Virtuality, Immersion, Simulacra and Avatars

Virtualy is a computer simulated world, "An aspect of reality that is not material" - Wikipedia, 2009.
You may find that many teenage boys are sucked into the world of XBOX 360, where they dissapear into their bedrooms for hours on end to play virtual games accompanied by the avatars they create online. This fantasy world takes you through pixular adventures, a community based on dishonesty, acting as people we can  only imagine really being. It is a world that exists through peoples imagination and dreams, fiction and fantasy.

In our lecture we created postcards which were sent from Mars, obviously not really sent from Mars but created from using our imaginations, being the crazy Enrique Iglesias fan, mine included Enrique sitting on Mars with a santa hat on... It showed a world of virtuality and dreams, dreams that are for obvious reasons, never going to come true.

Immersion exists purely through virtual reality, being within the virtual reality world. In the late 1980's aned early 90's goggles and gloves were used in order to show and be within a virtual world.
The first state of immersion is marrative immersion, this is an experience which humans commonly do, for example reading a book/magazine, taking them into another world of the imagination.
The second state being stragetic immersion which incorporates gaming, many people that have bought a game close to their own imagination and dreams, often getting to be someone they idolise may find themselves playing on it more than they do spend time in physical reality, totally closing our minds off of everything.
The third state is tactical immersion, to do with being in a trance or day dreaming, a common thing within students.

Simulation is usually an immitation of something real, for example at many arcades you may find a rocket or airplane simulator. Simulation can often be used for such things as training or purely due to entertainment giving a lifelike experience.

Take a look at Sims, a game where you can create a Avatar surrounded by your own family and friends which you decide to design, you decide what happens between relationships, and even life and death, your completely own world. I am one of the victims of Sims, still playing it at the age of 18, its an enjoyable time waster. However if you look at it properly its nothing like the reality of the world at all, and this is perhaps why alot of people enjoy playing these games in there spare time, getting away from everything into a world where they make the decisions.

The video I have posted above shows just how much video games are not like how reality is, how we are letting ourselves enjoy a world which is nothing like our world.

Community, Participation and Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is a community on the World Wide Web, with various websites where the public can share information and stories via videos, blogging and chat rooms on websites such as Facebook, Myspace and Youtube.
These are all websites where you can interact between different users online, you, the public are bassically the people that keep the website going.
However, lets not mistake Web 2.0 with the World Wide Web, Tim Barnes was originally the creator of the World Wide Web, but that doesn't mean the World Wide Web was our first interaction with the Internet. 'Mud and Moo' was a text based online virtual reality where people could interact.

Nowdays, we can access the web through devices that our constantly in our reach, such as mobile phones and laptops, where we can scan our Facebook pages regularly, updating our socail statuses, letting everyone know excatly what we are up too at all times. Now with Iphones we also have access to Apps which have a bigger impact on the sort of websites we can scan.
With websites such as Youtube people are able to upload home videos, talking about there concerns on issues, or just messing around. Alot of people that we see as "Famous" now would not have become celebrities without such websites as Youtube, for example, and new singer Lana Del Ray has just come on the scenes after uploading a selection of videos on youtube. I will upload two videos of hers, one from before and one recent video.

As you can see in the first video she had created it herself with various clips, but over time she has been seen on Youtube and is now on the uprise to become extremely globally famous.

Lets not forget the famous blogger Perez Hilton, who would deffinately not been known today without Web 2.0. Perez Hilton posts blogs online with critical celebrity gossip.

The way that Web 2.0 works is very clever, we, the public are the creators of the web pages, we upload the information and keep the website moving with new stories and fun activities, take Facebook for example, what would it be if we didn't post statuses constantly online?

The internet has become a community where everyone can now interact together at any time, good or bad, atleast now we can keep in contact with old friends and new friends. I am right now contributing to Web 2.0 by writing this blog.



Is it possible for anyone to really have a private life?

What with sites online now such as, Myspace, Bebo, Google, Wikepedia and of course now the typical Facebook, websites where we are willing to let people know what we are doing, constantly. However, are we actually showing are true selves over Facebook, or are we hiding behind a person we want to be, only showing tiny parts of our day to day lives, but look to our friends and family as something with big impact. People without such social networking pages are almost seen as strange and perhaps even out of their time zone, but how has this developed and how is it affecting us?

I have heard some strange sayings lately, one being that, if your not "in a relationship" on Facebook, then your not actually in a relationship at all, totally blowing things our of proportion. Do we really need the internet to validate our everyday lives? Apparently so according to alot of the younger generation. It seems as though young people are communicating alot more within social networking sites than they do face to face, being able to say things they wouldn't usually say otherwise.

Since the age of 12 I have been using all sorts of public, social websites. I guess the fact that we can keep in touch with lost relatives and old school friends is a bonus, but should we be dwelling on the past so much? Go back 30 years, and if you lost contact with someone, that was it unless you bumped into them. Another question that constantly enters my mind is that, if we lived without phones for so long, why do we depend on them so much now? So many secrets and lies are hidden behind these private chat devices, couples cheating each other, friends gossiping about each other, and thats where the online arguing comes in, the fights and threats mostly covering over Facebook walls and inboxes.

I typed in Google and Youtube, "Fights over facebook" and I found myself in a realm of various arguments which developed over Facebook. People were arguing and fighting over some of the most ridiculous things, arguments that seemed to turn into real life confrontation. The video I have contained in this post is of a young girl that got murdered over $20, the argument began over Facebook, containing various threats via statuses. Is this really what our world is coming too? A world where people are getting killed for some of the most tiny and ridiculous things.

I remember when Myspace was one of the top crazes, I was about 14 years old and one of my friends had moved to Harlow, I would go there every weekend to see her at a club for under 18's. Somewhere along the way of these "exciting" visits full of J20 instead of Vodka I managed to make an enemy, her name I will not bring up, but we would argue constantly over Myspace, on Bulletins where everyone could quite clearly see what we was arguing about, it would start up huge arguments within alot of 14 year olds, and I'm telling you now, if there was no such thing as Myspace there would have been no such thing as the arguments.

Cyborgs

We all know the Terminator or Robocop, but whats the real Cyborgs of our time?
The term Cyborg was created in 1960 when Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline used the word in an article about the advantages of self-regulating, human-machine systems, however the term has now been applied to an organism that has different abilities due to the help of technology!
Another description of Cyborgs I have taken from the Oxford Dictionary which explains them as "A person with physical tolerances or capabilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by a machine or other external agency that modifies the bodies functioning an integrated man-machine system".

I found a website online which talk about Ray Kurzweii, a 61 year old scientist who is completely convinced that we will eventually have the technology and biology to know how to be Cyborgs within 20 years. This could mean becoming immortal, imagine noone having to die in 20 years? The scientist has pointed out that artificial pancreases and neural implants are already available to us. He commented in The Sun saying "I and many other scientists now believe that in around 20 years we will have the means to reprogramme our bodies' stone-age software so we can halt, then reverse, ageing. Then nanotechnology will let us live for ever".

So there at two types of Cyborgs, the real ones we use today, and the Fictional ones we regularly see in Sci-Fi movies.

"Cyborgs" that we see around today (and yes they are around, not just in movies) are known to enhance humans normal capabilities, these are items such as:

• Artificial Limbs
• Hearing Aids
• Glasses
• Pace Makers

Without some of these items humans would find it extremelly hard to get on with everyday life, but really do we want to be so reliant on these things, we should actually be in fear of them taking the human body overall. We will then be completely controlled by computers, and I'm pretty sure myself that I do not want another person, a complete stranger in charge of me.

The Fictional Cyborgs are usually seen as "human" looking subjects with atificial robot arms and legs, they usually at some point decide to randomly take their skin off aswell. They always have the ability to take over the world, and are constantly alot more stronger than us.

I turned deaf in one ear after having a virus when I was younger, does this mean when I put a hearing aid in, I then become a Cyborg, if so... Cool.

Neil Harbisson, born in 1982, is a young man who claims he is officaily a Cyborg, was diagnosed with Achromatopsia, which is a disease which means you can unfortunately only see in black and white. In 2002 Neil moved to the UK to study at Dartington College of Arts, where in his second year he started to attend a class called Cybernetics which was given by Adam Montandon. After introducing themselves and Adam finding out about Neil's condition, the pair started to work on what they called an "eyeborg project". It was a camera on Neils head which picked up colours and converted them into sound waves.

So will Cyborgs actually take over the world as we not, will there be a whole new species of humans in 20 years time. I think not for now, we should leave it too the movies.

Interfaces

Deffinition on an Interface= A concept which refers too interaction between to concepts, this may be machines, devices and computer programmes.

 I wanted to point out the fact that interfaces are everywhere, wether we like it or not, what with video cameras and of course now even our mobile phones can track everywhere we go. What with interfaces getting more and more advanced over the years, is this a good thing? Do we really want to have this skill of being constantly tracked? I think not.

We generally don't realise it, as humans we always think we have control over ourselves, however, it is completely true when I say that most modern day interaction and entertainment is made through screens. If you sit on a train, as soon as it comes out of the underground, it seems everyone instantly rushes to get out their phones, and you suddenly have a music tracks of ongoing ring tones.

Anyone in the world today is completely capable of creating a website by using HTML.

As a complete begginner at creating any kind of websites, unless you want to include my amazing MySpace page in that catergory, when my teacher decided to let me know we was going to be creating website pages from bassically complete scratch, I felt a tiny explosion in my brain. We began by using HTML, which is a description of what something is, I remembered when I would use myspace that I would type in simple things such as <b> meaning things would then become bold </b> and <u> making things underlined </u> so I knew the very much basics of HTML. However by the end of my class was was eventually able to create something that looked slightly like a website by using Komodo.

All over the world there are many different types of interfaces, but to sum it up here are the main groups:

• Off Screen
• Hand Held
• Detection
• Desk top/ Screen Based

All of which everyone can generally use.
It seems to me that in the end, there will be more computer based items than there is computers, is it healthy to be that connected with these items?

21st Century News

We have come along way from how news would originally have been transmitted. We can now capture any news story that has come out in an instant, through mobile phones, iPads, TV's and laptops and since these devices were created, news has become alot more in the publics interest. Go back a couple of years and news would have to be orally transmitted or peer-to-peer transmission, some people wouldn't find out news for months, it would also be impossible to read newspapers if you wasn't in London.
Luckily news now comes out frequently and regularly, theres almost nothing we don't know about.

But is there ever any hazards of having 24 hour news? How about the pressures on the journalists that are having to keep up with all the regular income. We may find that because they are wanting to write all the stories up so quickly, we could get some misleading impressions and wrong information. There is also of course the cost, 24 hour news is extremely expensive to keep up with.

However with all the different websites and channels, such as Youtube and Twitter, almost anyone can now become a blogger. Alot of people on Youtube have made Channels where they will take stories they have seen on the news and give their views on it. The video I have uploaded is a clear example of public journalism. A person of the public has seen the incident and took a video to broadcast from the scene. Bassically, if you have a mobile phone, with a video camera, congratulations! You are now a journalist.

Are we loosing are traditional ways, such as news papers to the internet? I think so, it is just so much easier to get to now, and the stories are alot more visual. Although we have no decision on what news is aired, interested in it or not it will be shown, as typical humans, we have more concern in our lives than others, but is the news making us decide what is important to us, and how we should judge it?

Overall without news we would have no idea about what is really going on in the world we live in today.

What is Technology doing to us? (Part 2)

The world of technology is constantly changing and expanding, but is it changing who we are today? And actually affecting the way we are originally "meant to be". Technology, as great as it is, and as much as it helps every day to day task, is affecting the way humans communicate and work.

Rememeber that wonderful place called the libary? My parents used to constantly take me there as a child, I would enjoy all the different genres and stories I was surrounded by, but now-days people don't even think to take a trip to the libary, why would you when all the information you need is now found on the oh so famous, Google! I Libarys dissapeared, would anyone even take notice?
How about sitting with the family watching a Video infront of the TV? Bet you haven't done that in a long time, but yet again, why would you need to when you can download any movie online. We no longer feel interest in finding out news and interesting facts, because we can find everything we need to know quickly and easily without even reading the rest of the facts.

It has also taken to my notice, that instead of meeting with old friends face-to-face for lunch, we find ourselves communicating over the internet on such websites such as "Facebook" and "Myspace". It's the same with arguing, people who are now called "Keyboard Warriors" do not confront with people in real-life, but instead send messages online, sometimes seen as "Cyber Bullying".

Only a few decades ago the internet didn't even excist, so why would we find it so hard to live without it now? A couple of friends from University have said that they find it hard to concerntrate on work because they constantly seem to end up going back on socail websites such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. They have become more interested in local gossip than their own education.

I have never been good at maths, but with cheap calculators selling everywhere, why should I be?

Words are spelt for us with spell check, food is blended for us with a blended, communication is made within seconds with a phone.
Technology is making us lazier and fatter, we are no wiser just because we find all our information on Google. Sometimes I think its a good idea just to put all technology down for a moment and take a look at the greater things in life, the real world.