Final Post

How is it that so many people find out about certain events? Is it the fliers, word of mouth or the internet? There are always booth inside or outside the CUB promotion some sort of event or a service. Lately a great majority are giving away free items to have you like their Facebook page or group. They will even have laptops set up so that people can sign into their Facebooks right there. The social media known as Facebook has become such a huge thing that almost all events at WSU use it in some way. Whether it be to create an event and have people of that event invite their friends and those friends invite even more, or to simply put the information of the event on the Class of 2011, 2012... group pages. To be honest it seems like sometimes that using fliers is almost completely obsolete to use to invite people to events. I see or get invited to more events on Facebook compared to the amount of fliers I see for other events. It seems that in order to have a successful event nowadays some form of social media is needed to get it to the right people. I am not trying to say that fliers and word f mouth do not help, but they seem to be less important than being able to advertise an event on Facebook. An example, is that there was recently a Dodgeball tournament. Initially I first noticed when they had a booth set up in the CUB. Though just doing my daily routine I glanced at the booth and continued walking. A few days later I started seeing many advertising post about it posted in several groups that I was apart of. Then I received an invite to the event from a friend who was helping host the event. It wasn't until the event hit Facebook that I felt intrigued enough to look at the event. After seeing how many people said they were going I decided to join. In the end though my team bailed due to homework issues. The experience proved to me that the best advertisement that a group can really have is through Facebook. Due to the news of the event can get to many more people and at a much faster pace. I know that during my first year at WSU I rarely knew of any events unless someone posted about it on Facebook. This was caused because I lived in Stephenson where the event board seem to be rarely updated and all my class were in Todd. So I never saw any of the events that groups were handing out fliers or had booths at the CUB. My routine consisted of going to Todd, South Side then back to the dorms. So if it wasn't for Facebook my friends and I would most likely have missed many different events that the people had.

03/21/13

In the reading for class a major topic was the privacy of a persons account on Facebook. At first I thought that the paper was mostly gonna talk about how people post private information and that some friend who they do not want to see it, end up seeing it. The paper was partly about that then it started to talk about how people try to make Facebook much more private so that no who they deem unwanted will not see their post.  First was the simple ways by clearing your friends list to people who you do not want seeing your post or things you are tagged in. When I first thought about this I though, "Well of course you should do those things." Then the article went into how people bypass simple things like that because of how much Facebook changed their Privacy settings. I became extremely worried at this point because I thought that my Facebook settings were set to the default. (Thankfully they were not.) I did not realize how many people could see a person's Facebook profile without even being friends with them. The amount of access one had to see other peoples's information was scary. The paper started talking about how this has caused people to violate Facebook's Terms of use guidelines. By changing their name to either being shorter or just using an initial, to even forging a fake last name. After reading that statement  I came to realize that legally speaking I had a few friends who were breaking those guidelines. To be honest I started to consider doing so to help keep my information private. What amazed me the most was the reasoning that Facebook changed their default privacy settings. They did so for advertisements that way they can make money. If it wasn't enough that the article scared me in class Dr. Edwards showed us a graph about how much Facebook's privacy settings changed over the years. The worse fact about the low default privacy settings was that it is almost strange for a person to not have a Facebook. Some employers may think that because a person does not have a Facebook, he or she may be an antisocial shut in. So not only does one basically need a Facebook one has to make sure that he or she keeps track of who has access to the information they post. I find that the fact that Facebook went from privacy being a huge deal to allowing more and more people see the information quite appalling. 

Gold Farming

I started playing WoW at roughly the age of 14. So I have seen the advertisements for gold in the game for real money. I remember asking my parents at one point if I could purchase the gold, but both looked at me and said no. My mom said no because my dad did. However, my dads reasoning were much more sound because he had known one of his friends who purchased gold that way for a game called Everquest. My dad told me about how the business worked to a certain extent and then told me how his friends account was later hacked and used for gold farming. This caused me to drop the topic and later I stopped playing WoW to make time for football. Though after entering college some friends started playing WoW again which caused me to join. Then the same topic of buying gold came up between us. I told then what my dad had told me. They laughed and explained how much gold farming has changed and after their explanation I decided to look into the topic myself. When the topic came up in class I felt that I was fairly knowledgeable since the research I did was only a few years old. The concept still intrigued me because I know some friends who have purchased gold with real life money. After the reading of InfoDev, I became even more interested and did some research again. I ended up finding out about bitcoins and how they are used over the internet. A interesting story that I found is that a man in Canada is selling his house which would not seem strange. The interesting part is that the man is accepting an equal value of bitcoins instead of money. This just blew my mind that a person is willing to accept digital money in exchange for a HOUSE! With the way digital money is evolving I wonder if we as people will eventually turn to a pure digital currency economy. Though I hope that we do not because at our current state I feel that hackers would be able to easily manipulate the economy by creating false numbers for how much they have.

Lessig 03/04/2013

In chapter seven Lessig talks about how Jon Else tried to get permission to use a four second click of the Simpsons in the corner of a scene. He goes on to explain that Else just wanted to make sure that he was in the ok to use the click so he first called the creator. Then the Creator said yes, but best to talk to Gracie Films to be extra safe. Then Else called Gracie Films who said he could use the clip, but needed to talk to the parent company Fox to completely make sure. Once Else made the call Fox said no and that it would cost around $10,000 to use the 4-5 second click that was in the corner. After reading about this I was astonished because it seemed so outrageous that a 4-5 second clip that is only visible in the corner of a scene  would come with such a price tag. Else also thought that Fox was being unreasonable and did some law research to see if he fully understood all the details. Later he found out that he may have been able to use the clip and lable it under fair use. However, he was then told that Fox would fight it and that it would eventually come down to who has more money and a bigger legal department. I knew that some places can charge vast amounts of money to use something that is copyrighted. I never truly thought that people would be so unreasonable. Due to all my current works being for school and not for profit or commercial use that everything I make falls under the fair use law. However, I did not think that it would be so hard a tiny bit of something that was copyrighted in my work. This reading brought a new light to me about how terrible copyright can be. Lessig even states that "This practice shows just how far the law has come from its
eighteenth-century roots. The law was born as a shield to protect publishers’ profits against the unfair competition of a pirate. It has matured into a sword that interferes with any use, transformative or not." I fully agree with what he states because copyright has gone from a shield to a sword. It will be very interesting once I enter the real world and need to make sure I am not violating any copyright laws.

Comment for Melanie Hughes Blog 6

I agree with your thoughts on "Copyright Criminals" because I too was very confused. Just as you stated people have been quoting or paraphrasing other peoples writing for many years with only needing to cite their sources. Then after watching the movie I was blown away at the idea of how much people asked for using a few seconds of a song. The movie and that thought got me thinking about how much of my work has been influenced in someway by other people's work. I never use the exact same thing as another work, but I may take an idea from it and use it. The more I thought about it I wondered am I truly taking someone's personal property and then re-purposing it just as the people in the movie did with sound? Most art created today can most likely be related to earlier pieces even though he or she may not have seen the previous work before. They may have thought that what he or she did was something completely original only to have that idea crushed. I remember one time in high school where I was accused of plagiarism because a paragraph  in a paper I wrote was very close to another paragraph, used in a paper done for the same class a few years before. I had no idea who the student was or even that they wrote about the same topic. I avoided trouble because the teacher saw that when he said from who and saw the confusion in my eyes that I probably just happen to think the same way the other person did. I am sure that the teacher realizing I wasn't even in this state nor went to school the same year as the other person helped. Yet the idea of how easy it is to use a simple citation in a paper compared to using a few seconds of a song still confuses me.

Lessig

The main idea that I can understand the best, is the idea of remixing something into your own creation. In the book Lessig states "Creators here and everywhere are always and at all times building upon the creativity that went before and that surrounds them now." This statement is completely true due to almost anything that is created now can be correlated to something in the past. I am no different I have pulled inspiration for some of my graphic designs from either other designs or concepts. I may not use the entirety of the design, but I am still technically taking their idea without permission. This is not something that is new and can be seen everywhere. When I was younger I never really understood the idea till I took a DTC class in college. The main focus of the class was not about piracy or remixing, but there was a single day where we went over the topic. The teacher showed us a video someone created about how the movie "Kill Bill" had several ideas that were used before. Ranging from the yellow jumpsuit to the time in the movie where she chops a woman's arm off. This caught my attention immediately and I started to think of other great scenes from movies or games that I liked that may have been used before. Lessig talks about how Disney used ideas that were already done well before, but simply re-imagined the ideas for a new era. That they also took many ideas from the culture around the world and changed the story from a dark demeanor to a light one. Eventhough, Disney did this they are not the only ones. The stories that Disney used were from "The Brother's Grimm" which in turn were not their own stories either. I agree with how Lessig talks about how the laws that are used against piracy and copyright could use some redoing due to several of the issues Lessig stated.

Blog 4

The quote by Marshall Mcluhan "the medium is the message" makes much more sense to me now after the last class because of the demonstrations with the waveforms and videos. I never really thought about how one sees information as giving a meaning. Then the little demonstration given in class with the wave forms and the videos made things click more in my head. By telling us what each song meant to Dr. Edwards we were not able to understand what the songs were or sounded like the way he did. Then we were shown the songs waveforms which with the previous information gave us a little more meaning behind what they make sound like. Finally by having us listen to the songs themselves were we able to understand why the waveforms looked the way they did and also why they meant what they did to Dr. Edwards. This showed that even though we saw the same thing in two forms (the waveform and listening to it) each provided us with a different meaning of the information. The first only allowed us to guess on how the songs may sound while the other gave us how they sound, the beats, the words in the songs and much more. Yet both in a certain way had the same information even if all that was missing was that the waveform was not in the greatest detail for us or a program to analyze. Had we heard the songs in Audacity some may have known what they were. Though the video of the second song (gangnam style) provided us with even more information than just the music could. We could have not gotten the same meaning from the sound alone. This is definitely a way that the quote "the medium is the message" has been proven correct.