Thesis Weekly Review 2, Shuguo

• Nokia Developer Submmit 2009, presentation watching. http://www.forum.nokia.com/Learning_and_Events/Nokia_Developer_Summit.xhtml#video
• 2009 Horizon report reading
  
• Talk to http://www.bluewalks.com, a student in KTH start the website. Geo based service, to create walking tours. I plan to talk to them later about geo-based services, and people's opinion about share walking route to the others.
• Prepare reading list, Python books and Google API for the next week.
  

Thesis Process Report 1_Shuguo

• During last week, I worked on how to find out the method of data analysis. And still working on this.
• Come out some idea about, gather the "time spent" on some position. So that, I can measure how long time people spend on School, Home, Center, etc. That can be roughly guess people's everyday activity.
  
• Got the book "dive into python", and start reading.
• Re-schedule thesis plan.
• Told my friends using Google Latitude to share the position information, but found it's so difficult. People feel not comfortable if some others know their position. But, sometimes using telephone to find out current position is quite often. User locate themselves and find some thing interesting around them is easier. Positively share current location make them feel better, which is also some mobile services doing nowadays.
  
• Start thesis background writing from this week.
  

Negative effects of social media

My Belief is that the social medias is making people spent too much time in front of their computer. I state this from my own experiences and from people around me.

When MSN and different kinds of chat programs became popular I was then quick to adapt this new way of instant communication with my friends and use it in my everyday life. I realized often, when I was done chatting for the day, that I had spend a lot more time chatting than I had planned to do. I therefore started to use “offline” mode to be able to reduce time spent and only chat whit the people I really wanted to at that time.

When Facebook then were becoming more and more popular I straight away realized that this was an even more time consuming product/service. Now, was we not only supposed to talk/chat with our friends but also supposed to upload pictures, participate in games, quizzes, groups and other services with our friends and check out their profile. I was therefore very reluctant on creating an account there, but in the end did the social media win. In order not to fall out of this community of information sharing and receiving I created an account. I can almost say that I was pushed into creating an account.

These social Medias have on most people some sort of stickiness. I believe this goes hand in hand with the curious mind of people. We generally want to know what happens around us and with our friends. With these Social Medias we have the benefit and possibility to keep touch and maintain friendship with a lot more people simultaneously; on the other hand must this take away some of the important quality time spent with some other people or friends. Otherwise cannot I see how the time equation should be solved, the one must take out the other. By this I do not mean that using these services is something wrong, but that many people need to find a way to use them more efficient. I do think and feel that excessive time spent on these social medias is not justified compared to other physical activities that we can be doing with our friends instead.

Some ideas that are used in other time consuming products such as World of Warcraft is that they have a clock or a timer so that the user can know how long time they have used it and when they should stop playing/using it.

Essay 4 – the trade-off

During the last discussion, I thought generally the time issue of social media had so many negative effects for the users. I first come up my opinion on the guest lecture of media psychology. The guest asked us who bought one CD album since last month? Only one of my classmates put up his hand. And then, he asked who don’t use Facebook? Also the same guy answered he don’t use it. And everyone laughed. Then the guest said are you live in the stone age? Why don’t you use these new media services? The classmate answered because of time. I was shocked. “Time”, it’s usually ignored when we talk about the fantastic new services. People especially marketing or sales person, more concentrate on the value the social media provide to us, these services improve so much efficiency and convenience. While we forgot to consider how many time social media steal from us. Is it worth? I used to set up my personal blog name it “enjoy your life”. But when I face to the screen tired of all kinds of social media services, is that enjoying life?! I doubt about it. I really respect the value social media provide to us. And also I will still use it. But my discussion should go into another level. How to educate people using social media in a right way should be considered. While according to this blog’s topic, negative effects would be raised up instead of solutions. I think educate consumer how to use social media as a useful is difficult. For example, young people and teenagers are easily follow the trends and then addict with social network services and internet gaming. I am not saying, it’s good or bad for the person, but the point is he/she can not get the opportunity to choose whether it’s the life he/she like. Because usually they may lack of judgments, and after be addiction it’s very hard and cost too much to get out of social media. Maybe for us, social media is a choice, we can control ourselves well. It’s really provide us value. But when I study on the internet companies, they try hard to attract the customers, and make people stick on their site. The initial business model is using customers’ time to trade with advertisement. On one hand, it provides low cost or free information to us, on the other hand, we have to cost more time to find something we need. As Mayun (the CEO of Taobao) said, free is the most experience thing in IT industry.
In the end, hope you can spend your time in your own way, and enjoy it.

Essay 4- Where is our concentraion?

Excessive Internet usage has led us to a new world that is being built now on this planet. The way we communicate, influences the way we think and this would lead to changing way of acting and behavior and finally may lead us to a world –the whole sets of humans- totally different from the one that we know until now.

Internet as a new medium has been the most influential media ever and is affecting our societies gradually in a way that we don’t understand or even notice. But if we want to focus on only of the potential harmful consequences of internet, we can consider the way we perform our daily tasks. Let me tell you a scenario which happens to me almost everyday:

I am studying at my desk in front of computer. It doesn’t matter if you are studying a print material or do it by your laptop because you need your laptop anyway because of for instance, using online dictionaries. Suddenly, one of my friends sends me a link by MSN Messenger and distracts my mind to something that she has found interesting or funny. I try to prevent myself clicking on that link, but finally I will check it as soon as possible. But it is not the end of the story, I will find another issue in that link which sounds interesting for me and of course I think that my friends will like it, so I will send that link to all the people in my friends list and causing them distracting from their ordinary tasks. This impaired cycle repeats and repeats until it comes back to me again maybe two hours later.

This is the way that we perform our tasks everyday, even if we go to library to concentrate on our studying, but we take our laptops over there and unfortunately there is a wireless connection over there in order to not allowing us being away from this ubiquitous entity called “Internet”. It is like a situation that we are addicted to drugs and everywhere you find it and use it almost free, then the result is obvious you cannot go back to your normal life or get rid of your addiction. You will go to the end non-stop.

Everyday, every hour, every minute, we are encountering to massive amount of information which bombards us aggressively without any kind consideration. I think I have learnt 2 times more than what I had learnt in whole of my life in last 4 years which I became addicted to internet but what the result is. I cannot explain -or maybe use- any of these information that I have learnt recently because they are just attack my mind and go out quickly, replaced by new intruders. This kind of information just fills up your memory without any actual usage in your life, maybe just changing your point of view but at what price?!! It is very difficult now to read a scientific article or a journal paper. We can not concentrate on our tasks anymore.

Maybe, this is one of the reasons that “science” does not progress anymore. The only think which is progressing is technology not the pure science and that’s because of companies’ interests nothing else. We cannot see any new Einstein or Newton, because this system doesn’t allow us to flourish in that way. We have become like robots which do what is programmed to, not any innovation or creation. Or maybe worse than a robot, because we do not use any artificial intelligence, instead, Google thinks instead of us, defining the way for us and we just go in that way without any resistance. But where are we going?

Essay 4 - Social media for new social life?

The first thing related to social networks that is important to point out is the lack of attention. Just think that important companies have forbidden access to facebook or the use of messenger, just by closing it with a firewall. This means a waste of time, because people simply do other things ìnstead of their jobs. At work, personally, I could just use skype and of course for job purpose and no more. To be clear: this doesn't mean that somenone controls you; it's just that you cannot do some things not properly related to your work.

It's clearly something misleading your attention, because on work place you have just to work. Don't forget of course that sharing ideas can simply enrich our experience. It's easy to take someone other's idea and develop it, taking advantage of advices given by anybody: it's like a great community, where the sum is bigger than the simple addition. This is simply great, but we have to consider all the side effect that can emerge. For example if we are in trouble with a software or, in general, we want a deep look on a question we simply look for an idea on google. Is this really good? Perhaps, beacuse we can share opinion, but maybe we just don't use our brain and instead use blindly other's brain. So we are back again to quality problem, discussed before... Especially if we just consider the great amount of information actually on internet.

However the great innovation taken by the social media technology is that it has simply changed the way we communicate. It has changed the way we keep in touch. Maybe it's changed evene the way we consider someone "a friend". Let's consider Facebook: we add "friends", but considering all the people that we added, are they really friends? Maybe they're just people we know, so the friendship concept itself is sort of reviewed. We can consider this friend near us, but just on internet: in real life, where will be they? So, is our life becoming more virtual-oriented and sort of less real? I hope not, but I'm not so sure. Just consider that people doesn't talk anymore about sports on the stadium, but maybe they just see the sport events on streaming and talk about it on a specialized forum. How many people acted this way ten years ago? I think this is quite amazing, expecially if we consider that sport is social aggreation. The same for cinema; the great director Sam Peckinpah said that one of the most powerful thing of the cinema is that it is a social experience, because people share the same place and the same movie. Are we loosing it? Maybe: it's like we are going to that way. And I don't think it's a good news.

Maybe Internet in general, and social media technology in particular, are seen like a dream: we can do everything (illegal things too), we can find everything, we can se everything, but where is all this bringing us? Are we thinking about it?

We trust more and more everything that's on internet: maybe we have to be a bit more careful and start wondering what's rear the facade.


Giuliano Sementilli

Essay3- Music Industry!!! where does it go?

Music industry has experienced a very bad situation in comparison to other media in recent years. By improving computer network technologies, music piracy has been very commonplace these days. Within young generations, illegal downloading is not a big deal or immoral issue; it is something normal. Having this situation, legislating stricter laws or advanced anti-piracy software lock of CDs and DVDs will not be the remedy. The industry should find another way to solve this problem. If we look at some trends in the digital world, we can find some answers that can be beneficial for us to apply in this case.

Broadband Internet:
If we focus on internet speed and draw a curve of its increasing within last decade, we can anticipate that in 5 five years most of the world will have access to broadband internet with speed of 10-100 Mb/s at least in western world (which is the primary market in our case). Having broadband everywhere i.e. wireless access will be something ordinary in near future. Everyday, we see new standards will rise and being developed in academic and industrial areas. Standards like Wi-Max, 3G, HIPERMAN, GAN, iBUSRT just to mention a few. Within a few years 4G (4th generation of networks) will be completed and then we will have a universal secure super fast network connectivity standard in all over the world.

Mobile Revolution:
Now, it is one decade that everyone is looking for mobile booming but we can say after emerging iPhone, this booming time is near. Most of mobile phones that are produced now are stronger than a 1980’s computer. Growing the market for the smartphones is around 30% annually and it is predicted that smartphones will own 30% market share of the whole mobile market until 2011. Your mobile phone will not be just a device to make calls; it is your gateway to whole the world. Gaming industry is focusing now on developing games just for mobile platforms; new applications are emerging everyday for every kind of services on iPhone platform, any kind of location-based services are being developed day by day; spreading 3G (3rd generation) mobile; new mobile handsets that ares a music player more than being a phone. Knowing this situation, it is better to forget any kind of disk (CD, DVD, Blu-ray) and finding new thing that suits the needs of the new digital world.

Social Media:
Post-modern human is searching his identity within his peers. Being very busy with your daily tasks, no time to see your friends; this causes you embracing your laptop as a friend even when you are at home after work. Emerging and spreading social networking websites like MySpace, Orkut, Facebook, etc. is just some example of next generation behavior in virtual world. Concept of “Second Life” which is a very hot area of research in social networking is one of the signs to see the future of human being living in a virtual world.

Open Source Movement:
Now, it is the open source era. Everything is going to be open source, from media to software application, from academic researches to industrial researches, from political debates to military information. Everything is and should be free on the internet. It is one of the consequences of democracy and thinking democratically. The open source world is the utopia that human being has had looking for it since two thousands years ago. Living in such a world, no one expects that one industry want to restrict itself from being accessible. If any entity in this world wants to restrict itself, it will be condemned dooming.

Future of Music Industry?
Knowing these trends, proves that if music industry wants to be in line with the world, they should change their way of thinking. They should consider their long-term profit and ignore declining short-term revenues. Being always online, at home, at office, at street, at vacation, at beach, … no need to own a music. You just want to listen to it. If it is available for you whenever you want it, then no need to buy CDs, or downloading it (based on a lecture by Spotify representative). In my point of view (based on a lecture by Nordic Warner Bros. CEO) the era of any kind of disks is passed, the industry should think of new kind of sharing concept in music world. Even no need to buy a digital music online. If you could buy the rights for listening music online, then you will not download any music. No need to save a huge amount of data on your hard disk which is unsecure to damages. The musics are saved in powerful servers somewhere in the world and you just listen to whatever you want just by a little amount of subscription fee.

Another big trend in computer world is going back to 40 years ago. The next generation of computers will not be most powerful entities in the computer world, they will be just some interface devices that provide you whatever service you want by connecting to powerful servers that exist around the world. Hence, next generation computers do not have big hard disks or powerful CPUs, they are very simple mobile devices that offer you whatever you want. UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) and next generation Nano-tech based Nokia phones are just some examples to mention.
The bottom line is the music will be free within 5-8 years from now on. The business model will be based mainly on ad-funded contents; and user-funded little subscription fee. This means that no one owns a music track, just rights to listen to it because there is no need to own a music track. Everything will be online and based on mobile platforms and you can easily share your music with your friends but not for downloading; just as a recommendation for listening. Most of your friends have their own subscription (in a universal server like iTunes), so they will be able to listen to your recommended song just by clicking on your sent link.