- Analysis the characters and Themes in Harry Potter and philosopher’s stone

Name -            Vyas Foram Y

Roll no:  -        21

M.A.Part-2 -   Sem-4

Paper -             02, Ec-401

Paper name – New Literature

Topic for Assignment    - Analysis the characters and Themes in Harry Potter and philosopher’s stone

Submitted To: Dr.Dilipsir Barad

  Department of English,

  Bhavnagar university,

  Bhavnagar.                 

Characters :-

Harry Potter -  The protagonist of the story, who is gradually transformed from timid weakling to powerful hero by the end. Marked on the forehead with a lightning-shaped scar, Harry is marked also by the confrontation between good and bad magic that caused that scar: the standoff between the evil Voldemort and his parents who died to save their son. The story eventually becomes a tale of Harry’s vengeance for their wrongful deaths. As he matures, he shows himself to be caring and shrewd, a loyal friend, and an excellent Quidditch player.

Hermione Granger -  Initially an annoying goody-two-shoes who studies too much and obeys the school rules too zealously. Hermione eventually becomes friendly with Harry after she learns to value friendship over perfectionism and obedience. She comes from a purely Muggle family, and her character illustrates the social-adjustment problems often faced by new students at Hogwarts.

Ron Weasley -  A shy, modest boy who comes from an impoverished wizard family. Ron is Harry’s first friend at Hogwarts, and they become close. He lacks Harry’s gusto and charisma, but his loyalty and help are useful to Harry throughout their adventures. Ron’s mediocrity despite his wizard background reminds us that success at Hogwarts is based solely on talent and hard work, not on family connections. Ron’s willingness to be beaten up by the monstrous chess queen shows how selfless and generous he is.

Hagrid -  An oafish giant who works as a groundskeeper at Hogwarts. Rubeus Hagrid is a well-meaning creature with more kindness than brains. He cares deeply for Harry, as evidenced by the tears he sheds upon having to leave the infant Harry with the Dursleys. His fondness for animals is endearing, even if it gets him into trouble (as when he tries raising a dragon at home). Hagrid symbolizes the importance of generosity and human warmth in a world menaced by conniving villains.

Albus Dumbledore  -  The kind, wise head of Hogwarts. Though he is a famous wizard, Dumbledore is as humble and adorable as his name suggests. While other school officials, such as Professor McGonagall, are obsessed with the rules, Dumbledore respects them (as his warnings against entering the Forbidden Forest remind us) but does not exaggerate their importance. He appears to have an almost superhuman level of wisdom, knowledge, and personal understanding, and it seems that he may have set up the whole quest for the Sorcerer’s Stone so that Harry could prove himself.

Voldemort  -  A great wizard gone bad. When he killed Harry’s parents, Voldemort gave Harry a lightning-shaped scar. Voldemort has thus shaped Harry’s life so that Harry’s ultimate destruction of him appears as a kind of vengeance. Voldemort, whose name in French means either “flight of death” or “theft of death,” is associated both with high-flying magic and with deceit throughout the story. He is determined to escape death by finding the Sorcerer’s Stone. Voldemort’s weak point is that he cannot understand love, and thus cannot touch Harry’s body, which still bears the traces of Harry’s mother’s love for her son.

Themes:-

The Value of Humility

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone emphasizes the virtue of humility by showcasing the extraordinary modesty of its hero and by making this modesty an important part of Harry’s success in obtaining the Sorcerer’s Stone. Harry’s humility is no doubt ingrained in him during his ten miserable years of neglect and cruelty with the Dursleys. But Harry does not stop being humble when he gains fame, wealth, and popularity at Hogwarts. His reaction to the discovery that everyone seems to know his name on the train to Hogwarts does not make him primp and pose, but rather only makes him hope that he can manage to live up to his reputation. In this respect, he contrasts sharply with Draco Malfoy, who prides himself on his family reputation and downplays achievement.

Similarly, when it becomes apparent that Harry has an astounding gift for Quidditch, his reaction is not to glory in his superstar abilities, but rather to practice more industriously than before. When Harry breaks Quidditch records by catching the Golden Snitch in the first five minutes of the game, he does not even pause to appreciate the applause of the crowd, but rushes off. Harry’s refusal to glorify himself is instrumental in getting the stone because he differs from wicked wizards like Quirrell in that he desires only to find the Stone for the common good, not to use it to acquire personal fame or fortune. If Harry were less humble, he would be unable to seize the stone. He is the extreme opposite of Voldemort, who strives only to achieve his own selfish goals.

The Occasional Necessity of Rebellion

Hogwarts is a well-run institution, with clearly spelled out rules that are strictly enforced. Midlevel teachers and school administrators like Professor McGonagall constantly police students for violations, and the rules are taken seriously. Even at the highest level of the Hogwarts administration, there is a clear respect for the rules. Dumbledore is a stern taskmaster. He makes a very gentle and warm welcome speech to the first-year students, but he throws in a few menacing reminders about the prohibition of visits to the Forbidden Forest and the third-floor corridor. None of these Hogwarts rules ever seems arbitrary or unfair. On the contrary, we generally approve of them, feeling that in a world imperiled by misused magic, strict control over student behavior is necessary.

Even so, it soon becomes clear that Harry is unable to abide perfectly by the rules. He enters the third-floor corridor in the full knowledge that it is forbidden territory, and he dons the invisibility cloak to inspect the restricted-books section of the library. After the flying instructor has clearly prohibited broomstick flying until she returns, Harry does not hesitate to take off after Malfoy to retrieve Neville’s stolen toy. And Harry approves of infractions of the rules by others as well. When Hagrid reveals that he is engaged in an illegal dragon-rearing endeavor, Harry not only fails to report Hagrid to the authorities, but actually helps Hagrid with the dragon.

Harry’s occasional rebellions against the rules are not vices or failings. Rather, they enhance his heroism because they show that he is able to think for himself and make his own judgments. The contrast to Harry in this respect is the perfectionist Hermione, who never breaks a rule at the beginning and who is thus annoying to both Harry and us. When she eventually lies to a teacher, showing that she too can transcend the rules, Hermione becomes Harry’s friend. One of the main lessons of the story is that while rules are good and necessary, sometimes it is necessary to question and even break them for the right reasons.

The Dangers of Desire

As the pivotal importance of the desire-reflecting Mirror of Erised reveals, learning what to want is an important part of one’s development. Excessive desire is condemned from the story’s beginning, as the spoiled Dudley’s outrageous demands for multiple television sets appear foolish and obnoxious. The same type of greed appears later in a much more evil form in the power-hungry desires of Voldemort, who pursues the Sorcerer’s Stone’s promise of unlimited wealth and life. While Voldemort and Dudley are obviously different in other respects, they share an uncontrollable desire that repels Harry and makes him the enemy of both of them. Desire is not necessarily wrong or bad, as Dumbledore explains to Harry before the Mirror of Erised—Harry’s desire to see his parents alive is touching and noble. But overblown desire is dangerous in that it can make people lose perspective on life, which is why Dumbledore advises Harry not to seek out the mirror again. Dumbledore himself illustrates the power and grandeur of one who has renounced desires almost completely when he says that all he wants is a pair of warm socks. This restraint is the model for Harry’s own development in the story.

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Analysis of Characters and Themes in Harry Potter and Philosopher's stone

The Assignment will publish soon..................

The Conflict between Idealism and Society in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the obscure

Name -            Vyas Foram Y

Roll no:  -        21

M.A.Part-2 -   Sem-4

Paper -           E-E-405

Paper -  A study of special Author-Thomas Hardy

Topic for Assignment      - The Conflict between Idealism and Society in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the obscure

Submitted To: Dr.Dilip Barad

  Department of English,

  Bhavnagar university,

  Bhavnagar.                 

Topic for Assignment      - The Conflict between Idealism and Society in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the obscure

The Conflict between Idealism and Society in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the obscure

Introduction

Thomas Hardy is one of the greatest writers of the Victorian era, in his novels he seeks

to diagnose human ills and then endeavors to find a remedy to them. The majority of his

novels were set in rural England where the Industrial Revolution had already brought changes

to the lifestyle of the countryside. As a result, the pastoral values had been swallowed by the

new urban lifestyle, and people of the countryside began to shift to the cities seeking for jobs,

education and means to share with the urban dwellers the progress and the optimism of the

Victorian age.

A Idealism versus Social Reality

1 New Woman’s Ideals versus Conventional Marriage

The breakthrough of the feminist movement toward the end of Queen Victorian’s reign

paved the way to the Victorian women to gain not only a respectable position in society, but

also to aspire to a higher ambitions such as the questioning of the compatibility of the

conventional marriage with women’s ideal of self-improvement. However, the desire of

Victorian women to materialize their ideals provoked the wrath of society and led to a sharp

conflict between the two antagonistic sides.

Sue protests against the church morality which reduces the relationship between a man and a woman to a matter a of “Property transaction” (Jacobs 202). In this sense, the British novelist D.H. Lawrence argues that Sue considers marriage as “a submission, a service [and] slavery” (qtd. in Guerard71). After her marriage with Phillotson, Sue discovers that it is her ignorance and confusion which lead here to accept the compromise, she also realizes how disgusting is marriage and how incompatible it is the relationship between being bond and wanting to materialize one’s dreams. When Sue goes to attend the funeral of Jude’s aunt Drusilla, she confesses to Jude that she is miserable in her marriage. After sacrificing herself to the morality marriage, Sue has a new perception of herself:

... Before I married him I had never thought out fully what a marriage meant, even though I

knew. It was idiotic of me-there is no excuse. I was old enough, and I thought I was very

experienced. I rushed on ... with all the cock-sureness of the fool that I was!.... I am certain

one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done so ignorantly! I daresay it happens to

lots of women; only they submit.... (256)

2. Romanticism versus Darwinism

The spread of Darwinism in the second half of Queen Victorian’s reign had swallowed

the idealism and the optimism of the Romantics claiming that “the instinctive, joyful response

to the world… is not enough, because pain and death are realities which cannot be

overlooked” (Williams58). Darwinism had swept away the feeling of optimism and brought a

new mood of pessimism by maintaining that „life is no pleasure, but meanness‟. Darwinism

had also changed the views of nature and Darwin’s portrayal of life as a ceaseless and

„competitive struggle‟ between species brought about the end the Romantic’s depiction of

nature as a compassionate, „nurturing force‟ and spread an awareness of nature’s cruelty.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s famous poetic description, “Nature, red in tooth and claw”

demonstrates the Darwinian perception of nature (kepos 110). In Hardy’s Jude the obscure,

the character Jude sticks to the „romantic sensibility‟ of the early nineteenth century, but the

incompatibility of romanticism to the requirements of the new and passionless Darwinian

society makes the conflict between him and his fellow humans sharp and enduring.

3. Academic Aspirations versus Social Obstacles

Jude manages to endure his own life in creating ideals by which to live. From the

opening pages of the novel, Hardy shows to us Jude as a child of eleven different from his

fellow children. Jude starts to dream of an intellectual life in Chris minster (Oxford),

regardless of his age and his humble origins; Jude wants to invent his own path before

becoming older. His determination as child is well expressed in his conversation with the

schoolmaster Phillotson who quits the village Mary green for the university city of

Christ minster to be a scholar and a clergyman there. When Jude asks the schoolmaster for the

reasons behind his departure, the latter replies that he is not mature enough to inquire about

such things, Jude responds by “I think I should now, sir” .

B. Defeat of Idealism and Daybreak of Pessimism

1. Sue’s resignation

After the death of her children, Sue relinquished her own ideals and realizes that the

struggle of the new woman to make her own way in society is futile. Thus, she is driven

toward espousing resignation as psychological response to failure. She urges Jude to give up

the struggle and conform to societies rules. Sue loses faith in the optimism New Woman’s

creed and embraces submission and acceptance of her role as an Angel in the House. Sue says

to Jude after the disaster of the death of their children:

We must conform!.... [She continues] All the ancient wrath of the Power above us has been

vented upon us, his poor creatures, and must submit.... It is no use fighting against God!.... I

have no more strength left; no more enterprise I am beaten, beaten!....

2. Jude’s Failure and Death

Despite his perseverance and his herculean efforts to go beyond his origins and his

class, Jude childhood’s optimism and dream of an academic life in Christ minster is turned on

it head by the tyrannical and apocalyptical pessimism of social reality. No matter how hard he

tries to reach his noble goals; however, he receives a bunch of thorns rather than that of

flowers as reward of his honesty and his long-suffering. The outcome is so, because Jude

finds himself in society where “the wicked [like Arabella] prosper and the good [like him] are

cursed” (Whitfield 20).

3. Little Father Time and Pessimism

The emergence of the precocious Little Father Time changes the course of the novel

and deepens Sue and Jude belief in the futility of their struggle. Little Father Time perception

of existence is concerned only with its generalities rather than on its particularities:

It could have been seen that boy’s ideas of life were different from those of the local boys.

Children begin with the detail, and learn up the general; they begin with the contiguous, and

gradually comprehend the universal. They seemed to have begun with the generals of life,

and never to have concerned himself with the particulars. To him the houses, the willows,

the obscure fields beyond, were apparently regarded not as a brick residence, pollards, and

meadows; but as human dwellings in the abstract, vegetation and the wide dark world.

(Hardy 330)

Father Time seems to scorn life and because he does not disturb himself going into

details while contemplating things around him, life for him is uninspiring and

meaningless .

Conclusion

The growth of the feminist movement in the later years of Queen Victorian’s reign and women’s desire to expand the horizon of their demands is one of the attitudes that make the behavior of Sue. Some feminists and Sue want to gobeyond their gender in order to surpass prejudices and limits imposed by society to them. The spread of Darwinism in the second half of the Victorian age is one of the chief reasons behind undermining the romantic Jude and leading him to live inharmoniously with the rest of society.

A Brief history of Cinema and Impact of Cinema on society

Name -            Vyas Foram Y

Roll no:  -        21

M.A.Part-2 -   Sem-4

Paper -             02, Ec-404

Paper - Mass communication and Media studies

Topic for Assignment    -A Brief history of Cinema and Impact of Cinema on society

Submitted To: Dr.Dilipsir Barad

  Department of English,

  Bhavnagar university,

  Bhavnagar.                 

Topic for Assignment    -A Brief history of Cinema and Impact of Cinema on society

                       Introduction

   The years proceeding the dawn of cinema in India were witness to the growth of musical dramas, the Paris theatre, the drama companies of Madras, and the Jatra in Bengal. Music, dance, song were an integral part of these performing tradition; this was the heritage of Sanskrit drama and later popular Folk performing traditions; such as the Ram lila, The Ras Lila, The Nautanki and The Thirukoothu.In painting the calendar art of Raja Ravi Varma and others was well-known and stage sets incorporated some of the design and color of this new art form.

      Cinema has become the most influential art. Form of 20^th century, from its marginal beginnings. India holds emient position in Film making in the world. Cinema was three simple means of mechanical recording preserving and reproducing moving visual images with the development of film technology, the art of cinema developed a language of its own. ‘Cinema’ and ‘Films’ are used inter changeably but there is a difference between these two terms. Cinema has specific means to create imaginary time and space, and utilization of these means defines how cinematic a Film is. Imaginary time can be created through movement by means of montage. Films are made of stories dance, music, drama, photography, painting, architecture and many other things that we call cinema.

     Among the numbers crowd that watched the first screening at Bombay’s Watson Hotel with almost Fascination was a photographer named Harishchandra’s Bhatwadekar .He ordered for a moving picture camera from London, and when it arrived took it along to a Gardens, and shot the match live. It is significant that the cinema had its beginnings in India almost at the same time as in the other major films producing countries. Indeed, barely six months after the first Lumiere Brothers cinematograph projected moving picture on to a screen in a perish basement, and two years after Edison’s unvention of the kinetoscope in New York. Just as Indian photographers and studies proliferated soon the introduction of the camera in 1840, so arrival of the motion picture attracted a large number of business people, artists and craftspeople into Films production and Exhibition. Photographers in particular took to the new enterprise with enthusiasm.

                       The pioneers: The Lumiere Brothers

   ‘The Cinema’ is an invention without a Future’ declared Louis Lumiere who together with his brother, Auguste, pioneered what was to develop into an international culture industry. The Lumiere brothers were the inventors of the ‘Cinematographe’, a compact and portable machine that with a few adjustments could be used as a camera or projector or printing machine. As professional photographers themselves, Cinema of photography; hence they sought to capture from a single a train to, in brief ‘actualities’ such as: the arrival of a train, ladies and soldiers on wheels. Like still photographs, these ‘living photographic pictures’ were no more than attems to reproduce reality.

                       Realism and soviet cinema

The cinema of realism climaxed in the work of the early Russian films-markers, especially that of V.I.Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein was not only a prostatic films marker of the revolution but also a film theorist. His ‘materialist’ masterpieces, battleship. Potemkin, Ivan the terrible and others Pudovkin identified five basic types of montage: contrast parallelism, symbolosma, simultaneity and liet-motif .He developed theory of the interaction between shots variously called’ relational editing’ markers and theorists include Lev kuleshob, Vertov, and Devzhenko: a major concern of the Films makers of the early soviet cinema was ideology and the socialist state. Their films had the appearance of a documentary style.

                       Pioneers of Indian cinema

Dadassaheb Phalke

                One of the pioneers of the silent feature films in India was Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, a Bombay printer photographer, painter, and magician. It is reported that he was converted to cinematography when he saw the films, like of Christ, at a Christmas cinema show.

Only a few Scatterd fragment of Phalke’s silent films are extant .The overall structure of each films is forever lost, but the fragments show a fine pictorial sense and also remarkable a vast range of techniques including animation. He experimented with color, via tinting and toning for some of the other films markers of the ‘twenties and thirties’.

In south India as in most other parts of the country, the mythological genre held sway. The foundation for a flourishing film industry in south India was laid by R.Nataraja Mudaliar, a businessman trained in cinematography in poone. During the silent Era over a thousand films of various genres were made in India; however, only ten of them survive.

                       Types of films

1.  Commercial cinema

   It primarily aims at providing entertainment to the people .It includes the ingredients of popular cinema. For example, films like Sholay.

   2. Art cinema

 It is more realistic and relevant to the need of the people and society. National films Development Corporation provided institutional aid for the production of these films.

  3. Documentary films

 Documentary dramatizes an idea or therne.It uses the factual material in order to dramatize its idea tells its simple story in terms of human interests. Something also can be exhibited in schools, villages and labor areas through mobile vans so that a large number of children can take advantages of these films.

As Expressed by Goswami,

“Making films children is a harder task than making films for adults. The producer has to take great care at every step only the best should be shown to children.”     

                       Impact of cinema on society

    The Three terms ‘Impact’, ‘cinema’ and ‘society’ are extremely complex and much too comprehensive to take at surface-value. The term ‘impact’ is frequently used synonymously connotative meaning point to an long-lasting .A further complication arises when one realizes that an ‘impact’ can be weak, moderate or strong, that it can relate to the psychological and even physical.

      The term ‘cinema’ is equally complex today, with television, video, cable and satellite TV vying with each other to screen films on the small screen. Moreover, there are so many genres of cinema, each genera perhaps having an ‘impact’ of its own ‘Horror Films’ for instance, might have the impact of frightening viewers, and slapstick comedies of entertaining and relaxing them. The third term ‘society’ is an infinitely more complex phenomenon. The term takes within its compass all social institutions. How does one asses the ‘Impact’ of ‘cinema’ on such an all-encompassing phenomenon? For several decades now, ‘Impact’ or ‘effect’ studies have been narrow psychological studies  on the ‘effect’ of violence and sex in specific groups such as school children, college and university youth. Most such studies have been carried out in the United States. In Indian Institute of Mass communication New Delhi, conducted a ‘sociological’ study on the ‘cinema’.

                       Ethics of Cinema

    While censorship is imposed by the authorities and the law, the matter of ‘ethics’ is imposed by individuals on their own professionals like advertisers and public relations practitioners have drawn up ‘codes of ethics’ for themselves but journalists, film producers, radio and television broadcaster in India have yet to agree on a common set of ethical practices in their respective media professions.

The need for ethics in cinema and the other mass media arises from the fear that children and sensitive adults might be harmfully influenced by certain portrayals and action. Film makers must be concerned about the possible influence on individuals and groups of their artistic efforts. For instance the stereotypical portrayal of women and minorities in Indian Films could help to reinforce cultural stereotypes rather than roles in society. This is where ‘ethics’ comes in: a concern for sensitive’s in films mentis for family viewing; the insertion of pornographic sequences in Films have been already censored; the portrayal of excessive violence for is irrelevant and unnecessary; there is a long tradition of Indian films markers of plagiarizing Hollywood Films, something shot by shot. These Cloned versions are palmed off as original Indian language films.

                       The central Board of films certification

  The central board of films cancers is set up by the central Government under the powers granted it by the cinematography rules 1958. The board is headed by a chairman, appointed by the central more than nine members. Presently, there are offices at Bombay, Madras Calcutta and Trivandrum, with Bombay as the head quarters.

   A Films producer has, in the first place, to submit an application for a certificate to the per reel. The examining committed consists of a member from the advisory panel and an examining officer in the case of short film, while in the case of a feature films four members from the advisory panel and an examined must be complete in every sense, with the background music and sound effect duly recorded on the films itself.

                       Conclusion

      The popular attitude to cinema as a means of mass-entertainment has its origin in the type of films made up to the ‘fifties’ in India. As right from the beginning cinema in India was aimed at the lowest common denominator and became primarily concerned with providing entertainment. Even when well-known writers became involved with camera, they deliberately changed the quality of their writing .It is only in the last decades or so that intellectuals have begun and associating actively with the making of films and thereby raised the status of cinema to an art form.

As Roberge remarks,

  “While cinema is acknowledged as a disseminator of popular culture, the contributory role of the cinema in cultivating and also shaping culture is not acknowledged and is perceived as a mere instrument or channel”                

  

on-line communication

Name -            Vyas Foram Y

Roll no:  -        21

M.A.Part-2 -   Sem-4

Paper -             02, Ec-402

Paper name - English teaching

Language- 2

Topic for Assignment      - On-line Communication

Submitted To: Dr.Dilipsir Barad

  Department of English,

  Bhavnagar university,

  Bhavnagar.                 

Topic: - On-line Communication

Ø Introduction:

          The nature of communication has undergone a substantial change in the past 20 years-and the change is not over. Email has had a profound effect on the way people keep in touch. Communications are shorter and more frequent than when letters were the norm; response time has greatly diminished; we are even surprised if someone we wish to contact does not have an email address. Although there are still a few people who print out their emails in order to read and respond to them, most of us are accustomed to the daily duty of reading and answering emails that have arrived since we turned off the computer the night before, and to keeping up with them as they trickle (or flood) in during the day. Even as we have gotten used to email, though, the nature of communication continues to change. Instant messaging has created another method of interaction, one where the length of messages is shorter and the style of the interaction is more conversational-but where it is acceptable and common to pay partial attention. Broadcast technologies like Twitter transform these short bursts of communication from one-on-one conversations to little news (or trivia) programs: we can "tune in" when we want an update or have something to say, and "channel surf' to other activities in between updates. The expectations we place on those we communicate with vary from medium to medium, as has always been the case. Sending a letter through the postal mail sets up an expectation of a response that will come in days; email, in hours; instant messaging, in minutes. We expect the letter-writer to devote a certain amount of time and attention to responding. With email, the expected time investment is smaller. With instant messaging, we understand that the other party's attention may wander between messages in some cases and remain focused on us, as with a phone call, in others.

          New environments like virtual worlds present additional opportunities and challenges for communication. In such settings, there is a visual component to the online interaction that is lacking in email or instant messaging: we can see a "body" that goes with the voice or text conversation. Affordances like this can help foster a feeling of presence and give us clues about when the other person is listening, when he or she wishes to speak, and when his or her attention is directed elsewhere. This is not to say that these environments offer the same contextual cues as face-to-face communication -they do not; but there is an added dimension to interactions in these spaces that does not occur in other online contexts. Online communication tools also have the potential to increase our awareness of the movements of our professional or social contacts. Twitter, for instance, offers an at-a-glance update of things people we know happen to be doing: who is outside cleaning their gutters, who is writing a new blog post, which is about to have lunch with a friend. Clive Thompson (2007) calls this phenomenon social proprioception, named after the physical quality of proprioception that tells a creature where its extremities are by the reception of stimuli produced within the Organism.

Ø The Contexts of Online Communication

The context in which an interaction occurs has a profound effect on communication. In face to-face encounters, factors ranging from psychological to environmental to cultural all have an effect on how the message is transmitted and how it is understood. Online communication is no less subject to context, and may bring with it additional contextual issues that will have an effect on the intended message. The type of technology being used to facilitate the interaction, for example, has a bearing on the environmental context of the conversation. A conversation taking place through instant messaging in between meetings will have a different flavor than if the same topic were discussed in a virtual world, on the phone, or in an online meeting room. The challenge of any communication that of being understood, exists online as much as- maybe more so than-offline. Posts on threaded discussion forums and instant message communications are notoriously hard to decode correctly because of the lack of nuance. As more people participate in these kinds of communications, signals that were developed to add context to text-based messages, like smiley’s (J) and tags (like <rant> </rant>), are slipping into the mainstream. The issue of context is far from solved, though, and continues to surface with each new mode of communication that emerges.

Ø The Internet is the Place :

The vehicle for these changes is the Internet. Increasingly, it is the "third place" (the first and second places being home and work) where people connect with friends, watch television, listen to music, build a sense of togetherness with people across the world, and provide expressions of ourselves which are themselves forms of communication. As more people turn to the Internet for professional and social purposes, we are seeing new means of communication, new places to communicate, and new avenues of interaction unfold at a rapid pace. New means of communication. Internet calling services like Skype or Yahoo! Voice turn a computer, a webcam and a headset into a video phone. Blogs, while not new, have grown in usage over the last few years and are now a common way for many people to communicate their ideas to a broad audience and, in most cases, to hear back from that audience. Both Internet calling and blogs are relatively easy. to accept, because they are based on understood models (telephones and magazine columns). It is more difficult to grasp the potential implications of forms that are not modeled on a comfortable, twentieth-century mode of communication. One such example is Twitter: Twitter users post short messages that usually have to do with whatever is happening to them at the time-whether it is intellectual, practical, social, or professional in nature-to create an ongoing log of activity across a community at the minute-by-minute level. Messaging, but its broadcast nature marks it as a different type of communication. Twitter has been described as fun, trivial, innovative, addictive, a waste of time, and potentially a powerful social networking tool; but its implications for teaching, learning and creative expression, if any, are not yet fully understood.

          New places to communicate. Increasingly, a computer with an Internet

Connection is the locus of a range of interactions in a variety of media and a gateway to an array of social spaces for work and play. Social networking sites like Face book and MySpace and virtual environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft have become online meeting spaces where users- members, residents, or players-can interact and express themselves. These spaces give people a way to represent themselves (a profile or an avatar or both) and various means of communication ranging from text and voice chat to public message boards and/or private messaging. They offer a way to keep in touch with existing communities that users belong to offline, such as social and professional groups. They also make it possible for people who would not normally communicate more than a few times a year to keep in touch -colleagues met at conferences, for instance, or friends met through the online community itself. Sites like YouTube and Flickr represent another forum for online communication that is centered around sharing, preference, and popular culture. Visitors can browse movies (in the case of YouTube) or photos (in the case of Flickr), express personal preferences, add commentary, and upload their own creative work. YouTube is also a repository of popular culture in the form of newscasts, television shows, movies, or music videos that are of current interest. The kinds of interaction that occur on these sites center around shared interests and include not only verbal commentary, but commentary in the form of original or derivative works based on popular pieces. These online spaces draw people-and can keep people-in numbers. Face book claims 45 million active users, nearly half of whom are associated with an educational institution; Second Life lists over a million logins in the past two months, with between forty and fifty thousand people online at any given time; World of Warcraft has over 8 million active subscribers worldwide. YouTube serves over 100 million videos per day. In a recent NMC survey of educators using Second Life, 49% reported that time spent in Second Life has replaced their TV time, indicating that some online activities are compelling enough to displace traditional leisure time activities.

          One of the reasons people return to places like these is because of the

Interactions they can have there, both social and professional. Whether it is as simple as checking back to see what other comments have been added to yours or as involved as attending a workshop or presentation in a virtual world, the nature of the attraction lies in the connections between people that these online spaces afford. New avenues of interaction. Online communication channels reduce the distance between people and allow interactions to happen more quickly than they might otherwise. Communication with distant colleagues, relatives and friends is shortened from weeks to minutes and can even be instant, allowing us to maintain stronger ties to a wider group of people than ever before. At the same time, tools like Face book and Linked in help to relieve the additional social burden of these ties by making it easy to keep track of contacts and keep a record of when we last "touched" them

Ø Conclusion :-

          Online forms of communication also incorporate modes of contact missing from more traditional means of interaction at a. distance. Communications that would once have been text-only or voice-only are now much richer, weaving together text, voice, body language, and even shared experiences. Many of us are still learning how to process these cues while receiving and transmitting them through the medium of a computer, a challenge that can make effective communication difficult; but for many young people, for whom these technologies have always existed, interpreting and interacting this way is already second nature. Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of online communication channels is that they are not exclusive. It's possible to create a blog post, Twitter about it, send an instant message to a colleague and get on a Skype call with someone else almost at the same time. Moving back and forth between these and other channels is quick and easy. The choice of medium depends on the person (or people) we want to reach, the length and nature of the message, and the amount of time we want to spend in the interaction; but the ability to flow between them is becoming more seamless by the day. The ease of transitioning from one to the other technologically can be at odds with the desire for a deep, sustained interaction. The Online Conference on the Evolution of Communication is designed to encourage an examination of the ways communication is changing and to further explore both the positive and negative effects on learning, social interaction, creative self-expression, and more. The conference will be conducted entirely online in the virtual world of Second Life. Sessions, which will be conducted live, can incorporate a variety of visuals and rich media, and are generally about 45 minutes in length, with about one-third to one-half that time devoted to dialog with participants using in-world voice chat. Second Life (www.secondlife.com) is a 3-D virtual environment created by Linden Lab. Residents create an avatar and may own land, build and create objects and clothing, and interact with each other in the setting of a user-created virtual world complete with its own economy. Skype (www.skype.com) is an Internet calling service that enables two-party audio and video chat and multi-party audio conferencing. Skype can make computer-to ­computer calls as well as computer-to-phone calls (land- or mobile phones). Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a cross between instant messaging and blogging that allows a user to send a short (140-character) update. Users can also follow the updates of selected 1 friend. World of Warcraft (www.worldofwarcraft.com) is a massively multiplayer online game created by Blizzard Entertainment. The game takes place in a 3-D virtual world; players interact with hundreds of other players in both cooperative and combative situations. Yahoo! Voice (voice.yahoo.com) is an Internet calling service offered by Yahoo! Features includes the ability to assign a phone number to your computer so that it can be called from land- and mobile lines; computer-to-computer calls from within Yahoo! Messenger; and computer-to-phone calls. YouTube (www.youtube.com) is an online video site owned by Google, Inc. Videos are uploaded by users and can be viewed free. Users can leave comments on video pages)