Networks Assignment!

The Parrot Bay is a website which alludes to the very popular, Swedish-based BitTorrent site, The Pirate Bay. Through the form of a recognizable torrent indexer, the purpose of this website is to bring awareness to what torrenting is, to its effectiveness in spurring all-to-frequent cases and debates, and also to shed some light onto The Pirate Bay's recent trials in court. The website itself does not encourage any form of piracy or illegal activities.

The Parrot Bay was created as an assignment for a Digital Media class at York University. The purpose of the assignment was to explore the basic applications of HTML and CSS coding, while at the same time engaging in a particular topic or issue. This website was not written from scratch. That being said, The Parrot Bay is also not a strict copy of The Pirate Bay's website. Well over 15 hours of time has been spent on writing, tinkering, and experimenting with code. The original files belonging to The Pirate Bay were only used as a reference. This site is, after all, supposed to resemble the world's most resilient BitTorrent site. 

The main Search page can be viewed here.

The Search Results page can be viewed here.

Torrent description #1 can be viewed here.

Torrent description #2 can be viewed here.

The About page can be viewed here.

References and more can be viewed here.

All pages are accessible through one another.

References CSS documents can be found in the source code.

Enjoy!

Networks Website Idea

Project 2 of The Electronic Landscape requires me to design a 6 page website. This website will be inspired by one or two pre-existing websites. My idea for this assignment is to combine two contrasting websites: contrasting in terms of both style and purpose. Using at least three different layouts, I am to critically engage with the HTML/CSS code as well as the content of my website.

The topic around which I plan to design my website is that of piracy. Music, video, game, and even picture piracy has existed for years. It is a topic of controversy, debate, and more often than not involves money or lost sales. I find this an important issue in today's society; especially with the growing popularity of BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer file sharing protocols. The recent events of LimeWire's shutdown and The Pirate Bay's time in court are also factors which swayed me in deciding on this as a subject for my website. I've got some interesting ideas for this assignment; let's just hope their implementation won't be too difficult.

Activism Through Social Media: Article Comparison!

Chapter 1 fromClay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody

Malcolm Gladwell'sSmall Change

The two articles above cover the topics of internet publicity, new media, and social networking from separate viewpoints. The first article (It Takes A Village To Find A Phone) concentrates on the benefits (and some drawbacks) of the advancement of social media; using the quite recent “Stolen Sidekick” incident as an example. The article talks about the ways in which social medias such as Facebook and Twitter are effective at raising awareness to certain issues. The second article (Small Change) uses an older example to take the opposing argument. It begins by illustrating to us a situation that occurred in the 60s, for the purpose of telling us that social activism today isn't what it used to be years ago. 

“The platforms of social media are built around weak ties.”

Though many may not entirely agree with the second article, I believe it has a strong, valid point; more so than the first article. It uses concrete examples to explain the essential differences between history's high-risk activism and the social mediums activists use to petition today. It also directly attacks the events that are discussed in the first article, dismissing this notion of an “upgrade” to activism; at the same time claiming that we live in a “networked, weak-tie world” focused on bettering irrelevant issues. When we look at the way social networks are used today, we can see what the second article is talking about. “Weak ties” refers to people having a vast network of “friends”; friends that people share weak relationships with. As the article explains; this method of activism is easy when it comes to expressing one's self; but more difficult for that expression to have any impact.

HTML Mini Assignment

Over here.

Poor Pure HTML, baby.

The Yes Men Strike Again!

The Yes Men spoof on Chevron is one that revisits the common theme of large corporations propagating their “altruistic” intentions in the form of concerned advertisements. What the Yes Men so effectively (and humorously) do is present the campaign in a manner almost identical to the way Chevron did. It's what makes the spoof so effective and the content of the article more attention-grabbing. 

"But what's unique and different here is the honesty. We've never been able to do this before."

With regards to coding and decoding, the Yes Men simply mimicked the original article's method of encoding (and why not, seeing as they already had an effective template for presenting a message laid out in front of them). Since decoding process is mostly subjective to the viewers of the article, the successful transmission of the Yes Men's message relies on the physical interpretation of the article, as well as the content of the text itself (specifically in contrast with the original article). The imitated professional layout and fake emails (all part of the encoding process) make the spoof more convincing (in addition to the already-present charisma held by popular activist groups similar to the Yes Men). 

<Chevron press release> 
<Yes Men press release>