BOOK: LASN, K - Culture Jam

An interesting quote about the post modern family and their realisation of reliance on technology when presented with 'real':

'The post modern family, out there in the woods trying to bond, can't adapt to real time, real trees and real conversation, because real life has become alien landscape. Mom and Dad can't navigate in it. No one really feels they belong. No one feels any sense of purpose. The spaced-out daughter is alive when she is in front of the TV, and the mopey son is alive when he is surfing the net, and Mom and Dad are alive when they're at work. Meanwhile, in real, hairy-ass nature, concrete things keep intruding on their consciousness, breaking their media trance: the rumble of the nearby creek, the prick of mosquitoes on their ankles, the subsequent sight of their blood.

Living inside the postmodern spectacle has changed people. Figuratively, most of us spend the majority of our time in some etheral place created from fantasy and want. After a while, the hypperreality of this place comes to seem normal. Garishness, volume, glitz, sleazy excess - "the libido of the ugly" - becomes second nature. 'The environment consists of what you see around you - the ambient spectacle. Occasionally, you'll bump into an outsider bearing tales of that other environment, the one you may have known.

The moment you fail to understand why the natural world might have relevance in the day-to-day lives of human beings, you become 'a lost ball in the high weeds.' Abandon nature and you abandon your sense of the divine. More than that, you lose track of who you are.'


Is this perhaps why our course leader has challenged us to the '3 peak challenge'.... I wonder?!

My online behaviour

[This is a post I made to the IMS forum on the CEMP website following on from a lecture on online behaviour]

So what have I been doing online this week?

Well, for a start, Sunday seems to be the day that I spend the longest continual time on the internet, so apologies I am only just getting round to posting now. I have to say that perhaps the time I spend on the internet has slightly decreased this year, at least for personal surfing. I seem to spend more time now using the online databases for looking up journals etc and even when I do find a journal I want to read, I will almost always opt to print it out instead of read it on the computer screen.

Although I seem to go online mainly for uni research purposes, I will go through the same sort of routine before getting to what I actually intended to do. This basically includes checking my two email accounts - hotmail and the uni one - which is really the main personal purpose I have for the net. I used to always automatically log in to messenger when my computer started but I changed this as I found it caused too much distraction and although I quite enjoy talking online, it would take up soooo much time.

I have recently joined a whole load of social networking sites, which has been prompted by the 'course requirements'. I don't think I would have landed at the sites otherwise unless perhaps recommended by friends (WOM again). 3 of my housemates are currently obsessed with Facebook and have used the words 'I'm addicted' when refering to it. I have joined Facebook and yeh, it's interesting but I do find it odd that you have to send out requests to get people to be your 'friend'. I also struggle with the fact that mostly people's friend on there are people you see every day - so why not just ask them something face to face instead of posting comments? Whatever happened to conversation? Oh, also someone who has the same name as me asked me to be thier friend, which I found a little odd.

Another thing that has annoyed me lately is the number of passwords I have to remember as a result of being on all these various sites. The number of times I have had to send requests asking the sites to re-send my password is just getting annoying. But then, I also think that if write them down somewhere then someone else could get hold of them, log in and vandalise my spaces! Perhaps a little cynical?! With these kind of sites as well, I find that mostly people from school contact you, and it's usually all the people you don't really want to talk and I wonder if they do it just so they can say 'I now have 56 friends on myspace'. Does it make people feel better to have this kind of benchmark?

I do use online banking quite a lot and probably check my accounts once a week online. I find the service pretty good and trust that all the reporting is correct. This service is really useful to me and I am more than happy to pay bills online etc. Although saying that I tried to renew my car tax online this week and after trying three times and getting a 'technical fault' message, I had to revert to calling up the automated telephone service which for some reason I am more dubious about when giving card details etc.

In conclusion, I really only use the internet for communication purposes and have been known to download the odd music track for free. I am comfortable using the internet for services such as banking or buying insurance and will occasionally shop online for clothes or shoes.

JOURNAL - Corporate blogging strategies

LEE, S., HWANG, T., & LEE, H. (2006) Coporate blogging strategies of the Fortune 500 companies. Management Decision 44 (3) p316-334.

So in the last post I summarised my own feelings about blogging and what I think I can use it for but perhaps more interestingly, this journal investigates how companies are using blogs to capture and engage with consumers and employees.

A corporate blog might be defined as a web site where an organisation publishes and manages content to attain its goals.

"A "blog" - short for "web log" - is a web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual (Blood, 2002). Because the blog can be used to convey various types of information, such as personal, public, commercial, and political, it has become an effective communication tool over the internet."

There are a lack of rules that govern the blogsphere and it has been termed as today's 'Wild West' (Jones, 2005).

If an organisation adopts employee blogs then this automatically raises the issue of control - but then if control is present on a blog is this really the true voice of the employees and does this acutally add anything to the business? In the worst case scenario however, some employees have been fired over blogs they have written eg: a Delta Air Lines flight attendant lost her job because she posted photos of herself in her uniform on her blog which the airline felt were 'inappropriate and an unauthorised use of Delta branding'.

Types of corporate blogs
The authors of this article suggest 5 types of different corporate blogs:

(1) Employee blog - a personal blog that is maintained by a single rank-and-file employee. Can be hosted on commercial sites or (as is the case increasingly now) can be hosted on company-owned domains as more companies are officially sponsoring employee blogging.

(2) Group blog - written be several people, this type of blog is also known as a collaborative blog. Usually focus on a specific topic and contributors are experts on the topic.

(3) Executive blog - 'when top executives appear in the blogsphere, thier blogs generate instant traffic and can be an effective tool to establish a direct connection with stakeholders'. In the current business environment it is believed that top-level executives should be more transparent and disclose more information than ever before.

(4) Promotional blog - purpose is to generate buzz about products and events. This type can be controversial largely due to the lack of an authentic human voice. One of the first attempts of this type of blogs was for Dr Pepper/Seven Up's Raging Cow blog, which was supposedly written by its cow mascot. The company hired several young bloggers and aksed them to promote its new milk beverage "Raging Cow" via thier personal blogs. This strategy was severly criticised as being deceptive and one blogger even proposed a product boycott (Gallagher, 2003).

(5) Newsletter blog - some organisations have launched a newsletter type blog that officially represents their positions. They cover a variety of news such as company news and product information.

Where's all the blogging gone?

Ooops! Almost 4 weeks later, here I am back again to write the second entry for my blog. Not quite 'every week' as intended. So why haven't I been blogging?

Well for a start I wasn't entirely sure what a blog was until I started this course. Yes, I have heard of them, but haven't had the drive or opportunity to embrace the blogging hemisphere and therefore haven't grasped what they are all about. So making this a course requirement is definitely a good thing and perhaps one of the reasons I haven't been on here blogging regularly is because I have been off reading, reading and reading. Anyway, now is as good a time as ever to stop thinking and actually start doing ('think - feel - do' right?).

So the purpose of a blog is to act as an online journal or diary of events. I have been thinking about this quite a bit over the past few weeks and have been trying to figure out if I would actually find a use for blogs outside of the course requirement. I have thought of at least two situations that I could use a blog for;

a) to diarise a holiday or gap year. I am going to Australia in December 2007 and I would definitely like to keep a blog along the journey so that family and friends can keep updated about what we are up to.

b) to log useful information I learn on the course that could be used when I enter the world of working. I was thinking that if I made a conscious effort to blog all the notes I have made over the length of the course then this could act as a great source of information for when I am out working and need to refresh on theory or learnings.

So, in sum I can see this blogging lark becoming something that will be of use to me in a personal context. Whether I would find the time to blog on a weekly basis or whether I had the need to is a different matter. I guess what is important for this blog is that it is going to be a learning curve for me and it will give me a voice (which I still don't make the most of in lesson time, an alergy I seem to always have had) where I can express my views on the subject of IMS and what I see happening with the digital landscape which is actually of real interest to me.