For this week we went about studying globalisation and its effects on the world and how it relates to us in the media world.

We first started studying this topic by looking at globalisation as a whole and what it consists of, this includes the economy, networks, corporations, social and even the globalisation of culture.

Each of these things has positives and negatives to themselves but in the lecture and the seminar, we learned about how they relate to the media industry and why globalisation is such a big thing.

Having a networked media society means that it is easier to communicate, conduct business and organise things through the internet, rather than waiting for slow old technologies to do this for us. This is a good thing but also a bad thing because if we do too much business or spread our culture too much, it means that we end up wiping out the receiving end’s culture, this creates one huge superpower which is a good thing but also a terrible thing as it means that true democracy is eradicated leaving the world with a super powerful group in charge of the whole population.

In this week we learned about the networked society and its personal and company based uses. The networked society characterises the structures and dynamics of our societies in the world of the twenty-first century, what is meant by this is that it controls everything we do and we use it to control everything we do. It is a very powerful tool that we use to communicate and transfer information between possible clients or other people across the internet.

The best description of a network society is people using things to interact with the internet/cloud to come up with new ideas.

Further, in the lecture, we carried on learning about the production, consumption and knowledge exchange through networked activity.

We learned about the generation of wealth and how the creation of cultural codes came to depend on the technological capacity of societies and individuals, with information and media technology at the core of this capacity.

In the readings for this week, it covers the topics of the information age and the process of how the network society first came to be. the readings link to what we learned in the seminar and are relatable to the topic as a whole. All together for this week, I understood the topics and ideas and I believe I can carry forward these ideas into next weeks learnings.

The information society.

In the seminar and lecture for this week, we learned about how we are currently living in an information society and the different aspects of what that is.

Mansell describes an Information Society as “a particular vision of developments arising from the growing use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the acquisition, storage and processing of information” (Mansell,2008:2) what this quote means from Mansell, is that the information society itself is not just a way of explaining how we use our media technolgoies, but also why we use them and in what way, it is how we ourselves are now turning into data for the big data farmers such as facebook and google and our privacy is at the stake here from third party companies.

Also in the lecture, we learned about digitalisation and how the internet is becoming faster and more reliable as well as cheaper, this means that the amount of information we can exchange grows vastly in size further meaning that we become more and more of an information society

We then covered the informational economy and how that relates to how we can sell our information to other people for a profit.

Overall from this week, I believe I understood a lot of the key topics and I’m ready to learn more from this subject.

For week 3 in this topic, we learned about media technologies and social change and how and how these reflect into society.

In the lecture for this week, we learned about the link between the media and the changes that are actually projected by them. we also learned about digital media and how this also links to the topic for this week. We also learned about terms such as ‘technological determinist’  and ‘social shaping’. What is meant by these terms is that technology is ever evolving and that society is influenced by what technology is around at the time. A determinist in this sense would be someone that is part of this period and helps contribute to society using the tools that are presented to them.

As I missed the seminar for this week, I missed out on some valuable information but the core readings have helped me to catch up with this week. Especially the reading titled ‘New Media. A critical introduction’

Media convergence is the act of all the different types of media converging, or combining into one big stream of information. May this be through smartphones or different technologies and industries, media convergence is happening faster than we can keep up and if we choose not to continue focusing on creating new and interesting content the world will just leave us in its trail of bored users. Jenkins describes the five process of convergence as Technological Convergence, Economic Convergence, Social or organic Convergence and Global Convergence. Cultural convergence represents the new forms of entertainment and creativity fostered through the different types of platforms that they can be accessed on, this differs from technological convergence as with cultural convergence it relates directly to the content that is produced but in order to produce said content, it means the required technology would be required. One example of this is Snapchat and having pictures that don’t last forever. An example of social or organic convergence would be using multiple media technologies at the same time without realising. One example could be listening to music on Spotify whilst texting your friends on your phone but also using a laptop and scrolling through Facebook at the same time.

One memorable experience that I- have through media convergence and using mobile internet on my phone is when I was walking to somewhere and I was fully lost, so I spoke to Siri asking for directions and it took me back home because that’s where it thought I was trying to go (it wasn’t), i find this memorable because we claim to have come so far with these new technologies but at the end of the day they simply don’t work.