Until the other day, i found that i could watch TV on through my laptop through the university using cablecom and IPTV and all i have to do is pay £20 for the year and i can watch a fair amount of channels not just terrestrial TV.  A few years ago, if i didn’t have signal on my TV I’d have to miss all of my favourite programs or get my mum to record them at home which would be a lot of hassle. So why do people choose new technology… simply because it makes life easier (if you know how to use them that is).

So when looking for my upgrade i noticed that instead of buttons, most of the phones i liked the look of were touchscreen, so this brings me back to my point of ‘is it needed?’ … whats wrong with buttons, surely if a button stops working it’ll be alot easier and probably cheaper to get fixed than if the phone was touchscreen with no buttons at all. So the main question i ask myself is … are these advances really worth it? sure they look good and possibly do better things, but when 1 little thing goes wrong that it, your phone could be unusable and you’ll have to spend alot to get it fixed or have to pay for a completely new phone.

This morning when i was watching The Suite Life on Deck (sequel program to The Suite Life of Zack and Cody) on the Disney channel and during the episode one of the characters, London  Tipton, was creating webisodes for her Website, ‘Yay Me’, and at the end she gave out a website address, so out of curiosity, i decided to investigate to see whether such a website actually exists…

… turns out it does and not only does it exist but it also has more webisodes from London Tipton that fans of the show can watch and comment upon. I decided that this was a good example of media converging as it brings both TV and internet together.

At first i thought HA good luck with that, theyre never going to be able to stop people from uploading videos. But as i searched for Metro Station – Shake it!… itd seem Youtube are doing a fine job of removing official videos .. much to my annoyance.

I can see why they’re doing it because artists arent getting enough money for the amount of plays their video’s get which is fair enough but Youtube was my only source for music videos as i dont have music channels whilst im at university, surely artists can do without gettin a little bit of money for the sake of their fans.

But then again, it is the music industry and artists only want to make money so if theyre not getting what they want for their efforts and work, theyre going to complain and have something done about it. However im sure it wont be long before a few music videos sneak their way back onto youtube, or what normally happens, something new will come along to show the videos, such as a website where you’ll have to pay like 10p everytime you want to watch the video or something like that.

However because the radio annoys me with adverts and music i dont really want to listen to, i invested in a little invention that uses the old cassette but that can be plugged into your Ipod which is really handy for me as it saves me wasting money on a cd player being fitted and i have all my favourite music on one thing so i dont have to fiddle around with changing CD’s whilst driving …. safety first =)

when trying to think of what kinds of technologies weren’t around any more I came unstuck… All old technologies are still around people still have them. For example people now have CDs and mp3′s which have evolved from tape cassettes, however cassettes are still around and some people still use them so technology hasnt really properly moved on.

But here is my main point, if people still use the older technologies, why is there a need for new technologies, why do we strive for new things, what is wrong with what we had before .. it was good enough for us then why cant it be always.

Also, with new technologies coming out all the time, how long will it be before we get bored with it and just want things to stay how they are, I think this could already be happening. For example VHS vs DVD and DVD vs Blu-Ray, when DVDs first came out they took off alot quicker than when Blu-ray came out… i cant see blu-ray wipeing out DVDs anytime soon … they’re too costly and frankly not a whole lot different from DVDs.

I began with the flash element as i found this the easiest part to do (being a little experienced) I didn’t struggle with this part much, i just had to remember how to command the buttons to do what i wanted them to do which wasn’t too hard when it came down to it. I was even able to add fades to my pictures to make the transitions between each one a little smoother.

I then began the website side of the project. I found remembering how to do DIV tags the hardest thing to remember well in fact it was remembering the correct size of the left and right containers… even though i could make them whatever size i wanted, i liked the size that was made in the workshop whilst following Mez’s instructions. After remembering this it was back to the easier side of Dreamweaver .. choosing a colour scheme, linking numerous pages, adding my statistic pictures and general titivating.

Then came the hardest part … Photoshop! I decided that the photoshop elements within my website will be the picture of myself  edited in Photoshop and also the titles of each picture edited in Photoshop too. Despite my earlier disagreements with Photoshop, it was rather easy. I turned the picture of myself black and white and added “112mc” in the corner with added text effects. I found this part the most challenging and the most rewarding part of the final artefact as it was something i’d never been able to do before.

After adding my Photoshop elements to the website, my titles that i created on photoshop had a border round them when i incorporated into my website as i had a border round each of the pictures. This annoyed me as i just couldn’t stop it from happening  and i couldn’t make it so the picture had a border but the titles didnt. But after a lot of tinkering with the script, i managed to get rid of the border around the title and still keep the border around the picture.

All in all i think i was quite lucky with the amount of things that could have gone wrong but didn’t and the website looks exactly as i had imagined when i began this artefact so im rather happy with the end result.

Yes, i learnt how to make a mini animation but we also learnt this in this module so maybe i could have chosen a different Add+vantage module and gotten a little more out of it.

For example… crosswords, i used to sit with my mum and “help” do crosswords with her, now she doesn’t really do crosswords anymore because shes doing puzzles on her nintendo DS.

As DS’s and technologies become more popular, i believe they’ll slowly but surely push out simple entertainment things in media sources such as crosswords from newspapers. The question is … when will some of the things i know of not exist anymore.

Thinking back over the years, you could only phone up to donate money…. then a few years later you could donate money through the website …. a few years later viewers could donate by pressing their red buttons…. and now this year all you have to do is text YES to 66609 and you will automatically donate £5 to Comic Relief. (Now i sound like one of the adverts!)

This is a perfect example of media that has converged over the years .. its moved on with technology, granted a few years behind but everything can’t happen as soon as new technology comes out … can it?