A SecondLife

For our final project meeting we communicated through Facebook messenger and used Google Drive to share our final slideshows with each other. Each team member had put in equal amounts of effort and it was evident we had put in the hard work. I spent a few hours trying to create my slideshow that my laptop supported and I saw this as a challenge for me personally as my laptop wasn't cooperating with me. I over came this challenge after a few hours and had practiced my piece that I had written on Microsoft Word beforehand. I created a slideshow using various images to help aid what I talked about in my piece for the group. I found my pictures on various newspaper articles online and decided to put them into the presentation as visuals can aid the information given during presentations - a tip I learnt from the last presentation. After gathering my images for the slideshow I edited and took out any pieces of irrelevant information in my word document regarding sustainable fashion...

Image 1: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" book cover. This week, my class and I read Ursula Le Guin’s short sci-fi story called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. The story features a breath-taking seaside city of Omelas, the city is celebrating a summer festival; everywhere there is happiness. “Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time,” Le Guin writes. Sadly, there is one catch; Omelas happiness depends on one child’s, suffering. He/she is locked away in a basement room, it is not loved and barely fed. Surprisingly the happy people of Omelas are aware of the torment of the child, the people of Omelas are selfish in the sense that they are willing to sacrifice this child’s life in order for their own happiness. Some people however decide to leave Omelas after witnessing the horrors of the child. My online avatar mirrors my RL self. I wouldn’t consider myself to be any different online to how I am...

Image 1: Cyber bullying. As mentioned in a previous blog post, there is a very distinct difference in how we act in an online community to IRL. The internet is a scary place; it offers an unparalleled promise of cooperation and communication between everyone. Sadly, instead of embracing something that has become a massive extension of ourselves, we seem to be reverting to tribalism and conflict. The biggest ongoing issue is Cyber Bullying.  Normally we conduct our real-life interactions with strangers politely and respectfully, online we can be horrible. Hiding behind a computer screen or a mobile phone can give people a sense of security and will allow them to think it’s okay to send someone a nasty message like a death threat or racist slur. The real problem here is that people feel safe behind a screen as they most likely won’t have to deal with the consequences of their actions as you would IRL. The question is can we relearn the code of ethics and act in a way that ...

This week my team and I have made a lot more progress since our last meeting! We have discussed topics that we could research further. Such topics surrounding how millennial's improve the world we live in today include thrifting, carpooling, climate change and house sharing. Each group member decided to take a topic from each ideology to talk about in further detail. I decided to talk about fast fashion and sustainable fashion. After reading several articles online relating to my topic I felt confident enough to write out what I would be talking about on Microsoft Word for the presentation. Making small changes to your shopping can really have a positive effect on the environment and help to reduce waste water pollution as the percentage is currently the second highest contributor to waste water pollution due to fast fashion brands releasing toxins, harmful dyes and synthetics into water supplies. Lead and pesticides are also released into the air which are harmful to humans. ...

Our modern world is completely different from the world that existed many years ago. The knowledge we have of ourselves and our whole entire universe has increased. Technological developments have revolutionized the way we communicate with each other.  Everyone has their own 'personal brand' while not many of us have consciously cultivated a brand, we have one, nonetheless. In our society nowadays we can choose to guide and cultivate the brand, or we can allow it to be defined on our behalf. In today's blog post I will explore what factors influence our online personas and in doing so how this affects how others may perceive us. For instance, if we take a normal conversation with someone in real life it is most likely to be direct and straight to the point as it cannot be as easily traced as if it was in a virtual environment setting. What we post online is going to be there forever as it is a lot more difficult to remove our digital traces in a world containing t...

Fig 1: Marshall McLuhan. Today's class topic of discussion: Marshall McLuhan "The Medium is the Massage". We explored the concept of tools: what they mean to us as individuals and how they might actually affect us and the society we live in. Before class I did a little research and discovered who Marshall McLuhan was, he was a communication theorist who became internationally famous for his studies of effects of mass media on thought and behaviour. He was particularly praised for his exceptional observations in "The Medium is the Message", a phrase coined by Marshall in his book. The iconic phrase simply means the way in which we send and receive information is more important than the information itself. In a world where we were once consumers, consuming information through many different tools such as the television or radio we are now producers creating our very own information in our 21st century. His approach in understanding how the tools we use freque...