Week Four Tasks

Part Two:
LiveJournal allows their users to create and update online journals and communities. LiveJournal provides users with templates for creating and maintaining web pages based on content provided by their users. "Each LiveJournal user can create and publish a journal and /or join communities to post text, data, messages, information, and/or links to software, music, sound, photography, graphics, and video ('Content')". On LiveJournal’s Terms of Service it states that the user is solely responsible for the Content that they post. LiveJournal also has the "right to remove or disable access to Content at any time for any reason without approval or notice".

LiveJournal states that all 'Content' is the sole responsibility of the user who posted the Content. LiveJournal claims to have no ownership or control over any Content posted by its users. "The author retains all trademarks to all posted Content, and is fully responsible for protecting their own rights" (http://www.livejournal.com/legal/tos.bml).

LiveJournal states that they are "committed to making best efforts to protect their users’ personal information and to give their users as much control as possible over the privacy of the content that they post... LiveJournal realizes that any content posted over the Internet or a wireless network cannot be guaranteed 100% private or secure". Therefore, LiveJournal will make efforts to ensure their users privacy in the following way – Safeguards, Passwords, Encryption, Security Breach and Email (http://www.livejournal.com/legal/privacy.bml).

Part One:
What is cyberspace? Is it real? Where is it?
Today in the lecture Cyberspace has been described as a way to "understand the internet". In his book, 'An Introduction to Cybercultures,' David Bell describes Cyberspace as a hardware -

"a global network of computers, linked through communications infrastructures, that facilitate forms of interactions between remote actors" (2001, p.7).

Cyberspace has also been defined as a 'new universe,' created to sustain the world's computers and communication lines (Benedikt cited in Bell, 2001, p.7). Therefore it has been stated that Cyberspace refers to all the computer networks on the internet. It distinguishes the physical world from the 'virtual world'.

Jeremy W. Crampton describes Cyberspace as a

"mutual process of production between physical space and abstract or virtual space, as a series of relations, and as a process of becoming".

He continues on to say that Cyberspace is a 'replacement of the real,' (eXistenZ) a mutuality of "being virtually there" (2003, p.12). It could be said that Cyberspace rapidly increases the blurring of reality and virtuality. It is argued that Cyberspace provides us with a representation of the real, it undermines one's ability to differentiate between real and imaginary (Dodge and Kitchin, 2001, p.21). 

Cyberspace does not exist in any physical geographic location. You can be everywhere in Cyberspace - a site can be used simultaneously by many different people worldwide. Cyberspace goes further - "where communication travels at the speed of light" (Bertol & Foell, 1997, p.60).

References:

• Bell, D (2001) An Introduction to Cybercultures, Routledge, London
• Crampton, J (2003) Political Mapping of Cyberspace, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh
• Dodge, M & Kitchin, R (2001) Mapping Cyberspace, Routledge, London
• Bertol, D & Foell, D (1997) Designing Digital Space: An Architect's Guide to Virtual Reality, John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Canada