6 contested visions

The lecture on contested visions was a very interesting one to me because a lot of questions came to my mind when I thought about the topic after the lecture. The first one was, the guy who invented the internet (Tim Berners-Lee) said he made it as a way of enabling communication and sharing of knowledge, his vision of the web was that it would always be free and available to all human beings. The question that came to my mind was did Tim Berners-Lee know the capabilities of the internet when he first designed it, or was it just made in its original state just to send text based information from one channel to another. I mean look at the internet today, it is a massive space where you can pretty much do anything you want. But was that his vision? Upon doing some research I found out that he never thought it could ever get to that level but he always knew it have the capabilities too.

The second question that came to my mind was the notion of the cloud, in the sense of everything you owning being in one place like in your phone. Yes having our ID card in your phone would be very covenant, but what if you lost your phone what type of information would you have let out into the world, as we all know phones are not encrypted and they can very easily be hacked, so what’s to say a save password to your bank accounts can’t be out there? It’s just a question that ran through my mind and personally I don’t think I would ever use one of these services unless I was fully sure.

5 Social media

Social media is another topic that I found to be very entertaining over the course of the lecture because it would be almost impossible to say that you don’t know what Facebook or MySpace is if you are from my generation living the whole of your life in the western world. I think that they are very important to the development of the world. Think about the communication methods just 30 to 40 years ago, it was either a phone call to someone’s house or work, or it was a letter which took at least 3 days to arrive. But now you have 3G phones, you have things like Skype and Facebook which allow you to be in the other side of the world without even leaving the room you’re in. I think that that is a beautiful thing.

But this also has its limitations in the sense that face to face communication is becoming a very difficult and strange thing. People’s interaction skills become undeveloped because they can be whoever they want behind a computer screen without effort. Also someone with a 1000 friends on Facebook could potentially not even have a handful of real friends which they can interact with on a physical level.

This is also I think a dangerous thing because someone could pretend to be someone that they aren’t, you read about these things happening all the time with people meeting on Facebook and then meeting up and find out that person is a completely different person both physically and personality wise. This has led to a number of raping, assaults and deaths due to social media. But on the whole these things are designed to be tools to help people develop their lives and as my grandmother always says to me too much of anything is not good, which she is right about except cake you can never have enough of that.

4 Newspapers

Newspapers have been such a big part of global news in terms of being a convenient resource for a long time. For as long as I can remember I have been reading or attempting to read newspapers and it seems to be a dying industry purely because of the fact that there are so many technological advances that mean that the newspaper would become unnecessarily and it would become a redundant form of media. The technological advances that I was refereeing too were tablets, i.e. portable media forms. The reason that these are the future is because you can get the same news in your portable device anywhere where you can get a connection to the internet, weather that is a form of Wi-Fi or if it is a 3G connection it can be accessed fairly easily and quickly. Also in some cases such as The Sun newspaper all of the information is available for free to view online. Even the page 3 girls, if you’re into that, that is. But with some other newspapers such a the Telegraph it is a small subscription price that is cheaper than the actual newspaper is required   

Another aspect of newspaper development that is really eye catching is the news tables which show the news from the comfort of your sofa or chair. This is really cool because it acts as a newspaper and as table but with mixing the two together, for instance when you put a hot cup on it or plate, it will register it as food or drink and it will advertise places that you could go to get such items which really cool. But It will be a sad day when newspaper production goes out of service purely because I had such fond memories with them in the past.

3 Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is a very strange concept to get your head around, but how much have we actually seen about Nano technology. I mean companies such as Apple have been using the word Nano as the name for one of their products for a good few years now, but what is the real meaning of the word Nano?  Nano is beyond small, it can’t be seen by the naked eye. But what is generally thought about when talking about things that small are Nanobots. If developed fully these small cells could be used in all sorts of things from repairing space station satellites to killing bad cells in the body (i.e. cancer) this aspect of Nanotechnology that really got my interest, due to the fact it could help in the development in research into a cure of cancer.

I read research that stated that Nanotechnology in this field is allowing scientists to make new tools that are smaller than the cells themselves, which allows them to attack the cancer cells at a cellular and genetic level. This is a very scaring thing when you really think about it because the technology could detect a cancer cell before it has even developed, so what it is saying is there could be in time an era where no will ever got ill again, and who to say this technology couldn’t allow people to grow limbs for instance people who have lost them in wars. We could in fact be playing God. Scary stuff

2 Stark hud

The concept of product that you can control with your eyes seems like a fantastic idea that could be revolutionary. A product like this was shown in the lecture, this product is called Stark hud, a pair of sunglasses that allow you to make video calls, gives you directions and lets you leave the place you are and puts you in a club environment from the comfort of your home.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_u34kV9go0

Even though this is a concept design what would be the impact that this could have? Well in my opinion I think that this type of product would revolutionize the way the mobile industry is because what it ultimately becomes is the greatest phone/ laptop computer ever. Because everything will be stored on your face, there won’t be any heavy things to carry around. Plus the technology that is on show makes products such a Iphone with its Siri capabilities look very average and outdated. Plus it could become a fashion accessory as it is a form of eyewear.

This is what the company (Fujikawa) who are planning to create this product say it is capable of doing

• High speed data in the palm of your hand!
• Geo-location services and tourist information!
• Weather and traffic updates!
• Social networking tools and applications!
• Mood-monitoring jukebox!
• Matchmaker targeting!

I product with these capabilities could potentially kill some products and services that we use today, like dating websites, and things like Facebook as you’ll be able to use their service instead. Never the less the product isn’t due to be out until 2020 so we’ll just have to wait and see.