the end...

Well it's been an interesting semester to say the least. I had a great time in this class and I can honestly say that I learned a lot about the implications of online communication technologies. Thanks for everything professor, and everyone else!!!

I've attached my macro assignments in an email to you professor - enjoy :)

g) social networks

I’m sure most other people will say this but Facebook is by far the most effective online way to communicate with people. It’s a common site between pretty much all of my friends (and for some people professors, family, coworkers etc.) so it is easy to contact multiple people at once and you can casually browse other people’s pages to see how they are doing. No more boring vacation picture slideshows because you can click through all of the photos once they’ve been uploaded in a matter of minutes. There are also no annoying email addresses or screen names to memorize, it reminds you of birthdays that you normally would have forgotten, you can be invited to parties you might not have been otherwise, you can catch up with people quickly through the chat section (since we are online way too much)… the list goes on and on.

Personally I have never used Twitter – maybe since I never created an account it wasn’t possible for me to get addicted to it or anything like that, but overall I think it is kind of a waste of time. You get very little information (a sentence at a time) or a link that will distract you even more than you already are so you can procrastinate even further. It doesn’t really provide any useful purpose, especially since on Facebook everybody has a status they can update which does the same thing as Twitter. I suppose some people find it amusing to follow other people’s Twitters (like celebrities and whatnot) but I find it to be kind of a waste of time… no offense :P

I think the electronic interactions have been interesting as I got to see other student’s ideas about the concepts we were learning in class, that I might not have been exposed to otherwise. I thought it was appropriate for the class considering we were looking at blogs and different ways of online communicating – it forced me to delve into that world just a little bit to get a clearer idea of how those media work and what you can do with them.

As for online communication systems… I think that they aren’t as much of a distraction as just a part of modern life. It’s not something most people can avoid entirely – it’s our way of communicating now. Yes a lot of the updates we get are completely useless (I get invited to events in Taiwan during the year even when the people hosting them know I won’t be able to make it) but some of them are “important” as they relate to our daily lives. I make lunch dates and arrange to work on school projects through Facebook, I’ve even written apology letters through it. You can always be in communication with the people you need to be. Yes I’m addicted to it.

continuing thoughts from class today...

I've been thinking about a couple things since class ended just a couple hours ago that I felt like writing about briefly.

Firstly, about a comment I made near the end of class about how we want everything to be easy, simple and logical. I was looking for a snack in my room after class since I hadn't eaten lunch, and I found some packs of ramen noodles under my bed (don't worry they are still sealed and don't expire for another 10 years or so). That didn't sound too bad, so I looked at the directions and it said you have to actually cook them, like on a stove. My reaction in smiley was basically -_- . In words, it's unlikely I'm ever going to cook those noodles, unless I can figure out how to do it in the microwave.

The other thing I've been thinking about is the China Tracy video and the city she created. I personally do not think it was an act of individualism - she herself said that was not her intention at all - she claimed it was a space of culture, where people could be in a community of sorts. She took images and customs of modern China (that greatly combines new and old aspects of the society) and made a virtual world out of it. It didn't strike me as something particularly original or a way for her to escape the supposed lack of individualism in China - it was more a representation of what she saw in her daily life, just a few years in the future. From my experience, individualism and originality are not characteristics typically valued in Chinese society as they are in American society, and I've found that many foreigners do not very well understand why that is the case. And now I'm sprinting away from computer-mediated communication relevance, so I will end my mini-tangent at that. If you are interested you can leave a comment and I'll rant further :)

f) attend a virtual event

Ok now that I actually think about it, I’m not totally sure that what I did for this assignment was what you had in mind originally professor… but that’s ok, I still learned something!!!


So, I was looking online at random “virtual events” to attend. Then I saw an advertisement for this multiplayer interactive game called Evony. I see the annoying ads all the time on random sites I go on, so I decided I might as well try it out. Basically you build a medieval city – you build up your town (with houses, resources, etc), you can also build alliances, wage wars and so on – it’s rather like Age of Empires. There is also a chat box underneath with a number of different groups you can choose to chat with – as a beginner you only have access to the beginner group. That was really annoying because so many people use the site that there were too many people trying to talk or find out how to do something that no one actually had any kind of a conversation at all.

After about 20 minutes of playing the game and telling myself I wasn’t wasting my time I learned a valuable lesson – there are a lot of weird creepy people online. Some guy started emailing me through the game, and when I didn’t respond right away he kept asking me why. I lied about where I live and who I am, as it both amused me and made me feel safer. I continued to play the game a while longer however, because to enter a chat that didn’t have 100 people talking about unrelated things, you have to join an alliance with other gamers. So I upgraded my city until I reached that status and then started talking on the chat box. It was very interesting to see how many wars different alliances waged on each other. I purposely joined one called FRIENDLY so that wouldn’t be as much of a problem. However there were still gamers who wanted to wage wars on everyone. The game even gives you awards for talking in an alliance chat or sending a personal email for the first time. It really does encourage you to interact with the other players and create the feeling of a larger, complex world.

Overall I think it’s a fun experience… definitely not an essential one, but it’s something fun to pass the time with. I think it provides a similar appeal to Second Lifers – you do have to spend some time figuring the game out, how to utilize resources and gain as much power as possible, which stops a lot of people from playing past the first 5 minutes – and you create another world where you can be someone totally different. In this game you are forced to be someone different in fact, seeing as very few people these days are in charge of a medieval empire. It’s an interesting way of interacting with other people, and I could see how some would get sucked in to it – I witnessed a number of the chatters in the alliance that had really created a relationship of sorts. Some of the members got annoyed with others, some were clearly leading or trying to lead, others constantly looked for help from certain people, and so on.

Now my problem is that I’ve finally worked myself into the network, but the assignment is over, so I’m torn between wanting to play more and work on my finals… figures.

e) build something

At first I really had no clue as to what I should "create." I thought about a couple of different things, and after typing in vague creation related phrases into google, I came across some online game creation sites. That initial stage took probably about 5 minutes or so. Once I had decided on creating a game, it took about 10 minutes to find a site that I wanted to use (I tried a couple, my computer couldn't handle some of them, some were too complicated for me, bla bla bla). Eventually I found sploder.com, which is a very simple gaming creator.

I quickly made an account (all it required was a username - mine is kaili - a password, and an email account). Then I created an avatar for my account which is mostly just used to put a "face" to the user - the lego type head you can see above in the first paragraph. That took another 5 minutes or so, but you could have completed it in 10 seconds, I just like mucking with avatars.

I then set about creating my game :) You have the choice between platform games (hand-to-hand combat and such) and shooter games. I chose shooter. From there you can choose between using an alien spaceship or a futuristic robot to battle. I went with the spaceship. Once you have chosen your game parameters, you get an empty multi-angular shape with your shooter, and then you can select objects from a list to include in your game (there are mines, enemy combatants, walls, missiles, lots of fun stuff). The "game creating" stage is depicted in the lovely image below.


FINALLY you can test drive your game :) :) :) that was highly entertaining. Granted I created the entire game in about 15 minutes, just to see what I could come up with (and I knew that I would spend hours on it if I didn't keep it simple), so it's not particularly amazing. However the obnoxious enemy spaceships I had to include killed me in 2 or 3 minutes. But it was highly amusing nonetheless. I titled it "first attempt" - I thought it was fitting.

So in total I spent about half an hour on the whole project - I wanted to see how fast I could do it. It's really kind of impressive. However you can spend hours and hours on these things, perfecting them, putting in lots of little tricks and challenges and so on. There are even contests on this site - who can make the best game and whatnot.

Overall, I think what I made is amusing and a good waste of time. I like it, and I like that it was so easy to do. Now I can go back and edit it, create new games, play other people's games.... ok I'm starting to see why I had reservations about starting this whole process. It can be a little addicting.

And here is the link to my game if you are really really bored -
http://www.sploder.com/publish.php?s=d000tbsu&browse=1&ref=0

d) playing well with others

None of the posts I commented on had only my comment - I think the class as a whole chose the posts that they found the most interesting. At least with the blogs I saw, the vast majority of comments were linked to the "extra" posts that students did (not specifically assigned posts). It was the same for my own blog - if you're reading this you can check it out right now - I had a number of comments on the post I wrote about a news article I noticed online and its relation to computer mediated communication. I think the reason for this might just be that these extra things we blog about are the things we find most interesting, and thus others can assume that we are more passionate about the subject (and therefore more entertaining to read).

I commented on three different blogs, in addition to responding to comments on my own. I pretty much randomly chose names from the class to comment on - I didn't just want to comment on people I knew, so I just picked random sites from the CICADA page. I would say that overall it isn't the best method of communicating within a class setting, mostly just because of the fact that you have to navigate between pages, there isn't one site that everyone communicates on. It would be more efficient to have a home base (like CICADA) and then everyone gets a page that has a link from that original source. That way it's just simpler to get from page to page.

Just from personal experience I'm not a huge fan of blogs, simply because I don't have the stamina to keep up with any (including my own). I think it's not a bad tool to use for the purpose of writing about a class or something like that - it's kind of a nice, slightly more personal way of online work submission. It's a good way for a professor to keep up with his or her students, and to see all of their work in one chronological location. Otherwise... ha... as you can tell I'm not the biggest fan.


5. What are the advantages/disadvantages of this method of communication?

c) playing with CICADA

I changed the positioning of the quick line about this page being a “sandbox” and italicized “course description” – very simple things, but I thought they were good structural changes. The whole process was pretty easy and organized – since only one person (or one group) could edit one page at a time, things went pretty smoothly. You can see where the page is now, how you want to change it, and if you need to consult with someone about making a change. I didn’t personally interact with anyone on this task; I didn’t think it was necessary for the relatively minor changes I made. Overall it seems pretty clear that trying to (and actually succeeding at) making adjustments to personalized wikis than an official article site on Wikipedia. I was expecting this, seeing as there aren’t any overarching powers stopping us from making changes to a private page that only 20 or so individuals can see in the first place.

The whole idea reminds me of our constitutional right of free speech and all of the controversy associated with it – you can have one hundred percent free speech as long as you are talking in a closed environment where you aren’t in a position to offend people (or enough people anyway) to create any problems. According to US law we can say whatever we want wherever we want within the United States as long as is isn’t libel or slander. However the more widespread the source of “speech” comes from (say, the New York Times) the more careful you have to be with what you say, because there are more people who could take offense and subsequently take legal action against the source (even if it was the truth that was written, or merely an opinion piece that makes no overarching claims).

However what concerns me mostly is that this leaves many open options for people to create slander in semi-closed environments. While the New York Times does not have the luxury of producing whatever it likes (due to its editors, funders, readers and so on) a small town paper does (more or less) of which there are thousands. Even though sending a message through many of these less widespread methods of communication would be less efficient than sending it through one extremely widespread one, the message can still get through loud and clear to enough people.