emac 2322 Taken For Granted

Throughout my typical day I get on the Internet multiple times a day. I check Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, my UTD email, and various other sites at my leisure. If this sounds like a normal occurrence for you too then we are both amazingly blessed. Thousands of people in countries around the world are restricted to their Internet usage via their government.

One such country is Burma. Only 1% of their population has private access to the Internet. This leaves 99% of Burma citizens to retreat to cyber cafes if they want to browse the web.

Problems with this limited access:

1. Time Is Limited

Who wants to spend a ton of time in a crowed, noisy cafe not to mention the cost factor..see next bullet point.

2. Cost

Since the government controls where the population can use the Internet they can also control the price of using it. In Burma if you want to simply check an email you must first pay a fee to be connected to the Internet and then another fee for every hour you spend on it after that.

3. Slower Connection

Even if you can make it through sitting in a crowded cafe and paying the hourly fees you still have to put up with a slow connection. There are only two Internet providers in Burma(Ministry of Post and Telcommunications(MPT) and Myanmar Teleport) and usually these are slow or not even up and working connections.

4. No Blogging

Being a blogger in Burma is near impossible. Not only do you have to hurdle time restraints, high prices, and a slow connection but 2 bloggers have been put in prison.

So if you can get on the Internet in your own home without being carted off to jail count your blessings. If you lived in Burma you would most likely be sitting in an Internet cafe right now reading this having to worry about how many hours you had been on and how much it was going to cost you all because of your governments restrictions.

Snow Day!!!

It snowed this past Thursday breaking past years records with 12.1 inches! My roommate woke me up and 8A.M. with "It's snowing!" and I didn't believe her at first but as soon as I looked out the window I did! The snow fall was beautiful and kept coming down all day long. In the morning my friends and I went out to the field behind our apartments to take pictures. The photo on this post is from that day of myself and friend Mei Khei. Brightness from the freshly fallen snow was an awesome tool for taking pictures, especially jump shots like the one above, because the more light you have to enter your camera the faster the shutter speed you can set and catch people in action. A fast shutter speed is used to stop or freeze motion. If you try to take a picture in a darker setting with the same fast shutter speed you had when you were outside you most likely will end up with a blurry image :( Thus, shutter speed is based on how much light you are dealing with. Personally I think light is the most important aspect to consider when taking a picture. Here is an excellent article about light and how it can make or break a photo. Hope you find this interesting and were able to enjoy the snow while it lasted :)

The Tragedy of the Commons is an article written in 1968 by the ecologist Garrett Hardin. He talks about the loss of public resources due to peoples focus on self-interest rather that the interest of the common good. Since our interests are in the wrong place our resources are being sucked dry at the expense of our selfishness.

4 family members. 3 cars. Is this really necessary? No and yet this is not far from reality. Shouldn't this number be reduced thereby reducing the amount of pollution the family is contributing to our world's air. Our air not just yours. This statement is what the tragedy of the commons is all about. We must learn to share the public resources we have with everyone as equally as we can.

How do we learn how to do this? Well we must first give up the excuse "i'm just one person so I can't make that much of a difference." If everyone has this mindset then we are sure to head for complete resource depletion. Here are some simple ways we can keep the air clean for everyone.

1. Reduce Car Fumes
2. Reduce amounts of hairspray and aerosol cans we use
3. Stop Smoking
4. Quit cutting down so many trees

These are very simple suggestions but if they are actually taken seriously they can make a big difference!

Jump and Bend

"Run and jump over her but please don't hurt her!" That one sentence was all the instruction I gave to Garrett before he jumped over back bending Jessica. In the photo it looks as if he is about to do just what I asked him not to but in reality he landed well beyond her. This very aspect is what I love most about photography. You can control what the viewer sees or even what they don't see.

There are numerous "levitation" photos on flickr where someone is laying or standing on an object that has been photoshopped out of the image to give the illusion that they are floating. If done well these can be truly amazing! I love looking at photos that have been manipulated into something that couldn't have normally existed beforehand. Photography has become an even more extensive form of creative expression with the birth of photoshop, lightroom, and the other various editing programs. These tools have opened an endless outlet for making imagination a "reality". This article reiterates a few things I mentioned and how Photoshop has become even as typical as having Microsoft Word and Power Point.

As we delve into an even richer technologically based society I wonder what truth will remain in our photos. Will everything be manipulated or skewed? Will we be able to believe anything we see as reality? In my photo above it seems as though the boy is about to crush the unsuspecting girl but we as the viewer know that he must be jumping over her and therefore accept what we see as reality. What if I had photoshopped the girl to be doing the back bend in the air above the boy. How would you realistically explain this? You couldn't. It would just be a fun image. I hope some of this made sense and maybe got you thinking about how reality in photos is changing with our culture. I'm not saying it's good or bad just a thought about the future.

emac 2322 It's A Small World After All

Photo provided by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kruse/91118309/


It's a small world.

How true is this phrase? Well with the internet birthing social networks left and right it is becoming more true by the second. These social sites are allowing us to venture out of our circle of friends and travel across the world in one click. Take Twitter for example. You can be directly connected to celebrities that most likely (unless you are one) would never be in the same friend group as you in real life.

Duncan Watts writes about how we "don't have friends but we have groups of friends" and that these "groups are connected by virtue of individuals who belong to more than one group." What he's saying is that before social networking we were constricted to only the groups we were born into and the groups in which we had mutual friends, essentially. Meeting random strangers who had no affiliation with any of the people in the groups we hung out with was severely uncommon and therefore our connection with the entire human race as a whole was very small. Now,thanks to these social sites such as Twitter and Facebook, we can all be connected in one way or another.