Welcome+ Week 1 (What is networked media?)

Hi my name is Tim Findlay and i am studying media/multimedia at the University of Canberra. I am originally from Newcastle and transferred from the University of Newcastle at the start of the year. I enjoy surfing, skating and playing the guitar. I chose wordpress because it looked like an easy interface to get around on and operate.

This week was the first lecture for the semester, we were dealing with what the term networked media means. Network media is basically a medium, something between one person and another, that allows us to communicate and express ideas. Most of these ideas can be expressed as text, images, sounds etc. Network media allows us to communicate through space, from one person to another, from towns to countries. It can also exists throughout time, as it is a way of accumulating evidence throughout history and understand peoples ideas that have been dead for thousands of years. Network media has become so predominate from the formation of the Internet, as its name implies networks of networks. The Internet works by chopping up data into packets, or “Packet Switching”. Meta data tells the packets where they are going, and are sent to the network. The network effect was also discussed which means the more people that join a network the more effective the network becomes, examples include myspace, facebook etc. These networks would be useless if you were the only one on the network. That’s why Facebook is so successful, you can basically search for a persons name, and it will find there network page. Bandwidth was also discussed, and the ideas of compression. Bandwidth is the amount of data that is being carried through your connection, you can never have enough bandwidth its limitation is endless. That’s what gives rise to the idea of compression, which is reducing the size of a files so it can be distributed easier. The relationship between the client and the server was also brought up, the client which is your computer sends a request to the server and the server responds with the requested file, this can ranges from accessing a web page to downloading a file.