theMazed

Personal Video Recorder (PVR) also known as the DVR (Digital Video Recorder) has been an absolute amazing transformation to watch TV. watching TV is hardly the most important thing in the world but it is still something lots of people do for an hour or so a day. Here in Australia the PVR revolution has barely begun. In fact, if we explain to people what it does they just would not really grasp it. I blame this lack of understanding on the big electronics manufacturers who at the moment do not seem to want to promote this technology. In Australia there is a big push to get people to buy DVD recorders. Which is a step in the right direction but a DVD is really only capable of recording a couple of hours in high quality. So what is the answer to having to change media? The ‘Hard Disk Drive’ (HDD). What a great thing the HDD is! There are some DVD recorders that include a HDD, they are becoming more and more popular. But here in Australia they only have the capability of recording an Analogue signal. It seems okay for now but in 2008 the analogue transmission might get switched off. If the analogue transmission is turned off, these devices are going to become severely disabled and I bet that big electronics manufacturers and all the other retailers in Australia are not mentioning that. It will be the Digital transmission that will take over in future and The digital PVR is without doubt the way of the future for recording Tele.

“Media” and “Public Sphere” both word has got different significant values and definition but they are connected with each other. “God is all knowing and all-powerful. He is a spirit, not a body, and he exists both outside us and within us. God is always with us, because He is everywhere. We can never fully understand him, because He works in mysterious ways. In broad terms, this describes the God of our fathers, but it also describes electronic media, the second God, which man has created” (Tony Schwarthz, 1983). Millions listen to the same networks, hum the same commercial jingles; share with soap opera characters the testing of souls, the mystery of love and death. So by this perspective we can image about its’ power. On the other hand the public sphere consisted of organs of information and political debate such as newspapers and journals, as well as institutions of political discussion such as parliaments, political clubs, literary salons, public assemblies, pubs and coffee houses, meeting halls, and other public spaces where socio-political discussion took place. There is contradiction about the concepts of public sphere. Habermas’s concept of the public sphere thus described a space of institutions and practices between the private interests of everyday life in civil society and the realm of state power. The public sphere thus mediates between the domains of the family and the workplace, where private interests prevail, and the state, which often exerts arbitrary forms of power and domination. And the bourgeois public sphere, which began appearing around 1700, was to mediate between the private concerns of individuals in their familial, economic, and social life contrasted to the demands and concerns of social and public life.

The principles of the public sphere involved an open discussion of all issues of general concern in which discursive argumentation was employed to ascertain general interests and the public good. The public sphere thus presupposed freedoms of speech and assembly, a free press, and the right to freely participate in political debate and decision-making. The media, state, and business are the major institutional forces of contemporary capitalist societies, that the media “mediate” between state, economy, and social life, and that the mainstream broadcasting media have not been promoting democracy or serving the public interest and thus are forfeiting their crucial structural importance in constructing a democratic society.

In this issue entitled, Why the cross-media laws should go-for all our sakes by Fred Hilmer(The Age 5th June 2002 page.15) is a good article to verify our media democracy. But democratic theory also developed stronger notions of citizen participation, or what has become known as participatory democracy, in theorists such as Rousseau, Marx, and Dewey. In this conception, famously expressed by Abraham Lincoln, democracy is government by, of, and for the people. For such a conception of radical democracy to work, to create a genuinely participatory democracy, the citizens must be informed, they must be capable of argumentation and participation, and they must be active and organized to become a transformative democratic political force. By all means it is clear that a well functioning public sphere is a necessary pre-requisite of all democratic societies.

In respect to community standards and censorship, Office of Film and Literature Classification
does a good job. Films and videotapes, whether they are locally made or come from overseas, have to be classified before they can be sold, hired or shown public in Australia.

Classification is done by the classification board (the Board) which is located at the Sydney based office of film and literature classification.

Before making its classification decision the board is required to reflect contemporary community standard and must apply criteria, which are set out in the nation classification code (the Code).

The code is determined under the classification ACT 1995.

Classification decision are given following some principles –

a. Adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want-
b. Minor should be protected from material likely to harm or disturb them
c. Everyone should be protected from exposure to unsolicited material that they find offensive
d. The need to take account of community concerns about:
(i) depictions that condone or incite violence, particularly sexual
violence; and
(ii) the portrayal of persons in a demeaning manner.

The code names and broadly describes the six classification categories like G, PG, M, MA, R and X. MA, R and X is legally restricted categories. By law the board must apply both the code and the guidelines when making classification decisions.

Basically it is helping the media to get in to the public sphere. The guidelines are revised from time to time in consolation with members of the public, community groups and organizations, including contributors of research.

I would like to say that in this digital age of technology, media playing an important role in every aspect of human life. We are connected with each other and for a complete democratic society media should be at the center of the public sphere.

The success of the Google search engine was mainly due to its powerful PageRank algorithm and its simple, easy to use interface. A search engine is a program designed to help find information stored on a computer system such as the World Wide Web, or a personal computer. The search engine allows one to ask for content meeting specific criteria and retrieving a list of references that match those criteria. Search engines use regularly updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently. search engine usually refers to a Web search engine, which searches for information on the public Web. Other kinds of search engine are enterprise search engines, which search on intranets and personal search engines, which search individual personal computers. The vast majority of search engines are run by private companies using proprietary algorithms and closed databases, the most popular currently being Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo!.

The first Web search engine was “Wandex”. Another very early search engine, Aliweb also appeared in 1993 and still runs today. Soon after, many search engines appeared and vied for popularity. These included WebCrawler, Hotbot, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Open Text, Northern Light, and AltaVista. In some ways they competed with popular directories such as Yahoo! and Google. Later the directories integrated or added on search engine technology for greater functionality. In 2002, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi and in 2003, Yahoo! acquired Overture, which owned AlltheWeb and Altavista. In 2004, Yahoo! launched its own search engine based on the combined technologies of its acquisitions and providing a service that gave pre-eminence to the Web search engine over the directory. Around 2001, the Google search engine rose to prominence. Its success was based in part on the concept of link popularity and PageRank. PageRank is based on citation analysis that was developed in the 1950s by Dr. Eugene Garfield at the University of Pennsylvania. And now these days Google is the most favourite search engine for the users.

The first ever computer virus spread by mobile phones has been sent to anti-virus firms. No infections have been reported and the worm is harmless but it is proof that mobiles are at risk from virus writers. When the infected file is launched the mobile phone’s screen displays the word “Caribe”. Every time the mobile phone is turned on, the worm will launch itself and scan the area for other phones to infect, sending a copy of itself to any it finds. Malicious programs that can delete address books. Junk messages that flood a cell phone’s inbox. Stealthy code that uses Bluetooth wireless technology to sneak onto handsets. Security experts say plagues like these will target mobile phones. Japanese phone company NTT DoCoMo already sells phones with built-in antivirus software from McAfee Inc. and McAfee expects similar phones to be available in the United States and Europe in 2005. Like Skulls, and unlike most PC viruses, Cabir has to be installed by the phone’s user before it does anything. When it’s installed, it creates several files on the phone and sends itself to other phones via Bluetooth. Even when installed, though, antivirus company TrendMicro Inc. ranks it as having low damage potential and says it can be removed fairly easily. The organization, which monitors computer viruses worldwide, added threats to mobile phones to the list of what it tracks earlier this year.

Dancer in the Dark, which is a bit different from any other conventional film in entire film history. It is an unusual film because it has been shot like a documentary; in which characters break out into song and dance as in a musical. Dancer in the Dark is a melodrama film where mother sacrifices herself to provide a better life for her child. In terms of understanding cinema this film is a bit complicated to understand but there are more things that we can learn from this film.

Selma (Bjork) the main character in this film is a unique example of motherhood. She is a hardworking Czech migrant who works in a factory in small town, Washington State. She is poor and lives in a caravan with her ten year old son Gene (Vladica Kostic). To make the ends meet, she lives simultaneously in two worlds. The first is a world of darkness and the second world is a world of light where she sings and dances in the musical numbers that she has always loved. She is partially blind with a hereditary illness but intents on saving enough money for her son to get an eye operation and avoid the effects of his family disorder. As days grow long and images become more blurry, Selma uses her sense of hearing and memories of Hollywood musicals to guide her through factory assignments, imagining that the sounds of machines are forming grand symphonies, and picturing herself singing and dancing her way through them.

This film has shot such a way where the every smallest gesture carries meaning. In the film, Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) cover her mouth with her hand to suppress a worried cry as she sees a nearly blind Selma use a railroad track to guide herself to home. Again Kathy dances two fingers across the palm of Selma’s hand to the movie theatre to convey to her the essence of the Busby Berkeley dance number playing out on the movie screen in front of them. These two moments were very simple to watch but extremely touching and emotionally effective. These moments are perfectly executed. Another significant shot was the one on the train tracks with Selma’s potential love interest but which is heart breaking, filled with hope and crushing reality. But Von Trier the director shifts a gear and places Selma under further torture. This is a way of story telling where people will find it just as a sequence of film but in reality when the emotion involves with situation, it is too much to realize. In addition Dancer in the Dark, is filled with marvelous symbolism. Most notably the railroad tracks that run next to Selma’s trailer. It seems that Selma is on a journey, and the tracks representing that.

Von Trier used most unconventional camera style for Dancer in the Dark. He used 100 simultaneously rolling cameras to shoot the musical numbers instead with multiple cameras none of which employ any camera motion at all, no pans, no zooms. With the camera so close and lack of distracting images we see intimacy with the characters, draws us in with the power of a whisper that is an intimate cinematic style. The director challenges us at every turn, forcing us to leave our entire previous cinematic cases at the door. Then he takes us on a journey filled with memorable performances and unexpected turns.

Von Trier cannot be underestimate as a unique director. He says that, I thought it would be interesting to put the documentary style up against the musical but I beleve that I act from admiration for the way musicals are – I’m not trying to subvert or destroy anything. I’m trying to make it richer by somehow importing true emotion. It’s such a beautiful cocktail, emotion and music. Throughout the film Selma escapes from the unpleasant nature of her reality into a fantasy world based on Hollywood musicals. At the same time Von Tries shows us it is also a quite wonderful film that dares to exceed and challenges our understanding of cinema, narrative and genre.

Apple has created the iPod which was said to change how you listen to music. Gradually iPod created many different versions of the iPod there is such one as the iPod mini which means that the user can choose the colour that they want. the user thinks that they have chosen an iPod to suit them when in fact there is hundreds of people with the same colour. Other iPods include the iPod shuffle a smaller version for those who are unsure of the new technology and need to start of with something simple. By doing this the user can get used to the shuffle and then progress to the iPod itself. This means Apple itself benefit from the user as although they originally buy a cheaper version they then progress to buying the larger one which is more expensive. The iPod photos shows a convergence in the technologies of camera and iPod, this new iPod allows the user to take photos and listen to music in the same device. By releasing iPod photo Apple has released and demonstrates how they are constantly updating their range of devices. Apple want to make sure that they have the most popular downloading device and have good sales so they bring out convergent devices in a way to try and secure this.