Gadgets

Amongst the technology sections in various newspapers I have noticed that many gadgets these days are designed specifically to be attached to your person. Amongst the gadgets that have caught my eye are 'the digital eye' and the 'smart goggle.'

The digital eye apparently can "Future cameras become embedded in the eye utilising the internal dead space out of the light's focal path for supporting electronics, while the camera replaces the cornea and lens."
So this is a camera that is actually part of the body, a camera that you wear on a daily basis perhaps? What this is an example of is technology you cannot actually see, something that you and others are hardly aware of. This could perhaps be used in a medical sense, but this surely appeals to a far greater market. As cameras, phones and MP3 players are quickly being combined into one easy to use device, now it seems as though the ultimate storage space becomes the body itself. Perhaps someone could wear the latest gadgets rather them carry around on your person.

The Smart Goggle is the latest invention to come out of Japan. The idea is to wear the glasses as part of your everyday wear and if you were to lose your keys, your phone or anything else for that matter, the glasses play back film footage of the last place your saw the item you have misplaced. Built into the glasses is a tiny camera, which is programmed to film constantly. The glasses recognize objects by dimensions of common household objects that have been programmed into the hardware of the glasses and camera. The glasses look rather bulky, but the team behind this genius invention are working on making them much smaller and wearable for an everyday basis...because gadgets this days have to be as small as possible.

What these gadgets are examples of is technology becoming part of our bodies...voluntarily of course. This poses all sort of questions regarding identity. How much technology would someone use and wear and have become part of them before that person no longer considers themselves completely human for example? Or will people soon no longer be able to function without the use of these gadgets? On a lesser note, many people nowadays may not be able to consider the prospect of functioning without the Internet or their mobile phones. So as technology becomes a more intrinsic part of our lives, will it become an intrinsic part of our bodies?

Privacy and Politics

With news of Gordon Brown "going digital" in the news this week I found myself wondering how politics has had to change over the years to accommodate the ever increasing use of the Internet. I for one, read most of my news online, flipping back and fourth between the broadsheets from the comfort of my own bedroom. Now it seems, the government wants to show how trendy it can be, and in tune with us 'normal' folk by using websites such as Twitter and Google Earth to promote themselves and stay in touch with the public. One Twitter from Number 10 was "No 10 admin in the US is tired, but surviving on strong coffee and muffins" which is just one of many examples of twitter from the PM and his admin.

Muffins aside it is understandable why the PM would want to get online and create a feeling of being more in touch with the public. This is because on the Internet, there is a voice and many many places to make that voice heard. From message boards, to comment trails on you tube, to chat rooms, facebook and twitter. Outside the realm of politics the influence of the internet and its capacity to influence decisions off line cannot be ignored. A rather amusing example of this is the New York Mets (the American Baseball team) being the victims of a massive online prank when the song "Never gonna give you up" was voted online to be the teams anthem. Apparently over 5 million people were in on the joke. Another example is online communities having influence over productions such as Lord of the Rings. Apparently Peter Jackson who directed the much anticipated trilogy kept an eye on the forums of many Lord of the Rings websites to make sure directional decisions he was making were being taken well. So these examples are not political but they are proof that even multi million dollar films still look to online communities for approval, knowing how influential their opinion can inevitably be.

So can the internet be influential in political decisions? Well the government seems to think so. Not only does it want to keep to keep the community it happy, it wants to keep its online communities happy, which are indeed more likely to be made up of international and well as national people increasing the range of opinion and delivery the news further around the world.

Politics must prepare to become less formally seated in one place, and prepare to become more technological, so politicians themselves must also become comfortable with the technology that they will have to use in order to reach into the online world, as well as the off line to which they are probably more familiar. The seats in the houses of parliament should be exchanged for swivel desk chairs amongst a network of politicians and the politics of online communities.

TV on ISPs

It seems an impossible task to imagine the Internet without television. Even before the launch of websites such as Google Video and You Tube programming was available to Internet users throughout the world. Anyone, anywhere could download the latest episodes of their favourite television programmes without hours and be watching them instead of waiting months for the latest American drama series to make it to their screens. The favoured approach used to using P2P programmes to download, then came torrents, a faster way of downloading a users favourite shows. the favoured approach, favoured by students such as myself who really cannot be bothered to fork out a licence fee, is of course online sites providing direct links to not only television shows, but films, cartoons and music videos. websites such a TV Links and Alluc operate on the edge of legality by using Asian websites to host their videos. many are removed for copyrite infringedment but will inevitably reappear within days. The reason for this is the avid users of the websites either being the source of the clips and with pure determination to share a particular TV show will get it back online as quickly as possible, or they will scourer the Internet to find another source of the clip, and become a hero on these website message boards.

The key word here is copywrite. If you were to take a popular BBC programe such as QI (Quite Interesting) and type it into You tube, almost every episode (in 3 part segments) would appear on your screen. The BBC seemed rather slow to catch onto this, but once they realised millions of people were watching a BBC licenced funded programme for free, the public saw the launch of the BBC iPlayer. According to the guardian online, the BBC iPlayer gets over 250,000 hits a day, which is staggering considering how new the player is. For the BBC it may be a step in the right direction in terms of technological advance. First we had sky plus which allowed us to pause, stop, record and play any TV show we wanted, now the BBC has offered a service free of charge that does the same thing. With illegal downloading sites such as The Pirate Bay which has over 10 million members downloading television online, it seems only a matter of time before television corporations all attempt what the BBC has done, and put TV online in order to offer a legal alternative to the downloading revolution.

So good news for the consumer, bad news for Internet Service providers, or ISPs. In an article by Charles Arther of the guardian technology supplement, he points towards ISPs being hit by higher streaming costs because they pay by gigabyte consumed. This means that by using the BBC iPlayer, they are hit by massive streaming costs because of the massive amount of people streaming off the BBC website directly, rather than using P2P. So it would seem that the illegal users of website such as Pirate bay actually cost ISPs less money than the legal users of the BBC.

So is there a solution? For the Internet user, yes there is. If you really are concerned about costing an ISP a lot of money then you might consider downloading illegally. But really it shouldn't be the user or customer who have the concerns. Watching television online may not be a new idea but doing legally certainly is and it won't be going away fast. The flexibility the Internet offers to watch programmes when ever you want to is all to appealing. Eventually the BBC and other broadcasting companies will come up with a far more full proof way of providing television for "free." ITV for example streams its advertisements during an online viewing of one of its shows. The BBC will also have to introduce some way of getting licence fees from viewers who watch online rather than on the channels itself. But away from the money making side of broadcasting, online television offers a new, faster and more flexible way of watching television. The broadcasters may not like it, but 250,000 people per day using the BBC iPlayer will surely disagree.

The Future of Books?

I may have caught onto the Kindle rather late, it was only bought to attention about a month ago and even after reading many articles in various newspapers on Amazon's new digital reading device, I'm still not entirely convinced.

Amazon itself describes the Kindle as "to provide an exceptional reading experience" which I have no doubt it is, but is it a worth while reading experience? As a student, I would like nothing more than to carry the 18 text books I lugged home for the holidays, and to be able to fit them into on small digital device. One newspaper article pointed out this very thing, also siting Lawyers as targets for the Kindle. But there has already been problems with the technology itself. Customers were quick to complain they were having to pay for documents such as newspapers that with their computers they could get online for free. These however are minor complaints, what I am more interested in, is the relationship between the reader and the material itself.

I first heard about the Kindle in a seminar where the class was being encouraged to engage with the theories concerning text, and our relationship to the written word. Up until recently, the written word has predominately been found in the book, or at least the academics and professors and students will rely heavily on what they can find in a library. Still in essays, almost all the references you will have will be from a book, with far less dedicated to online referencing. Hours are spent squeezed in between book shelves trying to find that one article, only to find its on long loan and you won't be seeing it until June. Either way, when considering something like the Kindle the hours pent in the library seem to fall away and what you are left with is mobile reading, downloading and a more leisurely way of finding that information you need. Text becomes accessible from anywhere and it becomes an interactive experience, rather than just an active one. Texts can be deleted at the touch of a button and disregarded within seconds. They can be borrowed from the comfort of your own room and never returned, forever saved on the memory of a hand held computer.

To delve into a philosophical debate just for a moment. The text survives beyond its author, which it has always has done in many respects. In a digital age, and with the Kindle the text survives beyond its author but it also survives beyong the book. It is in the hands of the reader to do as they please. The text is now mobile. It can be moved, downloaded and deleted as the reader wishes. The Internet continues to shift the boundaries of the text and make it so that the text does not exist in any one place, it exists where we want it to.

Being Technically Scrabulous

For anyone who doesn't know, Facebook is a social networking website designed to let people all over the world share photos, chat and in general stalk any member of the public you met in a pub and think is rather attractive. As well as being an amazing time wasting device when students like myself should be focusing on writing essays, instead I find myself becoming more and more addicted to Scrabble...oh I'm sorry I meant Scrabulous.



I came across an interesting article in The Daily Telegraph the day I arrived back from University titled "Why Scrabulous is Fabulous."

This immediately caught my attention because I for one am not used to reading the Daily Telegraph and finding any article I find find remotely interesting outside the Sports pages. This is partly in fear of the danger of warming to David Cameron, but that is for someone else to discuss.

When the game Scrabulous was first introduced to me I was immediately addicted and was horrified as an avid Facebook whore to find out that Hasbro who own the copyright laws to the original Scrabble were launching a lawsuit against the creators of the online application version that can be found on Facebook. What Hasbro were not prepared for was the back lash against the lawsuit. One thing the lawyers didn't count on was the online fan club that exists within the Facebook community. I confess to myself joining the group wanting to save this application from the grasps of Hasbro. What Scrabulous has managed to achieve that perhaps the board game never could is the opportunity to sell the product to a more modern market.
Scrabble is a game I have always associated with arguments at Christmas and keeping my Grandma amused after Countdown had finished. What Facebook has done, and the creators of Scrabulous have done is make an old word game into an online, transnational sensation. A user can play with anyone all over the world, it no longer has to be a game one is dragged into against their will.

So that is pretty much the only defence Facebook has against the lawsuit from the outset...the fact that Scrabulous is popular. However what I fail to understand is why Hasbro are annoyed at all?! The creators of Scrabulous have found a way to reinvigorate an old game, to make it appeal to a generation who now apparently spend over 20 hours a week on the Internet. But if I were to stand up in court and argue for the guys who made Scrabulous possible for us Facebook fans, I would say that not just Facebook but the whole of the Internet is in a public domain. Once a Facebook user publishes a wall post on a friends wall, or makes a comment about a photo it is there for everyone to see. When I play a move in Scrabulous I've done exactly the same thing. Scrabulous is about Text, its a text based game with new ways worked in to make Scrabulous or Scrabble more versatile online.

Scrabulous is within the public domain, and the fact that it was the online Facebook users who have now caused Hasbro to backtrack on their lawsuit claim proves that the users online have considerable power over the far more private domain of the law courts. Its an interesting turn of events. But I would choose Scrabulous over Scrabble any day.

Welcome

This is my Blog. I have no idea who might be reading this and who the audience of what I'm writing now shall be either but I guess that's sort of the point of blogging on the Internet instead of in a book. However, I do feel a Blog should have a focus and because I have chosen the technological route to Blog my opinions and general musings I have chosen to focus on the world of Technology. I find myself coming across articles concerning everyday Technologies such as networking sites in newspapers on a regular basis especially with an ever growing concern over privacy (and employer questioning how much their employees seem to be skiving...) by using social networking sites such as Facebook. There is also Technology within Culture and what I am interested in is the effect it has on our everyday lives and perhaps our approach to how we function as a society with so much Technology influencing our every move. These may be necessary Technology but I shall not forget the more recreational Technologies shall we say, such as computer games or popular online ways of spending time. Now its time to route through some newspapers and explore the infinite world of the Web.