My digital artefact is a music blog titled Listen Loud, along with its accompanying social media platforms on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Redbubble. The reason I chose this DA is twofold. Firstly, as an aspiring music journalist, I wanted to kickstart my career and build a portfolio of my work. After recognising the relative … Continue reading Listen Loud: My Digital Artefact →

This week, we talked about the 'internet of things', or devices that collect and transmit data via the internet. Currently, there are around 20.4 billion devices connected to the internet of things, but by 2025, this number is expected to rise to 75 billion. That is a lot of connected devices and data being collected, … Continue reading ‘Remind Me Tomorrow’: The Internet of Things →

Following on from last week's lecture on hackers, lulz, and whistle-blowers, I wanted to approach this week's topic from a different angle than my previous blog post. After researching countless resources on cybersecurity, I stumbled across cybersecurity expert Eva Galperin, who shared a video via WIRED debunking cybersecurity myths. What really caught my attention, though, … Continue reading Cybersecurity & the Government →

As of today, I've been working on Listen Loud for one hundred days, and while that sounds like such a long time, it has gone so quickly and is still well within the early stages of its development. As I've said from beginning, this project has always been more than just a university assessment, and so I know it still has such a long way to go. But, I think it's the perfect time now to reflect on how far I've managed to come in such a short period of time.

As personal computers were extremely new at the time of the film's release, and there hadn't been any major hacking operations to raise concern at the present time, these potential issues were frequently dismissed, at least until the attention brought about by WarGames in 1983. Following the concerns on cyber security expressed by President Ronald Reagan after his viewing of the film, it was revealed that there had actually been many concerns about cyber security within the military for a number of years prior. In fact, one of the earliest published pieces on cyber security – Security and Privacy in Computer Systems (1967) by Willis H. Ware – was unheeded for decades until these new policies were proposed under Reagan.

Last semester, in BCM 112, my discussion and remediation around the topic of Collective Intelligence was my favourite piece of published work. So, unsurprisingly, I've decided to expand on this through this week's remediation, where I, again, demonstrate collective intelligence in action, but with a specific focus on networked insurgencies, as is this week's focus.

In this week's BCM 206 lecture, a comparison was drawn between the class-based Feudalism system of the 9th to 15th centuries, defined as "a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour", and our modern-day digital landscape. While traditionally, kings granted land to lords, who in turn managed the 'surfs' who worked upon the land, these roles have now been replaced by investors, tech entrepreneurs, and users, respectively, whose work takes place via the internet.

Everybody has a start date – mine is 1999 – and one day that 1999 is going to be followed by a dash, and another date. It’s that dash that’s in between that’s really, really important, as the time we have to create a fulfilling life is limited; it's finite; it's scarce. Likewise, the attention we're able to focus on the things most important to us is limited – so why do we waste it? Why do we spend hours upon hours scrolling through our feeds, our social media, the internet? Why do we measure success by the number of likes, followers, and shares we receive? And most importantly, why can't we stop?