what's on your mind? megan is writing about facebook.

Bebo,Myspace, Twitter and especially Facebook has taken over the world. If all the Facebook users were a country it would be the third largest in the world, 1 in 3 people in Britain have Facebook so the only people that don't have it are babies and Kelly.  The average user has 130 friends, but how many of these are are friends? a lot of these people I'm 'friends' with are mostly strangers, and don't interact with them at all, and the people i do interact with are my real life friends who i see every day anyway!

The positive social benefits of social networking, i think are being able to interact with friends that we don't get so see face to face, for example family in Australia, or friends in different colleges. If they post pictures we get to see what there doing and status's reveal 'whats on there mind'. Before Facebook, we would of had to describe aspects of are life that are friends are missing out on over the phone or emails, or be really old skool and write a letter! A negative aspect of communicating through Facebook is that we stop having genuine conversations with people, meaning we don't convey true emotion. You can't cry over a friends shoulder online, all you can do is type a pathetic :'(. This all shows that were getting lazy in are friendships, back in the day we would pick up the phone arrange a meeting place and hope that they would be there to meet us! why would we do that when we can instantly talk to are friends without having to get up and leave the computer (if we can bear it!) ?

This changes most forms of are relationships and how we meet people, we can now become friends with friends of friends through Facebook (if they accept) without being introduced by are friend, defeating the whole object! Meeting people on nights out are a thing of the past, we can talk to them for 5 minutes and from finding out are names they can find out a lot more from adding us on Facebook! If we choose to put up photos they know where we went with who, and if we post status's they know how we feel about what!

When we finally meet up with are abandoned friends, most of us have to make an active effort not to check facebook when were with them, most new mobile handsets come with the internet or a Facebook app,meaning if there's wifi connection in the cafe, on the train or where ever we are we can instantly access are Facebook, updating on the go. Do we really need to know that Sophie just ate an apple? or that I'm not enjoying the weather? we wouldn't send a letter to everyone that we know to tell them a pointless, irrelevant piece of information, so what is the constant need to let everyone know everything about are lives!?

Instant access to almost all information affects our ability to process the information, we don't take any of the information in, casually skim reading through everything that everybody is up to in there day to day lives. Does this make it not as important?

What would i do if Facebook didn't exist? i would turn off the computer, leave the house and interact with friends face to face. This is because i wouldn't know any better and you cant miss what you never had. A lot of my friends (admittedly not the ones im close to) would be in despair without Facebook, before it would be "i'd die without my straightners and chocolate" and now its "i cant live without Facebook" and we have to ask ourselves, really!?

i dread to think of the future of social networking, will we ever see each other in real life again!? i hope so, are we going to turn into robots!? i hope not.

intaglio printing.

Intaglio printing is a long process but very worthwhile. For are homework last week we were given a small plastic rectangle and a sharp scratchy thing and were asked to scratch a design into it. I chose to do a rose and did it free hand, it probably would of been a lot easier to put a picture underneath it and go over it but i am silly :). We then brought these plastic rectangles in, went to the print centre and started the printing process.

First we had to scrape down the sides of are rectangles so that the edges weren't sharp, but sloped instead after this we popped on some once green gloves and covered a leather dabby thingy in lots of oil based ink and spreaded it over are plastic rectangles. We then used the leather finger dabby thing to get all the ink into all the nooks and crannys. Once the design was fully inked up, we then used a netted rag called a scrim to wipe off all the ink, sometimes the ink got on the back of are design so we had to use a smelly rag from the smelly rag bin to wipe off the back. Now we had to grab a damp piece of thick paper and take it over to the rolling machine. We put down a piece of scrap paper down onto the rolling machine and marked the edges of are damp paper on it and then put are print in the middle, then put the flurry blankets over this and rolled. We then had a print, and if we wanted another we simply had to put more oil over are print and do the whole print again.

Overall I'm pleased with how both of my prints turned out,  where i hadn't rubbed off all the ink around the edge of the print there's a lot of shadow. I prefer this look because i think it makes it looks more edgy and less 'clean cut'. When i scratched the design in, i didn't do it very neatly and also pressed in more hard, this meant that more ink went into the dents making all my line work really clear and dark. The only drawback of not rubbing off all the ink means that each time i did this print each one would be slightly different because it wouldn't be possible to get the exact amount of ink each time. Which kind of defeats the object of being able to print the same image 100 times over if we wanted. Although there are a lot of procedures and different things we have to remember when printing, i enjoyed making the print, from beginning to end. I hope that i get another chance/excuse to go to the print centre soon because this is one part of the media course that I'm really enjoying :)

rose 1

rose 2

alex's lesson.

In alex's lesson last week, we learned how to follow eachother's blogs. We also learned how to set it up so that every new thing that we do, comes up on Alex's blog and whoever else's we're following.

In today's lesson we are scanning are prints into the computer to put up on are blog.. to be continued.

m.i.a

coooooool

blog bloggy blogger blog blogs blogged.

a blog is..
what is a blog!? a blog is a journal you keep on the web:short for web log. yes.
who uses blogs? perez hilton, boffs, cool people and now me.
how do i embed an image into my blog? um. copy and paste.
how do i embed an youtube clip into my blog? copy and paste.
in email, cc, bcc, and subject means who you are sending to, who you are and what your emailing tother person about.
rss feed is..good question.



that is what i have learnt today, go me!