September 2011 - Rhymes With Asia

September 28, 2011 Peter Spezia

Copyright in an Archive

Every individual who reliably uses the internet has something intriguing happen to them at one point or another. When someone loses hours of time, jumping from one video to another on YouTube, they can attest to the allure of the wide variety of content that exists in this massive video database. In all of those video tangents, however, it is likely that we all have encountered a video that has been removed or regionally blocked at some point. With the sense of vast archival footage that YouTube possesses, it was rather disappointing to see how little this week’s articles discussed

September 20, 2011 Peter Spezia

Cyberspace in Cartoons

It is difficult for a child to comprehend what the Internet truly is and how it really functions, even in today’s modern, web-driven world. So when the media that surrounds them tries to explain the concept, the process has to be basic and all sorts of jargon have to be removed. After all, it would be too complicated to tell a child that “When a packet comes in on a link, the router very quickly looks at the destination IP address, decides which outgoing link to use based on a limited Internet ‘map’ it holds, and sends the packet on

September 15, 2011 Peter Spezia

Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy

When we discussed the domestication of technology and the social shaping that goes along with it during the last class, the concept struck a particular chord with me. For one, a technology’s domestication is an idea that is widely understood, when explained as a phenomenon that occurs when technology which “once seemed marvelous and strange, capable of creating greatness and horror, is now so ordinary as to be invisible” (Baym 45). Many individuals can understand how machines in this day in age quickly reach a point where they lose their sense of wonderment. When it starts to reach that point