblogs. In System Sciences, 2004. Proceedings of the
37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on, page 11 pp.
Herring, S. C. and Paolillo, J. C. (2006). Gender and genre variation in
weblogs. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10(4):439–459.
Hughes, C. E., Stapleton, C. B., Hughes, D. E., and Smith, E. M. (2005).
Mixed reality in education, entertainment, and training. IEEE Comput.
Graph. Appl., 25(6):24–30.
Jenkins, H. (2004). The cultural logic of media convergence. International
Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(1):33–43.
26
Jhingran, A. (2006). Enterprise information mashups: integrating information, simply. In Proceedings of the 32nd international conference on Very
large data bases, pages 3–4, Seoul, Korea. VLDB Endowment.
Jun, S. and Ahamad, M. (2005). Incentives in BitTorrent induce free riding. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Economics
of peer-to-peer systems, pages 116–121, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
ACM.
AF
T
Leuf, B. and Cunningham, W. (2001). The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration
on the Web. Addison-Wesley Professional.
Maurushat, A. and Watt, R. Clean feed: Australia’s internet filtering proposal. SSRN eLibrary.
Meadows, M. (2007). I, avatar: the culture and consequences of having a
second life. New Riders Publishing.
Mishne, G. (2006). AutoTag: a collaborative approach to automated tag
assignment for weblog posts. In Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 953–954, Edinburgh, Scotland. ACM.
Mishne, G. and Glance, N. (2006). Leave a reply: An analysis of weblog comments. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.
1.61.5982.
DR
Morris, T., Tomasi, C., and Terra, E. (2008). Podcasting For Dummies. For
Dummies, 2 edition.
Ondrejka, C. Aviators, moguls, fashionistas and barons: Economics and
ownership in Second Life. SSRN eLibrary.
O’Reilly, T. (2006). Web 2.0 compact definition: Trying again - O’Reilly
radar. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/12/web-20-compact.html.
Accessed 2009-07-12.
Pouwelse, J., Garbacki, P., Epema, D., and Sips, H. (2005). The bittorrent
P2P File-Sharing system: Measurements and analysis. In Peer-to-Peer
Systems IV, pages 205–216.
Ritzema, T. and Harris, B. (2008). The use of second life for distance education. J. Comput. Small Coll., 23(6):110–116.
Robinson, S. (2006). The mission of the j-blog: Recapturing journalistic
authority online. Journalism, 7(1):65–83.
27
Shim, J. P. and Guo, C. . (2009). Weblog technology for instruction, learning,
and information delivery. Decision Sciences The Journal of Innovative
Education, 7:171–193.
Sprague, R. (2006). Fired for blogging: Are there legal protections for employees who blog. University of Pennsylvania Journal of Labor and Employment Law, 9:355.
AF
T
Völkel, M., Krötzsch, M., Vrandecic, D., Haller, H., and Studer, R. (2006).
Semantic Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 15th international conference
on World Wide Web, pages 585–594, Edinburgh, Scotland. ACM.
Walker, D. Beltel. http://www.allatsea.co.za/retropics/beltel.htm. Accessed
2009-07-11.
DR
Wong, J. and Hong, J. I. (2007). Making mashups with marmite: towards
end-user programming for the web. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 1435–1444, San Jose,
California, USA. ACM.
This text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. All other rights are reserved by
the author. Q.v. http: // creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by-nc-nd/
3. 0/ .
28