Nov 11

Week 7 – Who am we? Fictional selves online.

After doing this week’s reading, one of my many thoughts was that Sigmund Freud would have had a great time studying how human beings operate on the internet if he were alive today.

Anonymity online is one of the biggest elephants in the room of our time and is a massively discussed concept. Now like never before, human beings can interact with countless other human beings whilst being completely anonymous doing so. Well, I say completely anonymous but that may not necessarily be true to a certain extent. However, the vail of anonymity has led to people interacting online in far different ways to which they do so in real life, or ‘offline’. Anonymity is like a shield, a cloak, a disguise, people can be whoever they want to be online, be as harsh or as kind as they like without repercussions. It can be described as different aspects of peoples true personalities coming out in a ‘safe’ place for them to do so rather than in the real world.

This idea which I wish to look into is best explained in Sherry Turkle’s ‘Who am we?’ where she interviews a college junior ‘Doug’ who explains how he has several ‘MUD’ accounts where he takes on different characters/personalities depending on which he’s currently logged in to. Logging in and out of an account, he says, is like “I split my mind…. I can see myself as being two or three or more. And I just turn on one part of my mind and then another when I go from window to window.”

This weeks reading looks at this idea and how it and online anonymity has created the concept of ‘trolling’. However I wish to focus on the fascinating idea of people creating ‘other selves’ online rather than the darker products of online anonymity such as trolling.

I myself am no stranger to people making up entirely fictional personalities on the internet through which they interact with others, this is not to say I have done this myself of course. It can be said that the rise of online games, particularly MMORPG’s such as the one ‘Doug’ plays in Sherry Turkle’s essay, has facilitated and allowed more and more people to go online and live through alternate personalities. However my story was not quite so simple, rather the people involved were brought together through a game but the character was built outside of it.

In the mid-2000s, as many nerdy teenagers do, I played a lot of online games. One of which, as one inevitably does if you play a game for so long, led to me making friends with people who played on the same server as I did. As we grew to know each other we started regularly communicating through a shared skype instant messaging chat room, which to this day still has 15 people in it who continue to communicate even though none of us play the game anymore. We spent around 2 1/2 years interacting, playing games together, talking about what was happening in each others lives, all the while living thousands of miles apart. After 2 of those years however, several members of the group slowly began to become suspicious of one of them. This person had been such a prominent member of our little online community for so long we were careful to doubt them. It soon came to light however, after peices of their life story didn’t add-up, that their entire ‘online self’, everything they had told us about themselves, life events, all we’d discussed and shared, was a lie.

It was an odd feeling, someone you thought you knew, a good friend, was a work of fiction, didn’t exist, never had, and to top it off that person was now replaced by another person, the first persons offline real self, that you now had to get to know all over again.

Was what they did wrong? For ease, lets call this person ‘Tom’.

In his ‘outing’ Tom confessed that he did what he did at first as a prank, but as the community got to know him he didn’t want to leave it and simply stuck with the false persona and it grew from there. He didn’t do it out of malice, he genuinely valued the friendships he’d created, and borrowed ideas from stories he’d read or watched to keep up his illusion.

In the end, everyone forgave him, some found it funny, some felt genuinely betrayed. It raises very interesting questions about the morality of creating a fictional self online. People were hurt, no one likes to be lied to, but it gave ‘Tom’ an escape from his real life, to a life he preferred. Does this justify his actions? Could it be considered a kind of ‘trolling’ of an online community? Perhaps, it is the intentional conceitedness that trolls use to get reactions out of people but minus the malice in the intent. It certainly wasn’t the dark picture of ‘trolling’ that the Radio 4 clip; Digital Human: Transgression paints in it’s investigation of the concept.

What I do know however is that I got a very good lesson in the what online anonymity allows people to do.

Nov 3

What is Web 2.0?

I was, as I’m sure many of my fellow bloggers this week were, rather confused by the concept that the internet can be defined as having two ‘iterations’ in the form of Web 1.0 and 2.0 over its history. This is most likely because we all primarily started using the internet after the ‘dot-com crash’ of 2001, which I also only first properly learned about in my research this week.

Web 1.0 is what the internet was before the dot-com crash of 2001. With the rise in popularity and use of the internet in the late 80s and through the 90s there was a mad rush to move onto the new technological platform by companies. The content and websites on the internet was dominated by big business corporations and government bodies, millions of dollars were invested in online start up companies and some of the web giants that exist today such as eBay and Amazon were born during this time. As Tim O’Reilly in his article ‘What is Web 2.0?’ describes, these sites, such as ‘Doubleclick’ were focused on ‘the notion that the web was about publishing, not participation; that advertisers and consumers ought to call the shots’. He refers to the websites of web 2.0 as serving ‘the long tail’; the masses of smaller internet companies and users, instead of ‘the head’ the big companies and advertisers that the 1.0 generation did.

Web 1.0 seemingly ended with the dot-com crash. In 2001 the economic bubble surrounding the internet and all the investment that went into it burst. Internet start-up companies that had had millions of dollars in investment without actually making any money crashed and burned and websites of the Web 1.0 generation died out, such as ‘pets.com’. And so the era of Web 2.0 was ushered in, the web we know today, the socially charged web where sites such as Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, YouTube and Bit-torrent dominate. Unlike the centralized, corporately dominated Web 1.0, Web 2.0 focuses on the sharing of content between users through websites that provide ‘services’ over which to do so.

Here is a nice little video where it is all explained in pictures and I can stop rambling.

The change in the internet from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 can be seen, generally, as a good thing. We have seen the democratisation of the internet, from top down information distribution to information being distributed between users through websites that offer the ‘service’ for us to do it through. These websites gain money through allowing advertising on their websites and everyone goes home happy.

You do have to question however, the drawbacks of the democratisation of information creation on the internet, or in reference to last week’s study, the drawbacks of users becoming ‘produsers’. As highlighted by Steven Colbert in the Video posted on this weeks syllabus page, Wikipedia, an open source information website, is easily edited by a group of users to give false information. Wikipedia and the internet in general is now the main source of information for the masses today. A small portion of those masses choose to add to and modify the information they find on there, but what are their motives and what are their credentials? As information on Wikipedia is crowd-sourced it can’t be trusted to be accurate, we don’t know if a Doctor wrote the article on Brain Tumors or a Hair-Dresser did. When an article is edited we don’t know if the person did it to share their knowledge on the subject or deliberately provide false statements for ‘shits and giggles’.

It can be argued that as it is crowd sourced a median will be found where after thousands of edits by different people the information will be all perfectly accurate and true. Henry Jenkins’ blog article on ‘Collective Intelligence vs. The Wisdom of Crowds’ certainly supports this idea and gives good reason as to why it works but the same can’t be said for lesser known, rarely visited articles.

 

Oct 13

Forms of New Media – Beyond Facebook

When asked to think about what forms of new media are out their today, many would surely respond with answers along the lines of Facebook, BBC iPlayer and Reddit. These however, are not themselves media, they are platforms upon which media is shared and distributed. In Jay David Bolter’s essay on Remediation and the Desire for Immediacy, Bolter defines ‘new media’ as forms of old media that are being made, shared and presented on new platforms, often ‘remediating’ old media.

So yes, forms of new media are these platforms such as social networking, online blogging, forums, digital and on-demand TV, etc. They are so because they bring new ways of creating, sharing and interacting with the types of media we have always known, images, text and film.

These mediums that media is presented on are forever changing and currently, much like the advancement of typewriter to the printing press, the internet is threatening to take over all (or at least most) mediums of media output. With the rise of the internet it has presented many challenges to older mediums such as TV and newspapers, causing many to believe these platforms may eventually die out as all forms of media become readily accessible over the world wide web.

New media today is watching TV on your laptop, reading a newspaper on your tablet pc, updating your status or blogpost from your phone, watching on-demand programming through your internet-capable TV.

It makes you wonder what will come next, what will be the next form of new media? Can you imagine a world without Facebook? Of course you can, unless you’re below 10 years old. However what I mean to say is what will eventually kill off Facebook? Much like Bebo and myspace that Facebook outperformed, it too has to have an end right?

Bolter, in his essay, describes how newer remediations develop on from older ones, by still remaining faithful to the old medium and its content whilst offering improvements.

‘Creators of other electronic remediations seem to want to emphasise the difference rather than erase it. In these cases, the electronic version is offered as an improvement, although the new is still justified in terms of the old and seeks to remain faithful to the older mediums character.’ 

This can be seen in things such as new on-demand TV services. The online sites that offer these are offering TV, the content of TV, only better because you have control over when you watch it and it is more easily available. It can also be seen in how Facebook killed off it’s predecessors, it was faithful to offering what the old mediums did but it offered a better service, a more user friendly platform that eventually became more popular.

So what will come  after Facebook? If we look at how forms of new media have come about in the past up until now, as explained by Bolter, it won’t be anything drastically different. It will be something that offers the same sorts of services Facebook does, but better. However Facebook is so ingrained into contemporary society, such a dominant force on the internet, I believe it will take a rather large advancement in some new form of technology before we saw an end to the Social Network. This advance would have to be so drastic it would be easier to create something new than adapt the platform; much like the invention and rise of the internet that brought about Facebook itself.

References

Jay David Bolter, (2000). ‘Remediation and the Desire for Immediacy’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 6(1): 62-71.

Sep 30

How I use Digital Media

On a regular day to day basis I use a variety of different websites for different purposes. For organising events and keeping in touch with friends I use Facebook, for keeping in touch with the family 200 miles away I like to use Skype. When procrastinating I can usually be found browsing the massive information sharing sight of Reddit and for all my news I go to The Guardian online website.

I also use the web for downloading or streaming a plethora of different TV shows and films as well as playing the occasional online game.