Today I read an excerpt of ‘Reality is Broken‘ by Jane McGonigal, a game developer who works to create alternate reality games games that help to solve real world problems. In her book, she talks about how gaming has become a replacement for reality for millions of people. Many people now spend many hours a week playing video games, often at the expense of their real-life relationships, due to the games being more intense and exciting then real life – escapist entertainment. This trend is found worrying by many people because of the immense social ramifications – our society is not built for people who want to escape reality. Gaming has become such a huge part of society because they provide a place where people can be themselves without many of the limitations of real life, can experience much more exciting things then reality, and can devote their talents which are not used in their real-life work environments. The argument has come up that society must decide if it will allow gaming to continue to grow as it has as an escapist entertainment, or if it must fight gaming to prevent being overpowered. Jane McGonigal presents a third idea in her text, the idea that games can be used to help solve real-life problem and find a way to get people to view reality in a similiar way they view gaming. She as spoken about such an idea at Game Developers Conference and it was greeted with great interest- many of the great minds and leaders of the industry have begun moving in that direction. Should be interesting to see what happens from that.

This article as of particular interest to me as I am a gamer and I’ve worried about how much time I spend gaming. It can be difficult to balance real-world relations and work with the constant desire to be in the virtual world. I do agree that something has to be done about the gaming culture to prevent it from growing out of control and becoming the escape from reality that everyone runs to immediately from work. However, there is no good, clean way of cutting it down without causing more problems. The idea of using games is a very interesting idea, one that I would like to hear much more about. I have some difficulty in conceptualizing how that would be done, or how we would work to have people shift their efforts in games to being in reality. But the idea has merit. Games already are used as education tools and as ways for interactions with other cultures (Second Life, among others), and many games are attempting to have people exercise as well. I feel that as a culture, we need to learn moderation: a balanced way of life that western cultures have been struggling to do for centuries.

Continuing my adventures from the previous post, I read a study that looks at the Unintended Outcomes of Second Life, written by William C. Diehl and Esther Prins. Both authors have backgrounds in researching the social impacts of online events. The study focuses on the surprising trends that appeared in second life in terms of intercultural Literacy and cultural Identity. Due to the diversity that exists in the user base of Second Life, users are often experience other cultures and languages, which as the added benefit of making them learn about those other things. People can learn new languages and ideas that are common in foreign countries without ever having to leave their homes. Classes are even offered in certain player area, both free and on payment basis. This sharing of knowledge gives Second Life immense potential as a learning tool for people who are unable to travel in real life.

I find this development interesting, but not altogether quite as exciting as the authors seem to feel it is. I think it is good that people experience other cultures and learn new languages, but I also feel that having those experience in a purely online form lacks the personal depth that is so important for well-rounded social development. There is only so much real development that can take place online. The learning environment is a definite plus over most online games, but still lacks the real connections of real life. I feel that Second Life is a good start toward cultural literacy, but still is not as great as the researches seem to think it is.

I took a trip into the world of Second Life recently. The idea behind this virtual world is that people can do what ever they like with their avatars. They can fly, build, buy, change appearances, and even enter into relationships with other players. I made my avatar, named Minmax, and spent half an hour wandering around and getting used to the world and controls. My first impression was not exactly good. As I am something of a gamer, the worlds that one could enter into seemed very small and limited. There were many options of places to go, but beyond site seeing, I felt like there was nothing to do. What interactions I had with other avatars was, frankly, stupid and something of a waste of time. None of the theme worlds really gave anything to me and the socializing users seemed to all to be trying to impress me or to get my avatar to do something sexual. Compared to some of the other online worlds I’ve spent time in, this one felt very shallow and pointless, and the load time was annoying. The idea of the game is interesting, but the execution just feels lacking to me, as I’m used to fast, more streamline and, most importantly goal oriented worlds.

My avatar reflects my disinterest in the game. I named him/her/it Minmax. It was nice being able to customize what the character looked like to such degree, but then having to pay for anything else did not seem worth the cost. I looked through the character bio options and added a few basic things, but I simply didn’t feel connected enough to want to write a back story for an avatar that I had no connection with, as I could change it at any time and had spend no time developing it in any measurable sense.

The growth of religion on the internet has been a very interesting thing to watch. Elizabeth Drescher wrote about media trends that are shaping on-line religion. I found the first two trends particularly interesting: the social prayers and the ministers on the go. Social prayer groups are among the top most popular pages on many social media sites, like Facebook. The religious activities on-line sites like Facebook and Twitter are growing quickly, and may shape the future of religions. Even religious figures, like ministers, are catching on – they use location services such as Foursquare to let their communities know they are around in the local area to talk. Much of the religious activates that formerly took place in holy sites are now moving on line.

I found this very interesting. Looking back at history, many religious have a very negative view of advancing ideals. How the churches and other religious organizations are adapting their faith to online cultures is quite interesting. I find it quick ironic, as the Internet is often denounced as the space of Atheists and other such heretical groups. The fact that religious groups are fighting for their own space on line is quite interesting. I am curious about how much really gets done on the sites – I imagine the sites would be targeted by other groups as a place to troll (to make inflammatory comments, to anger users) and generally disturb the faithful.

Today, I was poking around in the open source Audacity sound editing program. It is a good example of the type of free tools can be created and shared through open source movement. The program is designed for editing sound files; I am looking into it for a later podcast project which can be edited with this program. The parts in particular I was watching today where several basic ‘how to’ podcasts made as a tutorial for the program. The tutorials where made by Jason Van Orden author of Promoting Your Podcast and general podcasting consultant. He does not go into great depth in the tutorials, instead sticking to the basics of sound editing. This is a plus, as it gives new users a great starting point from where they can experiment and learn on their own. This was perfect for me as I have had very little experience with editing audio files (or editing of any kind, really). It strikes me as a useful skill to have in the modern digital culture with so much of the information and new artist media being connected to such technology. People have made their living off programs like these and that alone is argument enough for me to learn at least the basics about it. I would not be surprised to see schools starting to offer students programs to allow them to learn how to use useful open source software.

Today I read “The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions” which is a study lead by Gilad Lotan, the head of R&D of SocialFlow. The study tracked who was blogging about the revolutions in Tunisian and Egyptian by filtering tweets sent with certain periods of time by key words relating to the revolution. The Tweets were then sorted into flows; a flow is when a tweet is re-posted by another user. The longest 10% of flows where kept and 1/6 of those tweets where randomly chosen, creating the data set. The study then looked at who had published each tweet, where the source was and who re-posted that tweet. The results are rather interesting. Journalist tweeters tend to re-post each other’s comments. The ‘other’ category of users (users of indeterminable goal/source) where the most common tweeters about both revolutions, with bloggers close behind.

This idea of creating revolution through services such as media is an interesting idea to me. It creates a interesting dynamic between traditional journalists and ‘amateur mobile media journalists’, which was mentioned in the study. The two groups will be contesting for attention from readers, and may create issues for creditably in the future. On the plus side, such mobile media and networked revolutions becomes much harder for governments to clamp down on information about revolutions spreading. Even with new found ability to support and share information about revolutions, there is a down side. If a government had the right tools, they could use the tweets to track down dissidents. Incorrect information could be spread with out going through the confirmation process regular journalism does. Even with these downsides, I have a feeling the democratic process and revolution process of the future will depend much more heavily upon such sites and mobile technology. We just need to make sure we can still do both without it as well.

I listened to a Google development podcast about the Google program Guice. The podcast was posted by Dion Almaer (a Google Developer), and had Dick Wall and Car Quinn (two ‘Googlers’). They talked to Bob Lee, who worked on developing Google Guice. Google Guice is a program that helps programers in eliminating ‘factories’ (which I’m not actually sure what they are) and replace them with more code-friendly java. The end result is code that is easier to change, test, and reuse. The podcast talks about how they do this, and how it is useful for users.

The podcast was interesting for me, although some of the technical terms went over my head as I only have limited programming experience. The idea of having the developers of Google talking about what they are doing with software development seems like a good thing, even for those people who do not fully understand the terms. It feels very open-source and friendly, which is part of Google’s image.

The Writing in the Wild article, by Olin Bjork and John Pedro Schwartz, is a interesting article regarding the academic affects of improving technology. The article spends a fair amount of time discussing the affect on student writing spaces: that students, before mobile technology, generally wrote in either the dorm or the library. Now with mobile technology students can write virtually anywhere and publish anywhere there is internet access. The class room dynamic is changing as laptops are appearing more and more often. Although laptops are not totally replacing paper as the note taking median, tablets are becoming more prominent. In addition more digital inventions are becoming more involved in the academic system, such as podcasts and blogging.

I enjoyed reading the article. I found many of the ideas about changing to a wireless classroom to make sense, specially in regards to the prominence of personal computers and the importance of internet in daily life. With American society becoming more dependent on the mobile technology, it only makes sense to have the academic community take advantage of the offered services. The idea of breaking the writing locations from being writing locations vs. non-writing locations into where everyplace can be a writing location, depending on how one feels like working.