ICIS – Katie's view

Another blog on an article written by Henry Jenkins. (Jenkins, a professor of communication, journalism, and cinematic arts at USC, is a self proclaimed ACA fan, which he describes as a part fan, part academic. He has written about a dozen books on media and culture. For his complete bio on himself, see his website at: http://www.henryjenkins.org/aboutme.html) I like his style, so I decided to look to him when this Kony 2012 thing came out.  Here it is if you haven’t watched it, you should:

I first heard about this on Facebook. The Kony video was going rampant and people were changing their profile pictures. The critics started immediately, with the quips that people were posting pictures that said “I watched a 30 minuet move, and now I’m a social activist” Jenkins in his article “Why youth are drawn to Invisible Children: Prefiguring Kony 2012”  refers to this as slacktivism.  Jenkins recognizes this point, but he also sees the whole Kony 2012 explosion in a different way.  He sees is as a way that the youth can get socially active.  It has been a concern for many years that the youth do not seem at all interested in politics, and society as a whole would benefit if the youth would educate themselves and go out and vote.  Jenkins sees this he recognizes that “talking to members of Invisible Children shows how previous IC movies indeed played important roles in helping young people become socially active, though not always in clear, immediate ways.”  I definitely agree that videos like this could launch youth into action, I just fear that people will blindly follow the one side of the story they are being feed.  I mean, there are sob stories like this around the world, but also in the slums of the United States.  I agree that Kony is a terrible human being, and something should be done, but there are so many more stories just like this around the world.  I personally think that that our efforts should be more toward empowering the people of these nations.  Educating them and giving them the ability to defend themselves will do the whole world more good than killing Kony, because his death will only leave an opening for another, just as horrible, leader to take his place.

I fear however that the recent news of one of the co-founders getting into legal trouble will squash the possibilities of the Kony movement (check out this Huffington Post article, if you don’t know what I am talking about).  All of the people who I knew had supported the movement have become eerily quiet on the topic recently.  It makes me wonder if this fad would have died out on it’s own anyways, or if it would have taken root.  The video cardinally had a large effect on those who watched it.

The Internet has changed everything.  The other day my daughter was asking me about how someone got pregnant, and I managed to avoid the question, because, well, I had not prepared myself to have the birds and the bee’s speech and I needed more time.  That night I hopped online and watched YouTube videos of people giving the birds and the bee’s speech so that I could feel better prepared the next time she asked me about something like that.  But the Internet is full of horrible parenting advice as well.

Have you seen the video of the dad shooting holes into his daughter’s laptop?  Facebook parenting: for the troubled teen.

It exploded on Facebook about a month ago (then died out, as most one hit wonders do).  Nonetheless, it has been sitting in the back of my mind for a while now.  All of my friends who posted the video glorified this dad; saying that he was showing tough love and more parents should be like him.  I could not disagree more.  This dad is an example of why our youth do not respect their parents.  How can he do exactly what he is scolding his daughter for doing and expect her to respect him for it?  He is upset because she posted a Facebook post about what a terrible parent he is, so his response is to make a YouTube video about what a terrible daughter she is, and he uses a gun to prove his point.  It doesn’t make sense to me at all.  I agree that parents need to put their foot down with their children, and that there are many children who are too spoiled these days, but I simply do not believe that this dad is amazing.  I think he is a hothead and immature and should not use the Internet to punish his child.  I am a firm believer in an eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind.

If you are interested, here is an interesting article  entitled “Father Shoots Daughter’s Laptop: Now What?”  that critiques this dad’s parenting style.

Publishing written papers onto a hypertext has been an interesting experience.  I have done two of these types of works: a personal hypertext and a Podcast Hypertext.  There are several things that I liked:

1. The ability to link to ideas/pages/references of other people
2. Adding pictures or YouTube videos definitely adds to the presentation to make it a full experience.
3. It’s different

What I didn’t like:

1. The amount of time it takes to create the hypertext takes away from the amount of time I could have spent to make the writing better or longer
2. All of the bells and whistles can take away from the meaning of the words.

Overall it was interesting experience, but I probably will not choose to do this on a regular basis.

I posted to my Facebook the other day that “I will fall in love when a man calls me instead of texting, and gifts a book instead of flowers”.  It seems that dating these days has turned into a cliché where people don’t really connect anymore.  I was chatting with my ex boyfriend in our long 4 hour drive home from Tahoe, and he and I had different views on love (it’s no wonder things didn’t work out with us).  He believes in soul mates, and I believe that we choose our partners and fight to make it work.  What we agreed on is that our generation does not work hard enough in relationships and we want the instant gratification that we can get with food and technology, but not from other human beings.

Because I have been thinking about this I recently found and read two articles about dating in our new technology centered world. Abra Cohen, a freelance writer for the Huffington post, has an interesting view in her article “Modern Dating, Decoded” about how we have become dependent on technology for dating interactions.  We text instead of call, check our phones constantly, and look to have meaningless relationships, but we are not capable of actually doing that.  In the end, we all need the affection and physical closeness that we think we don’t want or need.

Ramona Pringle, host of ridgitallife and faculty at Ryerson University, actually touches on the same idea that we think we do not need other people to be happy in her article “Breaking ‘the Rules’: Finding Love in the Digital Age.”  She says that “in many ways we were raised to be single. Our generation was taught that independence was the gold standard” As an economist, the gold standard is actually the opposite of independence (it’s giving up your ability to control monetary policy in the country), but I get what she means.  We have been taught to be independent, and to not depend on anyone else for our wellbeing or happiness.  The problem with this is that we do need others to e happy.  We were made to have physical closeness with other humans.

The question is, how do we move forward from here?  How do we learn how to be co-dependent again?  How do we learn to put effort into relationships?  What needs to happen in society to make marriages work again?  Or do we abandon the idea altogether?  How do I teach my daughter to love so that she does not end up facing a future of being alone?

Ok, last blog on “For the Win,” I promise. I have finished the book now, and I have to say that I did not love the ending.  Here is how I feel about Part III:

What I didn’t like: For such a wonderfully painted picture about how the underprivileged needed to work together to achieve a common goal, it seems like only the already powerful  “won” in this book.  The laborers in China lost their strike and ended up back in the work place, while the American Turks are going to get what they wanted.  I know the book was centered around the game, but it certainly feels like the strikers who worked in gaming were going to come out ahead, while the others still had large fights to battle.

What I did like:  The Ponzi scheme was awesome.  It was fun to show macro economics in the works and how if too much cash is dumped into an economy, it can collapse.  The stocks shorting/leveraging/etc. seems a little complicated for a youth novel, but it was explained fairly simply so that it could mostly be understood.

Overall, I still liked it, but wished more had been done or there was more closure for the laborers.

As I read more of “For the Win” I keep coming up with economic experiments and thought processes.  As an econ major, I love how much econ is in this book.  When I read about the group of people being put in a room with poker chips and the resulting trades that happened, it made me wonder if economists really run these types of studies.  I actually found a game theory site that described some of the different types of experiments that economists actually run in real life. I am still in love with the way that Doctorow explains economics in a straight forward way.  The books is a fast read and is extremely interesting.  I have been on the edge of my seat reading it the whole time.

I did my first podcast the other night.  I went to Aquis in downtown Campbell and spoke with several people about going out, drinking, and getting back home.  I have to be honest, I was extremely nervous at first.  I did not think that strangers were going to want to talk to me about drunk driving, but I found the opposite to be true.  Once I spoke with the first couple people, it started to become fun.  While most people did not want to talk to me about THEIR drunk driving, they were more than happy to talk about other people’s drunk driving.  The only problem with recording them was that they asked a lot of questions about what I was doing before they would talk to me.  I had to edit a lot of that out.  I did get to use most of what people said though, because they were all interesting in their own way.  I put some fun music in the beginning of the podcast to make it up beat and fun.  Then I transitioned in some Beethoven to make it a little more somber during my rant on how our system is broken.  You should definitely listen to it!

Confession:  I love young adult series.  I’ve read all of the Twilight and Hunger Games series.  Go ahead.  Poke fun of me, but I enjoy being able to be pulled into a novel and mindlessly read without my brain hurting.

Confession:  I love Cory Doctorow. I have only ready 2/3rds of “For the Win”, but I cannot put it down.  He manages to mingle his points into the storyline, and if you simply mindlessly read the story, you will understand his points without hurting your brain.

Confession:  I started reading this book before I did my research on Mr. Doctorow.  Before I did any research I would have told you that in addition to clearly being an amazing writer, he also certainly has some economics schooling, he has a heart for laborers in third world countries, and he has extensive knowledge of gamming.

Best I can tell, I am two for three.  Doctorow, in addition to being a writer (I suppose that the shear fact that he had a book published would tell you that, but he has actually written several other books as well as hosts a blog), worked with Greenpeace as a child and did a Youth Challenge International trip in Costa Rica when he was 21.  As an adult he has created/worked for several open source/P2P, but I could not find what his major was, since he never actually graduated from any of the colleges he attended.

I can’t help but love the way he intermingles the first hand story telling with the harsh realities of poor workers in third world countries and with the facts of gamming economies.  Reading this book will cause you to really feel for poor workers in other countries, be cognoscente of how large the gaming world really is, and gain a basic understanding of macro economics.  It’s all wonderful!!

I recently read an excerpt from Jane McGonigal’s  New York best seller “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World” book.  McGonigal is a PhD from Berkley has and worked in the gamming industry for over a decade.  The book seems really interesting, and it might be worth skimming through one day.  McGonigal describes how gamers escape reality to the video game world because reality is broken, because we cannot find the camaraderie, the exhilaration, or the success in reality that we can get from games.   She goes on to discuss how game are starting to transition towards games that are designed to “improve quality of life, to prevent suffering, and to create real, widespread
happiness.”

Now, I have never been a gamer.  Probably because I am the little sister, and my brother used to whoop me at Mario Kart.  I am one of those people who McGonigal says sees games as a waste of time.  That being said, I love the idea of creating useful games for gamers.  To turn something that is unproductive into something that can improve the world is an amazing idea that makes me less afraid of what the world will be like for my daughter.

I have a tangential thought on why gamers likely love games.  I feel that my generation is the instant gratification generation.  We love to be able to get what we want when we want it.  We love fast food, smart phones, On-Demand, and the Internet.  Because a lot of thing can come quickly and easily, we get annoyed when things actually take work. No wonder the divorce rate is around 50% (this, of course, coming from a divorcee). I believe that games are an extension of this instant gratification.  In games, you can beat a world, a level, or a game in a matter of hours.  There is constant achievement, entertainment, and friendships.  The real world requires a lot of work, time, and determination to achieve the same goals, and sometimes hard work does not translate into results.  That being said, I still thing the real world is where real progress should be made.  I seriously worry about how my daughter is going to grow up.  Is she going to want to be out in the world enjoying it, or is she going to want to be behind some type of technology all day?  It’s not that technology isn’t good, but too much of a false reality can really start to mess with your brain, and physical movements are important.

I recently read “Unintended Outcomes in Second Life: Intercultural Literacy and Cultural Identity in a Virtual World” an article in the Language and Intercultural Communication Journal. It was written by William C. Diehl and Esther Prins from the Adult Education Program, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA. The article discusses the online virtual world of Second Life, and how that world can actually create intercultural understanding and help educate people about other cultures and further their language understanding.  While I do not doubt that all of these things are true to some extent, I did have trouble trusting the data stated in this article after he stated that his data was collected from 29 people when he recognizes that there are “As of 28 August 2007, over 9.1 million Residents had registered, 1.64 million of whom had logged into SL within the last 60 days.”  29 people are not a large enough sample of people to be statistically significant.  He further recognizes that he collected his data from a survey that he advertised for on a virtual billboard.

I think the concept of this paper is interesting.  Online forums where intercultural understanding and acceptance are important in our global economy, and education is always something I would encourage.  I have never been overly interested in online communities (I like the outdoors way too much to sit in front of a computer for too long), but I certainly can encourage education and cultural understanding.  I’ll leave the 18-30 hours a week in a virtual world to other people though.  I’d rather attend a language class in person.  That being said, I’m going to go for a jog!