Topic four

Lecture- This week’s lecture was called “Old communication Technologies.” The reason we are studying this is to see where the New Communication Tech, our topic, has come from. We looked at the history of Communication, such as tribal practises, print, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, cinema and Television.
Tribal practises included telling stories and singing which involved mythological and deep meanings.
We also looked at Semiotics, which is the study of sign processes and observes how meaning is understood. Body language might be a form of Semiotics.
Tutorial- Scavenger hunt questions:
1) Michael Buen was KNOWN for creating the Lovebug virus.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/817269.stm)
2) Johan Vaaler created one of many forms of the paperclip, although there were many other forms before that.
(www.a9.com)
3) The Ebola Virus was discovered in Zaire, near the Ebola river.
(www.geocities.com/mockturt/variations.html )
4) Chile is the country that has the biggest recorded earthquake. It was 9.5 on the Riktorscale. (http://earthquake.usqs.gov/eqcenter/top10.php )
5) A Terabyte is one billion kilobytes
(www.zyra.org.uk/kbytes.htm)
6) Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing email in 1972.
(www.hotbot.com)
7) The Storm Worm purports to provide info on dangerous storms in Europe. Users who fell for it were directed to a website containing malicious code.
(www.yahoo.com )
8) The best way, that I could find, to contact the Prime Minister is writing a letter via this address:
The Hon Kevin Rudd MP
Prime Minister
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
9) Professor Stockwell was known to be in the band “Black Assassins.”
(http://christina01.uniblogs.org/2007/11/22/scavenger-hunt-qs)
10) Web 2.0 allows users to upload information and to communicate with users of the Internet.
(http://christina01.uniblogs.org/2007/11/22/scavenger-hunt-qs)



I suppose that search Engines rank the stuff that they find on the internet by the most recent and updated pages.

By correctly spelling and punctuating your phrases on the search engine, you should find the most valuable information at the top of the page.

My favourite source of information on the net is Wikipedia, although it might not be considered a search engine. My second favourite is Google, and I use them above all others because they have a wide range of subjects. Usually I don’t place in keywords for the information I need and come up with nothing.

Reading-
This week’s reading was “The work of art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
What I got out of this essay was the descriptions of different arts and how they have been changing. Photography replaced lithography, which allowed graphic art to represent life.
The use of photography, when sped up, was able to keep up at the same speed of speech for the first time. Only recently has there been a visual representation to go with sound. On that basis was Television different from Radio.
The early forms of portraits were there for sentimental value, to look at family members or friends that were absent or dead. That has now changed, with photography being there for exhibition value.