My Second Life Experience

The first time I heard about Second Life was when I suddenly lost contact with my sister last summer. She switched off all her phones and locked herself in her apartment. The only way to communicate with her was through email. When she revealed that she moved her “first life” to Second Life, I decided to create an account as well. I have to admit that I found the game equally addicting. I even bought myself an enormous yacht, which wouldn’t fit in the marina and made a lot of friends. I enjoyed the idea that I could have a second identity in a world just as diverse as the real one. At the cost of about $30, I could pretend to be a multi-millionaire in a fictitious world with real economy.

The recent Media & Technology class devoted to Second Life brought my character back to life. Although working in groups in Second Life is not as simple as in the real life, it is certainly enjoyable. I wouldn’t mind to do it again. I hope there is an Adventure Club of some sort in Second Life which I would really like to join.

My teammates were: Allan Benedict, Chelsea Burke and Darren Tam (Group A).

We only managed to visit a domestic university (DePaul), a foreign university (Warsaw University), a Star Trek Museum and Hemingway’s house.

E-de(m)ocracy

Democracy is far from perfect, however it is the best system we came up with so far. In various forms, it has been adopted in many countries around the world. Since the society is better regulated in the real world, Internet users are subjected only to a small portion of the democratic law. World Wide Web makes it not only easier to maintain anonymity to a certain extent, but also spread ideas and share files on foreign servers, where law is different. Martin Lister observed that “the essentially participatory and interactive elements of the pre-web Internet clearly suggest attractive homologies with Hebermas’s description of the idealised public sphere.” A question arises, how ideal is this public sphere?

Having access to the Internet, one can actively participate in discussions on virtually every topic. He can express his feelings and ideas freely and even though a libel and copyright infringement are serious offences, the chances are weak that he is going to be caught. Peer-to-Peer programs and torrent sites are the record companies’ nightmares. They take away a vast fraction of their profits and understate the statistics of records sold. While a person stealing an album from a record store probably won’t get very far, people stealing on the Internet are extremely hard to control. For every closed torrent site or delegalized P2P programme, five new emerge. Is this the idealized kind of democracy Lister talks about? Virtual public sphere resembles rather a Frank Miller’s comic book, Sin City.

Internet is a place where everyone can find something for himself, no matter how bizzare it may be. While analysing the Internet culture, it is essential to look at the both sides of the coin. Culture jamming, though entertaining, is often illegal. A good example is the recent spoof of the MacBook Air commercial. Internet may be perceived as a gigantic country. The bigger the country is, the more difficult it is to control its citizens, while maintaining a sense of democracy. In these terms, Internet is undoubtly a democratic place.

Diplocercides

I have come across a Wikipedia article that not only required expanding but also needed some serious grammar changes. I have never heard of a creature called Diplocercides and I found this Wikipedia article through “Random article” search. Unfortunately, there are no images or drawings of that genus of fish, since it has extincted nearly 400 million years ago. I did some “minor changes” which included changing phrases such as “it was belonged” to “it belongs” and words such as “fishes” to “fish”. Perhaps the author did not know that the order of fish called Coelacanth was thought to be extinct for the last 100 million years until the discovery of a few living species around the world in the 20th century.

All you need is an idea

The web enables us to be those who we cannot be in real life. It contributes to the creation of multiple identities. My Second Life profile is far from representing me as a real person. In SL, I own a yacht (it wasn’t easy to find a spot for it in a marina), a porsche and a condo in a fancy district. I have lots of friends who are equally unreal as I am. Yet, there is one feature which unites us. It is playing the game of pretending. I also post messages on various forums under fake names and beliefs. Just for the fun of it. Or perphaps something more?

Since the development of mass media, we have begun to have more idols. For some, it is Brad Pitt and for others the dancer from the “Evolution of Dance” video on YouTube. The World Wide Web made it possible for all of us (assuming we have access to the Internet) to become stars of pop-culture. All we need is a unique idea and a basic knowledge of the Internet. Those virtual attractions have helped a global fandom culture to emerge.

Even though we strive to be unique and different from the rest of the population, we tend to divide ourselves into groups where the only criteria of belonging is personal taste. Perez Hilton is an example of a celebrity created by people. His blog is shocking and bizarre, yet he managed to gain sympathy of millions. By posting news from the celebrities’ personal lives, he gained an international recognition. He became a star, having very diverse fans and groupies.

Is cherishing a man who reports on celebrities right? When did he become a celebrity? The concept of a celebrity is losing its former boundaries. Nonetheless, it is essential to point out that those boundaries have been continually since the development of the Internet. The possibility of becoming a superstar is closer than ever. Just as The Beatles used to sing, “All you need is love”. Except now, all you need is an idea. And love will come by itself.

Amusing ourselves to death – literacy is passé

It is no secret that people prefer to watch television rather than read books. It has many advantages; it is less demanding and requires far less concentration. In addition, like no other medium, it gives an opportunity to have a snack on a comfy couch while watching a movie or simply being entertained by one of our favorite shows. All we have to do is sit back, relax and let others entertain us. Books require more attention and are subjects of interpretation. Whether we enjoy the unique choice of words, so characteristic to each writer or simply follow the plot, the idea is the same – entertainment. Yet books provide a different kind of entertainment from television, Internet or comics. Written text is more demanding and above all, rewarding. Who doesn’t like the mildly euphoric state after turning the last page of a good book? Television and comics deprive us of that experience.

The world has been gaining pace since the beginning of the XX century. It all comes down to the fact that we have much less time and energy to use fine arts for entertaining purposes. Hence the growing productions of dull comedies, cliche love stories, and degradation of culture as a whole. Mass media, as the name suggests, is meant to target mass and undemanding audiences. As Neil Postman pointed out, we are “amusing ourselves to death” and we will eventually turn into troglodytes, mindlessly sitting in front of TV screens. Perhaps Scott McCloud’s idea that “words and pictures together are considered, at best, a diversion for the masses, at worst a product of crass commercialism” (p. 140) supplements Postman’s theory.

Though it wouldn’t be fair to completely reject and criticize pop culture. It has a very practical function in our daily life, however it is being excessively promoted and simply omnipresent. The so-called higher culture is not a very encouraging alternative due to its marginalized presence.

Though comics are just an expansion of text, they interfere with our imagination as everything is already drawn and pre-imagined by the author. Nonetheless, they certainly contribute to the diversification of culture and arts in general. It is the intensiveness of the mass media that is worrying.

It is widely believed that the media shrink the world and enhance a worldwide communication. Though it would be rather difficult to argue with that statement, I find it hard to believe that the media create a unified community, defined by promoting a free flow of information. Martin Lister holds that the “shared online spaces allegedly provide a sense of ‘cyber community’ against the alienations of contemporary life.” Lister adds to this rather risky statement that new media give us “the removal of information and communication from central authority, control and censorship.” I find these two concepts to be very far from the truth.

First of all, the “new media” tend to limit our true contact with the outside world.  I speak from experience and I have a hunch that I am not an exception. Instead of calling a person, I prefer to text him or her or just send an email – it’s quicker and can always be edited before sending. Rather than going to a kiosk to buy a newspaper and having a small talk with the shop assistant, I’d rather read it online… for free. Instead of making lengthy, thus pricey international phone calls, I use Facebook or an instant messenger to contact some of my friends. Though this way I can save some time and money, can we actually call it communication? Studies show that over 50% of a written message is misinterpreted and that 93% of communication is non-verbal. In various forms of digitalized communication, it is often difficult to recognize sarcasm or even some of the most basic emotions. The new media certainly increase the speed of communication but they also deprive it of emotions, gesticulation, body language and articulation. We might as well talk to robots.

In addition, lack of censorship in the modern world is a myth. Apart from the clear division of media into leftist and rightist, numerous communities do not have access to the truth. When a Chinese person types in Google “Tiananmen”, he or she will not learn much about the massacre that took place in 1989. Similarly, the news coverage in Cuba is limited to local news and the information from beyond the iron curtain are filtered by the oppressionist government.

It appears that technological progress, as everything, has its disadvantages. The media are still a fairly new subject and it should remind us to approach it with reserve.

New media are as old as old media

Defining new media is not as easy as it might seem. First of all, how can we define new? We tend to say that electricity is a rather new invention or that the latest update to Norton Antivirus is new or that fire is fairly new, looking from a perspective of “only” a few thousand years. Therefore, “new” has no real boundaries. It’s a matter of one’s interpretation. In my interpretation, there is no “new media,” just as there isn’t any “old media.” Is a website created two minutes ago a new medium, making one that was brought to life ten minutes ago an old medium? In my belief, media in general are new. In fact, they are much more modern than any other branch of market.

Though one might count the media’s age from the invention of a printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the early XV century or from the first mail system developed in Persia in the V century BCE, the first breakthrough in the media business was the invention of a telegraph in the early XX century. Information was finally sent significantly quicker and the electronic signals made the world much smaller. Another crucial invention was the radio, followed by television and finally Internet. Even though some of these inventions are nearly a century old, mass media law has not yet fully dealt with the copyright law. In addition, while radio, Internet and telephone are easily broadcast throughout the world on the same wavelengths, television still remains divided into three major systems: NTSC, PAL and SECAM. It shows how new and still obscure to us these media are.

New Media is being primarily defined as digital. The digital is rapidly conquering analogue, however it does not mean it is better. A good example is music, where the analogue players offer a much better sound quality from even the best compressed digital audio files. Peter Gabriel and Neil Young confirm the idea that digital is not necessarily better. Similarly, it appears that digital photography will not replace the analogue 35mm film anytime soon. Its quality is roughly four times better from a Full HD picture.

The media all around us are certainly new and at the same time rather old. Whether we type an email or listen to an mp3, we are reiterating what our past generations did, though in a different way. Of course the transfer of information in the digitalized society is much faster but it still remains the very same kind of transfer that was used hundreds of years ago. Only the method is different. Perhaps someone will invent a yet another way to communicate in a few years but it will still be probably based on the one our ancestors used a few centuries ago.  While the digital media are certainly newer from the analogue ones, do they qualify to bear the name of “new media”? In my opinion they are just the same.