"Discuss the rise of the internet with reference to cultural contexts
and technological developments"
In the essay I'm going to discuss the rise of the internet with reference to anime and technological developments. The internet has changed our way of life and even our personalities. Many people , mostly young people nowadays, look to the internet as a way to access fun activities or social aspects and one of these pastime activities is watching anime or reading manga. But as fun as it may be, the internet has both positive and negative effects. We are yet to discover just how powerful theses effects re because it can really change our lives and give us all sorts of experiences which could be good or bad. I'm going to use anime as a example of cultural context and explore how it has grown though technology. First, I'm going to start explaining where anime came from and how it developed into being accessible on the internet.
"Anime is the shortened way animation is said in Japan"[1] which is where anime began in 1917, this is only the earliest known date, so for all we know animation in Japan could have been around for many years before then. But from our knowledge we have came to believe that Osamu Tezuka is the 'father of anime and manga' after his ground breaking and extremely popular manga 'Astro Boy' which took japan by storm and made its way over to the US in 1963 making it even more popular. Many cartoon artist liked Tezuka's art style and decided after his company 'Mushi production' went bankrupt started taking the shot light, one of the more well know companies were Studio Ghibli. This explains that anime started from the work of Osamu Tezuka and he interest in Walt Disney's cartoon led to anime, we know and love today and also a little of how it became global.[2]
From books anime began to spread on to other technologies such as TV and DVD. For most people this would have been the first time seeing this art style and they wanted to see more, which made it more and more popular. When people started have computers at home the internet was more common and companies started to put there materials online, which meant anime could now be accessed on the internet and viewed whenever and wherever. This made it easier to see your favourite animes when even you wanted. [3]
At first it was quite time consuming because the internet used a dial-up connection which was connected to your land line. However, now with fibre optic broadband internet connection is much faster making viewing easier.
The development of social networking sites has helped us bring anime out of books and TV and into the real world though cosplay. This is bringing an anime character to life though dressing up in their clothes and role-playing. With sites like Facebook and Twitter cosplayers can arrange meetings and exchange opinions. This technology gives us twenty-four hour access to our friends and gives us the opportunity to make new friends who share this activity. But cosplay outfits and accessories are very expensive and can not be found in store in many countries so many people look towards to internet to provide these things though online shopping.
Cosplay has become very popular as it gives people the chance to bring their anime characters to live and interact with them making them more real and not just a fictional character. This makes people feel more confident in themselves when surrounded by people with the same interests makes them feel more accepted. But people can get lost in this activity making it hard for them to connect with the real world. It can also be very stressful to keep up to the fashion and the standards made by other cosplayers.
It can be very expensive buying the clothes for cosplaying and because they are not available anywhere apart from online, you have to pay the set price or go without. Plus post and packaging which is more then the standard price which could be a problem for some people. Also because theses garments are shipped over seas waiting time is very long and it could be weeks before you receive your parcel.
People also can share things such as pictures, drawings and videos with their friends or strangers on the internet, who can then comment on these media helping them improve. Now with the technology we have today we can connect other devices such as mobile phones, cameras and video camcorders and share the media we have gathered. You can store memory and travel with it using memory cards and stick which depending on the size can hold any digital information.
As you can see anime has really developed though our technology starting from a thought of one man to connecting to thosends of people in all sorts of way and stored or recorded on digital evidence for years to come. Now that we have this technology a small thought or idea such as anime could go worldwide by just a click of a button. I think that soon enough our technology would be so advanced that even a click of the button would seem primitive someday.
Bibliography
1. Brown Steven T. Cinema Anime. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anime
2.Marwah Zagzoug (2001) The History of Anime & Manga, from
http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/his135/Events/Anime62/Anime62.html
3. Alia Yumeka (2010) What is Anime? from
http://www.animeyume.com/site_general/justwhatisanime.html
No comments:
Post a Comment