the eighth blog

Second Life: How it influences human life

       According to the article—Second Life and The Sacred: Islamic Space in a Virtual World, Krystina Derrickson describes the introduction of the second life. “Second Life (SL) is a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE), a "vast digital continent, teeming with people”^, a space that is defined, designed, and detailed by its 12,480,281 worldwide users.  It is a space of entertainment, commerce, education, tourism, relaxation, socialization, participation, play; a space put to those uses determined by the choice of its users, vastly interactive and surprisingly, seemingly-concrete. Users are represented in-world by their avatars, representations of the self that are presented as infinitely personalizable, the self's digital emissary.” With the spreading of second life, it has become a part of human life. Its unconsciously influence changes people’s mental world.

         When a person goes into this virtual world, he or she would build an avater, which the character and the looking are similar to the person. Then, when the acater starts his life in the virtual world, many other avaters will come to you and make friends with you. Gradually, the person will adapt into the virtual world. In such a world, people still care about their behavior; whether their behavior is appropriate. Most of the players build their avaters perfectly; such like they would choose the beautiful cloth for their avaters in terms of looking confidence and charming. However, spending too much time on the second life will change the real person’s behavior. Lately, Stanford University, the chief of VHTL laboratory, Jeremy Bailenson expresses a phenomenon based on his study: As long as player using avater to chat over 90 seconds, it is easier to change the player’s behavior after the player’s status is off-line; at least in the short run. This tells us no matter the influence is bad or good, it indeed brings some changes to people.

         We can say that the second life provides a chance to people to re-build the confidence. In the virtual world people can build the avater in their own thinking, which can fill people’s pity in the real world. If a person is a disability, he or she can gain free in the second life; in this case, the second life can makes the person become more active to communicate with others because the person can forget he is a disability provisionally. However, the second life is such an attractive virtual world that people lost themselves in it. Take an example, there is a news told that a couple just have their own baby, because they still addict to the second life and they have their virtual baby on it, as a result, they forget to feed the real baby and the baby die from starving. It is horrible news and indicating that how dangerous that people lost themselves in the virtual world.

          I believe that the first purpose of the second life is to build a space to entertain people, providing a proper way for people to relax. However, it is not being developed maturely, and at this time, it is easy for people to addict it and cannot control themselves, which is bad for human’s body and mental development. Especially for the youth, they do not have a strong mental, which is easier to be changed by the virtual world. Currently, it is better for people to keep some distance from the second life. 

the seventh blog

                   The effects of games on children and youth

                  Children, especially born after 1980s, love to play computer and video games. They often get great satisfaction during playing all kinds of games. Boys like playing action games and role playing games while girls prefer education games. If children can allocate their time properly on playing games, actually, games act as stimulations to their studying. However, if they fail to have good schedule on games, addict to games and even study games, something bad will happen.

                  Many games now become much better on pictures, playability and even make people feel like being in reality. Counter Strike, Call of Duty series, World of Warcraft and StarCraft represent some of the best games in the world. One of the common points of those games is filled with violence. Counter Strike and Call of Duty series are best interactive point and shoot games. StarCraft gives people a chance to develop their strategy about mastering the overall picture. As for World of Warcraft, it is a purely bloody game. The majority victims of playing games are children and youth because they always confuse about fantasy and reality. When they are playing an interactive shooting game, they are experiencing conditioned skill practice. Because children have strong imitate ability, so those conditioned skill practice helped school shooters commit for real violence. It is true that many military schools use point and shoot video games as their real battle training. Although published games may not be as professional as those games used in military schools and many students may not be trained professionally with those games, every time students play the games, to a certain degree, they learn some practical skills and it is very dangerous to others.

                 Not all games are bad to young people. Computer games also acts as a teaching machine. Many good game players are active in solving problems. They are not easily beaten by obstacles and on the contrary, they treat mistakes as opportunities of practice and learning. What is more, if in a game, a team is needed, it is also a good chance to learn leadership, teamwork and how to assign works between group members. A good example of this kind of game is Civilization III. In this game, there are many countries and each country has its unique characteristics. For example, when you choose the Old Babylon, you will discover that its advantage is in technology and the cost of technology and religious building is only half of other nations. When players change regime of the Old Babylon, there is no chaos period. However, you will not appreciate those advantages before you choose other civilizations. Once you use other nations, the differences come. Because each nation has its own advantage, so players must pay more attention to those huge differences in choosing nations. After people play the game, they will learn some useful experiences that may be used in future life.  

                No matter what kind of games children play, they should cope with those games properly. Although games play an important role in and have great effects in youths’ lives, it is better for them to assign proper time on playing games.

        

the sixth blog

                                      The New Media Economy

       Nowadays, the network can be seen as a form of the new media. When combining the network and the economy, there is a great improvement in the economic market. Because of the technology of the network, it provides a widespread platform for business man to interact, communicate and corporate; moreover, the network stimulates working efficiency; and also, the commerce diversity is promoted by the network.

        There is a famous phenomenon called “the long tail”, which is a business problem that makes the business man headache. But now, with the development of the new media, the problem can be improved. In the economic market, there are some head products which gain the most popularity; of course, there also existing some products that cannot gain the public’s attention. For those products, are the long tails in the economic market. What can improve the long tails? There is a way--- the Internet.

        “The long tails” phenomenon is indicated by Chris Andorson. He applies some commerce and economy model, like Amazon, Ebay to show that the long tail can be improved by the new media. In his article, he wrote about an example of two best sellers. Joe Simpson wrote a book about climbing---“Touching the Void” in 1988, after he published it, the book did not sell well. After 10 years, another person called Jon Krakarer wrote “Into thin Air”, which caused the public’s attention and became the best seller. Because both of the two books talk about the climbing experience, the Amazon put the “Touching the Void” as a recommend book aside the “Into Thin Air” and hope reader can realize it. As a result, the reader like “Touching the Void” as Amazon expected, and they order the book from the on-line bookstore. After a year, the demand for “Touching the Void” is much more than “Into Thin Air”.

         This example explains that some less-popular merchandise can be re-sell in the long run. In the long run, nobody can exactly know what the consumer’s need and how to satisfy them. The consumer’s need is diverse, unstable. Take an example for myself. Last year, I saw an Indian movie called “Three Idiots”, it is a great movie and I found the male character’s acting is vivid. Then I bought his other three movies to watch---“Star on the Earth”, “Death Unknown” and “Damage”. They are also meaningful, vivid and thoughtful. As a consumer, I have the experience that when one merchandise appeals to me, I would like to find the relevant because I like it. I think most people have the similar experience; therefore, the business men realize the psychology of consumer, use new media as a tool to re-develop their merchandise and gain the profit.

         In the new economy market, most of cooperating method cannot live without the new media. The new economy needs it to broadcast, exchange and process. Not only the businessmen can take advantage of the high working efficiency of new media, they can also share with its unlimited space resource. Creating more benefits to the public and themselves in a relative low cost and convenient way is what everybody expects. 

The Fifth Blog

                                       Google Earth –Not as Beautiful as It Looks Like

     As multidimensional meta-medium providing geographic information, Google Earth takes advantages of photographic technology, weather report and the Internet community and combines various elements into a vast map. While Google Earth is facilitating social life and actual physical, emotional experiences, it is not as beautiful as we can see.

Seeing pictures of destinations from different point of view using Google Earth is a pleasant business; however, privacy can be losing at the same time. Pictures are taken by the satellites without screened. As a result, personal properties such as lands and houses are easily searched and found. When it comes to military affairs, a tiny piece of information exposure is vital for the country due to the existence of Google Earth. According to The Dong-A Ilbo, a renowned newspaper in Korea, said that in the satellite photographs of Google Earth, air defense bases of the capital Seoul and surrounding area aiming at North Korea are clearly displayed. Although Korea has remonstrated with Google about such leak, there is no such an agreement to deal with the privacy loss.

Another problem Google Earth has to face is about quality and accuracy. It is not as accurate as one would expect it to be owing to various reasons. Symbolization of content and data is not only difficult to construct but also understood differently from person to person, which leads to information bias between makers and receivers. In addition, cost is much more troublesome comparing to symbolization. The source of revenue of Google Earth mainly depends on charged to the non-free version users. In spite of the cost to send a satellite into the space, Google has to pay millions of dollars for human resource to collect information, combine it with pictures, and promote the application. Briefly, symbolization and cost block the way for Google Earth to be more accurate.

The last but not the least, information lag makes Google Earth is not that reliable. World is changing all the time while Google Earth not. In such a situation that some pictures are taken nearly three years ago, little evidence can show that a definitely real world is displayed. To be specific, if a building is razed to the ground, it seems impossible for Google Earth to change the appearance the next minutes at current technology level. Unlike immediate transport of words or photographs using the Internet, it takes time for the changes in reality to be reflected in Google Earth.

Google Earth facilitates an increased range of personal and social actions, an extension of social space( Jakob Linaa Jensen, 2010). It makes a big improvement of simplex web map and creates a multifunctional application including world map system, Global Position System, weather system and so on. Nevertheless, Google Earth is not as beautiful as it looks like. If it aims to be a requisite application for life, these ineluctable issues including loss of privacy, accuracy and information lag must be solved.

The Forth Blog

                        Forget to Live in the Digital Age

       We live in a digital world. We are involved with the digital at every moment. Since it brings a lot of benefits to human life, we depend on it gradually. However, is it really good for human to rely on the digital world? Recently, I read an article which written by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, called “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” In his article, he points out that the technology has changed the relationship between human and memory. This point causes me to think more about people’s life.

        Our real life is filled with digital material. People used to work or study with digital tool; moreover, information and knowledge has also been transferred by digital tool. No matter for the working or living, people depend on the digital tool in terms of gaining help. In general, it is digital tool that help us to memorize information. This technology has replaced the relationship between human and memory. Nowadays, the poetry can be digitalized; the building can be digitalized; only use the default value can record every digital working and new things. If we lose the digital information, our loss would be disastrous.

         As long as the Internet once has someone’s record, no matter how long it is, when you search his or her record, you could find it. “Google knows more about us than we can remember ourselves (P4).” Since we use the digital to memorize, every detail we have record will be last long unless we delete it by our own. However, to memorize everything is not good for human to some extent. Since forgetting is a natural law; if we broke the law, there would be some disadvantages to human life. Just as Viktor Mayer-Schonberger said, people concern about what they did and what they said on the Internet; and the life is fulfilled with chatter and tangle. As a result, people may stop going adventure; then the society would be suffering loss.

         There is an old saying in China: Misfortune may be an actual blessing. If some memory lost, just let it go, forgetting is a good thing in some case. People can gain relax from forgetting.

         The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age makes me think of a Hollywood movie, “50 First Date”. It represents a love story: After the first meeting in a café restaurant, Lucy and Henry fall in love. The second day morning, when Henry wakes up and wants to kiss Lucy, Lucy is terrified and hitting Henry. No matter how Henry explains to Lucy that they have fall in love, Lucy does not believe in him. What is worse, there is no evidence left can prove that they fall in love. Going through asking Lucy’s friends, Henry knows that Lucy suffers Transient memory loss because a traffic accident one year before. When Lucy gets up every morning, she would forget all things happened yesterday. Since then, Henry starts to save her memory in a romantic way; to let Lucy fall in love with him again; Henry goes to the café restaurant every day and tries to find a way making Lucy loves him day and day.

          Although this is a movie, from the content I can figure out that, while we lose some memory we can gain other memory. As long as to experience and go through the life, we can feel the real happiness. Only relying on the digital material to memorize, we may get regret and lose.  

The Third Blog

                       The Erosion of the network World

       From the article, “The Inner History of Devices”, there is a website called Slashdot.org. This is a news community and there is a large amount of information, such as video, news, pictures and so forth. People who join this website can share information and get more information in terms of convenience. This website brings a lot of fun and information into people’s daily life.

        There are few examples about how people thought this website. Most of them are positive to using it. According to their thinking, I think the situation can be described in two aspects. Firstly, this kind of website indeed enriches people’s life because most of the information is interesting and popular. Not only it relaxes people’s life, it could also expand their view. However, if people focus on the website too much, it will lead to wasting of time or, making human’s thought dully.

        In China, there is a similar website called RenRen, which is very popular around college and university students. Few years ago, RenRen is not an attractive website and little of people know about it. With constantly improving and the creator knows the Chinese young need such a place a sharing and relaxing, RenRen steps into people’s life gradually. So far, it has developed a big platform for online relaxing. Once some argue that RenRen is bad for young’s mental developing if they spend a lot of time on news sharing. Because no matter what the content of the news is, as long as the news or videos become hot, most of people want to know about it, or share with it. In this way, it is easy to cause the act of following suit prevails. I have ever faced with this situation last year.

 In 2010, Shanghai hosted the World Expo. At that time, a lot of people around the world came to visiting. Shanghai World Expo invited the Korea singer stars to celebrate. A large number of fans got together and some of them are Korea fans. Those fans all want to see the stars, but the place is limited, which leads to the crowded and disordered situation; what was worse, Chinese fans and Korea fans fight with each other for the purpose of seeing those stars. This event was released on the RenRen website, most of users are angry with it because those Koea fans, even some of those Korea stars abused China. Since I opened the website, I remember clearly that most of the users’ comments are defiant even though some of them are not very clear with the situation. Moreover, some people share with the event video to tell everyone how arrogant and crazy the Korea fans are. In my point of view, those users were influenced by the trend, rather than the truth of the event. Since they got the news from the RenRen website, those news and videos’ topics come from the people who are emotionally facing with the event; therefore, the event was spread in an emotional way. This phenomenon reflects the bad effect of the online news community.

Although the situation cannot be solved right now, to overcome this problem, people, especially for young people need to strengthen their mind. When we facing with a serious problem, we need to hold a rational attitude to solve or, treat the event. Moreover, since we have much more spare time, it is better for us to escape from the website and turn to the natural world. Everything has its advantage and disadvantage. To make best use of the advantage is our pursuing.  

Second blog assignment

                    Digital Wisdom---A Part of My Life

      When I was 10 years old, my family had our first computer. During that time, I were not familiar with the computer, I even did not know what it was used for. Nowadays, I cannot live without computer though. Digital wisdom, which can be seen specifically as Internet, has reached through the centre of global economy and people’s daily life. In the past decade, the digital wisdom spreads rapidly and influentially. Few days ago, I just heard from my friend, who comes from Japan, said in her country, there is a kind of telephone, can be used as Visa, Metropass at the same time; moreover, it can also be used to send email, surf the Internet and so forth. Once losing the telephone, the people would lose a lot of important information. Thus it can be seen that how vital the digital wisdom for people. In fact, the relationship between the digital wisdom and me cannot be described as “close”, more specific, it should be a part of my life.

        Since I came to Toronto and started the university life, I gradually rely on my laptop. In my high school, I rarely have chance to use laptop to finish homework. In the university study, I must use laptop to accomplish an assignment or make a presentation. Thus, I learn many skills for digital wisdom. I have an economic course in this semester; for the first assignment, I need to calculate the GDP, CPI and so on. If I did not use Excel to calculate, I would spend a whole afternoon to get the answer. It is the digital wisdom that provides such a convenient way for me to finish the assignment in proper time. Not only that, many professors would let students to do a presentation to develop students’ learning skill. Most of students would like to make slides to finish their presentation. In my opinion, making slides not only can draw the audience’s attention, but it also represents a clearer and vivid way for speaker to explain. Because for university students, they are young, active and curious; a vivid slide can attract them to focus on what speaker talking about and lead them to learn more about relevant knowledge. The skill of making a good slide is also a result of using digital wisdom. Unconsciously, we are influenced by digital wisdom and learn a lot of related skills.

         I just have to admit that even I benefit a lot from digital wisdom; I am also controlled by it. I read an article---Growing up Digital, Wired for Distraction, which written by Matt Richtel. There is a sentence that left a deep impression on my mind: “Facebook is amazing because it feels like you’re doing something and you’re not doing anything. It’s the absence of doing something, but you feel gratified anyway (p.4)” This is exactly description of my mind. I log in facebook everyday for many times, if I don’t, it feels like I forget to do something. When I open the laptop in the morning, it feels like I open the window. I don’t deny that I have deeply appealed by digital wisdom. Another example, if I face with trouble in the study, I would like to search the answer on the internet, rather than reading the textbook over and over. I know it is a kind of lazy, but how can I control myself?

        Advantage and disadvantage exist together; although digital wisdom supplies a lot of benefit to human life, it still forms us some bad habits. In this case, everyone should wake up with the harm of the digital wisdom and force ourselves to spend less time on the computer, laptop and other digital wisdom tool. Do not be a person that controlled by such a tool. 

First Blog Assignment

                                       The Virtual World

       Accelerating the development of technology, the new media is being received more and more attention. The new media is different from traditional media, because the traditional media have boundary among television, broadcast, newspaper and communication. People from different countries or disparate industry cannot communicate conveniently and directly. However, new media uses the feature of the Internet, bringing a lot of change into this world.

        As we all know that the internet is closely related to the society; not only it produces benefit to human’s daily life, but it also change the human’s thinking. In today’s class, I learn more about the influence about new media, especially for computer influence. There is an attribute given called “Avatars or a self”, which leaves me a deep impression. In my opinion, “Avatars or a self” is like someone can get another identity on the Internet, and he or she can create a person with various characteristic, who can stand for him or her on the Internet. In the contemporary society, there are many websites that can produce such a service for people to entertainment their daily life. The feature of “Avatars or a self” makes me think of a Chinese website, which is the most popular website among young people. I also use it in daily life and very familiar with it.

         www.QQ.com is a Chinese website. It provides chatting room, various games and other services. There are more than nine hundred million users in China. In this website, if people want to chat with other, they do not have to use their real name; furthermore, they can create a simulative person to play game. For example, a game called “people’s farm”, it is a simulative farm game; user can create his or her own farm and plant various crops and breed animals, then they can corporate with each other and sell their product. Another popular game on this website is “Battle”. It is not bloody and crucial, but original style of building camp, producing crop, occupying domain and fighting with monster. It also interested user very much. In these two games, people do not know each other; all of them live in a virtual world. The feature of this website just like “Avatars of a self”’s. First of all, both of the users can create a virtual person to represent themselves, and they can get what they can’t in the real world. Secondly, users do not know each other; that they connect with others on the website are virtual person.

         Since I read the article which written by Sherry Turkle, I think the feature of this website is just one of what Turkle worry about---“Avatars or a self”. To begin with, Turkle thinks it is easy for those users to lose their real characteristic because they connect with other through their second character on the Internet. According to a Chinese report, there is a 16-year-old student, before he gets in touch with online virtual world; he is an outgoing and active person. However, his character is totally changed and becomes bilious since he is attracted by online virtual world. He even hit his parents and asks for money to play virtual game. Moreover, Turkle expresses that teenager has little experience of how to communicate with other people, if they always express their feeling through their screen avatars, their character will become unsociable and introversive. Since the people who playing in the virtual world, they can do whatever they want on the Internet, they cannot full fill their duty if they make mistake. Oppositely, in the real world, they must undertake their behavior. In this case, they will become inadaptable living in the real world.

        New media brings changes into our society. Whether the changes are good or not, we need to size up the situation and try to avoid the bad effect of those changes. Making use of the positive feature of the Internet, we still have a lot of work to explore.