Tiki Toki Timeline!

Hey everyone!

Check out my painstakingly created Timeline below for a comprehensive account of the early years of Television :)

The History of Television

Course Cross Over ;)

Hi Everybody,

This post today has nothing to do with New Communications Technology. Well, not exactly... I have used new communication technologies to create a survey for my Marketing Assessment with surveymokey.

Sooooo, anyone living in Australia who has a couple of minutes to spare, please take the survey to help me out a little :) Right here:

Seline's Survey

More Research...

TASK 2: FAMILIARISE YOURSELF WITH THE DATABASES
   a) Stephen Stockwell writes about politics and the media, particularly in Australia. What database would you use to find his first academic article about Brisbane in a national journal? What year? Provide a full citation.

1. Journal: The Journal of Urban Policy and Research
2. Stockwell, S 1995, The Brisbane Model: Considering a Unique Experiment, The Journal of Urban Policy and Research, vol. 13 no.2, pg. 89-96.

   b) What is the latest medical thinking about internet addiction? What database did you use? Full citation.

1. The latest medical thinking about internet addiction is concerned with the fact it is heavily associated with both depression and suicidal ideation and is of increasing concern amongst young adolescents (Park et al 2013). Reserach also has found that body image concerns, specifically "body image avoidance", is associated with symptoms of internet addiction (Rogers 2013)
2. Database: MEDLINE (Via Ovid)
3. Citations:

• Park, S et al 2013, The association between problematic internet use and depression, suicidal ideation and bipolar disorder symptoms in Korean adolescents, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, vol.47 no.2, pg. 153-159.
• Rogers, R. F. et al 2013, Internet addiction symptoms, disordered eating, and body image avoidance, Cyberpsychology, Behaviour and Social Networking, vol. 16 no. 1, pg. 56-60.  

c) What are IT engineers thinking about surveillance cameras? Identify a theme you could write an essay about and cite three papers that would be useful.

1. IT engineers are speculating about the issue of increasing the effective coordination of multiple surveillance cameras programmed for the detection of multiple targets (Rios-Cabrera, Tuytelaars, Van Gool 2012). Studies offer solutions to relieve or limit the computational load and optimise system performance (Yao 2010).
2. A possible theme: The increasing effectiveness of multiple cameras in multi-target surveillance
3. Citations:

• Rios-Cabrera, R, Tuytelaars, T, Van Gool, L 2012, Efficient multi-camera vehicle detection, tracking, and identification in a tunnel surveillance application, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, VoL. 116, No. 6, pg. 742–753.
• Yao, Y 2010, Adaptive online camera coordination for multi-camera multi-target surveillance, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Vol. 114, No. 4, pg. 463–474.
• Hatakeyama,Y, Mitsuta, A, Hirota, K 2008, Detection algorithm for color dynamic images by multiple surveillance cameras under low luminance conditions based on fuzzy corresponding map, Applied Soft Computing, Vol. 8, No. 4, pg. 1344–1353.
• Mackay, M. D., Fenton, R. G., Benhabib, B 2011,Multi-camera active surveillance of an articulated human form – An implementation strategy, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Vol. 115, No. 10, pg. 1395–1413.

The Joys of Library Research

Today, I have been practicing and refining my skills in the humble art of library trawling, a truly fantastic experience. To demonstrate what I have leaned, I shall present to you the tasks I completed while conducting library research.

TASK 1: FAMILIARISE YOURSELF WITH THE LIBRARY CATALOGUE

   a) Which of Stephen Stockwell's books are in the Griffith Library? Provide full citations.

1. Isakhan, B & Stockwell, S 2011, The Secret History of Democracy, Palgrave MacMillan, New York.
2. Stockwell, S & Scott, P 2000, All-Media Guide to Fair and Cross-Cultural Reporting: For Journalists, Program Makers and Media Students, Australian Key Centre for Cultural & Media Publishing, Nathan, QLD.
3. Stockwell, S 2005, Political campaign strategy : doing democracy in the 21st century, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne.
4. Stockwell, S 2010, Rhetoric and Democracy: Deliberative Opportunities in Current Electoral Processes, VDM Publishing, Germany.

   b) Cite three academic books that might provide useful material for an essay about Jean Luc Godard's  Alphaville. On which campuses do they reside?

1. Brody, R 2008, Everything is cinema : the working life of Jean-Luc Godard, Metropolitan Books, New York.
- Located: Nathan Campus
2. Darke, C 2005, Alphaville: French Film Guide, I. B Tauris & Company, London.
- Located: Online Full eText
3. Godard, J 2000, Alphaville: A Film, Faber & Faber Ltd., London.
- Located: Gold Coast and Nathan Campus

c) What is a book that will assist you to find out about possible research methods to explore social media. Full citation.

1. Ponter, R 2010, The handbook of online and social media research : tools and techniques for market researchers, Wiley, New York.

Facebook: Freak, Fellow, Friend, Fiend or Foe?

The first time I used Facebook was in 2011 and I was 15.

My friends had been raving about for ages but I had not relented. To be perfectly honest, I had no real intention of getting Facebook for no reason other than I had no interest. Quite frankly, I just couldn't see the point in getting it and using it to speak to people that I spent the whole day with anyway. Why would I want to do that? I could just see them the next day and talk to them then or maybe even use the ancient art of texting. We still knew what texting was then, didn't we? It wasn't that outdated, it isn't that outdated, right?

Or maybe I could even have used my phone to, like, call someone if I wanted to take an authentic vintage approach to communicating with my friends. But why would anyone want to go to all that trouble when they could just use Facebook? I don't know maybe I was just old school.

Anyway, moving on. If you're so cynical about it, you ask, why get in the first place? Well, let me tell you, I probably wouldn't have if a couple of friends of mine hadn't moved overseas. Good friends too, not just the kind you see walking around at lunch times who are maybe a friend of a friend of a friend, and you don't speak to them but you add them on Facebook anyway. These were good friends. So, that was one motivating factor.

Secondly, I had just been on a really amazing family holiday to my Mum's family's mother country (i.e. Samoa) and I wanted to share the pictures I had taken with my extensive extended family so that I didn't have to send out a group email with heaps of pictures that would take forever to send and receive. I also didn't want to select just a few pictures to send so that the whole process would be faster. I wanted them to see everything, I had enjoyed a really fantastic time in Samoa so I wanted them all to see it. Here's a picture below if anyone's interested :)

So, after my friends moved away, one to England and one to Hong Kong, and after I returned home from holiday, I knew that I should probably conform and join the Facebook community. And I did.

I joined Facebook, I posted my photos on there for the family to see and enjoy, I spoke to my friends in England and Hong Kong and kept up to date with what they were both doing... It was pretty cool, actually. I liked being able to do that stuff and I still do. To this day, these two uses remain the only real reasons I bother to go on Facebook. But that does not discount the fact that, at first, I was seriously bothered by the whole privacy thing when using it.

It was not the government monitoring or the big brother paranoia or the Facebook information collecting that bothered me so much as the fact that anything I posted could be viewed by a lot of people. Of course, I instantly made my Facebook account private, but the fact that random people could send me friend requests kind of freaked me out a little. Now, I am less concerned about all that stuff because I know I can just sneakily click on that "Not Now" button and then "No" when it asks me if I know them outside of Facebook but it still sort of weirds me out when I get a request from a random guy in Canada or something with a strange name like MegaTreeLopper.

However, despite the strangeness of receiving friend requests from strangers, the thing I found most odd about the nature of Facebook was the fact people who I didn't personally know or people who I had never spoken to and ignored me in real life, wanted to be friends with me on Facebook. I mean, what is that? Why would they want to be friends with me if they didn't even spare me a second look when they passed me by in real life? What would motivate them to do that?  I'm sure everyone has experienced this, but I am equally sure that most have just given a casual shrug, said: "meh" and added the person anyway. I haven't, I wouldn't.

This is the aspect of  Facebook privacy that bothers me. To me these people, distantly friends of friends or not, are as good as strangers, therefore I do not add them and I do not understand why they would want to add me. I would feel incredibly uncomfortable to know that some random person that I go to school with but have never actually spoken to could have access to my photos and basically just anything I post if we were 'friends'. It would make me very uncomfortable. And while I don't want that discomfort, it also causes me some concern that they (i.e. the person sending the friend request) either do not feel that discomfort or do not realise that they should feel that discomfort if were to become friends. It's a two way street, you know. If I don't know you, you don't know me either. So, why would you want to be my 'friend'?

Most of the time, little issues like this are issues that bug me most about  Facebook and the way that people use it. I don't care if the Australian government or some other government sees my stuff, I've done nothing wrong, I've got nothing of importance to hide from them, so to them I say "meh." If giving my Facebook account the once over helps them do whatever it is they need to do, I'm not particularly bothered. And if Facebook wants to collect some trivial info about me, to them I also say "meh." If I'm using their service, it's under the terms I agreed to and if those terms included allowing them to know some stuff about me then I agreed to it so whatever. I see the reasoning behind that. But if some random person wants to add me on Facebook, I do care. I think it's weird and, frankly, I just don't get it. 

So, Facebook: Freak, Fellow, Friend, Fiend, or Foe? You decide.

They're "Serious About Social Media"

Really, serious. "At Sprout [they] revel in the fact that social media is a crucial component of brand and customer relationships" and therefore offer their software as the means by which a business can organise and analyse the response to their social media profiles in order to effectively utilise these social media resources to the fullest extent (Sprout 2013).


Sproutsocial is a "powerful social media software" which enables the user to manage their social media profiles on websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ by streamlining all notifications into One Inbox so that the user may view the information from all their social channels and profiles together.

Sprout allows the user to Publish To Multiple Accounts from the one place and as it is built for team use, meaning the account owner is able to add or remove team members and collaborators as necessary. 

The account owner will have the ability to Forward Messages from customers to the appropriate people/departments, create and manage a Team Calendar, and view Drafted Posts from all team members before publishing.

However, perhaps most importantly, Sprout's Analytics allows the user to easily track the response to their social media profiles by presenting them with information regrading the amount of new followers, new fans, retweets and mentions gained from their social media efforts.

Saunders claims that "this Sprout Social review should be a pivotal weapon in your marketing arsenal", stating that "it is a simple, effective way to manage your social media efforts" (Saunders 2013).

Concurring with Saunders, I believe that Sprout can be an incredibly useful tool for businesses, especially smaller businesses, in helping them effectively utilise and organise their online presence. It will be a great aid in creating, managing and maintaining direct dialogue between businesses and their customers and, especially with the addition of a handy dandy Extension App for mobile use, it has the potential to really benefit the user in their efforts to not only monitor followers, but also engage new ones.

Sproutsocial: 'Engage, Publish, Analyse'

New Communication Technologies in Use

Hello Everyone!

Today will be sharing with you a video which is of particular relevance to the field of New Communication Technology. This video, presented by the IPI i.e. The International Peace Institute, discusses the benefits of new communication technologies to their humanitarian endeavours and outlines the specific ways in which they have been useful to their cause.

I found it important to share with you as it specifically addresses the positive and potentially powerful impacts that new communication technologies can have on the world and also demonstrates the innovative ways in which they can be applied.

This video proves that New Communication Technologies really can make a big difference :)

So take a look here:
Humanitarianism in the Network Age