THE FUTURE IS NOW!

Looking back at how the internet came to be and what it is now, I can only look on in wonderment at what this technological marvel will be in the next 50 years. Who knows what we will get, and how much more the world will benefit from access to this wonderful tool. Will it help bring about world peace? Will its potential for destruction be abused and turned into a weapon for the whims of the selfish and debased? Will governments around the world seek to silence its users for the power that the masses have been imbued with?

Regardless of the potential directs that the internet may take, one thing is for certain, and that the internet is not going away. For better or for worse, the internet is here to stay, and only by staying abreast of developments and keeping our humanity intact will we be able to harness it for the good of all mankind.

Journalistic Integrity on The Internetz

I think we can all agree that STOMP, the “citizen journalism” arm of the Straits Times, is the official asshole of the internet. Citizen Journalism has become a dirty word in today's internet culture, with websites such as The Real Singapore, STOMP, and Mothership allowing just about anyone to post articles regardless of journalistic integrity. Such a thing is only possible because of the freedom that the internet gives to people: by allowing people to publish their works freely without being subject to peer reviewing and journalistic etiquette, citizen journalism on the internet has become a free-for-all.

I believe that citizen journalism is something that should be embraced, not vilified. But Singapore society is not ready for this sort of free expression, especially since we have been under the yoke of government censorship for decades. We do not have the free speech culture that the USA has; most of what we feel we need to exhort is hate-filled vitriol that is emotionally generated and requires little thought to produce. And that is what I believe is the crux of the degeneracy of our brand of citizen journalism: we feel too much and think too little. We give little consideration to the consequences of our thoughts when we write them down, and don't think through what we have to write. As a result of this, our articles inevitably come out as petty and contrite.

The only way to fix this is to take a step back and ask if we really want our citizen journalism to remain is it, a hotbed of petty arguments and xenophobic hatred, or do we want journalistic standards to be raised. Because it's only by taking ourselves serious that the rest of the world will too.

Internet Politika

One of the defining factors of the 2012 US Presidential Elections was Barack Obama's extensive use of internet social media to garner the support of America's tech-savvy young voters. It was this decisive use of such a medium that gave him a definitive edge over Mit Romney's campaign. The Republicans' reliance on tradition print and television advertising saw them lag behind in popularity, as less of the country's large voting base relied on them for campaign information.

The reason for the Republicans' abstinence from internet advertising was partially because of their main supporters being older and more reliant on traditional media sources such as print and television. As well as this, Republicans are known to be slow to pick up on new technology, as was the case when Mit Romney did not have a YouTube channel when he began campaigning.

One telling difference that the Democrats had over their competition was their extensive use of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to post campaign updates, as well as stay in contact with their supporters throughout Obama's first term in office. What this did was to endear the internet-savvy population to what they saw as a president that understood how the people of today communicate, and was willing to embrace their ways instead of forcing the old ways on them like the Republicans were perceived to be doing.

And so it came as no surprise that when the numbers were tallied, Obama once again took the office in 2012, and Mit Romney faded into obscurity.

Mega Multimedia Mayhem

Apple's use of digital media for marketing. Apple is extremely well-known for its quirky online digital media advertising. From its “Mac vs PC” advertisements to its dancing black silhouettes for the iPod, Apple knows how to appeal to its market. As Simon Sinek, a motivational speaker specializing in business leadership, once said, “People don't follow what you do; they follow why you do it,” Apple is big on showing its customers its vision and ideas. Unlike most other companies that simply advertise their products as they are, Apple appeals to the non-tangible benefits of its products, such as a better Augmented Reality experience benefitting everyday life.

Apple states that one of its core beliefs is making life a better experience, and they will help to achieve this by making products that help to better people's lives. With this in mind, they make computers and electronic accessories that will benefit customers in this way. This way of thinking helps Apple to appeal to customers in a much more physiological way than, say, Microsoft, which simply advertises their products by parading around their advanced technology. Yes, advances in tech is well and good, but there is no reason why one should buy their products. The exclusion of the why is how companies that put emphasis on the reason they do what they do, like Apple, are so successful.

I believe that Apple will continue to lead the technological revolution in the forseeable future. Although they are not as tech-savvy as other companies that really push the boundaries of electronic technology, like Samsung or Microsoft, but they have a stated their beliefs so strongly in their advertising. And people who identify with their beliefs will continue to patronise Apple and ensure their dominance in the market.

“People don't follow what you do; they follow why you do it.”

Imma Chargin' Mah Lazor!!

My first taste of an instance of internet (in)security was when a file-sharing cloud website I used to frequent went down for several weeks from a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. When the site came back up, all the data on it was gone. I had used this website as a storage for my polytechnic portfolio shortly before my laptop died, and up to that point, I had thought it was the safest place I could store all my valuable data. Three years worth of digital creations to my name gone just like that, and all for the smug satisfaction of a bunch of people who didn't have anything else better to do.

That incident taught me two things. One, it taught me to never store all my eggs in one basket. Two, it made me realize that there are people on the internet that existed to cause misery to other people. It really made my blood boil that there existed means to cause grief to people on the INTERNET, of all places. It made me want to find out more about what they did, and how they did it, in order to understand what happened to me and to ensure that it never happened again.

My research into the seedy world of internet vigilantism led me to discover just how insidious people were online. There were actually active online communities where like-minded individuals came up with new and creative ways to disrupt and cause mayhem. One such socially deviant network was 4chan, an open imageboard dedicated to scum and villainy.

  

 pretty much

The users of 4chan operated on the premise that the internet was one big playground, and that they were its biggest children. The internet was essentially theirs to toy with, and that the fallout of their machinations would be wrought on the people unfortunate enough to taste their wrath. One popular tool was a DDoS client known as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC). The LOIC is a client that organizes muliple concerted attacked on a single IP address into a single focussed beam. That was how my cloud website got hit: someone had the bright idea to blast a large and popular cloud service with a LOIC for “fun”. The result was the infernal termination of three golden years of my academic life. Boo.

You Have My Bow! And My Axe! And My Keyboard!

Today, I learned that there is a really cool tool on Google called Google Images. It allows you to search for the origins of an image using its URL. This handy little feature is a real treat to use, especially if you chance upon a picture on a website and don't know where it came from. Another really interesting use for Google Images is to get higher resolution versions of the images you already have. This is possible because most images found on the internet were originally uploaded their original raw form, and then compressed and shrunk down to fit in the bandwidth limits of other websites.

One really creepy experience I had with Google Images was when I randomly searched one of my pictures for fun one day. There was one result that got back from a blog I didn't recognize. It turned out to belong to an ex-army mate of mine that held a grudge against me and had gotten ahold of my picture. He posted a huge rant about some asinine incident where he took offense. It really, really weirded me out. I confronted him about it and he took the post down. Still, it's really creepy what people can do with your pictures online.

An Education Like No Other

The internet is a great tool for the dissemination of information. With it being available to just about anyone with a secure connection, it is a great way to share and receive ideas from virtually anywhere in the world. Indeed, learning can be made much more effective through the use of online digital media, in a way that traditional classrooms can't do on its own.

One reason that the internet can expand upon the teaching capability of the classroom is that traditional lessons are limited to a lesson plan or curriculum set forth by a school system, and in order to ensure that learning is kept consistent, it is locked into place with no room for deviation. For example, if a school wishes to teach about goldfish, they will plan out exactly how they will go about teaching their students about the subject. This plan, once finalized, will be adhered to until the syllabus needs reviewing. Along the way, if teachers wish to expand upon the syllabus, they can't, because the lessons have all been planned out, and there is no resource available to draw extra information from.

That is, until the internet comes along and totally blows that way of doing things out of the water. With the internet, educators are able to actively draw upon digital media stored on this vast network, so that they can expand upon established learning parameters at will. Now, instead of always teaching about how a goldfish swims, videos and papers can now be accessed to provide further insights into the subject, information provided by experts in their field that open up whole new avenues to learn. Standardized curriculums will be a thing of the past as more and more educational institutions embrace the power of the internet to teach their charges. The possibilities, as they say, are endless.