Author Archives: 3 and 22 Minutes

Group Project Update 1

Our group met on Friday the 11th to discuss what our group will be doing for both our presentation and our final project. I have been reading the book Jim gave me called Where the Wizards Stay Up Late. The book takes a look at the beginnings of the internet specifically when it was part of DARPA. It is very interesting to think the internet was created because of our fear of Russian technology surpassing our own because of the success of Sputnik. Our group decided part of our presentation will be going into the initial reasons behind the creation of ARPAnet. There seem to be 2 schools of thought of why ARPAnet was created. The first is that it was going to be used to connect university researchers together to make the sharing of knowledge easier. The second is that it was created to be used as a secondary communication tool in the case of nuclear attack. The second reason was first published by Time magazine the first reason was brought up by many people who actually worked on the project. The second part of our presentation is going to be a brief history of the internet. Our group will be using many different types of media to present our material. We will have a video, website, and a POWTOON.

Reflection on Economic, Cultural, and Social Impacts

I think we covered a large amount of topics within all the topics we had to discuss. We first covered the economics mainly on Tuesday. I believe we covered many topics ranging from the internet access as a basic human right to amazon tracking employees efficiency. I still stand by what I said about internet access being a basic human right. A good analogy, I think, is the existence of public libraries and public schools. Both public libraries and schools are ingrained into our society and both are there to help people acquire knowledge. If the internet means having access to knowledge and education I believe access to it should be free and public. Talking more about the amazon tracking its employees, I honestly don’t really see it as that big of a deal and similar practices have been going on for centuries. Efficiency allows for firms to produce more goods at the same cost. If employees are not happy with having their movements monitored they can easily leave their job and find a new one. This may sound cold but if you look over a persons lifetime, leaving one job isn’t going to have a very big impact on them. I think the cyber bullying discussion was very interesting because it affects so many people yet we don’t have a very effective way of stopping it other then “being positive”. I am also glad I got to talk about how philanthropy has benefited greatly from the internet. I hope I motivated people to at least think about donating to a charity through a website.

IP and Fairuse

I think that Lawrence Lessig does an excellent an excellent job of encapsulating the changes of creation in our generation. I think it was very effective to compare the changes we are having now to the changes that occurred when music became more commercialized. The one point I do disagree with him on is that he believes we currently have to extremes to fair use. I believe we only have one extreme and that is of the companies trying to claim anything and everything (even things protected under fair use as he pointed out) as copyright infringement. Lessig mentions that we are at a point of prohibition which I also believe to be the case but I don’t think the stance that we should ignore these laws is extreme at all. When prohibition of alcohol took place there was illegal alcohol creation and consumption but do we consider those people breaking the law to be extremists? I believe we can find a balance and I agree with what Lessig said about competition begets balance and equilibrium.Piracy

Experimenting with HTML

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So I got my HTML website up. I used a youtuber with the username EdzJohnson. His videos are straight forwards and taught me quickly how to use HTML. To get to my website click here. I started off creating my title and then the body of my site. I decided to upload a picture just to see how one would go about doing that. Then I also included link to information about Io and a link to my blog. Oh and I also learned how to change the font size, color, and style. HTML isn’t very hard because all you have to know is the names of tags and what they do.