What is the attraction of alternate realities like Second life?

In the words of Godin Second life lets players “find their tribe”(TED2009 2009) be it vampires, sports fanatics or single people looking for dates, all kinds of groups exist in second life and players can communicate and form relationships within the virtual reality game. Unlike real life people in second life represent themselves through self-constructed avatars enabling then to project the image they wish people to see.

Second life has its own currency which can be exchanged for real money (Linden 2011) therefore people can get real paying jobs, buy clothes, houses, attend events, learn, invent, create etc through the virtual environment. Therefore it is possible to make money from second life to support your real life.

Therefore it could be said that alternate realities like second life allow people to transcend their physical location and embodiment and in order to live in an virtual world, although as Malpas points out this doesn’t “release from the limitations of embodiment” (Malpas 2009) in the real world. In order to contribute to this online society users still need to operate a form of ICT of some description, therefore second life doesn’t replace real life it just an alternative way for people to connect and to contribute to their tribe.

 Linden, R. 2011. How to sell Linden dollars. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/How-to-sell-Linden-dollars/ta-p/1018151 (accessed 16/11/11).

Malpas, J. 2009. On the Non-Autonomy of the Virtual. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 15 (2): 135-139. http://con.sagepub.com (accessed

TED2009. 2009. Seth Godin on the tribes we lead. TED Ideas worth Spreading.

3.4: In what ways are virtual worlds different from the 'real world'? In what way are they the same?

From what I understand of the Malpas reading it is incorrect to think of the real world virtual worlds as separate entities as virtual worlds are depended upon and based upon the structures of real life.

Malpas states  “There is thus only the one world, and the virtual is a part of it”  (Malpas 2009 p.136)

He notes that real and virtual worlds share similarities such as

o   Communication models

·      Linguistics:  the same languages are used in and out of virtual worlds for people to communicate

·      Reading of content: we attach and associate meaning with objects in the real world and these associations are reflected in the virtual world

o   Relationships

·      The basis of a virtual relationship relies on “honesty trust and respect” (Malpas 2009 p. 138) which are the same things we value in face to face relationships

o   Ethics and Law

·      Virtual life is still answerable to the laws of real life e.g. you still have to sign legal terms of agreement to play a game of join Facebook, these are laws made in the real world

·      The ethical beliefs of people in the real world are reflected in the virtual

The difference between the real world and the virtual are

·      That the virtual world cannot operate without the infrastructure that exists in the real world – the real world can operate without the virtual

·      Virtual worlds can be constrained by “genre-specific frameworks”(Malpas 2009 p. 138) and as such do not offer as much diversity as the real world.

Malpas, J. 2009. On the Non-Autonomy of the Virtual. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 15 (2): 135-139. http://con.sagepub.com (accessed 16/11/11)

3.3: Can you really build a community on Facebook or is it all just a bit meaningless? Give me some examples of Facebook communities.

I think now more than ever Facebook offers a huge scope for creating communities.

My personal Facebook account follows along the same line as Westlake discusses when she states  that the "online world of Facebook reflects the local, “on ground” life of its specific users" (Westlake 2008 p. 23). My account is made up of friends I have met face to face, its a little community of people in my life.

Facebook today also allows users to create pages based on common interests and themes such as
"Local Business or  Place", "Company Organization or Institution", "Brand or Product", "Artist, Band or Public Figure", "Entertainment", or "Cause or Community" (Create a Page 2011) so the commonality that people form communities around no longer needs to mimic outside social circles and personal relationships. I imaging this type of pigeonholing of interests makes good business sense - as a way of collecting and packaging data for resale, but it still does allow communities to form while it performs this function.

 Create a Page. 2011. http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?ref_id=20531316728 (accessed 15/11/11).

Westlake, E. J. 2008. Friend Me if You Facebook Generation Y and Performative Surveillance. Project Muse 52 (4): 21-40. https://auth.lis.curtin.edu.au/cgi-bin/auth-ng/walkin.cgi?url=http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_drama_review/v052/52.4.westlake.pdf (accessed 14/11/11).

3.3 How do you use Facebook? Do you chat? Update? Link? Share? Poke? Create fake profiles?

I'm on Facebook. I update my status occasionally, chat with friends and upload photos. I've created a group around the production of a short film my husband was involved in making as a way of keeping in touch with all our new contacts and I have also created a fake profile for an art unit I studied last year. The unit was called Art and Creativity and the assignment was to think of  "100 things to do with a bucket" - my bucket gained a persona and joined Facebook.

I found it interesting to read about Facebook as a performance (Westlake 2008) as I find that I tend to "perform" or alter my personality more to suit the face to face interactions of a work environment than I do on my Facebook profile.

Office jobs require professionalism that in turn, I feel, requires you to keep parts of your personality under wraps. For example - in work life you should ignore the rude comments of a customer and tolerate the nasty witch you sit next to in order to maintain and air of professionalism, keep the peace and get the job done.

While on Facebook you can unfriend people you don't like, or hide their comments, and choose the things about yourself that you want to let people know. Facebook is a social performance while professionalism could be explained as a corporate one. Or maybe this is more reflective of my desire to avoid confrontation which according to Westlake is a typical attribute of Generation Y. (Westlake 2008 p 37)

Westlake, E. J. 2008. Friend Me if You Facebook Generation Y and Performative Surveillance. Project Muse 52 (4): 21-40. https://auth.lis.curtin.edu.au/cgi-bin/auth-ng/walkin.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmuse.jhu.edu%2Fjournals%2Fthe_drama_review%2Fv052%2F52.4.westlake.pdf (accessed 14/11/11).

Topic 2.4 Notes on play, games and media

In the ilecture Woods stated when speaking about the history of games “TV killed gaming innovation because the companies that produced games … started remaking them with a new image on the box… this hasn’t really changed much” (Woods 2011). While this is true of board games (a quick Google search will find loads of different versions of monopoly including “make your own Opoly” where you can customize the board game to suit your own interests) I am not sure that it applies to video games in the same way.

While the reason for buying the Star Wars version of Monopoly, hopefully is because you are a fan of Star wars – playing the game of monopoly is not something overly representative of the movies themes or storyline. Video games on the other offer a greater flexibility in representing the initial text - be it in graphics, storyline or characters voice and appearance. In fact the media companies that creates the movie also create the game ensuring a harmonious branding across all platforms. For example Sony – a company that makes televisions and electronic equipment is actually a group of companies. One branch of the group is Sony Pictures who make movies and television shows. Another branch of the Sony group make the Sony PlayStation and PlayStation games (Sony Global - Sony Global Headquarters  2011). Therefore when Sony pictures make a blockbuster movie with a lot of graphics and special effects, a game can also be produced at the same time using the same graphic styles and is instantly recognizable to consumers.

Games are popular and in an article about the future of video games Mawer suggests a few reasons why this is the case. His first reason once again, is in the production value – he states that games have “story lines that are gripping, full of suspense, action and adventure which are supported by some stunning visuals, amazing sound effects and a stirring soundtrack to accompany the hero” (Mawer 2011) and his second reason in purely financial “but the movie is over within a few hours while the video game plays for a whopping 50 hours” (Mawer 2011). So the games have all the story line and production value of a movie, but offer better entertainment value by allowing the consumers to extend the time they spend interacting with their favorite media texts.

Professor Thomas De Zengotita’s theories on the effects of media evolution could give further insight into the popularity of games. In an interview about fame and celebrity he speaks about something he calls an act of “fundamental robbery” that has been created by a fame driven media system. The fundamental human need is acknowledgment and he believes that our media society takes this away from the average person stating “the evolution of media of all kinds, in large scale societies (should be seen) as taking the fame or acknowledgement that used to be everybody’s and some how reassigning it to only a few people” (Genier 2011) . With this in mind video games could be seen as way of placating this need to be acknowledged as in the game the player becomes the central focus, their existence within the game is acknowledged and their actions instantly rewarded.

This could explain why adult gamers feel they need to rationalize their game playing to others. Research conducted by Helen Thornham discovered that while many adults play games, many still feel there is a social stigma attached to it and therefore tend to rationalize their game playing as a logical pastime – such as socializing. Those who admitted to playing games regularly and by themselves were often ridiculed, seen as geeky, and their sexual orientation questioned.  Thornham put this reaction down to a cultural issue in the structured adult life that mimics “working lives where every hour has meaning or purpose” (Thornham 2009). Gaming offers a form of escape from the everyday that is seen purely as entertainment, it is therefore unproductive (in the work life sense) resulting in gamers defending their actions through rationalizations.

Finally Jenkins offers further insight into the role of gaming in society. He notes the roles that moral panics have played in the multiple stigmas attached to video gaming – such as violent games producing violent people. He counters this argument by advising that gamers have the ability to distinguish the real from the virtual stating that people “tend to dismiss anything they encounter in fantasy or entertainment that is not consistent with what they believe to be true about the real world”(Jenkins 2006). Unlike Thornton who sees games purely as escapist and fun, Jenkins sees games as a meaningful way to spend time. He sees games as a place for learning about society, a way for people to escape and blow off steam, a way to generate new thought and a way of improving social ties and bonds. All meaningful if not conducive to the production of a commercial goods.

Teenage Paparazzo. 2011. SBS FIlm,  http://www.sbs.com.au/films/movie/10426/Teenage-Paparazzo (accessed 23/10/11).

Jenkins, H. 2006. The War Between Effects and Meaning: Rethinking the Video Game Violence Debate. In Digital generations, ed D. Buckingham. Massachusetts. http://edocs.library.curtin.edu.au/eres_display.cgi?url=dc60263484.pdf (accessed 19/10/11).

 Mawer, K. 2011. Video games - the media of the future. http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/uncategorized/video-games-the-media-of-the-future (accessed 25/10/11).

  Sony Global - Sony Global Headquarters. 2011. http://www.sony.net/ (accessed 25/10/11).

Thornham, H. 2009. Claiming a Stake in the Videogame : What Grown-Ups Say to Rationalize and Normalize Gaming. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies: 445-462. http://con.sagepub.com/content/15/2/141 (accessed 19/10/11).

Woods, S. 2011. Play with Me. In MCCA104-Engaging Media. Perth. Curtin University of Technology.

2.3 Activity 4: What is pop cosmopolitan?

In Pop Cosmopolitanism: Mapping Cultural Flows in an Age of Media Convergence Jenkins makes the distinction between “Locals” and “Pop cosmopolitans” that I found helpful in defining the phrase. He states:

“locals care little about diversity per se but want to hold onto their own traditions. The cosmopolitans recognize that they will not get the diversity they crave “unless other people are allowed to carve out special niches for their cultures and keep them” (Jenkins 2006 quoting Hannerz p.162)

I am not sure I agree that a Pop Cosmopolitan craves media from cultures other than their own because its cool to be different. This could be one extreme but Jenkins also notes the role media institutions play in the generation of “cool” content. He gives the example of Japanese media companies breaking into the American market by targeting their animations to children and running a tight marketing system to expose their audience to other forms of consumables such as comics, movies and merchandise (Jenkins 2006) with great success. Therefore the Americans craving for Japanese animation could be said to have been generated by good target marketing . It could also be said that Japanese animation would no longer be seen as cool and underground by American kids – but as cool and popular, maybe even a little bit mainstream.

Jenkins repeats the idea of access again when he speaks about “Grassroots intermediaries” - another term for people who moved and live in a new country. These people keep links to home,  including  links to their favourite media and as Jenkins states “they play a key role in shaping the reception of those media products” (Jenkins 2006 p.162). In other words your friends or family from other parts of the world introduce you to the media of their country or culture. You like it and seek it out not because its cool to be different but because you enjoyed watching it, and your friends and family enjoy it . It is a sociable experience and finds a common ground between two cultures.

I don’t think Pop Cosmopolitanism happened in vaccume, but is a natural part of life in a multicultural society.

 Jenkins, H. 2006. Pop Cosmopolitanism: Mapping Cultural Flows in an Age of Media Convergence, Fans bloggers and gamers: exploring participatory culture: New York University Press.

2.3 Activity 3: What is an imagined community?

An imagined community is a group of people who are interconnected and bonded by a commonality. They need not have met but in a sense feel tied together through a common circumstance, event or point of view. An imagined community is not bound by geographical location (Srinivasan 2006) but can be influenced by it as a result of globalization:

In the ilecture Dr Jayaprakash described Appadurai’s 5 dimension of globalization as:

Ethnoscapes – the flow of people through immigration, refugees , tourism etc

Technoscapes – rapid movements of technology

Financescape – flow of currency  - markets and stock exchange

Mediascapes – flow of images and information via newspapers, TV, websites etc

Ideascapes – the spread of thought such as the western enlightenment world view - ideas of democracy and freedom etc

 (Jayaprakash 2011)

Imagined communities’ form based on common influences, experiences or attitudes as a result of the global dispersion of information, ideas, images and cultures across national borders.

Jayaprakash, T. 2011. Media across Cultural Boundaries. Week 7: Engaging Media. http://dbs.ilectures.curtin.edu.au/lectopia/lectopia.lasso?-MaxRecords=50&-SkipRecords=0&-Op=bw&ut=2908&CallbackID=928d2167f0cc56656c84409b4f366e45&usr=15055147 (accessed 17/10/11).

Srinivasan, R. 2006. Indigenous, ethnic and cultural articulations of new media. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9: 497. http://ics.sagepub.com/content/9/4/497 (accessed 15/10/11).