Seminar 5 Review

I would like start this post by thanking Professor Gilbert for not giving us the case analysis as an assignment for the next class. I was worried how I would do the assignment with a quiz added to my already ample workload for this week. Also I am happy because our elevator pitch presentation went well in the seminar. It definitely took me more than 6 hours to make the presentation but that was because I wanted to do a good job with it and also found it interesting as I had never done such a thing before with any presentation for any other module. The biggest challenge with the video was to synchronize the narration with the slides. I liked the suggestions Professor gave on how I could improve our presentation. Also, I got a chance to judge the presentation made by other groups.

The topic in discussion for this week's seminar was "Governing the Freedom Economy:Do we need new rules?" A very interesting topic. We can discuss for weeks on end and I can keep giving you reasons why we need new rules in relation to the changing technology in the world today. I personally feel that we need people to monitor the capabilities of the new technologies that enter the market and make rules or standards to govern them.

During the seminar, we discussed how the Singapore government has adopted the new system available to charge the vehicle owners/drivers for the use of the ways and roads in the ventral business district. Using the system called Electronic Road Pricing; the motorists are charged the required amount that needs to be paid from their CashCards by the ERP gantries. Click on the link for more information about the system. The system uses the "pay-as-you-use" principle. The important thing that was pointed out by the Professor was that a similar yet a little inconvenient system already existed before this system was introduced. Here I realized how the existing behaviour of the Singaporeans was used to enhance and improve the system using the new technology that had been developed. The professor pointed out that it would have been very difficult to introduce a totally different and new system as the people would not be "used to it" and hence might not have been so easily accepted. I found it interesting to see how the government uses the norms we all follow in society to make or improve laws to make them more acceptable to the people.

Lets take some examples how some technologies forced a change in laws all over the world.

• When the first mobile phones entered the market, I am sure there was no law banning their use while driving. But as the dangers of such a practice were realized, laws were quickly implemented to prevent this practice.

• Same is the case with laws for the use of internet. As hackers and piracy became more prevalent, it was felt necessary to control and moderate the internet by the governments which then placed laws into place to combat these threats.

• Currently the copyright laws owned by television and movie production companies are being violated by many users on the popular websites like YouTube. These users record and then post episodes that are shown on the television of popular series. Sometimes whole movies can be found on such websites which can be easily seen by anybody by streaming it from the internet. A lot of companies are trying to force YouTube to go against or modify its privacy agreement thereby enabling itself to give out information on these users who violate the laws so they can be punished by the companies. I am sure before such violations were even possible, the copyright laws didn't extend to such limits. This was mainly because the enabling technology that now makes this possible didn't exist at that time.

These are just a few examples that point out why it's so necessary to monitor and moderate the use of the new enabling technologies that are constantly being introduced in the market.

That reminds me of this news piece I read today...

Apparently, "Nokia will be teaming up with YouTube to allow users to view YouTube content on Nokia handsets." I would like if that happened, now that I own a Nokia handset!

Source: Gizmodo (Click on the link for the full article)

Keep reading my blog. Thanks.