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.

Rich and Poor - countries with the greatest disparities

While perusing the daily headlines I have on my Yahoo homepage, I came across a short article from Business Week about the top ten countries with the greatest disparity between the rich and the poor. I skimmed the article and my reaction was an interesting mix of both shocked and totally unsurprised that almost all of the countries are most often thought of as very wealthy, modern and brimming with fascinating culture. Just so that we’re on the same page, I’ll list the countries in order (there are a couple of ties in the mix): Hong Kong, Singapore, the United States, Israel, Portugal, New Zealand, Italy and Britain, Australia, Ireland and Greece.

These countries all have access to the highest levels of technology and their schools teach students (from what I understand at least) about the different forms of technology that are available to them. Particularly young people from all of these nations are up to date on web fads like Facebook, Wikipedia, blogs, and so on – I’ve learned from living overseas and meeting many people from different backgrounds that young people from my own generation pretty much have the same tech desires and knowledge (I know this is a broad generalization and I’m sure there are many examples to prove otherwise, but overall I would say that my claim isn’t unrealistic). I thought it was so bizarre that countries with so much opportunity for success, with some of the richest most powerful people in the world, just aren’t helping their own people to gain access to the bare minimum of the amazing facilities we have today.

This topic is particularly interesting for me because I grew up in Taiwan and Turkey (neither of which are on the list I’m happy to say) and I have friends who have lived in those other countries, and I never heard about the “poor” side of life in any of those places from them. Particularly Hong Kong and Singapore were the most shocking to me – I have a couple friends who attended the Singapore American School as expatriates, and another who is actually Singaporean but grew up overseas as well, and none of them have ever told me anything about the insane amounts of poverty that are clearly present there. I have a couple friends who have Hong Kong passports but grew up in Taiwan (they spend significant amounts of time there visiting family) and I’ve been to Hong Kong myself, but the poverty there never seemed to be a topic of discussion. I know about the poverty in the US and Australia, but I’ve never had to experience or even witness it properly, so I cannot even say that I fully comprehend the awful situations we have here either.

It seems to me that even with computer mediated communications we still aren’t using our knowledge to its full advantage (or to much of an advantage at all really) – we are too focused on getting that new iPod or whatever it is we desire, forgetting that there are millions of people who don’t even know what an iPod is, or can barely imagine that they exist in the first place.

http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/107980/countries-with-the-biggest-gaps-between-rich-and-poor

Wow I realized I haven't updated this in a while - I've been taking notes by hand about things related to the course that I've noticed but I kept forgetting to put it up online. Clearly my dedication to blogs is lacking... my memory too... ah well.

I remember the day in class when we talked about bundling, because right after class I was watching TV and a Charter Cable ad came on and they just flat-out started talking about bundling (saying "bundle" every other second too, not just referring to it). I found another ad for Charter on youtube that I liked (I couldn't find the original one I saw on TV) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9asq4PIW3t4

b) creating an avatar

My avatar's name is Kaili Xuanzang (Kaili is my Mandarin name), and I found Second Life to be relatively entertaining for a while - once the novelty died down I wasn't too interested but I had fun creating an individual look for my avatar. The main thing I found annoying was that my avatar was bald and only in underwear, and I couldn't change that. It was like in between the weird smoke phase and having an actual avatar. Other than that I found that flying was much harder than I thought it would be - you don't control the avatar very well while flying. But generally speaking I found the program pretty easy to use as long as you're willing to read a few short tips and instructions to start you off (something I find many people don't think to be important ever).

To me this technology would mostly be used for wasting time and messing around in ways that you probably wouldn't in real life. I heard a couple of students in class talking about getting hit on after only being on the program for 10 minutes. However I don't think it offers much more than that since there are other more advanced technologies that we can use more simply for communication and other tools.

There are clearly opportunities to "talk" to people, but I doubt many people would generate any kind of lasting relationship (I say "many people" because I'm sure it's happened regardless of my personal take on the matter). For me it was more a means of entertaining myself for half an hour at a time. Personally I most like the aspect of building your own avatar exactly the way you want it. I made the Asian version of myself, since I was bored of creating similar characters (from when I was younger) that looked exactly like me (i.e. white), and it amused my friends back home in Taiwan.

I think that Second Life isn't really practical, and there isn't enough happening in it for our insanely fast-paced society to be enthralled by it for very long. We're also always expecting more from technology, and I found myself thinking right away "well this isn't very realistic" even though the graphics are pretty impressive overall. I also think that as a society we don't simply want to be cut off from people and live through our computers (most of the time at least). I personally had never heard of Second Life, and I don't think the technology is very widespread anymore.

a) creating a blog

The service I have chosen to use is Blogspot, because I know that it is really easy to set up and use. I don't have lots of time to spend working on it, but if I do want to improve it I know that I can pretty easily, and I also have friends who use it and are very familiar with the tools associated with it - so if I ever needed help I could turn to them really easily.

Setting up the blog was ridiculously easy. I've made blogs before (that pretty much died after about a week) but this program in particular was very user-friendly, and I greatly appreciated that. The one problem I did have was coming up with a name for the blog itself, but other than that it was very simple. To be honest it was almost frighteningly simple, and it just reinforced my knowledge of the fact that anyone can post anything on the internet.

I do feel like I'm talking to the void most of the time when I do use blogs, however there are opportunities for interactions with "real" people - others can make their own posts on your blog or comment on others' and I can do the same on other blogs. I actually like the feature where you can post the blogs that you follow, so that you share the more interesting ones with others.

I guess I would consider using blogs again after this class, but knowing my habit for not following through on these sort of things, I doubt my blogging would go anywhere. However I have friends that are avid bloggers and I really enjoy seeing the fascinating things they find on the internet.

One final thing that I just noticed - blogspot saves your posts as your typing them (every minute or so) in case you navigate away from the page by accident or erase important information!!!