History of technology/Myth of technology p.1

The invention and the popularisation of the internet among other technical devices have led society to let a number of cultural factors influence the way we see and understand such things.

The progression of the internet in itself is astonishing, and the people who made these developments also brought about many 'myths' of the technology they were creating, also leading society into false beliefs.

''Technology'' can be the name for many things. As established previously, technology can relate from a pencil to a helicopter. In this instance of referring to technology as technological devices that we stereotype it with today.

Firstly, 'static electricity' was first discovered in 600 b.c by Thales of Miletus who wrote about amber being rubbed together and charging, creating electricity.

A thousand years later, in 1600 William Gilbert used the latin word for amber to make 'electricity'.

For the next few hundred years, electric technology developed further and further to make things like a running motor, new chemicals and properties found to make stronger electrical charges, and gas. Leading from this, clean water, lighting and communications through electrical means were brought into mainstream society, changing the way humans function in their everyday lives.

With all this progression, there is the question of what could possibly be next?

What can we learn from the history of technology?

With the mass expansion of technology, referring to the last century, we can learn that human kind are an adaptive and inventive race. We have completely changed our way of life, as the web affects almost every aspect of every day life. More than half of today's jobs involve a computer, even if you haven't gone into the computing industry. Social networking has impacted our home and social lives with websites like Facebook and Twitter. These sites also affect the way we receive news.

The company ''Xerox PARC'' have been a massive influence in the development of computing. Some of their most famous releases:

• Ethernet (cable)
• Laser printing
• Personal home computer
• Graphical user interface (GUI) - enables the interface to be controlled via electronic devices as opposed to text commands. 

Xerox are also known for collaborating with the giant Apple company, firstly releasing the Apple Macintosh (more commonly known as a Mac)

Cyberspace - "A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."
(William Gibson - Author.)

Cyberspace could be seen almost as a community. An online community with millions of bits of information and millions of users, like another world or country. Like a country, it has it's own rules and declarations.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

by John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland

February 8, 1996.

This text makes it literally seem like a new land has been discovered and it is being claimed. In a way, cyberspace is a different world in which you can indulge yourself and get away from your own life. The internet is so broad that there are so many things to do and look at, you can use it as a form of escapism. 

A question set to us to think about was ''Does history help me understand my own relationship with technology?'' 

Personally, knowing how much progress has been made and how much time and effort has been put into inventions that I take for granted, such as mobile phones and the internet makes me appreciate them. 

Looking at how far we've come in terms of discovery and invention, it's unreal to think we could have even more complex technology in centuries to come. I realise that I am dependant on certain technologies such as my phone and the internet for everyday things. The University uses the internet to send us messages and give us help and guidance with our work, without it it would be a lot harder to obtain information quickly. It makes me wonder what else could possibly be achieved using technology?

Identity and representation in Social Media and Games.

Identity  can have quite a broad definition. Put shortly, your identity is what makes you you. Everyone has their own individual identity. Features which make up your identity, such as your name, appearance and characteristics are easily changed in an online environment.

There are many things which can effect a persons representation of their identity. Your gender, geographical location, class, political views and other features can attribute to the representation you give of yourself. For example, if you wore dark clothes, had piercings, listened to metal music and were friends with people with the same interests, you may be in the subculture 'goths' and that would be how people saw you. This would then become part of your identity.

With the popularity of social networking, it'd be hard to find someone without a Facebook or Twitter account, or at least some form of social networking activity in the past, such as MySpace or Bebo which are now less used thanks to the popularity and mainstream use of Facebook and Twitter.  On the internet, no-one knows who you are. If you put in false details in an account, no-one would know who you really are, because how can they possibly prove it?

''On our personal homepage, however, we can manipulate all the elements until we are satisfied.'' - Goffman & Identity - Charles Cheung, Presentations of Self on Personal Homepages, in web.studies, p. 47

With sites like Facebook and Twitter, you have to fill out a profile giving details about you. They ask for your name, age, gender, e-mail address and other details. You also have the choice to put in pictures and other information about yourself, such as hobbies and interests. 

In a face to face meeting, it is hard to conceal your initial identity, your gender, age, location etc. People often judge someone within the first 5 seconds of meeting them. First impressions and conversations often mould the way people see each other. Online, you have the chance to act differently how you would in a real face to face conversation, because you have the protection of physical concealment. You could quite literally become anyone. There are obviously safety risks which come with this. Online grooming has arisen as a big problem online. This is where young people, in fact anyone is talking/communicating online with someone they think they know, however this person turns out to be entirely different. These people often try to get their victims to meet up with them or even send sexually explicit pictures of themselves over the web. The obvious problems that arise here include paedophilia, abduction and even rape.

Online, you have the opportunity to alter who you are. On a profile, you could pretend you are a world class sailor and have the photo's to prove it. You can change the music you like, you can put up certain pictures which show you in an entirely different light to how you usually look and what you normally do. You can post pictures to show how many friends you have, or perhaps that you have a love interest. You can exaggeration your own life or completely make one up. 

Most online profiles are supposedly private however there are ways in which anyone can access them. Pictures on facebook will show up on any search engine if you search the right tags. For example, my name 'Jonika Kinchin' is quite unusual. I actively use Facebook and Twitter and use my real name on both websites. Having google imaged my name, I discovered:

All these images are from social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo some years ago. Some are even from a college website from about a year ago. This shows not only that it's very easy to find someone on the internet if you know what to search and where to look, but that I could never really make a new identity for myself as these images will still be on the internet and easy to find.

Towards Ubiquity?

 Ubiquity is “used to describe the diffusion of computing technologies throughout our environment through increasing miniaturization and the development of ‘smart’ (i.e. predictive) computing applications. Therefore the idea that computers will soon be an embedded function of our physical environments”

Ubiquity = being everywhere. 

Terry Flew p. 430 New  Media: A Critical Introduction.

With the advancements of technology being used to aid, produce and even become human life, it is considered that technology is quite literally everywhere. It has become almost impossible to lead life in western society and other materially rich parts of the globe in 2012 without the use of any digital technology.

This text is being produced and evaluated through technology. The result will be given through technology. As previously mentioned, technology is in our lives, in our bodies and even in our minds. This can cause question of whether we truly have any privacy or anonymity.

Phones and the internet are the most common digital technology used in everyday life. With these two being combined, using Wifi & 3G data networks,  hacking personal and professional data and information has most probably never been easier.

Other less obvious devices can track a person, such as store reward cards which can see what you've brought as well as when and which store you were in. They also usually require your personal details such as date and birth and address.


Another card which can track you even easier is the London oyster card, which shows which stations you've been in when and what time.



There are many other ways in which you can be tracked by technology in which you would never even think. Even GPS systems and SATNAV car systems can be hacked and made available for tracking.

In regards to being tracked online, social networking makes this so much easier to find someone, with many purposes of the social networking sites are to find people you may have perhaps lost contact with, such as www.friendsreunited.co.uk, as well as the more obvious examples such as Facebook and MySpace, where there is a toolbar which lets you search for a particular person, using their name and any details you may know.

Instant Messaging and E-mail logs are also kept on computer memory devices. It is simple and quite easy to access any conversation you've had. With the growing popularity of Social Networking and Instant Messaging, more and more messages were being exchanged on the internet. On each account you have mini conversation windows with other account users, simpler and quicker than E-mails. This is then saved in your conversation history and it is easy to look back at what has been said. Recently, years old Facebook posts have been appearing on people's timelines, according to a French Metro company.







Privacy is an interesting concept which can be described in many ways. Put simply, it means to have the right to keep what ever it is confidential and to have the right so converse information for yourself, what ever that maybe. It can also be used to describe 'being private' so you may have something or somewhere that is physically private to you. Privacy concerning the internet and social networking relates to keeping things confidential. With a system that's so complex however so easy to access to anyone, it'd be hard to keep much private. Particularly with search engines and word triggers, personal details such as home address or date of birth would be very easy to find if you have submitted them onto any sort of social networking sites, which usually require these details. These details would show up on any search engine as you have submitted them to the world wide web and are very unlikely to ever have them fully removed from the internet.




There are certain laws which cover surveillance on the internet. In some extreme cases, surveillance can be considered a crime and lawful action can be taken. Surveillance can cover anything from online banking details to cookies on the web to social networking. The fact is that you are watched on the internet at all times. Even when you submit personal financial details on internet banking sites, there is always someone watching and controlling that database which will see your details. If there are problems with your online banking, you would have to talk to a customer service provider which would mean your actions are being watched and details that are supposed to be kept very private are exposed and shared.



The idea that everything we do on the web is being watched is similar to the 'Big Brother' phenomenon, in that anything you do will not be kept private. To say that technology is become ubiquitous would be an entirely sensible thing to say. Almost everything we do involves being online. To submit this blog, an online service has to be used and the feedback will almost certainly be delivered electronically via the web. Technology is literally everywhere. You can pay by card almost anywhere, the initial way of communication has become via the phone or social networking, and we spend ridiculous amounts of hours online every week for all sorts of reasons.

Before you accept, please read this Terms and Conditions.

Does anyone actually read the terms and conditions?

They're everywhere on the internet. Whatever you sign up for has their own set of terms and conditions. Like the small print in a contract, they are often forgotten about or slyly worded  into tricking you into a false sense of security. In terms of social networking, sites have their own terms and conditions to warn their users of consequences and rules of the site. Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites on the Internet today. 

Facebooks terms and conditions uses a lot of fancy words which are quite convincing in making you believe they are only after your safety on the web, one of the first lines you read is ''Your privacy is very important to us''. Obviously it is, as our private details are what attract advertisers. Facebook uses our details and what we write on Facebook to sell to advertisers. They also look at our activity on Facebook to see what we like and what we don't, so they know who to advertise their products too which would be most successful. 

Under the subheading ''Registration and Account Security'', number 7 claims:

''You will keep your contact information accurate and up-to-date.''

Ever got a random phone call asking if you were home and were you interested in Sky TV and did you want to upgrade? Yet you've never contacted Sky and have no idea how they got your details?

Well, your Facebook account is the answer. 

Safety

We do our best to keep Facebook safe, but we cannot guarantee it. We need your help to keep Facebook safe, which includes the following commitments by you:

1. You will not post unauthorized commercial communications (such as spam) on Facebook.
2. You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our prior permission.
3. You will not engage in unlawful multi-level marketing, such as a pyramid scheme, on Facebook.
4. You will not upload viruses or other malicious code.
5. You will not solicit login information or access an account belonging to someone else.
6. You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user.
7. You will not post content that: is hate speech, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.
8. You will not develop or operate a third-party application containing alcohol-related, dating or other mature content (including advertisements) without appropriate age-based restrictions.
9. You will follow our Promotions Guidelines and all applicable laws if you publicize or offer any contest, giveaway, or sweepstakes (“promotion”) on Facebook.
10. You will not use Facebook to do anything unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory.
11. You will not do anything that could disable, overburden, or impair the proper working or appearance of Facebook, such as a denial of service attack or interference with page rendering or other Facebook functionality.
12. You will not facilitate or encourage any violations of this Statement or our policies.

These safety policies seem completely fair and easy to follow. However, people still find it appropriate to use Facebook as a weapon. There have been many incidents involving cyber bullying which have led people, mainly younger children to resort to drastic measures, sometimes even suicide. Hate pages and 'trolls' are a problem which has recently hit headlines. 

If I were to be the next Mark Zuckerberg and create a massive social networking site, my terms and conditions would be slightly different. Instead of using advertising as the main way of collecting profit from the website, I would charge each member 50p/economic equivalent (this site is global) when they sign up, and that's the only payment you have to make. I would involve advertising but only when extra features are used on the site, such as viewing and sharing videos, I would allow advertisements to be played before the video, similar to YouTube. 

My Terms and Conditions:

1. You will not use bullying or intimidation towards another user.

2. You will use your real name or the name in which you are known. 

3.You will not use a picture of someone you do not know to pass them off as yourself.

4.You will not use this site to post photographic or videographic material that glorifies any act of violence. 

5.You will only post photographic or videographic material with the person in the materials permission. 

6.You will not be misleading with the information you give - i.e giving the wrong age. 

7.You will not create another account in someone else's name.

8.You will not create any group pages or club pages intimidating or discriminating against any other person. 

9.You will not use extreme profanity 

10.You will not express racist, sexist, homophobic, prejudice or any discriminating views of any kind towards another user. 

11.You will not use sexually explicit/pornographic language or photographic/videographic images. 

On the grounds of ownership and copyright, as soon as you upload any photo or video onto the site, Facebook have the right to do what they want with it without your say. Most recently, the application ''Instagram'' changed their terms and conditions in that they have the right to use anyone's material in their advertising campaign. In other words, your online life is not yours to own. 

Open Access

Open Access refers to academic texts and journals being accessible and free to everyone via the Internet. Usually, academic works such as research findings and articles summarising and showing information are in the form of physical books that are paid for, like any other book.

With the idea of 'free' reading, there are obviously economic issues regarding payment to the author and publishing companies, as well as royalties and other publishing issues. The concept of the ''common good'' comes into action here, in that publishing and allowing the public to view these established academic works is positive and beneficial for society, in that there are no limitations or prejudice in regards to the individual and any contributing factors which may have limited them to accessing these works previously. One limitation is the pricing of the books. As any University student could vouch for, text books are not cheap. The Internet will always be used for research, simply because it's so quick and easy, not to mention literally free. However, the Internet cannot always be 100% reliable.

''Many journals now cost more than $20,000 for a year’s subscription.'' - Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard University, USA. 

Having well researched, completely reliable sources that can be accessed so quickly and freely is so beneficial to society that the distribution of knowledge has gone wider than ever before in that you do not have to be a specific type of person in order to access new and more complex information. 

There will obviously always be issues with the distribution of free knowledge. Some of the most debated issues are listed below.

-'Traditional' academic publishing - Peer review/ professional publishing. 

-Issues of cost, access and distribution

-Issues of knowledge circulation and inequality

-Effect on wider society

-Opportunities and Challenges - standards, 'green' archive. 

In regards to the publishing side, Professor Dame Jane Finch, a sociologist at the University of Manchester states here that open access could cost the publishing industry up to £60m per year, however with the falling subscription prices, it will welcome economic growth and be beneficial for everyone. Universities are currently paying up to £200m for access to certain scientific journals that have been criticised for 'locking' away their works. The Internet is obviously relatively free and so ridiculously popular that it is part of everyday life to use the internet, with 2,405,518,376 Internet users from June 2012. With the amount of people who use the Internet, there will be a large percentage who use it for academic purposes, be it for educational, work, or just curiosity purposes. Wider society will benefit from having access to academia, it will entitle literally anyone to find out about whatever they want. It is possible that it will also strengthen the education system, in that students will have better access to research that they can investigate themselves. There is always the backlash of giving students the 'easy' option, however if the 'easy' option is more beneficial for everyone, why not take it? 

Another highly understandable issue about Open Access that hasn't been mentioned much is that of copyright and plagiarism. There has always been the issue with copying from books, however the internet is so much broader than books could ever be, in that there are millions and millions of pages, meaning the sources of information are scattered and if not referenced properly, could be almost impossible to find. You cannot delete a book, however you can a webpage. There will always be plagiarism, and Open Access could increase that, however with the more complex marking systems used by schools and universities, such as Turnitin, Plagiarism is a lot simpler to control, as the programme can search the whole web for similarities in the students work and anything available on the internet. With textbooks and journals online, this makes it easier to see if a student has copied from a textbook instead of the actual internet. This makes teachers and examiners jobs easier and simpler as the process isn't long winded, and they are able to spend more time on each paper, giving more precise and true marks. 

The pro's and con's of Open Access will always be weighed up against each other. The pro's are much more beneficial long term. They benefit more of society than banning the movement would. The argument that it would follow with an economic downfall for the publishing industry is worrying however alternative plans can be put into action, and as Professor Finch suggested, the industry will boost again and it will be long term beneficial. 

The Digital Body

Previously, technology history and progress has been discussed thoroughly, looking at the developments of what technology has been able to achieve with the invention of the internet being one of the biggest break through's. Now however, technology is being used as, and perhaps in replacement of human life and human features.

In 1943, the ENIAC 'Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer', or the first general use computer was made. This was the first one that could be reprogrammed to solve problems in computing. John Mauchly and John Presper Eckert from the University of Pennsylvania invented the machine for the US military. With the progression and development in computing, the ENIAC was no longer needed for computer programming as easier and faster methods were developed, and the power fuelling the ENIAC was eventually shut off in 1955.

< Programmers operate the main control board.

Interface

The point of interaction between a computer/technical device and a person.

There are many different ways a human can come into contact with technology. Computing is one of the main forms of interaction, with not only the internet. Millions of jobs require computing skills to perform correctly, mainly using word documents and printing equipment.

Phones and computing are the most obvious example of interface. More recent developments in interactivity have created new ways in which we can interact with technology for different purposes.
 < Nintendo Wii, using a hand device detected by motion control in order to play games on the console, released in 2006.

 < Oyster card, used for public transport in London, to be inserted into the ticket machine in the replacement of an actual ticket.

< Face recognition. Using developed cameras.

< ATM/cash machines. The machine detects and recognises the pin on your card and cannot be accessed without a 4 digit PIN number.

Could this lead to human life being dependant on technology? 


These are just a few examples of the majority of ways we interact with technology on more or less a daily basis.Technology has been developed and expanded so much in that it can even replace human organs. A pacemaker is a device which replaces the job of the human heart when it fails.One of the key problems with using technology to help human life is the possibility and threat of these devices being hacked and used for the entirely wrong reasons.

We already use technology to chip and track animals. We can also use hearing devices inserted into ears to help with any kid of hearing problems.

Prosthetic limbs have also improved people's lives massively. Although not always entirely technological, the parts are put together using machinery and can sometimes contain it, depending on the limb and the purpose.
A classic example would be from the Star Wars franchise film ''The Empire Strikes Back'' in the infamous 'I am your father' scene where Luke Skywalkers arm is cut off by his own father. You are then shown a new arm made for Luke by the robots of the ship.



The arm is seen to be electronic as sparks fly from it and it makes machinery noises when put to use. In reality, prosthetic limbs are becoming more and more advanced.



The limbs used to be designed to look like normal limbs, to ensure the person had a normal appearance. However research has concluded that other designs make life a lot easier. The most recent discovery has been the 'mind controlled limb': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppILwXwsMng



Cyborg? The concept that human kind and technology have become so closely intertwined that they could possibly morph to form a new kind of life.
References in Popular Culture:

Star Wars
Doctor Who

The idea of 'Cyborgs' has been widely covered in science fiction films, books and general interest. The whole idea of combining life and technology would blur the lines of reality, in that the two definitions would become entwined and be hard to separate. Although it is fascinating to think about and percieve, the idea that it actually could happen is quite frightening, as our way of life could completely change, and most likely will. 30 years ago, it would never have been believed that there would be a hand telephone device which could tell you where you were in the world, and that you could communicate with someone on the other side of the planet in a matter of seconds. The idea of  'cyborgs' and technological humans may seem absurd now, however in another 30 years it may be the complete norm.

Motions of life - what makes us human?

Vitalism: The theory or doctrine that life processes arise from or contain a nonmaterial vital principle and cannot be explained entirely as physical and chemical phenomena.

In other words, we are more than bodies and fluids. We have principles, morals and 'souls'. This separates us from other animals and technology. We have free will and freedom of thought, and something that makes us unique and 'human' which is deeper and more complex than scientific explanation.

Materiliasm: The theory that life needs certain physical matters to survive and develop as a kind.

'Material possessions' often relate to things that are expensive and desired for. However, as humans we need certain things to maintain and develop life. Chemicals, drugs and the need for medical research and developments are extremely important and keeping and maintaining life.

Informationism: The idea that living forms are capable of growing and repairing structures.

The idea and concept that we as humans can reproduce life, as well as being able to create and develop things such as buildings and developments.

One thing technology will (hopefully) never be able to copy off humans is reproduction. Humans created technology, and although technology helps to create other technology, humans are the initial controller.

Cloning  is a method in which can be seen that technology is used as a vital key in reproduction, however unnatural reproduction. The process occurs when an embryo is made in a test tube and inserted into a surrogate mother to continue like a normal pregnancy. Dolly the Sheep was the first ever animal to be successfully cloned, however she died young. This advance in cloning has shown that is it possible, and this could have major affects on the world.

To think that we have developed the technology in order to clone animals, does the idea of cloning people seem so far away? If that becomes possible, what singularity could occur next which will change the way of life even further?

The idea of cloning and creating humans in an unnatural way has been thought of before. There have been many films and basis of popular culture based around the concept of cloning and man-made humans.





Welcome to life - Tom Scott. 

Mind Uploading 

http://minduploadingproject.org/

The concept of 'Mind uploading' involves putting everything in your mind onto a computer device, so you are able to access it at any point. This may sound far-fetched and unrealistic however there has already been research and attempts at doing so. The thought of being able to upload your mind to a computer is odd, would it mean that everything in your head was copied or removed completely? There is the issue of privacy, in that if everything on your mind is physically on a computer, what's to stop it from being shared or hacked?
Does this also mean that theoretically, we could live forever? Even though our bodies die, if your mind is stored, what's to stop it being put in another physical form and technically, you would still be living.
There are a lot of ethical issues that surround this, and will involve a lot of trial and error in research if ever this was a genuine possibility.

Would you want this to happen to you?

If this ever did happen, your mind may be awoken in a different time, where everything and everyone you know has died. This would have a lot of effects on you and you may end up wishing you never underwent this. How would you kill a mind? Deleting?

So, who wants to live forever?

With everything that has been produced in terms of prolonging and maintaining life, is it just an obscure thought to think we could quite literally live forever?

Would you want to live forever? Thinking logically, your body would keep ageing, unless body preservation is progressed or Garnier come up with a better skin tightening cream. There are ethical, economical and social issues which would accompany this. The world would become even more over populated than it already is, if there aren't people dieing as often as there is now. This would lead to over crowding, a shortage of food and products, employment issues and others.

Overall, there may be research projects into this entire concept, however the actual possibility seems to be quite a while in the future. Who knows, you may be reading this blog with your head in a pickled jar in 4083.

http://inventors.about.com/od/estartinventions/a/Eniac.htm

Mythology of the Media part 2

Certain 'mythologies' about the internet can really affect our relationship with technology and our lifestyles in general. The internet is and probably always will be a big part of modern society and our everyday lives.
The variety of uses that the internet can be used for is massive. There is said to be 100 individual internet pages per person in the entire world.

Different cultures influence and use the internet in their own way. For example China has an entirely different way of using the internet, whereas most of the world use the ''www.'' forum, invented by Tim Berners-Lee. This means they can monitor everyone using their internet. Iran have also created their own network http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/25/iran-state-run-internet to increase censorship. This supports the myth of privacy and censorship. Usually what you put on the internet, unless privatised can be seen by anyone anywhere in the world. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have privacy settings, however they are not guaranteed and not everyone thinks about the consequences of having a public account or profile.

Another myth is that 'The technology of the Internet is making us more social and helping to foster a new kind of community'. This is true to an extent as from the internet you are able to meet and contact anyone anywhere in the world, whereas previously it would be near impossible to just meet someone from the other side of the world. However, this has also brought a new type of danger, with chat rooms turning into obsessive relationships turning into abductions and pedophilia. It could be argued that the invention of social networking has led us to become less social in reality, as we spend so much time socialising on the internet. Since October 2012, there are over a billion active Facebook accounts. http://newsroom.fb.com/content/default.aspx?NewsAreaId=22. 

Augmented Reality? - http://www.howstuffworks.com/augmented-reality.htm



This refers to combining reality and technology together, a view of the real world with implements of technical features using computer generated inputs such as graphics and other data. Also known as 'Virtual Reality' which has been in discussion for a while. Virtual Reality in gaming has recently come into the mainstream. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vcGqha6xJ0. Previously gaming delved into virtual reality by giving users the opportunity to use headsets and microphones. Combined together: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vcGqha6xJ0. This video shows the problems you can encounter with virtual gaming.



''We are the web.'' - Kevin Kelly. - http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html
This paper discusses web 2.0 (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1008839) and the progression of the internet itself. It tells how in 1965 Ted Nelson attempted his own version of the internet, however his efforts went unknown. 1984 Kelly met Nelson who told of his intention to ''organise all the knowledge of humanity'' and to ''save the world from stupidity.'' Alternatively, Vannevar Bush thought of 'hyperlinked pages' in 1945.

''For the trails of the machine become duplicated in the brain of the user, vaguely as all human memory is vague, but with a concomitant emphasis by repetition, creation and discard … as the cells of the brain become realigned and reconnected, better to utilize the massive explicit memory which is its servant.'' [Bush 1959, 178] http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/2/1/000015/000015.html

Is the machine using us?

We are the web.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

The next step? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=off08As3siM&feature=related