Blog 1.

Welcome everybody,

Just to take a second ill introduce myself, I'm Courtney Love (although I swear I wasn't named after her), I’m and 19 have lived on the Gold Coast for over a decade now but I hail from the small town of Wagga Wagga, NSW.
I’m new to Griffith University, this being my first year, first semester studying Communications. The following is a brief recap of week 2 in New Communications Technologies.

Lecture Notes:

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it to the lecture this week mostly because traffic decided to own me on Wednesday. Still after reading the lecture notes and reading the mammoth reading conveniently posted it felt like I was there.

The lecture discussed and explored the use of email and spam and its relativity today, its convenience, pro’s, con’s ect. Nearly everyone in the room admitted to being bombarded with irritating spam announcing discount Viagra and discount penis enlargements so effective the ladies will be banging on your door. These mass emails are sent out all hours of the day to the majority of email account holders in a bid to hook some poor sucker in on a scam. Although I can only assume that they do have some positive and interested responses or they wouldn’t be able to continually bug us with all this spam.

Also touched on was the question of whether bloggers should be or are considered to be journalists. Are the days of needing degrees and years of lowly interning at papers/magazines fetching coffee before you could call yourself a journalist gone and to be replaced by any Joe who has access to a computer with internet? Personally I think that there is a pretty clear line between legit journalists and bloggers, mostly because bloggers really tend to throw down any random thought, outrage or gossip and top it off with a pretty font. Just like I am now really, and I wouldn’t call myself a journalist.
Also worth a mention was the topic of ‘Second Life’ which was bought up in the first lecture last week. It’s basically a virtual world where you sign up and are given a body (called an avatar) then you interact with other users who are also roaming about. Then if you are really into it you can pay money to customise your avatar with clothes, hair, wings if you feel it necessary. It was pretty much the first I had heard of it bar a few friends mentioning it in conversation and while it was interesting to see the examples of people who had gone on to make money from it, mostly it reminded me of Myspace. Fun, but a total waste of time. Though it did bring up the issue of ‘cyber law’ to govern business transactions such as stocks and property, both which people are making real money from, also to catch those looking to scam users out of their money. When one woman who owned a dress store within the Second Life world said that she often spent more than 10 hours a day ‘in world’, I mostly just thought she was sad and needed to get a ‘first life’.

Tutorial Notes:

- Set up account for blog on Blogger.com
- Discussed what went on in lecture
- Became familiar with allotted hard drive space for each student (5gb)
- Began writing all my brilliant thoughts on this blog.\

Thats all! thanks!