Week 1 - Lecture Notes/Tutespark

WEEK 1 LECTURE NOTES
One lecture down, heaps more to go. So far, so good. The first lecture was held by lecturer/course convenor Joshua Nicholas and lecturer/tutor Jules (sorry, I missed your last name), and was basically an introduction to what this course is about; learning and understanding communication technologies and its history.
As we find ourselves living in year 2010, a time also known as the digital age, digital media is a massive part of our everyday lives; with our mobile phones, m3player s and now the newest Ipad on our hand, we’re being socially available and able to communicate at anytime, anywhere.

So what is communication? Communication involves a sharing of ideas or information, or as Aristotle described it; ‘the speaker produces a message that is heard by the listener’. The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary defines the term communication as; 1. The activity or process of expressing or of giving people information. 2. Methods of sending information; especially telephones, radio, computers etc. In other words, communication is about giving and receiving some kind of information.
Communication relies on interpretation (or sometimes misinterpretation). When a speaker provides the listener with some kind of information, the listener converts this in to an understandable message. But there are a couple of factors that complicates this communication process: intersubjectivity and intertextuality. Intersubjectivity means that the listener interprets the message received in the light of their own experience, changing the meaning of the message as they send it along. Intertextuality means that no message is ever complete. The message is understood in the light of information already known. When two people communicate, the message gains its complete meaning from all the other messages that s already sent back and forth.

In the last part of the lecture we talked about technology, in which can be defined as a tool for communication. We differ between old and new technology; old technology involves analogue devices or media such as printed press, TV, radio etc., and new technology involves digital media such as blogs, IM, social networking, MMS/SMS, YouTube etc. It’s sometimes hard to differentiate between what’s considered to be new or old technology, and when they turn from old to new, but for me I would say that technology become old when it’s replaced by something newer, more innovative and better (even though a lot of the new gadgets usually cannot measure up to the old gadgets qualities).