Last night there was an excellent show on BBC 2 as part of the Wonderland series that covered Seond Life. Here is the youtube link (unfortunately embedding has been disabled). It followed the journey of two couples who were seemingly ready to make real life changing decision besed on their second life relationships. As you can imagine, the two couples end up at rather different outcomes by the end of the journey. The first couple ultimately get married in SL with the rest of their real life families all hooked into the SL network to see the prestigious event. The second couple how a wife and mother of two kids travels half the way round the world to find out that the person she met in SL does nothing for her in Real Life. It was really interesting to see how this SL committment actually exists in everyday interactions. The clip I have posted in particularily good as it is from the view of the husbad who's wife leave America for her SL 'boyfriend' who lives in England. There are some fantastic clips where all parties involved speak about the versions of 'the real'. And it was great to see that it was all about the people instead of this look at what the technology was doing. It was a cutting edge take and how the people make this technology what is it. There is a lovely clip where the two who meet up in England go for a picnic in the park and they are just sat silently next to each other. Obviously, the build up to leaving America involved a number of intense arguments that were now finished with this very anti-climatic walk through a London park - As if to say 'uh is this it then?' The section that followed showed her talking through how she couldn't have both worlds and actually felt kind of sorry for her. Her SL character she confessed 'was everything that she wanted to be' and that all she wanted to do is 'bring a little bit of that into the real world'. For those two that got married their real life counterparts had been everything they wanted to be, but obviously this took some adjustent from them to see that they would not have the physical characteristic they do in SL. Perhaps what is needed here is an ability to see that they only thing that is really 'true' in SL is the interaction itself.
Thursday, 31 January 2008
Real Life vs Second Life
Last night there was an excellent show on BBC 2 as part of the Wonderland series that covered Seond Life. Here is the youtube link (unfortunately embedding has been disabled). It followed the journey of two couples who were seemingly ready to make real life changing decision besed on their second life relationships. As you can imagine, the two couples end up at rather different outcomes by the end of the journey. The first couple ultimately get married in SL with the rest of their real life families all hooked into the SL network to see the prestigious event. The second couple how a wife and mother of two kids travels half the way round the world to find out that the person she met in SL does nothing for her in Real Life. It was really interesting to see how this SL committment actually exists in everyday interactions. The clip I have posted in particularily good as it is from the view of the husbad who's wife leave America for her SL 'boyfriend' who lives in England. There are some fantastic clips where all parties involved speak about the versions of 'the real'. And it was great to see that it was all about the people instead of this look at what the technology was doing. It was a cutting edge take and how the people make this technology what is it. There is a lovely clip where the two who meet up in England go for a picnic in the park and they are just sat silently next to each other. Obviously, the build up to leaving America involved a number of intense arguments that were now finished with this very anti-climatic walk through a London park - As if to say 'uh is this it then?' The section that followed showed her talking through how she couldn't have both worlds and actually felt kind of sorry for her. Her SL character she confessed 'was everything that she wanted to be' and that all she wanted to do is 'bring a little bit of that into the real world'. For those two that got married their real life counterparts had been everything they wanted to be, but obviously this took some adjustent from them to see that they would not have the physical characteristic they do in SL. Perhaps what is needed here is an ability to see that they only thing that is really 'true' in SL is the interaction itself.
Wednesday, 23 January 2008
Deleting Facebook might not be as easy as you think
If you are like me, you would assume that profile pages can be destroyed as easily as they are created. However, the ICO has found that Facbook pages in the UK are particularly difficult to delete and require users to remove each individual wall post. This could be potentially thousands of wall posts for many users. The interesting question is how do we alert users to the problems with deleting their profile pages? The possibility of a banner saying ' we store your information indefinitely' seems a little much. Although I agree with the direction of the argument. Please don't anybody say we need to educate people more. I'm not entirely sure this is always the answer. What we need to do is make the technology easier to use. But, Facebook is certainly under no pressure to do this.
Check out this article on the unofficial facebook blog to read more.
Check out this article on the unofficial facebook blog to read more.
Monday, 21 January 2008
Friends like these
I have some immediate reactions to the article in the Guardian on Monday 14th January entitled 'With Friends like these...'(here is the link) that I was alerted to through the nettime listserv. This article really tells us more about the author (Tom Hodgkinson) than it does about Facebook, opening with line 'I despise Facebook'. The article fits with a classically naive version of the social implications of the Internet that arrives with each new technological possibility (email, you tube, blogging and now SNS like Facebook). There are always those saying, well actually, doesn't the Internet actually make us further apart? No. If anything, the net allows people to be even more social in their everyday lives, it is incredibly reductionist to presume that one simply replaces the other. Moreover, real life and the interaction we have in online communities are uniquely interwoven into this concept of 'being social'. Tom Hodkinson reports that in Facebook 'I can construct an artificial representation of myself in order to get sex'. Again, I don't think this what the majority of people use Facebook for. Although, I am intrigued by the interactional process that leads from the simplistic movement of taking a photograph to how this is constructed into an 'artificial representation'. What about this photograph is artificial? Presumably nothing. So then it is in the surrounding discourse that brings the artificial to life. I'm sure many people like to construct a certain image online, but to condemn that entire process to be about getting sex seems farfetched.
As with any area of public life the marketers have tried to find a way to tap into potential audiences, just as two people standing on the street have a large advisement in the background, as does communication in Facebook. I completely disagree with the idea that Facebook is profoundly uncreative, particularly in light of advertising. It is important to remember that Facebook members provide the content, nothing more. From my use of Facebook and studying a similar SNS that got heavily involved with Advertising (MySpace) it is interesting to note how little notice member take of advertising. If anything, it has become an expectation of anything in a modern society. Again, what is noticeable here is that you can not accuse the people of being uncreative when you have been put off by the advertising. Uncreative, you obviously have found the wrestler application! If anything I dislike the view that people in SNS are any different to those in real-life. For many, the relations they have online are just as 'real'. Taken from the article:
As with any area of public life the marketers have tried to find a way to tap into potential audiences, just as two people standing on the street have a large advisement in the background, as does communication in Facebook. I completely disagree with the idea that Facebook is profoundly uncreative, particularly in light of advertising. It is important to remember that Facebook members provide the content, nothing more. From my use of Facebook and studying a similar SNS that got heavily involved with Advertising (MySpace) it is interesting to note how little notice member take of advertising. If anything, it has become an expectation of anything in a modern society. Again, what is noticeable here is that you can not accuse the people of being uncreative when you have been put off by the advertising. Uncreative, you obviously have found the wrestler application! If anything I dislike the view that people in SNS are any different to those in real-life. For many, the relations they have online are just as 'real'. Taken from the article:
Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out
of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then
sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at
all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.
Thursday, 17 January 2008
EEEpc
Since my time at the CPPE I seem to only be known for my little pc. So here it is. Feel free to check out some more photos on my flickr account.
A good move by Facebook
I have long been a believer that a cluttered profile looks messy and untidy. Maybe this says something interesting about me as a person, or maybe, there is some deeper in the sense that I like the way we can manipulate our online identity with the applications on a SNS not just through the content that we upload. That was why I was pleased to see facebook's extended utility. For a further review check out what Nick o'Neil has to say here
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