Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

I find the idea and exploration of virtual worlds to be exciting and limited only by our technology -- which is constantly improving. One of my favorite pastimes is playing video games, a great escape from the limitations and ennui of real life.

I was perhaps first introduced to the idea of virtual reality from the 90s action/fighting kid's show  VR Troopers (the VR stands for virtual reality) in which three young adult protagonists entered "VR" in order to battle against Grimlord and his minions who were bent on taking over the real world. Exhibit A:

Virtual reality is not only limited to its use in entertainment, it can also be used for information, business, travel, and medical/psychological purposes. As Nicole Saidi writes in her CNN online article "Report: 'Naughty Auties' battle autism with virtual interaction," "many think [virtual reality] computer interactions could eventually be helpful in treating autism." Mark Tutton writes in "Going to the virtual office in Second Life," "[t]he ability to collaborate effectively using virtual tools may now become an increasingly important skill as technology offers more options than [...] video conferencing." We really are just beginning to contemplate the practical possibilities.

The pros are as stated in the above and the cons are, ironically, virtual reality's ability to isolate us both physically from each other and from "reality" itself (after all, what exactly is reality? It could be different for many people). For instance, a problem I have had is that sometimes I would like to play a video game with my friend who is physically with me at the time only to find out that the only way we could play together is if she was at her house, me at mine, and we'd connect over the PSN server for cooperative gameplay; as is the case with Borderlands, it's frustrating (a problem that was remedied with Borderlands 2).

Virtual worlds foster creativity like with the PlayStation 3 game Little Big Planet. The makers of this game have made it so that users can dress and decorate their avatars (called sackboys) and they can even design their own game levels using in-game tools that other players can access and play online! Here's an example:

I think that virtual reality in the future would find itself in many aspects of life for all the reasons I have listed above. It will be as common place as watching a movie and the lines between reality and virtual reality will blur so much that some people will prefer to live their lives connected to these virtual realities completely forgoing "real reality."

               You knew it was coming, lol. Hard to talk about VR and not mention The Matrix.

Creativity and New Media

A gif with several pictures of mine that I made and that can be used for an avatar: there are two cute dogs, two shots of my Skyrim avatar, and a lobster I boiled alive so that I could eat it. All brought together with free software called PhotoScape. 

 

In short, the biggest gif I have ever seen!

Creativity

Creativity is so versatile that it is no wonder people have been using Web 2.0 features to make original works or mix and mash works already in existence with their creative take. Enter Brooks Barnes' New York Times article titled "Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But why?" where he writes about the popular phenomenon of mash-ups featuring Disney and Nickelodeon characters who are manipulated to look like they are singing or saying whatever the mash-up artist thinks they should. Although Disney is notoriously protective over their trademarked characters they seem to turn a blind eye towards a mash-up on YouTube featuring Winny the Pooh characters rapping to a Soulja Boy song. The author posits the question of why Disney does not request that YouTube administrators take it down. 

I think that Disney sees the power of YouTube and understands that things are changing due to Web 2.0 and that they need to relent, in some ways, on the tactics of old. After all, Nickelodeon who is owned by Viacom openly encourages mash-ups featuring their characters and one SpongeBob SquarePants mash-up has "been viewed more than seven million times!" That's potentially free advertising revenue coming into Nickelodeon and when it comes to business the bottom line is always the deciding factor.

Here's one of my favorite SpongeBob mash-ups, SpongeBob and friends perform Slayer's "Raining Blood" (disclaimer: the views reflected at the very end of the video are not shared by me, that thing with the baby, but it's the best version I could find).

Slayer's bassist and vocalist Tom Araya wearing a SpongeBob

 T-shirt. SpongeBob Photoshopped with a Slayer T-shirt.

New media fosters creativity because things like video recording, editing software, and social medias allow people to take their creative talents and broadcast them easily, cheaply, and quickly over the internet.

Social Networking Sites

Social Networking Sites: Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and Tumblr, it's hard not to be joined to at least 3 in today's totally connected yet strangely disconnected society!

Personally I didn't have an active account to any of these before this class and when I was younger I was signed up to Facebook and Myspace but grew disillusioned with both to the point I forswore them. So here I am signing up again and my how things have changed!

Looking at Facebook I see that there have been a lot of additions to the format. There's a news feed, timeline, graph search, personalized ads, facial pattern recognition features that instantly tag people in friend's pictures. Every nook and cranny of a person's life and what they are interested, or not so interested, in sharing are served up hot on Facebook. Talk about the cult of total narcissism! Yep, I'm one of those, just not at all into it. I can't wait to delete this newly created profile it's seriously giving me the heebie-jeebies. Everyone I want to talk to I keep in contact with using phone, email, and in-person meet ups. This isn't to say that Facebook is a complete waste, it has its merits.  

                                                    Have you had your fix today?
 
Now time to turn an eye towards Myspace. My how things have changed! Myspace used to be the social network back in the day for everyday average Janes and Joes, not unlike present day Facebook, but it is clear that it has become a site used mainly by bands, musicians, and their fans. Guess they had to change the business model since Facebook devoured their Janes and Joes. Verdict: Not interested - profile deleted post haste!

Onto Twitter...at first I thought this thing was a terrible idea and fad but I was proven wrong. My opinion on it has changed because it can be used as a means for important and not so important people speaking directly to 'the people' and sometimes that can be informative and/or hugely entertaining. I remember from the Occupy movement and Arab Spring that tweets were used by people as informal journalistic tools and helped paint first-hand pictures of those events. Having signed up on Twitter for the first time for this class...I have to say, as soon as we've wrapped I'll be deleting my Twitter account ASAP. I'll leave the bloggers and news outlets to update me on the really important Twitter tweets.

Finally, Tumblr. From what a friend tells me, this site is where it's at. It's the only one I am actually interested in joining, why? Because it is chock full of LOLs and GIFs and images! I'm very visual so this is right up my alley. Once you find a topic or microblog that you like it's really hard to stop clicking on the down scroll to read/view more. It's a combination of Twitter's format with its 'follow' and reblog features, there's also a commenting section like on all social media sites.

I guess a drawback to not being embroiled in these social networking sites is that I miss out on a lot of trendy things going on. Sometimes a friend references some viral phenomenon and I am clueless about what they are talking about. It's a rare occurrence and I'm never missing out on anything too interesting. 

Social Networking

It should come as no surprise to any of us just how popular and revolutionary (Arab Spring anyone?) social networking has become. It informs many social aspects of our lives and since we are naturally social creatures this inevitability was only waiting for the technology to catch up to our natural inclinations — which it has, and here we are. Social networking can be used by corporations to advertise to current and potential customers, advance a public relations agenda (like BP did after their disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010), track customer feedback, and attract, recruit, and vet potential partners and employees. As Maureen Crawford-Hentz, a recruiter in the Frank Langfitt NPR.org article titled "Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting," states [s]ocial networking technology is absolutely the best thing to happen to recruiting — ever."

                                            Oil covered ducks on account of BP oil spill.


On a more personal note, many of us in this class know how social networking can be used for entertainment, collaboration, critique, self-aggrandizement, and staying connected to people that we love/like/dislike/pine for (you should really stop looking at their <insert social networking site here> page now, it's over! Lol).

The benefits of social networking to society are immense. As I mentioned above, its use to get people organized to (hopefully at least) change things for the better, to create new jobs, to educate, and to connect people are unprecedented. Another aspect of social media's benefit that most able bodied people don't think about is described by Roger Ebert, with the help of his wife Chaz, at the 2011 TED talks tilted "Roger Ebert: Remaking my Voice:" he states "writing on the internet has become a lifesaver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected [by my  thyroid and salivary gland cancer] and on the web my real voice finds expression. I have also met many other disabled people who communicate this way."

Like with most things in life, where there is light there is also dark. When thinking of the "dark side" to social media I am reminded of the rash of young and impressionable pre-teens and teens committing suicide over cyber bullying. Also, the New York Times article by Hilary Stout titled "Antisocial Networking" notes how our social networking culture may be eroding youngsters' "face-to-face communication with friends" and the negative psycho-social effects this might have on them in the future.

I feel that in the future all things are possible so it is difficult for me to form a concrete opinion but for the sake of argument: with the making and marketing of on-skin virtual reality enhancements like Google Glass and a predecessor worn by a Canadian professor named Steve Mann who has had his version surgically attached to his skull, I see cyborgs happening in the future, lol. More precisely, people will be using hardware that is surgically attached to them in order to facilitate brain to brain social networking, much like the Borg in Star Trek.

                            Just a couple a' Borg. I'm sure we'll be livelier and more diverse!

Blog vs. Wiki

Blogs and wikis are similar in that they both allow for the dissemination of information to a broad audience but they are different in that a blog is usually authored by one person while a wiki is editable and composed by more than one author.

Convergence, the joining of old and new media, in today's networked world is essential because we are at the nexus of new media and old media. Vestiges of old media, like physical newspapers and magazines are still with us because they have been standards of the written word for centuries but now with new media like ebooks and Web 2.0 we can have both the physical and online versions of a magazine, for instance -- old and new have converged.

Blogs can be used for collaboration. A blogger writes something in a post and others see it (maybe the blog is on someone else's blogroll or RSS feed) and respond to the post. The conversation on the blog could facilitate the blogger and readers getting together to collaborate further.  

For example, in the NY Times article "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid," we see how a neighborhood in Brooklyn has used blogs as an updated new media version of a neighborhood watch. These neighborhood watches have led to arrests and a stronger feeling of community among the more productive inhabitants of Bay Ridge.

This article highlighting mass participatory journalism links to a broader phenomenon of the influence of the blogoshpere. Kathy E. Gill states in her article "How Can We Measure the Influence of Blogospheres?" that since "blogs have exploded on the Web's landscape [...] bloggers are influencing the world outside of the blogosphere, as measured by audience reach, media adoption and political necessity."

The Pirate Bay: An Exploration of Both Sides of the P2P Coin.

The topic I chose is person to person file sharing focusing on events surrounding the popular and self described "galaxy's most resilient bit torrent site" The Pirate Bay (thepiratebay.sx). Possible cons I am thinking about including are the breaking of copyright infringement laws, the destruction of long established industries due to illegal activity, loss of revenues that governments could have collected from those industries, the grooming of younger generations to accept a culture of piracy. Possible pros include the encouragement of the Five C's: communication, community, creativity, collaboration, and convergence; also, the subversion of the status quo could be heralding a new way of thinking about property and ownership that will perhaps lead to a more communal sharing of human ideas and art. To help me explore these ideas and opinions I will be relying on the 2013 documentary TPB: AFK (The Pirate Bay: Away from the Keyboard), interviews, both academic and news papers, and any other relevant sources.    

First Post, Just Testing Stuff Out

Hello World and class!