Lecture Summary - Week 8

Political Possibilities – by Steven Stockwell

Welcome to another one of my exciting weekly lecture summaries. This week’s lecture is a little bit more difficult to write about seeing as we didn’t have one... YEEEOOOWWW!! Thank you to the lecturer’s of Griffith University for my day off. Your antics were much appreciated. As we all know the strike unfortunately lasted for one day only. Therefore, we got a quick rundown of the lecture in Thursday’s tutorial... Lucky us!

According to our tute, Daniel Hourigan, this week’s lecture was based on the link between the Military and the entertainment industry. The way he likes to describe it is as “a two way street”. Hollywood’s movie industry spent most of the 1980’s and 90’s trying to create sets in order to make movies based on these times.

Another topic which came up was E-petitions. We spoke about how they were very affective in relation to the regular face-to-face petitions. In accordance to the face-to-face petitions, there is more response online.

Several key words were brought up in today’s tutorial and we learnt about each one of their meanings when relating to politics and technology. The key words are:
• Access: which means your google results won’t be censored, when talking about democracy.
• Technologic Determinism: we don’t just use technology, as technological determinism determines the way we use it.
The following few terms are called Social Constructions:
• Encryption: Company secrets – something they won’t want the public to see.
• Commodification: to take a raw object and turn it into something or value.
• Anarchy: a complete loss of order.
• Liberalism: progress – going somewhere.