October 20, 2009
Interesting Things
From what I understand, the term “New Media” is often of the digital variety. This, basically, means that it is networkable and compressible, which in turn means that it is more easily shared, and more information can be stored in the same physical medium than what I have dubbed as “Old Media”. Examples of New Media are things like Facebook, blogging, internet messaging, and stuff like that, as opposed to Old Media, things like hand-written letters, posters, be they printed or drawn, or anything else not related to the internet.
From what I see, New Media has greatly blurred the line between interpersonal communication and mass-communication. What is meant for someone else to read is probably readable by the entire world, if they knew where to look. This blog, for example, is not searchable on Google. However, if someone who knew the blog link decided to go in, whatever I say here will become available for him/her to read. On the internet, nothing is really private anymore. If you wanted to find something, you can, provided you have the equipment and, of course, the know-how.
Reading some of the articles from the website Ms Josephine has given the class, I have come to the conclusion that most people are unhappy with mobile websites. Mobile websites, I assume, are websites you access when using your mobile devices, like a PSP, or a phone. The iPhone, of course, is able to view full websites. I’m sure there are other phones out there capable of doing that, but I’m only sure of the iPhone. Anyway, there are a multitude of people complaining that waiting for a website to load on their mobile devices is driving them insane.
I feel that this is a bit too much to ask. A website’s load time is based on the speed of one’s mobile device. Currently, the technology is such that a phone has roughly 1/10th of a PC. The users cannot expect PC-like performance from a mobile device any more than they can expect a rat to lift up a cathedral, one-handed, while doing a handstand on a skateboard. It’s just impossible. Some websites, which have no pictures, videos, or anything other than text, could, theoretically, load faster. In practice, this is quite difficult. There are many things that could go wrong. The latency between the web-server and the phone, the amount of people connecting to the site at the time, or an earthquake severing the internet lines, any number of things could go wrong. Comparing phones to PCs will not be fair. Not at this day and age, nor anytime in the future. This won’t happen in future because when the technology in phones improves, so will the technology in PCs. No matter how far phones go, PCs will always be better.
Even armed with that knowledge, phone companies won’t stop trying though. I applaud their perseverance and optimism.
