Introduction

"What are the reasons for studying the Internet in terms of the everyday and what our chief areas of focus?"

In my opinion, everyday is what happens to a person on a day to day basis, at least once or several times a week in some sort of common routine. Even though the everyday occurrences of many people's lives may seem mundane it is vital to understand how the Internet is changing them, as overall our everyday life is more important than our anyday life. The common tasks that we pursue everyday are what we spend the majority of our time and effort on. Anyday events are unstructured and may only happen once in a life time, but the everyday is predictable and frequent. Anyday events in the past may define who we are and what we do now, but who we are and what we do now define our everyday, in essence our everyday is who we are.

Our society structures our everyday lives and changes in society affect our everyday lives. Society defines how power and wealth is distributed. In this unit we analyze how the social dynamics in our society affect the Internet, and most importantly what changes the Internet has brought to society.

Activities

Individual: your own experience of the Internet

Extracted from the discussion board.

1. "How did you first encounter, hear or read about it?"
   I don't actually remember because I was quite young and I guess the technology was already there as a grew up it didn't seem significant.
2. "When and how did you first ‘go online’ and what did you think of it?"
   The earliest time I remember using the Internet was for fun as a child. I primary spent my use of it playing games on Lego.com. I don't remember exactly what I thought of it but I probably thought it was a cool toy.
3. "How do you use it nowadays?"
   Study is the foremost use for me. I am a classic Gen Y kid and love Facebook, Twitter and MSN. I also spend a lot of time reading articles about web and graphic design.
4. "Do you think of it as different or part of your everyday life?"
   It is definitely a part of my everyday life. Four days a week I'm online studying. In my free time I'm using social networks, chatting to friends, purchasing music off iTunes, etc. It has become so interwoven in my life that I don't think twice about Googling for something or choosing to purchase something online.

Group: start on your first task for Assignment 1

Extracted from the discussion board.

Like many other teenagers my age, the Internet is part of many areas in my life. I have embraced social networks, online collaboration, instant messaging, file sharing, etc. From Monday to Thursday I log-on in the morning to check my emails, respond to friend requests, view updates from friends and post my own status to IM services, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace through Digsby, an application that centralizes my online communication.

Study, design and entertainment are my primary focuses of computer use. Throughout the day I spend my time reading course work, using Google for research, and viewing design inspiration articles filtered through those I follow on Twitter. During these tasks I will be chatting on IM and replying to emails as they arrive. Some of my less common uses of the Internet include shopping for electronics on eBay, purchasing songs on iTunes and using Aardvark, an IM questions and answers service, to solve problems that I cannot find the solution to using Google.

Even though my study and future career will almost fully rely on the Internet, I do not see the Internet as a substitute for the various activities in my life. Instead it is supplementing them.

Discussion

Extracted from the discussion board.

Subject: Anyday Vs. Everyday

As a 17 yr old student my everyday revolves around study, part-time work, friends, etc. Four days a week I'm online most of the day studying and doing assignments, through that time I check email, twitter, facebook, etc. Then I have Skype and MSN which I chat on will working. Sometimes if I have something to get done I turn all these notifications and distractions off till I'm done.

Subject: How do you define "everyday" and "typical" people

I think if we are going to generalize how a certain group use the computer we must also gereralize what they are doing. So instead of saying a teenager uses the Internet for Facebook we might say they use it for social interactions which would encapsulate IM, Twitter, email, etc. For a business man we might say that they use it for professional communications, primarily email but might include following other professionals in their field on Twitter or using LinkedIn to find new clients, etc.

Activity - 'Ego-Surfing'

In this activity we Google our own names to get an understanding of our online web presence. There was no surprises on the first page of results as I tend to be quite active on the web already. There are other 'Luke Franklins' creating content also, but it is mostly good. Did you know I work for the ABC? I didn't either. I'm quite happy if a future employer thinks that St. Luke's Franklin Health Care Center is named after me; though I don't know how I'll explain being a saint if they don't realize that Franklin is a place! If there was anything that I felt was very reputation damaging I'd be quite prepared to bury it in a wealth of information, but if it was a case similar to the 'Star wars kid' and the content was immensely popular the damage would be irreversible. An interesting service I found is claimID, it lets you specify what references of your name belong to you. "One of the greatest things about having a claimID page is that you can easily provide people searching for you with a real picture of your identity. With claimID you can claim your blog, your website and news articles that mention your name into a central place." - claimID About Page.

Readings

Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata

This article goes over the differences between professional, author and user created metadata. Each having flaws it closely examines the strengths and weaknesses of user created categorisation called folksonomies. Even though the system is highly scalable it hinges on the vocabulary and methodology of users and the tags applied to the information can often inaccurate or only relevant in the context of a specific user. On the opposite side of the spectrum professional created metadata and classification is very precise but extremely costly.

A system that combined the different metadata creation methods into one could provide better categorisation and/or classification and be scalable for the vast amounts of information on the web. Maybe something similar to wikis where 'zealots' clean out irrelevent, incorrect and ambiguous tags and combine similar ones like 'flower' and 'flowers' in reward for reputation in the community would encourage finer controlled tagging.

Creating a separation between public and personal tags for users would prevent irrelevant categorisation by eliminating tags only relevant to the user from the public space, ie: 'me'. These are some ways that tags could be filtered and more exact categorisation and classification could be brought to folksonomies.

Activity - Playing Around

Here's my attempt at creating a derivative work:

Original image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/balakov/1614997917/