Hacktavism - All Together in the Vitual

This article about hacking is my first experience with hacking. The idea that programs could be developed to hack into high up places like NASA which has government programs and secrets. These programs could be detrimental to a government or a corporation, many files could be stolen or destroyed. With such a hash program hurting peoples files it would make it hard to replace them. I was quite confused when they were discussing how hacking was not burglary or theft, just because there is a trace of the hacker left behind unlike in burglary. I was confused how hacking was different then what I thought about hacking, I thought hacking was a way of destroying or something but they consider it something different. I didn't quite understand the view they took on hacking.

Facillitation

Women and Games

Women in the gaming industry are rising, for me, growing up playing games like Mario, from Super Mario, to Mario Party, and Mario Kart. As I grew up being a girl most of my friends didn't play much video games, I also grew up like my friends playing sports. My parents treated video games as a way to get together for some healthy competition on weekend mornings. As a family my favorite memories were the mornings we would compete and play Mario Kart and eventually that developed into Xbox and Wii games. I found the questions asked like Why do female gamer play digital games? What are female gamer perception of themselves and their gaming experience? How do these perceptions influence their decisions to play and purchase digital games? I found these questions interesting especially having friends who game they perceive themselves as one of a kind or bad-ass. They do know they are numbered compared to the male population but they seem to love it. I also find it exhilarating when you beat a boy at their own game, kind of like "nah nah I beat you at your own game."

Erogenous Zones

This article discusses the pornography industry and how it has developed over the years and how is has effected the digital economy. There is a fight going on about how the porn industry goes about being apart of the digital world. Porn is a industry that has spread from print to digital, the digital industry is spreading and cannot stop spreading and allowing people to search it or possible stumble upon it. Groups try to fight the porn industry and looking at the chart adult videos and escort services are two of the largest legal sections of the porn industry these alone being in 20 billion dollars and 11.5 billion dollars. There are people who disagree with the industry but personally if they are helping boost the economy then I can't see how it could be that bad. If people want to search pornography they can choose to do that but there needs to be a way to limit the access to pornography sites in public areas. Places like libraries and and open WiFi networks like in stores and cafes.

Question: How do you think the pornography industry is helping the economy and how do you think it is hurting the economy?

May 30th

It was my 21st birthday....

Biocolonialism, Genomics, and the Databasing of the Population

Biocolonialism  can be seen as a way to take DNA samples from different races for economic or medical reasons. The idea that they were planning on categorizing DNA samples in a database seems kind of cool to me. Personally I think they should just do it for everyone kind of like a census. That way when certain ethnicity and small tribes all over the world change and move or in the case that they die out there will still be a record that one day they did exist. Personally I had no idea places like gene banks existed, I guess I assumed there were labs like this but I didn't know that companies could specialize in being a storage place for these genes. I had heard of the Human Genome Diversity Project but I was never really sure exactly what they did. After reading the article I can see how this could be helpful to science and genome mapping. I can understand how this could be helpful to science, but I ca also understand where certain colonies and small societies can see why they don't want this to happen. They don't want people to have access to their genes for any purpose other than science, they don't want any medical use of their gene and especially no economic use of their genes.

Question: What do you think they could do with these genes that could be harmful to the societies the genes came from? How could this project be altered so that nothing bad could come of it?

White Flight in Networked Pubics

This article discusses the possibility that the choice in social networking site says about the person who chose the cite. Most people don't see the difference they just follow the flow of the new thing. The movement from Myspace to Facebook for me was just because it was a new way to connect with friends. Myspace was the place that people were considered to be left behind. I know that when I started making mew friends in high school I would really wanted to be able to contact them or do fun stuff online I knew at that point I needed to Facebook. Most people now consider Facebook to be a great way to meet people and contact people Myspace kind of fell short in that way. Personally I only used Myspace because I could customize my page and being an artist that was just fun creating new layouts and webpage schemes. I also only used it for the music, now Facebook has allowed us to do pretty much all of that on a nicer more updated format. With linking Spotify and allowing people to customize the timeline with cover photos and so on.

Voices of the Marginalized on the Internet

"New digital technologies are transforming the sense of 'silence' by offering opportunities for traditionally invisible groups, such as the women of South Asia, to find new discursive space where they can voice themselves and thus become visible and make their presence felt." When I read this I immediately related, I am a Tumblr user and as a user you begin to connect with people on a whole new level. You meet by having mutual interests (usually in tv or movies), we can gush about a new thing that we see and they understand us. It is almost like a giant group of nerds and geeks that can connect through the internet and get to know people like us. I know for me it is hard to connect to people unless I have something in common with them. When I was in high school I know I was much more shy than I am now, but the internet allowed me to make friends and allowed me to share my thought and opinions with people who wanted to listen. This connection took my silence in real life and allowed me to share whatever I wanted with the world. The nice thing about Tumblr is that no one is there to judge you or make fun of your interests and thoughts.

Questions:
What do you think the importance of sharing your voice is?
Do you think cyberspace is helping people or is it hurting people?
What sites do you feel comfortable sharing your voice on? What sites do you not?

Thinking Through The Diaspora

Facilitation Day:

Link: http://worditout.com/word-cloud/209288

Thought on the Convergence of Digital Media, Memory, and Social and Urban Spaces

To reach the effects that Casalegno is discussing he says that giving a community or social group a way to communicate is the cause and effect desired. They are focusing on the type of communicating that allows people to share simple software to create a virtual community to create new electronic agoras. Not knowing what agora meant I looked it up to find that it stems from the Greek word meaning central place, the literal meaning being "gathering place" or "assembly." These agoras were commonly known to be the center of athletic  artistic, spiritual and political life in the community. Having an electronic one would be like having a central gathering place where you could share information and meet with people in an electronic setting. Later Casalegno discusses how this Living Memory Project is shaping the social astetics of a community. The word community has changed in so many ways over the years that today what we think of a community is different than how he is meaning in his definition of community. He specifies that sending a message to a forum does not make us a part of a community immediately. He says that using those forms of communication technologies to build communities and societies we are not communication in the distance but we are creating distance in communication.

Asphalt Games

I found the quote, "The guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom," this is interesting to me especially with all of the discussions we have been having in class about the expanding technology and the rate at which we consume this new technology keeps growing and we want the newer better thing faster and faster. Asphalt Games is a location based game in which players vie for territory on an online map of New York City. This game was designed to encourage ordinary New Yorkers to share responses to a public sphere, they wanted a connection to the physical and online world by attaching the game to actual physical public locations. These games have developed into many different hybrids. With the ability to link locations to digital devices allows people to use the physical location in their game or event. They use the example of Flash Mobs, with out the internet the location of the mob would be harder to plan and the spread of the location would take longer. These Flash Mobs depend on a critical mass of people to be successful games, I mean can you imagine seeing a Flash Mob of five people? It really wouldn't have the impact that a Flash Mob of two hundred people would have, plus it would just be more fun, leading back to the game aspect of these asphalt games. As games like these develop many different location based games or social media have sprung, the Facebook check in, when people tweet the location they are at, people are finding different ways to play location games and also share their location with their friends.

Question: Do you think this game was helping bring back playing outside or do you think it was adding to the online use of games?

The End of Geography or The Explosion of Place?

This article discusses the convergence of computers with digital communications and media technologies to create cyberspace. Cyberspace is a place where multi-media skein of digital networks is changing into a social, cultural, and economic ways of life. The internet is just a vehicle in the place we call cyberspace. When I think about the end of geography I don't think of the actual physical geography I consider it to be the idea of geography. For instance when you search the internet for different things you are going places in cyberspace. It may not feel like you are actually traveling but you are moving through a place in the vehicle called the internet to different locations within the internet, this concept of moving is becoming less and less common, when people go into cyberspace it doesn't feel like you are going somewhere because it is not a physical place but it is a metaphorical place. These locations have now become the link to your social life, with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and so on. These location have become your source of entertainment with sites like Hulu and Netflix. Many people don't understand that when the serf the internet they are travelling to different locations in cyberspace and in the place of cyberspace can you understand the concept of creating new technologies.

Question: How do you think that geography will change as cyberspace continues to grow and develop?

Post-Sedentary Space

This article discusses the new public, personal, and professional spaces have evolved with the internet and connectivity. First he discussed the office, using Dilbert as and example, he began explaining that even in the comic Dilbert had a PC at his desk along with a desk phone. With the internet and mobile devices the office space was changed significantly. The professional world could new bleed into the personal and public world. With phones and email people workers can function outside of the office while still working. From personal experience telecommuting changed my Friday's because I was able to come home and see my mom after school. When before she started telecommuting on Friday's she would not get home till five or six at night, with telecommuting she could be working and spending time with her family in the afternoon she didn't have before. Next Mitchell discusses how banking and amazon changed the face of money and department stores.  Banking can now be done at "home" as he put it or now can be done on a mobile phone. The only reason I go to the bank now is to deposit checks, and even now banks are finding ways to deposit checks without having to go to the bank, all you have to do is take a picture of it and send the image to the online mobile banking site. Amazon changed the face of shopping during the dot-com era because who needed to go to the big department stores anymore when you could find anything you possibly desired on one website. To this day I still go to Amazon to buy items, books and computer accessories mostly, especially being in college in a town where not all the stores that you could need are available websites have made the biggest change in my shopping needs. The Post-sedentary space has changed the world of pubic, personal, and professional spaces and began to blur the lines between them, making it more accessible to communicate between those spaces.

Question: Do you think that eventually the lines between the public, personal, and professional spaces will be erased because it is becoming easier to access all of these parts of life all of the time?

Racism a Technology

Technology can be broken down into systems and processes, instead of machines and hardware. Along with systems and processes racism can be broken down into institutions rather than the individual. They begin to discuss how technologies from the industrial revolution began to advance the technology of racism. When barbed wire was patented it helped give the iconography of barbed wire as "prison". This iconography helped people advance their racism, when workers were help back by barbed wire fences the working class then began to get this lower class "below the general public" sense. With the working class being over-represented by people of color the stereotypes and racism  began to surface. During the world war the college campus began to be the place where the technology flourished, with many ethnic studies groups popping up. Young people wanted so bad to identify with an oppressed group. To some point this type of technology is still around today. Groups like this exist on campuses and outside of campuses today. They are less about racism and more about feeling like they wanted to be apart of a group of people just like them.

Question: how do you think racism is apparent today as a technology?

The Database

Last semester we discussed something similar to this about databases. How people are trying to continually categorize everything on the internet or everything in libraries. They discuss how the infinite categories and size of the database would be that it would be impossible to keep up with the amount of stuff that's being made. The database's are growing in size trying to categorize everything. the database can categorize anything you want from multimedia to documents. In the other class we also discussed the use of a library and how it relates to the database. We discussed that a library and how the physical library is slowly being phased out. As technology advances libraries become less useful. especially with the development of databases and the advancement of databases. Fewer and fewer physical books are being needed and the are being digitized so that everyone has access rather than just a few people at a time. The database is adding to the end of the library it is becoming easier and easier to access books through the internet rather than buying of renting the physical book.

Digitextuality

Response:

Digitextuality can be seen throughout new media. Especially how graphics develop through the years the film world becomes more and more digital. Most films today include some type of digital manipulation, processing, and CGI. Also to be a successful film needs to have a sense of realism, while also allowing the audience to escape into an alternate world, finally there needs to be a formal aspect to the movie. The movies that seem to hit all of these aspects seem to be the most believable and successful movies.  Digitextuality also shows up in TV, through TV the best types is shown in commercials, music videos, and science fiction shows. These all share the same aspects that films share the digital manipulation, processing, and CGI. Film and TV share computerized textual production and image manipulation using advanced digital editing. 2 and 3D painting on both films a video is used also. Shows must be naturalistic, fantastic, with realistic images. Shows that can be successful at this are shows like crime shows where there is a feeling that the story is natural or realistic. These crime shows also show realistic images from digital manipulation to acting. Producers are trying to keep people continually connected to the show by tying in the internet with the show, allowing people to view extras, cast interviews, games, past episodes all on the internet. I from a personal experience I feel like I know more about the actors on my favorite shows then I would without the show websites. I was also interested in click theory, this theory is like when you keep clicking on your favorite website moving on a line of links. These links is also like a scrolling theory, where people scroll and scroll mindlessly and continually consuming information important or useless. I feel like a scrolling theory is similar to the click theory in the way that people use social networks and multimedia pages like YouTube and Tumblr. 

Questions:

What aspects of film do you find interesting? What aspects pull you in? What makes you want to watch something (TV, Film, or internet)? 

What about click theory do you agree with? What aspects fit with our culture today?

Web Sphere Analysis &Cybercultural Studies

Questions: I was very interested in the way that they explained the Web Sphere. I was curious as to how other people see the web, and how they think it functions?

Do you see the web as having links as nutrients that feed it so that it can grow and develop , or do you see it more like a brain with the links more like neural pathways?

First Day

First day of class. DTC 475 summer session 2013.