An answer to illegal downloading ?

While major companies are still looking to find "The" solution to fight illegal downloading, some artists explore a new way to reach an audience by proposing their music for free on the Internet.
Let's take the example of "The Weeknd", a 21 years old canadian singer. The Weeknd released his first project on march 2011. This project was available for free on his website (http://the-weeknd.com) so everyone can have a direct access to his music. For me, it's a great example of a modern use of the Internet. This singer belongs to a generation, who grew up with computers and the Internet, and he knows the customs of Internet users. Here, the main goal is to use the Internet as a springboard to reach a large audience and to get fans. Later, maybe these fans will buy his first physical release or buy tickets for a show. Because almost all new releases are available for free with illegal downloading, concerts and shows are now the better way to become famous and to earn money with music. Nowadays, cd's are maybe just supports to find some new gigs.

"Global Warning"

Nowadays, the world is facing multiple ecological problems. It’s interesting to notice that for centuries, the occidental civilization has been considering nature as something which would be separated from humanity and only there to be exploited. In other traditions and cultures, human beings and nature are part of the same whole. For example, Rastafarians (like the members of Steel Pulse, the musicians who inspired this post) think that they belong to nature and this is why they say that they want to live in peace and harmony with their “mother nature”. As long as we consider nature as something that we can master, it seems very difficult to find solutions to the ecological challenges we are facing. Maybe the only solution would be to adopt another philosophy in which we are part of the nature, which would mean that if we do harm to nature, we do harm to ourselves.

My friends

A guy I met on the Internet has over 1000 friends on Facebook. But, actually he doesn’t know any of them. One day, he organized a party to meet them all. But nobody showed up. I didn’t intend to go either, because he lives in Japan.

One of the main dangers of the Internet is the creation of a gap between virtual and real life. A social network like Facebook encourage us to reproduce our real life on the Internet because we are naïve enough to believe that Facebook is a place of exchange where people can be or become friends. It seems really nice to have 1000 online friends - but how many of them are there when you need support or money? And what means the word “friend” when your online friend, who asked for your friendship, ignores you in the real life? I leave you now, sorry, a bunch of friends are talking to me on Facebook.

« In 10 months, humanity has exhausted nature’s budget for the year »

Even if global warming is a big issue, there are other ecological problems in the world like ecological overshoot. Ecological overshoot happens when human demand is bigger than “the regenerative capacity of a natural ecosystem.” The ecological overshoot shows the ecological limits of the earth and that humanity use “more resources” and produce “more waste” than the earth can regenerate. The 27^th September is the earth overshoot day. This means that for the rest of the year we’re living on credit and will have to draw from the earth’s non-regenerative resources

To go further : www.footprintnetwork.org

What are the real dangers of the Internet?

In addition to the dangers for the computers and the personal data, which can be easily avoided by having a Macintosh, a strong antivirus and not buying on-line, the main dangers of the Internet are: the access to pornography and violence for children, the sexual predators for women and children hiding themselves behind a false identity on the social networks, the cyberbullying and so on.

Let’s talk about the children.

There are easy solutions to avoid these dangers:

-       Not having Internet at home

-       Not having any computer or mobile phone

-       To live in China

-       Not having any children

More seriously, one solution could be not to put any computer in the children’s room but to have one family computer in a room where the parents can watch their children without having to supervise every move they make on the Internet. It’s also important to talk with them about these subjects and explain them that violence in movies and pornography are different from the reality and to have confidence that they are intelligent enough to understand that some contents are harmful for hem. And, most of all, to always be aware that real life is more dangerous than the virtual world.