Week 9 Freemind map: 12 theses on WIkiLeaks

Week 8 Second Life questions.

Week 8: Second Life Questions.

1) What is the nature of social life in Second Life?

- A little bit of everything, it ranges from beaches to hip hop/techno clubs to villages with volcanoes, and they also have events.

2) How do people converge and what is the main purpose of this form of online community?

- It’s just like any other chat room, except in SL you get to create your own avatar and its more visual.

3) What types of behaviors do you notice about your own relationship to the world and that of others toward you?

- I feel a little bit more hesitant to chat up people in SL, feel like I had to wait for the right time to jump into a convo.

4) What type of people do you imagine are mostly attracted to life within SL?

- That’s hard to answer. I am observing a conversation between XmissX and Averageoctave, apparently your avatars can have sex on SL. XmissX said she hasn’t done it in SL because that would be disrespectful to her real life boyfriend. So I am assuming these are people with somewhat of real lives but for some reason they feel the need to spend time in a virtual realm as well.

5) List five types of virtual goods for sale this week:

- Posters, ad spaces, hair, shoes, shirts, skin.

a) How much they were?

- A lot of free items, I think people are trying to promote something.

b) Who would use them?

- Your avatar.

8) List five people you met online per week and a) who they were and b) what they hope to get out of SL and c) how did they view you?

You will not have a customized avatar (unless you pay for one).

XmissX – stripper, 18 yrs old in real life, in a relationship.

The average octave – starter avatar, same as my guy.

missElemental – red haired, dark skin, stripper.

jury Bluestar – quiet soulless stripper.

Chucknorris5 – big naked guy walking around an erection asking for sex.

9) Is how you are treated as a 'newbie' different from how those are treated who have custom avatars etc?

- Nothing, they told me to spend more time on it and I’ll get the hang of it, most of them are pretty nice. Some people are pretty hmm, vulgar but whatever.

10) How do virtual goods get bought and sold in SL?

- To get money in SL, as I was told that you could strip, do lap dances and get tips. Or design clothes or something. You can also use credit or debit card to buy money aka L$.

11) What types of virtual goods are on sale and how does the economy of virtual goods sales work in relationship to the broader online economy?

- I was told you can design clothing, I am not sure how one to start to do that.

12) How do the 3D spaces used by different people online in SL reflect their interests & personalities?

- You can tell by the clothing on their avatar for personality. Also listening to their conversations works too. Most of them seem like regular people, others I think are just drunk and horny.

13) What type of informal and formal behavior are visible in SL?

- The only formal behavior was avatars dancing to music and pole dancing? Informal would be walking around with their virtual genital exposed. Literally.

14) How many compare to rituals etc in everyday life?

- I guess in SL you are allowed to do things that in RL you cannot or allowed. For one, you can fly in some of the destinations in SL.

15) How do people respond if you tell them that you are a student studying SL as part of a university project?

- Well only one person I talked to was serious to answering my questions. She was pretty informative I just told her straight up I was doing a project for school on SL and she just told me to ask if I have any other questions.

16) How closely does behavior in SL correspond to that in RL (real life)

- Conversation wise, just like any chat room. But people are more sexual since they have an avatar running around and for some reason they are always naked.

17) Summarize your experience in SL from the point of view of a researcher, what did you learn?

I would say there is definitely a large online community here. People from all over the world are involved in this virtual site. I believe that there is a lot more actions that a person can make their avatar perform in that world where it would be looked at as bad or illegal in RL. My experience with SL was interesting, it might have been my computer and Internet but it seemed laggy at times and the loading of avatar and the environment stalled a bit. I think SL actually has a lot of depth that I personally have not been tapped into since I am a noobie. But in general I think the virtual world of SL reminds me of the book ‘Snow Crash’ except here we have avatars and in Snow Crash, people goggle into the virtual reality.

Week 7 Questions.

1) Who invented the first computer game on the PDP1?

-Steve Russell

2) What was the name of the game?

- Spacewar!

3) What was the name of Morton Helig's amusement device that let you smell, hear and see in 3D filmed experiences?

- “Sensarama” in 1960, Martians user friendly.

4) What early 1970s movie does an arcade console machine of Spacewar appear?

- ‘Soylent Green’ as the green machine the girl plays.

5) What was the name of the man who developed the first TV tennis game?

- William Higgenbotham in 1958 who worked on the atomic bomb.

6) Who was the man whose company Atari commercialized the idea of the arcade computer tennis game?

- Nolan Bushnell

7) What was the name of this version of the game?

- Atari Pong

8) What are vector graphics?

-  Vector graphics in games are the use of geometrical shapes such as points, lines, and curves.

9) What types of games do vector graphics lend themselves to?

-  The very first games were obviously spacewar, which lead to asteroids and eventually battlefield. Atari seemed to use vector graphics in their games quite a bit.

10) When home computers were first made available, how did owners load games into them?

- They would either program it themselves, or buy disks from programmers and installed them thru floppy disks in stacks.

11) What is the name of the 1985 film in which a young Matthew Broderick starts World War III with his home computer and modem?

- “WarGames”, its actually from 1983.

12) From what sources did the designer of the Space Invaders aliens draw inspiration?

- From H.G. Well’s war of the world octopus looking aliens.

13) What is the name given to the contemporary subculture of 8 bit music made with gameboys and other 80s game technology

- “ChipTunes”.

14) "Escape from Woomera" was a videogame which was used to draw attention to the plight of inmates at a remote detention center in desert town in what country?

- It is a secret desert prison in the Australian outback.

Week 6 questions.

DAI 227 WEEK 6 Lecture Questions

1) Steve Mann describes his wearable computer invention as a form of ________ for one person (fill in the blank)

-  Architecture for one, or a building for a single occupant. He gets this idea because his dad worked for a clothing company when Mann was little.

2) Steve Mann's concept of opposing camera surveillance with "Sousveillance" is described as a form of “reflectionism”. What is meant by this?

- In a way, it is reversed SURveillance. With Souveillance it is like holding a mirror and asking people themselves if they liked what they were doing as described. Basically act as a mirror for people to see themselves.

3) In the section of "Sousveillance" called "Performance Two" Steve Mann describes how wearing his concealed device becomes more complex when used in what type of spaces?

- “These relationships, however, become more complex when wearing the device into spaces such as shopping malls that are semi-public rather than fully public” In a heavy surveillance area Mann was questioned more his souveillance.

4) The final paragraph sums up what Mann consider the benefits of "sousveillance" and "coveillance". What are they?

- With these technologies, this type of surveillance can act as neighborhood watches (for self protection and neighbors) while people are out and about doing activities.

5) In William J Mitchell's 1995 book "City of Bits" in the chapter "Cyborg Citizens", he puts forth the idea that electronic organs as they shrink and become more part of the body will eventually resemble what types of familiar items?

-  Mitchell theorizes that these items will eventually become a part of our clothing attire, things that contour to our bodies as a whole.

6) From the same book/chapter, list two of the things that a vehicle that 'knows where it is' might afford the driver & passengers.

- Other than being just a GPS, it can tell the person operating the car the history or background about the certain spot. (Which reminds me of the sightseeing tour on Alcatraz with the earplugs I was once told about.)

7) Mitchell tells the story of Samuel Morse's first Washington-to-Baltimore telegraph message. What was it?

- “What hath god wrought.”

8) Donna Harroway in "A Cyborg Manifesto" argues that women should take the "battle to the border". What does she say are the stakes in this border war?

- The things that are at stake in this ‘border war’ were the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination for women.

9) Harroway posits the notion that:
"We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream"What is this dream?

- “…Of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.”

10) Many have argued that 'we are already cyborgs' as we use devices such as glasses to improve our vision, bikes to extend the mobility function of our legs/bodies etc, computers and networks to extend the nervous system etc. What do you think? Are we cyborgs?
 

- Well, the difference in meaning between a robot and cyborg is that a robot is fully mechanized and a cyborg was once human now with partly or whole artificial limbs and parts (for example Robocop.) So the question is are we cyborgs? Partly yes/no and with partly yes, physically most of us still have our biological limbs so to speak. For people that are unfortunate to have to have artificial operations, they can be considered as partly mechanical (another example, that guy who lost his arm in a mountain climbing accident, movie: 127 hours, in an interview he is still does mountain climbing, and he said that with his new mechanical hand, he is stronger and better because of it). The no of this part of the answer is people cannot be as strong as the terminator per says even with mechanical enhancement. The yes, spiritually or the lack of actually. In this day and age, everyone and I mean almost everyone is depending on either a cell phone or laptop or at least some sort of a mechanical device, so in that sense I believe we are all somewhat of a half-assed cyborg, so to speak anyways and I do not think many people could disagree with that, or at least we are mechanically dependent on machine and technology.