Virtual worlds

In the lecture, we were introduced to the GAME that is “Second Life”. I had previously been intorduced to this briefly in Psychology at A Level, however i learnt a lot more about the actual happenings of the GAME this time round.

I was aware that people created characters of themselves, well i say of themselves.. what i mean is what they want themselves to look like. But what i wasnt aware of was that they actually paid their hard earned REAL life money into getting Linden Dollars (which is the currency of Second Life) to make their characters better, for example buying designer clothes. What questions me is if theyre willing to spend money on a GAME… why cant they just spend it in REAL life? Is their REAL life so rubbish and boring that they have to do this as a way of feeling saticfied with life. In the documentary we watched in Psychology, this didnt seem to be the case. People that played this had families and such but still spent almost all their hours on this GAME, which i find to be very selfish of them… they have a REAL life and a REAL family to take care of why cant they be saticfied with that, instead they have to create a new life for themselves… what’s the point?

Also what slightly disturbs me a little is that on Second Life, people can make their characters have sex with eachother and even get married!  It made me laugh when i heard the story of a man and a woman that met through Second life and got together in REAL life and then she caught him having sex with another woman, or should i say character, in Second Life and left him… how pathetic does that sound.

 What gets me even more is that now they have a TEEN second life!! … this is a sure fire way to get rid of childhood obesity isnt it.. inventing a game that a child can sit and play 24/7. Also wouldnt something like this encourage children to be unsociable sure they can meet and chat to people on the game but its not really the same as getting out of the house and experiencing REAL life is it. As if the REAL world isnt bad enough for image with celebrities apparently showing the perfect image but now games are trying to put a perfect image in our heads. As my lecturer said there isnt any fat, ugly or old people on second life, so if theres a Teen second life aswell as an adult second life, surely this is setting a bad example to youngsters who are very impressionable when it comes to image.

So really my question is … what is the point of this … what do people really get out of this GAME … is it even a GAME to these people or do they actually see it as a Second life, a chance to do life again.

 

2nd artefact – 1st website

After being introduced to Dreamweaver, it was on to create a simple website that includes our statistic images with links between them and links to other websites. I think the thing that again i found most difficult was remembering to save each page so that links and pages work when you go to preview them.

After a comment from Mez about my images, it sparked an idea that i will have a page for a picture and then on the next page there is an explaination as to what the word on the picture means, this way whoever views them will understand what the word means rather than leaving them in the dark.

 One thing i would have done differently whilst creating my website was to make the images the size i wanted by using Photoshop, instead i just resized each one every time which not only was a bit of a pain but was also very very time consuming. Also by doing this it would have enhanced my Photoshop skills that i will need later on when it comes to creating the final artefact.

Surveilance and privacy!

I always knew that what ever i did was tracked on the internet but i didn’t know to wot extent this was …

I’m a regular user of Facebook and although I rarely add pictures on there myself, all of my friends do and tag me in the pictures of theirs that I’m in. I didn’t see a harm in this but as the lecture went on i found one fact quite worrying… If you delete a photo off of Facebook, it still remains in their database and also when you sign up to Facebook and click the little agreement box, you give the rights of anything you put on your Facebook whether its photos of yourself or videos you have made (a strong reason why i don’t particularly want to put my work on my colour group’s Facebook account when it exists… i don’t want to unwillingly give away the rights to something i made!)

Similarly, the issue of privacy on such networking sites is debateable. What i mean by this is people control what content about themselves they put onto their profiles, so really they’re as private as you want them to be and everyone knows that anyone can view ur profile…there is the option of setting your profile to private so only your friends can see it. So really your profile can be as private as you want it to be.

However, one issue that was brought up in a video we watched was how employers sometimes look upon a person’s website to see the real person before hireing them. I think this is rather ridiculous because Facebook is a place for people to show who they really are (some people dont and lie) however, everyone has two sides to them… a professional side and a personal side both are usually very different. So if an employer was to judge whether to hire a person based on their facebook profile, they’re not going to be seeing the professional side of that person thus it isnt fair just because the person has a life outside of work.

Another part of the lecture was to do with surveilance and although people know about security cameras, i think people would be shocked to see how many are actually watching our every move. I know that i was shocked when i set about doing my video for 110mc. I worked as a group and together we wanted to show how much people are monitored through technologies such as CCTV cameras.

Dreamweaver

Today, i was introduced to dreamweaver… I was never really good with websites and technical sides of things, but i was pleasantly suprised at how easy it was to make a website. The only thing i found a little tricky was remembering to save each individual page when i had done something to it… the times i got annoyed because it didnt work just becaue i kept forgetting this simple thing.

Other than that continuous silly mistake everything worked in the end and im quite looking forward to incorporating all the elements that we have learned to eventually create a functioning website that could, in the future, actually be put onto the internet for everyone to see. I just have to remember to save every page individually or ill be trying to figure out what is wrong for hours!

History of the Internet Lecture

Its amazing how you can use something day in day out yet not really know anything about it

I had never heard or Arpa net or Netscape, i thought it had always been Microsoft that basically owned the internet, i suppose this is because thats how it has always been for me. Because by the time i came to use and familiarise myself with the internet Netscape had lost out to Microsoft as they gave the internet away for free.

I also never knew that the internet was once non commericalised, these days everything revolves around the internet, you sit and watch television shows and at end of it they’ll almost always read out a website you can visit to get more information. Not only can we now use the internet to get information but it too has become a source of entertainment with iplayers and sites such as youtube. I find it quite hard to think back to the time when youtube didnt exsist or wasnt popular 

Actually, I find it hard to think of a time where i didnt use the internet period!

Music Industry Lecture

I was quite looking forward to the music industry lecture because i love music. However i didnt realise how badly downloading was effecting the music industry, i was aware downloading happened and was causing a decrease in the market but to have such an effect that 2,700 music shops have now closed down, it was a bit of a shock.

 But then i try to think back to the last time i actually bought a CD and realised i couldnt remember when that was! because the last time i remember buying music was from Itunes and its not like i couldnt have found the CD in a shop .. i just simply couldnt be bothered to go out and look for it! and although Itunes gives some money to the artist so theyre not completely losing out on profits to illegal downloading, i now realise this doesnt stop good old CD shops from closing. 

One thing that got me thinking though is that if people didnt want to go to the shops and buy a physical CD then its highly likely they’re not going to want to pay for something that is just a file…something they cant actually touch…something that could be gone if accidently deleted or their computer crashes. Although its illegal, its quite easy to see why people would choose to download for free rather than pay for it.

1st assignment =) i didnt panic!

Here is my slideshow of still images of statistics about certain words

http://www.flickr.com/photos/34516408@N03/show/

Did You Know – Statistics video

In our lecture we were showed a video that was based around statistics of life. I found this video particularly interesting because of the statistics portrayed in it.

For example one of the statistics on the video i found interesting was “there are over 200 million registered users on myspace, if Myspace was a country it’d be the 5th largest in the world”. I found this one particularly interesting because I am a user of Myspace and knew that there were alot of other users on it, however I didnt realise that there was that many users that brought together would be the 5th largest in the world.

Similarly, another statistic that shocked me slightly was “Today the number of txt messages sent and received everyday, exceeds the total population of the planet”. I send alot of texts in a day but this statistic made em think about how many I send and how many the rest of the world send but i never thought it would exceed the planets population!

A third statistic that had a similar effect on me was “during this presentation 694,000 songs were downloaded illegally”. The video was only 5 minutes long so for that many songs to have been downloaded in that time it made me think about how much money record labels are losing out on just because people didn’t want to pay for a CD.

I liked the video because it had many aspects that i could relate to and statistics that made me think about them rather than think its just another statistic

Photoshop

This is possibly the most tricky piece of software ive ever used…. I tried to have a go with photoshop on my brother’s computer a couple years ago and didnt really get it so i was quite looking forward to actually learning how to use it.

After the workshop, i was a little bit wiser on the photoshop front but still pretty unsure. When i got back to halls, i tried to fiddle about with a picture and it went pretty horribly wrong … oops. It was so bad that i didnt even bother to save it and waste my laptop’s nice memory.

I really hope i can get some form of skills on photoshop before the final artefact is due … please be my friend by the end of term photoshop!!

My first wordpress blog

In our first term two lecture, we were introduced to a number of people, websites and videos such as Stefan Sagmeister, ted.com, gapminder.org and Stan’s café.

 

The lecture given by Stefan Sagmeister was quite humorous as certain designs that he showed the audience were comical. For example the speech bubble design created by a guy from New York who printed 5000 speech bubbles and left them around the city for people to write on and some of the things that were written on them were funny, i.e the starbuck logo saying “have you seen my nipples?”. Stefan chose to show the audience such designs because it made him happy.

 

A design that makes me happy, although its more of a personal possesion, is the iPod. Developed over time from a simple Walkman and mp3 player, the iPod makes me happy because its small, convenient, and it allows me to listen to the songs that a love all in one place anywhere and anytime I want. Also if I don’t feel like listening to music, its got games on it, such as solitaire, that I can also play to pass some time and these too make me happy (unless im losing)