20 August 2010

Hi,

This post is just to give a brief view of my week with regards to my Internet Studies course. During this weeks tutorial, learnt some interesting new ways in which Zotero can be used to make a group library of references and our term newspaper was also discussed. Our tutorial group is going to be focusing on Government Intervention in the control of data by networks, with particular interest to Facebook and Blackberry phones as well as local and international related problems.

I volunteered to be the editor for the newspaper for my tutorial group which hopefully will be enjoyable and I look forward to doing that:)

Otherwise the week progressed pretty solidly and will make another post to let everyone reading this know what is happening in the life of a psychology student:)

What does freedom of expression mean to me?

Hi, my name is Irshaad Bramdev. I live in Westville which is a suburb just outside of Durban, for those outside of South Africa who are viewing this, Durban is on the east coast of SA in the province of KZN. I am a BSocSc Pyschology first year student currently studying at UKZN, I hope to be able to graduate and hopefully get my honours in child psychology by 2014.

The main source of infomation and news that I get in my life is through the internet and television. I regularly watch the SABC and eNews channels to stay in touch with both global and local news, I also look at online media such as google news. My family, in particularly my dad, is a avid newspaper reader and I often get the news from him before I hear of it on the television or internet. I can only speak one language fluently, English is my home language and language that I have used throughout my schooling career, I can speak and write in Afrikaans, but my vocabulary is very limited. This language block has limited the amount of sources that I can access, however in South Africa, the ability to speak only english has been sufficient to allow me to communicate with people from all walks of life and has not in any way hindered my ability to forge meaningful relationships with people from many different cultural backgrounds. In relation to news, I tend to focus primarily on politics, financial and sporting aspects of the news (especially football, I am a "die-hard" Liverpool fan).

I enjoy reading, however I tend to favour novels and fictional books over the non-fictional autobiographies. My recreational TV shows that I watch are usually the light hearted comedies and sitcoms, I am not a big fan of soapies, dramas and horror shows.


The freedom of the press is, I believe, essential to any liberal democracy. The press form both a check on the executive body of the state as well as providing the public with the information of what is happening in their areas. In essence the press provides accountability for the government, however this is only effective if the press remain independent of the governments and if the press have the freedom to discuss any material which they wish to. Limitations to the press is a form of "legal corruption" in my opinion. Limitations that are enforced by the governments onto the press will allow the governments to behave as they feel fit without the worry that they will be exposed and help accountable for any shortcomings that happen as a result of what they have done or plan on doing.

The cartoon is a good representation of the career paths that I have chosen, with the main aim of my studies at psychology however there is a major influence through the internet and technology in my current career path.