Network Society

This is an section from the book 'Communication Power' By the theorist Manual Castells. It explains what a culture is made up of and how these values can be applied to network societies. The 'network society' is not restricted by race or culture and it is a global culture which enables 'communication between different cultures on the basis not on shared values but of the sharing of the value of communication' so social groups in this network are do not all share the same values but communicate in the same way.     

Constructions and Reconstructions of the self in Virtual Reality

 

 

These are extracts from an article by Sherry Turkle in Cyber_Reader.

The article talks about identity's within virtual games. She uses three example of people who played online games and their identity within them. I found it incredibly interesting looking at these three very different people and their use of these online identity's.

The firs person was a girl called Jess who's mother 'denies her existence' so she used the game to work out her own issues about her mother and have the conversations she was never able to have in real life. The second person is a guy who is completely isolated by health. He is more of the stereotypical vision of a game player, someone who gets to live a life the way her would like, complete with virtual girlfriend. And the last a guy who was able to get over emotional issues during collage but stopped gaming when he left and went on to get a good paying job. He says the game 'kept him form having suicidal thoughts.'

 

This article looking at these three people gives an interesting incite to the way that people use online inanity's and virtual self's in these kinds of games and virtual reality's.

Book publishers report record sales

The book's not finished yet

How is the digital revolution affecting the book trade?

If you travel on trains packed with commuters staring at tiny mobile phone screens rather than books, or wander along high streets now devoid of bookshops, you might think it was in a sorry state.

But the Publishers' Association annual statistical digest, published today, seems to paint a different picture.

The industry had a record year for sales, up 4% to £3.3bn. 2012 was the year when the digital revolution really took hold, with sales up 66% to £411m and fiction e-reading growing even faster, up 149%.

As for the physical book, long thought to be under threat from all those Kindles, Kobos and Nooks, reports of its demise may be premature. Sales fell just 1% to £2.9bn, and in some genres, notably children's books, sales actually rose.

The figures also show that the pace at we're switching from physical to digital books varies according to the type of title. Apparently, 26% of fiction sales are digital, whereas for non-fiction books the figure is just 5%, and for children's titles, 3%.

Why? Well perhaps for fiction it is only the words that matter, and they can be rendered as well or better in digital form, whereas for something like a glossy cookery book or an illustrated children's book, the physical object still delivers a much better experience.

Nigella Lawson: withstanding the digital threat?

What does this mean then for the pace of publishing's digital revolution and its impact on readers and authors?

A few weeks ago Michael Serbinis of the e-reader maker Kobo told me he reckoned that 90% of reading would eventually be on digital devices.

“Start Quote

I've got a Google alert and every day it tells me about a new torrenting site offering free copies of my book”

End Quote JoJo Moyes, author

You won't be surprised to hear that Richard Mollet of the Publishers' Association is betting on a lower figure - somewhere between 30% and 50%. But however rapid the shift to e-readers, publishing seems to be weathering digital climate change better than some other media industries.

But what about authors? I was surprised to hear from JoJo Moyes - a bestselling writer of women's fiction - that nearly half of the sales of her latest book were in a digital format. And each digital sale earns her a few pennies more than the royalty she gets from a physical book sale purchase.

Mind you, not all authors are happy - they point to the much lower costs of producing digital books and wonder how publishers still justify taking such a large cut.

The publishers' response is that they have to spend large sums defending authors from the threat of piracy.

My report for the One O'Clock News

Book publishers report record sales

 

JoJo Moyes has some sympathy with that argument: "I've got a Google alert set up and every day it tells me about a new torrenting site offering free copies of my book. I pass them on to my publisher to deal with. "

Still, neither publishers nor authors seem to have seen their incomes damaged significantly by either piracy or the wider digital revolution. Readers, meanwhile, have a wider choice, and perhaps the prospect of lower prices - although many will grumble that e-books should be a whole lot cheaper.

For bookshops the news is not so good. Independent book stores continue to close, as readers turn to online giants like Amazon for both physical and digital books.

That is making our high streets just a little less interesting, so it's a vicious circle where going out and browsing for books or anything else becomes less attractive than sitting at home and shopping online..

But overall, 2012 seemed to show that the British public still loves books in all their variety, and is prepared to pay to enjoy them.

We hear plenty of doom and gloom from the old media industries about the ravages of the digital revolution - but publishing seems determined to look on the bright side


This news report was published today about 30 minuets ago on BBC News . Thought it was interesting in relation to Katy's earlier post about the death of print.

Illegal Portrait Of The Internet

'SOMEONE HACKED ALMOST HALF A MILLION DEVICES AROUND THE WORLD. WHY? THEY WANTED TO SEE WHAT THE INTERNET LOOKED LIKE.'

This is a portrait of internet usage around the world created illegally by a hacker who accessed nearly half a million connected devices, simply by using the 'root' password to the devices which in general we don't change. He used the data of devices which were online to create this infographic map, where red represents peak usage and blue the lowest.

Some people would find it unethical that someone has 'hacked' them however it wasn't to cause any harm and created something really interesting!

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672187/infographic-hackers-create-an-amazing-illegal-portrait-of-the-internet  

Experiment

Ran a little experiment to see how many times I went on social medias in one day. In total, i went on Facebook 21 times, mainly in the evening at home as a distraction.

Marshall McLuhan - The Global Village

(interview starts at 3.00)

This interview is from 1960, Marshall explains about how the role of the book is changing as new electronic media is starting to emerge. He talks about how the world is becoming connected through television and radio and how the world seems 'smaller' because of this. I think it's interesting to look at their predictions and compare it to the vast amount of media and technology we have become reliant on now.

The term global village is defined as: : 'the world viewed as a community in which distance and isolation have been dramatically reduced by electronic media (as television and the Internet) 

(http://www.merriam-webster.com)

could this the the starting point of creating a new identity online?

http://www.fakenamegenerator.com