1.2 The Medium is the Message? When the media converge.

New Media is becoming far removed from what we have been served up in the past, no longer are we solely at the hands of established media players who deliver their brand and version of news and content. The internet and its associated hardware's has given the average person access to a multitude of information feeds and the ability to seek information not just to observe a selected and limited; possibly biased range of content.

With this freedom to view an ever increasing amount of news, entertainment and opinion, comes a fear of information overload, a dread that you cannot process all that you need to know. There are also many fears around the two way nature of the internet; not only are we pulling in so much information but the reverse is also true and we are giving out so much of our own personal details and we are not sure who is viewing, collecting and using all this information and for what purpose.

We have now become participants and this has opened us up to an obligation of honesty as we now have the ability to be our own broadcasters and publishers. The type of content we choose to add to the internet is only edited by ourselves and the correctness and moral or social boundaries we choose follow or bend is purely our own choice. Sure there are policing mechanisms in place that may prosecute those who slander or incite others, but depending on where the information is uploaded to on the internet it may only ever get seen by a select target audience or your own social network. Usenet [1] is an example of a lesser known region of the internet that is used for targeted groups of likeminded people and is still regarded as the wild west of cyberspace. [2] While social media sites, personal blogs and web pages are the primary places for people to host their own lives and opinions, Usenet and other subscription only website are places only the devoted may ever see.

My Choosen Text.

I had an eureka moment while looking through my music library and came across the song Brazil, [5] it's the title track from a film of the same name. I love this films retro futurism and its crushing bureaucracy. Brazil [6] is a 1985 British science fiction fantasy/black comedy film directed by Terry Gilliam.

"The film centers on Sam Lowry, a man trying to find a woman who appears in his dreams while he is working in a mind-numbing job and living a life in a small apartment, set in a dystopian world in which there is an over-reliance on poorly maintained (and rather whimsical) machines. Brazil's bureaucratic, totalitarian government is reminiscent of the government depicted in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, except that it has a buffoonish, slapstick quality and lacks a Big Brother figure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(film)


Now eureka moments often have a follow up ripple effect I've found and another song is also creeping in as a contender, a special version of 'Somewhere over the rainbow' by Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwo. now if I layer these two with some video and ........ And Blade runner, now that’s a real fav movie. Hmmm.