History of communication

We've come a long way from writing on cave walls... and sitting around a fire with 'the tribe' watching the hunters recount their kill by way of dance and re-enactment. Now we write on (well physically nothing I should say type) a medium made popular and accessible by apple in 1991 when using computers started to become a personal arena. Today the fire is a cybercafe where we sit, still with other people and watch re-enactments or read writings on our modern cave wall (screen). The face of art has definitely changed. But this doesn't mean those other forms of art and/or communication have become obsolete, it just means we have expanded the platform within which we communicate and also ironically still incorporate some of our older styles of art with this new fascination of cyber technologies.

It is fascinating to see people using weblogs within the confines of government suppression of free speech. And by free speech I refer to being able to say anti-regime statements and use subversive material. People in countries such as Hong Kong where the government watches and monitors material on the net. These people try to tell stories within these narrow confines. They try to tell the outside world things that normal or mainstream media either dares not tell, or is unable to tell. Freedom of speech in countries such as this is in grave danger and so is freedom of the press. So thumbs up to the daring people out there in the blogosphere (hey! a new word in my vocabulary....) who not only question but challenge oppression and use this wonderful new communication tool to fight for the right to have that freedom of speech. Something perhaps we may take for granted in a country without that kind of sensorship.

Is E-mail Dead? Well, good question. I don't think dead is quite the right term for it, but certainly it seems to be taking a bit of a back seat to things such as instant messaging. For example, I was on a website the other day and had a question I needed answered. In the past I would have had to send an email and wait for a reply, but behold, instant messaging meant I could ask my question and recieve an answer almost immediately. Then it occured to me how fantastic something like instant messaging was from a business point of view. You could speak with multiple people at once whereas in the old days (even older than email days) you would be put on hold for ages on the telephone waiting for an operator to answer your call (because your call is important to us... Ha!). Well okay, perhaps those days aren't so old, but you get my point. Communicating via something like IM enables you to speak with multiple people making the most of your time and that of your employer.... email, a great tool for sure, but in some arenas perhaps a little obsolete.... I say in some arenas because email for the purposes of marketing to large numbers of people is certainly a very attractive proposition for businesses and people in general who wish to disemminate a message to multiple or many people at once in multiple places and/or countries. Back to the question, is email dead? No, I don't think so.

Alphaville...

I enjoyed watching this movie, maybe because it is not something I would normally pick for myself. A very wierd futuristic film by Jean-Luc Godard, it was a bit hard to understand. Godard uses shadow and lighting to set up a scary atmosphere. The music in this movie seemed quite sinister and I believe was used to help create the atmosphere, with its dramatic tones. To me it had a bit of a 'thunderbirds' feel to it where a futuristic feeling is portrayed. Also, the film has a resemblance to Orwell's '1984'.

The main character Lemmy Caution, a secret agent but instead of his normal twentieth century setting, Jean-Luc Godard places him in a futuistic science fiction dystopia, where free thought and individualistic concepts are outlawed and replaced with contradictory concepts. There is an authoritarian air about him. He seems "Larger than life". This can be shown by the fact that he won't let anyone even take his luggage when he arrived at the hotel. He is the only character to where white/light attire. He stands out because of this.

I found it interesting that the graphic nature of violence in the movie was desensitised or controlled. For example, the fight scene in the bathroom at the beginning of the movie. The sound becomes muted, the background music raised to cover that lack of sound and the character of the woman continues in the bath as though nothing is happening around her. This style of desensitising graphic violence has been adopted in recent times by Quentin Tarantino (eg: In 'Kill Bill' where bloodied scenes were desensitised by cutting to black and white or a cartoon like portrayal).

The concept of advanced technology was partly portrayed by two formulas. E = mc2 (Einsteins equation for the relationship between mass and energy) and E = hf (the formula for a quanta of energy). These would have been two very new equations for the time - the second one in particular because quantam physics was a relatively new concept of viewing the world in the 1960's. It was less than forty years old and most people would not have known what these formulae meant.

Another interest thing I found in the movie, the portrayal of things/companies such as IBM and GE as icons of the past but use the aforementioned equations as symbols of the technology of the future. And to take this one step further you can see the dated view of the movie by the fact that IBM and GE are hardware producers but in reality, the 'future' computer superpowers are in fact the software producers and not the hardware producers...

Finally, the victims of Alphaville of the re-education campaign by Alpha 60 is reminiscent of Nazism and Communism and that concept brings up an entire topic of its own that would be fascinating to deconstruct.

Introduction

Hi there, my name is Nerise and I am doing B Bus/BA coupled with a post grad secondary teaching diploma. I have just got back from holidaying in France and have a bit of work to catch up on because today is my first day of class... Blogging is something I have never done in my life so this should be fun. It feels a bit like a diary entry (yes a bit of an old fashioned analogy). I hope through this I may become a little more proficient at communicating in this manner with a wider community perhaps than what I would normally. N.