The activity for this week is to do the reading and I have chosen to do the following:
Select a particular health topic that interests you for any reason (it could be a friend or relative’s medical condition, for instance):
- Find out more about the topic using the Internet.
- While you are doing this, note down the main ways you’ll begin looking and your process of selecting useful sites.
- How would you say your knowledge of the topic has changed in the course of this research?
- What are the criteria by which you’d select sites?
- Finally, describe in your portfolio 2-3 of the most useful sites and Internet applications and the ways in which they’d be useful to people visiting them (no more than a page
I have decided to go for a health issue that many Australian’s face: Diabetes. While I know that there are different types of Diabetes and that there is no cure, I don’t have enough information to discuss the issue with others.
I’ll start with Google and see what pops up.
Here goes…
www.google.com gives me the www.diabetes.org and wikipedia as the first 2 sites. The 3th is www.diabetes.com I don’t have a problem with visiting any of these sites for information about diabetes (unlike the folks from the UK in the reading). I also used www.google.com.au and obvoiusly the results were exclusively Australian and so the 1st site was www.diabetesastralia.com.au. Of the 2 sites www.diabetes.org and www.diabetesaastralia.com.au, I found it interesting that the US diabetes web site does not link being overweight as a specific risk to getting Type 2 Diabetes, the Aus site maintains it is the key reason. A little confusing and I suspect that the concern over obesity in Australia and the resulting health issues may play a part in the sites information. Or perhaps the US and UK sites are wrong.
It is important to note that the US, Aus and UK diabetes sites all advocate a healthier lifestyle and it is only the Aus site that claims that Type 2 diabetes is specifically a lifestyle disease. The main risk seems to be a family history, age and certain ethnic backgrounds. However, what I didn’t realise is that over 200 million worldwide have diabetes and the those that are most at risk come from low and middle income coutries. It is also suggested that for every person diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, there is 1 person who hasn’t been diagnosed. Seems like a ticking bomb.
The criteria for site selection was the use of national associations backed by government health organisations and finally the WHO. I avoided sites that sold diabetes medicine as they were about treatment rather than prevention.
The WHO is excellent as it gives a perspective outside the Australia, the US and the UK. I assumed that due to western diets, diabetes would be a bigger problem in Aus, UK and the US, but we are only a few of the many countries that have an issue with diabetes.
For anyone who need information about Diabetes prevention and treatment, the 1st port of call should be Diabetes Australia for some basic information (every site has easy to access information, so it might be easier for Australian web surfers to go to an Australian site.
In terms of social networking, I found http://www.tudiabetes.org/ to be excellent and if I ever learn of anyone suffering from this terrible disease or I am diagnosed with it, I will be spending time there.
This post is in response to David Beers article on the fall of the Top of the Pops and David Laughey’s Music Media in Young People’s Everyday Lives. In Music, Sound and Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual.
For me the most interesting part of the reading was the predictions made by Poster (1996), who suggested that there would be a shift away from centralised production and distribution of media. MySpace is one example of how the artist and consumer have taken themselves out of the traditional model of media distribution. Shows like the Top of The Pops, coud be seen as similar to Australia’s own Countdown which presented music that was popular at that time.
Mass media tends to about what is popular at the present time without accounting to taste. Personal preferences are more about what people like regardless of it’s current popularity. I aggree with Laughey that alternative music about past and future trends and tastes in music.
Answers to the Discussion Questions
What role does music play in your life and does it mesh with any of the practices and meanings described in the readings?
Music for me has been about losing myself in the sounds and drowning out the noise of the outside world. I prefer to listen to an album than a playlist. I love finding an album and listening to the whole thing, not just one song. While that song may be “popular” it may not be the best song on the album. For me it isn’t so much about the song, it’s about the artist. I listen to music on the train to work and in the car. At home we play CDs. I don’t play music video show as thwy have to much pop and hip-hop. I’d rather have my ears burnt out with hot pokers than listen to hip-hop.
Are your tastes shared with other people or groups that you are in contact with?
Don’t know, don’t really care.
How do you usually ‘pick up’ a musician/band or song?
If I hear a song on the radio or see an artist playing on a TV show, I will go online and find our more about them. If they have a site, I will go there an listen to some more songs. I did this recently with Kate Miller-Heidke and Amanda Palmer. I saw them both perform on Good News Week and immediately went online to find more of their music. Eventually I was able to see KMH live in concert and bought several of her CDs. At her concert I was fotunate to see another band thatI had never heard before and went online to find that they had an album that I went and bought.
What I tend to do if I find music I like is go to AMG (All Music Guide). A great site for finding out about music and music genres, influences and general information. I will find a band or artist that I know and like and AMG will give me a list of similar artists. I have found some interesting music that way. Part of the reason for doing it this way was the lack of exposure to popular music while living in Japan. Listening to the radio wasn’t very helpful, but access to the internet exposed me to a lot of music. From 91 to 98, I have a cultural gap, where I was not exposed to Australian music, sport, movies, tv, etc. Once I had access to the internet, that all changed.
Do you download music, watch videos with music, reveal your tastes in online profiles and applications?
I download a lot of music, but only watch some music videos. I do not belong to any music related social networking sites.
The first activity from this week’s topic was to answer the following question:
How far would a partner/spouse have to go online before it is considered cheating? Up to what point is flirting online acceptable? How ‘real’ is cybersex?
To be considered cheating you would have to have formed an emotional connection with a person online. You would be sharing things with your online friend that you don’t share with your spouse or partner forming what Pawlik-Kienlen (2007) termed, “emotional intimacy”. Keeping your online relationships secret from your spouse/partner could also be considered cheating. Flirting is acceptable if it is something you can do in front of your spouse/partner without it being sexually suggestive. If you treat everyone in the same teasing, friendly, way then it is acceptable flirting.
A second activity was to discuss as a group the following:
Discuss in your tutorial the acceptability of online dating amongst your friends and family. Do you know of anyone that’s met someone online and then gone on to date them face to face?
I don’t have a problem with meeting people online. I am of a generation where I met my wife prior to the Web taking off, so I haven’t experienced online dating. I would certainly try as it would be a great way to meet someone. I don’t know of anyone personally that has used a dating service. As for meeting people online in chat rooms of virtual worlds, I think its great that people meet that way. It certainly lowers the barrier to people who are shy or just nervous or even for people that don’t like going to bars or clubs. I have made friends with people online that I have never met in person and it doesn’t seem weird at all. I think you have to be open to all possibilities.
My own experiences with the Internet:
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How did you first encounter, hear or read about it?
Mid 90s, I had a chance to access email while working at a particular company. I had wanted to get online, but having dial-up at 15hrs a month for $30 was a bit much.
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When and how did you first ‘go online’ and what did you think of it?
I went online in 98. I can’t remember whether I went online at the company I worked at or at home. At home it was pretty exciting. I was planning a holiday and used to get prices and find places to go. Great fun. Pages loaded slow, but I distinctly remember listening to the AFL grand final in Sept 99, which North Melbourne won. This was a big deal as I was in Tokyo.
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How do you use it nowadays?
I use it for absolutely everything. Email is the mainstay. Friends, family and clients contact me via email. I use it for banking, shopping, weather, news, tv, music, movies, books, chat, info, etc
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Do you think of it as different or part of your everyday life?
Absoultely. Check news in the morning and emails in the evening.
Readings:
Everyday Life and the Internet in Everyday Life
The 2 readings gave me an understanding of the ideas from each. In the section on Everyday Life, we are given an idea of what the study of everyday life involves and in the 2nd reading on the Internet in Everyday Life we have a break down on how the Internet is used and impacts our everyday life. Is the study of the Internet a study of popular culture or can the Internet be studies as somthing independent, like the use of the telephone.
Some of the topics that were raised in the readings included the very question of whether the Internet behaviour should be considered separately from other apects of everyday life.
I believe that it should be considered as part of our everyday life now. Perhaps when the study was first made an the internet was not as pervasive a case could be made for making internet behavious a separate study. However, with the YouTube, Facebook and Twitter era, the Internet is different than it was 9 years ago.
My Internet Footprint over the past 12 years has consisted of Emails (lots and lots of emails), postings on usenet, forums and discussion boards, live chat in online gaming, IM and Peer-to-Peer networks, posts on blogs and twitter and a couple of personal webpages.
With the exception of emails, all of my online postings up untill this year has been under an alias.
The readings for this part of the module were on Identity Management, Personal Homepages, and Anonymity and self-disclosure on weblogs. I read all of them, but didn’t find them very interesting. I posed the following 2 questions:
Were personal webpages created and written the way were due to a lack of understanding of technology (web hosting, html, bandwidth) or were they written that way because Webpages were socially restricted to the use of “nerds”?
Does the shift towards Web 2.0 mean that the technology has allowed non-nerds greater access to the internet? Were they ready when the technology became available and easier to use or was their a social driver?
I think that when a group of nerds get together in their basement or garage they aren’t really considering the social impact of their tech creations, they are more concerned about making something cool for their friends to use. They are using existing tools and coming up with new ways of using them or when no tool is available, they are making their own.
