Blog 9 (Week 10, 11 & 12): Gaming

Gaming is an incredibly advancing medium. From its initial inception in the 70s and later 80s as video games, gaming was a huge phenomenon. Overtime, it has expanded into even greater things. Games started out as either arcade machines or home consoles, but now there isn't even need for one; you can get games and apps for your phones, and if you want to play a game in depth on the move ther are now portable consoles like the new Nintendo 3DS, supposedly allowing 3D gaming and the PSP. Of course now, we have Kinect for the Xbox 360, which completely removes the controller instead 'You are the controller', allowing your own physical actions and gestures to control the game.

 Though all these changes are fantastic and innovative, the core of a game has always been pretty much the same: there's always a set of rules that the player must abide by, a set of possible outcomes which the player has come choice over, player's actions, how they feel about the actions and the outcome. Games are now more like Hollywood films in their production, millions are spent to make the game, and the plot of most games is like that of a movie; a key character - the hero, usually a second main character - the villian, and a mission or task that needs to be completed to reach the goal at the end of the game.
In the early days of gaming only a select group of individuals played games, now designers are trying to open up games to the world and become more universally accepted. On the Nintendo Wii's release, Nintendo made sure in their advertising campaign that the message was fun for all the family, you could get your parent or grandparents to play, it was that easy;

But games haven't seemed to have forgotten about their roots. Retro games have become very fashionable and novice and expert gamers alike seem to be highly nostalgic for them. Online demand for them has allowed  the three major consoling giants (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo) to sell these games as downloadable content through their online networks (Xbox Live, Playstation Network and WiiWare). Online multiplayer has allowed millions of players from all around the world to keep in contact with each other and interact in a virtual world with one another. Second Life is a perfect example of this, where you literally create a second life for yourself virtually. In this world, you can do what you want, even marry someone. I think that gaming has finally entered the masses, more people than ever before are playing games, and there is now so much more choice on offer than Pong and Pac-Man.



 As technology advances so will gaming, this is inevitable. Film producers are already realising this and are now starting to work together to create new and artistic games, such as Fahrenheit on the Playstation 2 and Heavy Rain on the Playstation 3, both developed by Quantic Dream. In both games the plot is a thriller where the player makes choices which dictate what the character will do next in the game. There is no other media which allows this level of interactivity and multiple choice, you cannot decide the outcome of a TV show or movie, but in the gaming world, anything is possible.

Blog 8 (Week 9): Convergence and Social Media

Convergence allows one technology to provide the functions of many. It essentially incorporates many technologies into one device. Mobile phones are one example. Mobiles allow us the basic acts of phoning and texting, but now offer email, web browsing, Facebook, YouTube, even personal orgainiser and diary. This is all much easier and simpler than carrying a device for each individual activity. This convergence also allows us, the users, to be a lot more active with the media. In social media, the emphasis is very much on us making the changes Web 2.0 is about us: "We are the web!" In this new Web 2.0 society we can address the corporations and companies on what we want to wear and what we like to have. Facebook is one who's jumped on the bandwagon:

‘Facebook Ads represent a completely new way of advertising online […] For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation. And they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do’ (Facebook, 2007).'

And with all these brands and adverts competing for space, they are all willing to listen to the consumer. In Web 2.0, the data we send out is as valuable to these companies as the money used to buy their products. They are not just selling the product, you are helping them make the product for you.

Blog 7 (Week 8): Surveillance

To quote Ball and Webster;

"Surveillance involves the observation, recording and categorization of information about people, processes and institutions."

Dataveillance, to put it simply, is the same but applying it to technology, perhaps more specifically to data over the internet. We can often be quite foolish with our information online, letting third parties view us, sending out our credit card details for an offer that seems 'too good to be true', and that's' quite often the case. Sometimes we think we're safe because we have the latest security upgrade and that means we're secure or we may even know not to open a suspicious email from an unknown source, but our information is never 100% guarded. Many of the websites that we trust share out our personal details to various corporations, Facebook is one of them. Though we can hide our likes and interests on Facebook from other users, when you like or join a group or page, you are allowing Facebook to send information about your likes to other companies who then advertise products you will be interested in. I, for instance, have joined various tennis groups, and so get many offers for match tickets, club membership, rackets, balls and tennis clothing. Though I don't approve of everyone on the web knowing my personal interests and hobbies, I do like to glance at these tennis websites so I put up with them, as we all do.

On the whole, dataveillance is necessary. Take the police's approach to Facebook, in many parts of the country the police are using Facebook to fight and prevent crime, you can even join a police group on Facebook. But with this and all the CCTV cameras around, there is always that fear that... 'Big Brother is watching you!'

Blog 6: Networks

Technology has revolutionised our lives. It is perhaps the largest medium on which to communicate, thanks to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. It is easy to find friends and sites like these are often free to use, a certain advantage over mobile phones. However, there is a risk that we lose intimacy with people. Even now technology rules my life, I have to stop and think at how ridicules I am sometimes at the ways in which I implement technology. The other day, I was on Facebook chat texting to my friend who lives in the same flat just two doors away!.. That woudn't even take me 30 seconds to talk to him in person. But I know I'm not the only one that does it, all my friends do it and probably millions more. I cannot slag off the internet as it has granted us so much, Facebook, Google YouTube, Wikipedia and many more sites which benefit us and are now part of our everyday lives; I check my emails and Facebook account everyday, I have to to check my work, find out about any deadlines, and stay in touch with old friends. And if there's still anyone complaining about the loss of intimacy, you know what you can do... turn it your computer OFF! 

Blog 5: Consumer Cultures

How powerful is advertising to the consumer?
Are we taken in by everything an ad tells us?
How much are you willing to believe?

This is the job of an advertisement, to make you, the consumer, believe everything they say. Do they really care about what the product does to change your life, that Max Factor's 'New Age Renew Foundation really does take 5 years off your face? Or are they more concerned with the cash?

Advertisement campaigns spend vast amounts of money into researching what the consumer wants and what they're after. Take this advert for Max Factor's Natural Minerals Foundation:

Adverts like these are very common, the women are almost always young, attractive supermodels who you are hardly going to find strolling through Morrisons. And yet, cosmetic companies continue to dish out the same old adverts, maybe including a well-known celebrity every now and again. Notice the language used to sell the product, always very scientific, sometimes with a diagram of how it microscopically fights off aging within your pores, or something like that.
Max Factor claims to be the 'make-up of make-up artists'. What does that mean? Because the make-up artists use them we can be just like them. Women can look as glamorous as the models who grace the catwalk? It doesn't mean that these women ever will be catwalk models, or make-up artists for that matter. Buying the product doesn't grant you years of experience as a make-up artist either.

I'd like you now to take a look at a very different advert from Dove:

These adverts don't use young supermodels, they use ordinary women to model for them. Dove wanted to go for a radical change from the norm, and show what their product did for real women. So much so, that they wanted to show that aging wasn't a bad thing, changing the slogan from anti-aging to pro-aging.

Blog 4: Simulara and Simulations

Postmodernism is the interpretation of others with different claims to authority, as Andy pointed out in the lecture. They seek to find the truth or their own version of the truth, for they believe that truth and the true value of a subject are arguable. The idea of postmodernism is something most of us probably don't think about, but it is everywhere we look in television, radio and in newspapers. If we look at the intertextuality of newspapers and magazines you will quickly find this postmodernist idea. One prime example is the satirical magazine 'Private Eye', which parodies the recent headlines for political effect. The editor of which, Ian Hislop, is a panellist on the news quiz 'Have I got News For You'. We also see elements of pastiche in shows you would not intially realise, like The Simpsons and Family Guy, for example the Clockwork Orange scene in The Simpsons that we saw in the lecture. Postmodernism is all around us though we don't always realise it, we subconsciously take it in and even become postmodernist because of shows like Have I got News for You. We start to question the truth we hear, we question the politicians and the press. Sometimes we are very successful at arguing and uncovering the truth, take the Watergate Scandal; concealed to the public by the American government, it took two Washington Post reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, to discover the truth. They argued what the truth was and saw the reality that was concealed by the authority figures - image over reality.

Blog 3: Audiences

What we know about audiences is that they are constantly changing as the media forms evolve. As the text covered, mass broadcasting is a fairly new phenomenon having started with the introduction of radio and then film and television in the 1920s and 30s. This began the age of mass audiences, but as the media format has evolved so has the audience members. We learned in the lecture how audiences have transitioned from the passive, to the active and have now entered the interactive world thanks to such websites as Google and YouTube, and from the reading we see how media is competing with each other;

"Television is being squeezed by the new media mix. It is forced

to fight off competition for advertising revenue from computer games,

mobile media and the Internet - even from radio which is suddenly more

attractive because of its mobility...

...Television and radio stations are less important

in the marketing mix than they have previously been."

And the audiences of today are quite different from those of the 80s and even the 90s. Looking at David Morley's Active Audiences, we see that audiences are placed into 3 groups: dominant (hegemonic), negotiated and oppositional (counter-hegemonic) reading. These audience members will either accept the reading, modify it to suit their opinion or position or totally disagree with the reading. But what we are now seeing in this new interactive audience is something totally different, if people agree or disagree with the reading they can voice their opinion more loudly than ever before with the advances in technology, including Blogger.com and Facebook. The differences in interactive audiences is even greater as audiences are now capable of creating their own media, such as YouTube, thus celebrating audience empowerment and therefore increasing its popularity.