Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

When I look back at the last probably 6 or 7 years of my life it just seems as though the internet, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, dating sites - they all came out of nowhere. Furthermore, I remember my 14 year old self dying for a Nokia 3315. It was ridiculous. Late last year, half way through my mobile phone plan, I considered paying an extra $50 a month for an iPhone. Now, I'm not sure when or how I became so obsessed with all of this new technology but do I think in terms of my situation and the way I live my life, seeing where mobile phones have come from and having them be such an integral part of my life, more specifically my social life, the sky is probably the limit. I mean, I picked out my first camera phone and thought life couldn't really get any better, but over the years the innovation of this device has continued to astound me.

So where does the mobile phone sit in the eLandscape at the moment and where is it headed?
Well, currently, I think that in terms of social media the mobile phone is really rivalled only by Facebook. I would say that personally, I use Facebook for about 40% of my communication with my friends and my mobile phone for about 60%, give or take. However, when I consider that most of my friends do have a Facebook, there are still a few who don't and also, in terms of the older generation, mobile phones are definitely more popular.

In the years to come, I think that anyone who doesn't have a mobile phone already, will have one. Almost to the point that if mobile phone reception becomes completely reliable, there might actually be no need for landline phones. Furthermore, with their applications, internet access, email capabilities, as well as camera and camcorder functions - mobile phones are already making multi-tasking and the use of one 'screen' for multiple practices a reality.

I found this particular article on the site for The Huffington Post - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/05/future-phones-the-coolest_n_450678.html?slidenumber=7MJ7fOgMLYQ%3D&slideshow#slide_image

Posted in February of this year it takes a look at the 17 coolest concepts for future Mobile Phones. From biodegradable phones to 3D, clear, pen, solar powered and even Coca-Cola powered phones.These concepts encapsulate ideas that, before seeing some of the images, I would never have been able to imagine. I find it really exciting and, call me just another gen-Y kid - brought up on all this stuff with no concept of any other way of life - but I still recall being just as fascinated by my parents record player when I was 7, or the video player when I was 10. All of this stuff, this technology, really does blow my mind. Whether I could actually live without it or not, I am happy to admit I wouldn't want to. I love it.

Is that a Canon E300 Camcorder in your pocket..Or are you just happy to see me?

For as long as I can remember my family has always had a video camera. I mean, there is VHS tape after VHS tape in our lounge room to prove it! Every birthday, every christmas..I think it's fair to say that my father was a bit obsessed with figuring out how to use it, I do believe that the first tape has a lot of experimentation with zoom and the fade out (to black or white!!) features, or learning how to put a little bit of nifty type at the beginning of some event filming. He seemed like a veritable Steven Spielberg to me.

Canon E300 Camcorder. A bit like the one my dad had back in the day. Pretty cool.

Everything changed back in 2005, however, he took a huge step into the 21st century and upgraded to a new fandangled video camera. It would have been a quarter of the size and it recorded onto this tiny tape thing and he let me have a go at it! The next year came my school study tour of France and I decided I wasn't going to be one of the lame students who just took a camera along NO WAY! I was taking the video camera and I was going to document every detail of that trip.

Once we arrived home, very limited amount of editing took place and everyone was given a copy, except my French teacher - who we pretty much mocked the whole time. But even amidst what is said to be the "rise of YouTube and Google Video" (Austin and Jong, 2008) I never considered anyone but my friends and family watching what would now be called my amateur documentary.

I recently found this nifty little quote from this website - http://www.jstor.org/pss/3697358

"Anyone may accidently become a director, a scriptwriter, even a producer. Nevertheless, this has nothing to do with art. The only concern is to capture the world with a third eye (apart from the two naked eyes)....Suddenly, we realise the most mundane life is filled with surprises." (Digital Video Has Done What A Fool Can Do)

Unlike some amateur documentary makers, I had no social or political message in my film. I simply produced something as a keepsake, to visually represent the two weeks I spent with all my friends in our first overseas experience. Basically, I did it for the fun of it and I did find that some of the most surprising and funny parts where actually just us doing something mundane, like chatting on a train.

I think that the freedom of speech that is provided through the medium of digital video and documentary making is great! For example, type "amateur documentary" into YouTube and you can count 12 on the first of more than 7 pages. Now, I don't necessarily want to watch "Fat Food Nation", nearly 300 people have watched it and I'm pretty sure I can see Supersize Me for all those statistics. However, watching a "weird and wonderful movie" on somebody's brother is actually quite intriguing to me. So it is opening up a the potential for people to share their particular message or information, whether that be a critique of society or just something of comedic value, I think it is quite a liberating thing.

"I hate it when my mum calls and I'm at the mall with my bf" - Stacey-lee, student. 14.

I got asked the other day if I could live for one week without my mobile phone. There were other people around who thought they could do it, they really thought they could but I just don't know. I suppose there are a few things working against me in this situation. Firstly, I don't live at home with my parents and my house doesn't have a landline so I use my mobile for those calls and secondly, I forget to check my petrol gauge frequently - I've never broken down and had to make the call, but I definitely worry about it. So, aside from the fact that I enjoy texting my friends I suppose I have a computer and I don't actually need it but what effect does the mobile have on everyone else?

It was a long time ago, but I remember when having a mobile phone was a status symbol. The guy in the restaurant with the mobile phone when I was like 10 was the coolest. Now, at the time I didn't understand that it meant that his job was obviously so important that he needed to be contact-able during his leisure time - it was just cool - but what about mobile phones and work today?
So many people use their mobile phones for work, according to Leysia Palen and Amanda Hughes mobile phones used for work and recreation cause a caregiver to manage both aspects of their life in the same way and "The mobile phone itself embodies the intersection of multiple realms of life, with the realm of home clearly playing an important part" (Palen & Hughes, 2006).

In relation to the family unit some might say that the use of a mobile phone enables mothers to parent her children from a distance. Is it becoming a bit like having a GPS tracker on your kid or is that a bit too extravagant? Or maybe it gives some kids independence - If parents know they can contact their kids whenever they like then surely it's fine for them to go hang out with their friends anytime, right? I tend to think that it's a bit too hard to place the mobile phone in one category or the other. I mean, I know kids who never hear the end of it from their parents - 2 or 3 phone calls in an hour really is ridiculous.
Palen and Hughes, after studying 5 caregivers and their mobile phone use over a week, also discuss their findings and uncover that the mobile phone actually helps "conceptualise the idea of 'home base' as something that is extended beyond the physical boundaries of the house". Personally, I think my mobile phone enhances my relationship with my parents, I don't get to see them midweek, sometimes not for a couple of weeks, and without my phone I probably wouldn't talk to them. But there is also no pressure, I don't have to call them or text them but I like to, and I think it's probably the reason why I couldn't live without my phone.

A Friend Request from Barack Obama.

I love YouTube. It provides me with endless hours of entertainment. I can jump on to quickly view a funny clip or see a piece of a news story that I may have missed during the day or even watch a whole episode or series of a TV show all with the same application. It seems to be such a normal part of life now, one of the most visited sites on my computer and tabbed into my browser for easy access, it makes me wonder how I ever lived without it sometime. Even more than that, I don't know if I can remember exactly when it became such a huge phenomenon.

I think there are a lot of people in the same boat as me on this one, so it was hardly surprising when everyone started wanting a piece of this 'global exposure' action. My friends have done it, my idols have done it, even one of my teachers at school did it and so I guess it was only a natural progression for politician to do it as part of their political campaigns.

So in a country like America, where it isn't compulsory to vote, how much of an impact does putting a presidential candidate out in cyberspace have on a election? For the 2008 election John Edwards became the first US presidential candidate to announce his candidacy online via his website johnedwards.com. A short time afterwards, there was controversy surrounding the choice to place this clip on his own site as oppose to loading it to YouTube. In any case the use of the internet was a new and unique way to not only go about that particular announcement but also illustrated the great potential in the internet to reach voters.

If you go to johnedwards.com a short scroll down the right hand of his page leads potential voters to a section title "Connect With The Campaign". Under this heading is a myriad of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr and YouTube. Barack Obama, who I feel utilised social media to great effect, has connections to social media plastered all over his site. From his Organizing For America Blog, to "Obama Mobile". Users can even create their own MyBarackObama.com which enables voters to participate in online discussions, find events and tell their own stories in blogs. It really isn't any wonder that he was elected into office after viewing this site. Aside from the incredibly welcoming design and layout, by allowing the informal interaction of his followers Obama appears to have allowed them into his life, allowed a closeness between himself and his public that even someone like me, an outsider looking in, can feel a part of.

But just because Obama made it work doesn't mean that there isn't danger involved in creating such a high level of exposure. With such exposure can come vulnerability. In 2008, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin was the subject of a comedy skit on Saturday Night Live where Tina Fey imitated Palin alongside Amy Poehler as Hilary Clinton. The video of the performance went viral and today has over 10 million views and while Palin appeared on the show in another skit with Fey (a show that achieved phenomenal ratings), I still tend to agree with the media commentators who suggest that, in part, Fey's portrayal eliminated Palin's opportunity to be accepted as a legitimate candidate.

These examples certainly seem to illustrate how the use of social media outlets in politics can make or break a candidate and when "most campaigns do everything in their power to control every element of the candidate's image and message, from the clothes he wears to each word out of his mouth" (Howard Dean's campaign manager Joe Trippi, 2004), the internet - a place of freedom of speech and anonymous defamation - can be a very dangerous place.

Cosumer, Producer, Prosumer, Produser.

In a world were internet sites such as youtube, wikipedia and Second Life exist, can we still call ourselves 'consumers'? I don't feel that that term justifies the way in which users are "acting incrementally as content producers" (Bruns, 2008). At this very moment, by blogging online, I am utilising the internet to produce the content of this blog. Luckily for me, Alex Bruns coined the term "produser" to define my actions as a producer, distributor and consumer. According to Bruns, produsers actual help to improve the content available online over a period of time and numerous contributions. So is this the case? and does the "value chain begin and end with content", even if it is only temporary - waiting to be updated once again?

In the case of the improvement produsage generates over time, it is important to remember there are some limitations. Wikipedia, for example, appears to monitor its content rigourously. It seems that no longer do I hear from a friend that they have made some incredibly witty change to a Wikipedia page, that I jump online to be astounded only to find that said change has been removed. Youtube has also released - surprisingly only this year - a "Safety Mode" the opt-in setting allows the viewer (or the young viewer's parents) to "filter out videos which may be too graphic or contain objectionable content which you may not want to see" (Parfeni, 2010) . From what I've seen, Second Life appears to not really care what people see. However, during 2009 Second Life did make changes to the way in which adult content was dealt with. Similarly to Youtube, these changes are a choice made by the produser, they include: maturity ratings (A=Adult, G=General, M=Moderate), search function censoring and a password system to access the adult regions of the game. As well as the updating of the "Terms of Service, Community Standards, Knowledge based articles, etc" to coincide with the the new content filtering.

I attended a lecture last year that had a journalist as a guest speaker. She had held a long standing position of authority at a prominent newspaper and had recently changed jobs to work for an online publication. It was so interesting to hear her talk on the topic of technology and the effect it has had on the print newspaper industry. She spoke vividly of phoning in stories minutes before the paper went to press and reminisced about the smell of molten metal at 1 o'clock in the morning. To me, it all sounded so exciting - a thrilling career on the front line of journalism. Until she explained that those times and those practices barely existed anymore. People can get their information so readily these days. And yes, large newspapers still print but they also publish online.
Furthermore, the online publication she now works for, she explained, is a subscription based news service. She still gets paid to write news articles for them, however, everyday when it is emailed to thousands of recipients who hold a subscription, those people forward it on to thousands of non-paying people and those people forward it on again. After all that, there is nothing to stop someone copying and pasting this information into their own blog or email, editing it as much or as little as they like and putting it into cyberspace for anyone to read.

Sexual encounters..of the virtual kind.

It has become increasingly evident that 'people are forming relationships and communities in places that only exist in cyberspace' (Maheu, 1999:5). It appears that as the understanding of what can be found online increases, people are changing their lifestyles around this technology in the same way mobile phones and television altered living forever. Along with (e)extremist and virtual realities, as I have previously spoken of, there has also been a revolution of chat rooms, dating services, cybersex and pornography online.
I remember a time when someone who was dating online was considered a little bit weird and if you were going to fly some mystery man or woman over to live with you and marry you..that was definitely going to end badly. Today, however, its pretty acceptable to chat and form relationships online, dating services were made for it. In fact, there are service available online to cater to ever demographics' dating needs - Young, middle-aged and even elderly, such as at sassyseniors.com .
Cybersex also seems to be expanding from the days when it existed in only a text-based form. Now there is access to virtual reality-based cybersex. This involves a virtual reality setting such as Second Life and sexual based communication or interaction taking place within that world. I recently saw a program which investigated sex in Second Life. They showed the way in which users could purchase body parts and engage in sexual interactions with another avatar. Essentially, these are two physical human beings sitting in front of their computers, with actual lives and possible spouses operating an these avatars. It raises an unusual question of ethics, I mean, I don't think I like the idea of my partner having a sexual interaction with someone online..even if there is no physical interaction, surely there is some form of emotional investment.

In terms of pornography, there are advantages to viewing online, such as access, affordability and anonymity. It's pretty obvious that theses are the main contributing factors as to why the online pornography industry is generating such revenue. For example, every second approximately $3000 is being spent on pornography, over 28,000 people are viewing pornography online and 379 people are searching adult terms. Not to mention that a new pornographic video is being created every 39 minutes (J. Ropelato).

An area of concern within the online pornography industry is the issue of child pornography and child exploitation. It is a disturbing thought that people are filming or photographing children and posting such images online with sexual connotations. It is also considered child pornography if child takes a sexually explicit photo of themselves and is found in possession of that image, I find the fact that this was not known to me, and what I can only assume is a lot of other people, truly disturbing. Similarly to (e)extremists, it becomes really difficult to consider censorship with these issues. In my opinion it would all around be better if these things didn't exist online. It's unfortunate the world doesn't work like that.

When did one life stop being enough?

The internet has been responsible for taking the idea of a computer or video game to the next level. Digital characters and avatars are enabling users to become a part of a different world, have a different appearance and different friends. Mark Meadows discussed the idea that within these virtual worlds people "build things, use them, sell them, trade them and discuss them". He also explored the similarities between the virtual and the real, the way in which rules, roles and a "structured method of interacting" are used. So do these similarities override a fundamental difference? I can't help but wonder why the people who create an avatar in an application such as Second Life, interact with other people, develop relationships with them and even make money from buying/selling stock, developing land or designing clothes, dedicate so much time and effort towards something that is virtual when the real thing is right outside their front door. Is it escapism? so they become someone else? or to avoid judgement?

Meadows explained his reasoning: "when another person confirms what I am seeing, places value on it, spends time working to pay for it, buys it, keeps it, uses it, talks about it, gets emotional about i, and then sells it - this tells me there is something real happening. The suspension of disbelief has become a grounding of belief". I question whether or not something real is actually happening. It might be fair enough to talk about an emotional or mental connection or correlation between what is happening in a virtual world such as Second Life and what happens in reality, people do get involved in this with similar feelings. At this point you could argue that shared experiences create a sense of reality. However, a sense of reality is not the same as actual reality and you can't just ignore the lack of physicality. There will never be a real physical interaction in a virtual world, you will never be able to feel a handshake or a hug or a kiss. For this reason I find it hard to agree with Meadows' statement that 'there is something real happening'. I just don't think we can say that what happens in a virtual world can be the same as reality, that the experiences are the same. It's great that Second Life offers someone something that they can't have or achieve in their everyday life but at the end of the day, the person behind the avatar is someone sitting in a chair in front of a computer.