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QotW10: My Second Life

MY JOURNEY:


Hi, I am Rosh Writer, a member of Second Life since April 2, 2007. My name is Roshni Rawla, so Rosh was the closest to reality I could think of! Writer was a serious, intellectual name, something I’m not, but would like to be in my Second Life and hence, the name. My avatar is a female, another touch of reality and somewhat dresses like me, in short pants and tees with a jacket; casual and comfortable. I was thrilled to see the flying button and the teleporting one too, it was just like Hero Nakamura in the TV show, 'Heroes.'

1) ORIENTATION:

ENTERING SECOND LIFE

FINDING AND DRIVING VEHICLE

USING MAP

SEARCHING EVENTS


2) PERSONALIZING MY AVATAR

CHANGING MY AVATAR SHAPE

EDITING CLOTHES

EDITING FACE

EDITING APPEARANCE

GETTING EXTRA CREDIT FOR COMPLETING A TASK AT ORIENTATION


3) JOINING GROUPS

COM125 GROUP

THE BEATLES GROUP


4) GOING SIGHTSEEING

AMSTERDAM

THE PORT

FINALLY...THE EDGE

DANCING AND CHATTING AT THE EDGE


After exploring Second Life, the little that I could these past couple of days, I teleported myself to a couple of places, like Amsterdam, Edge and The Port. However, the best of all those was The Edge Club. According to Wired.com, The Edge is the hottest club around. It has metal pyramid hops with dancing and also has slot machines near the dance floor. It is buzzing with life and is a popular nightlife spot in Second Life. Overall it was a great experience to be with and communicate with so many people and the music wasn’t bad too, so I would say, definitely worth a visit.

QotW9: STOMP

Enabled by the increasing popularity of web-based easy-publishing technologies, the vibrant rise of participatory publishing – which could be ideally understood as “the act of a citizen, or a group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information (Wikipedia)” in order to “provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires” (Nguyen, 2006) – in the past five or six years, has such a significant journalistic implication, that many critics have even declared it to be the future of journalism (Nguyen, 2006).

“Personal publishing”, “self- publishing”, “do-it-yourself journalism”, “participatory journalism”, “deliberative journalism”, “alternative media/publishing”, “collaborative publishing”, “open publishing”, “social media”, and “community publishing” are some terms used for the commonly used “citizen journalism.” It was seen that with the weblog community that suddenly sprung up and the extensive use of handheld devices such as digital cameras and mobile phone with built in cameras, online posting and blogs immediately took off (2006).

Every citizen is a reporter. Citizen Journalism refers to a movement of independent- usually individual- news reporters delivering their reports to the Internet. It also refers to many people who, in the midst of a disaster or a tragedy, think to capture the moment in photographs, video, and film. The citizen journalists present during the 2004 Tsunami made history when they posted video clips to the Internet for the world to see what damage a tsunami could inflict. Similarly, photos from rescuers in areas afflicted by Hurricane Katrina helped shape public awareness of the real situation in New Orleans and the Gulf area (2006). Apart from the above-mentioned coverage, Citizen journalists are often also political activists in one way or another, and covering activist events and viewpoints is frequently the purpose of their blog.

It is seen that, “More and more, journalism is going to be owned by the audience,” said Jeff Jarvis, a prolific Blogger who heads Advance Publications’ Advance.net online operation. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for pro-journalists, who will always be there— who need to be there—to gather the facts, ask questions with some measure of discipline and pull together a larger audience. What I’ve learned is that the audience, given half a chance, has a lot to say. The Internet is the first medium owned by the audi­ence, the first medium to give the audience a voice (2004).”


STOMP (Straits Times Online Mobile Print) is a Singapore-based online portal by Singapore Press Holdings. Through the three platforms of online, mobile and print, STOMP enables Singaporeans to interact and engage in current affairs of Singapore. After going through STOMP and reading some of the articles in Singapore Seen, Star Blogs, etc, I feel that STOMP is a highly interactive forum, which is an ideal form of citizen journalism for Singapore. It gives the Singaporean public, an opportunity to post comments on how they feel about certain issues and allows them to actively participate in the discussions posted there.

STOMP has a wide variety of subjects covered in an informally written way, which makes it unique, and something that the Singaporeans can relate to. I feel their tagline “You Generate the Content, You Write the Reports, You Take the Photos, You Shoot the Videos,” elaborates on the fact that they are interactive and promote citizens to come forward and spread the information. I feel this is also a good example of a gift economy as people share and spread information without any ulterior motive and keep everyone around them informed.

Even though STOMP is a great platform for citizen journalists, I feel it has some room for improvement. I feel freedom of expression is curtailed and people should be aware of what to say and how much to say, so they do not get into any trouble, politically. I also feel STOMP should be advertised more as it is a great platform to share information and people should take advantage of it. However, since STOMP is by the people and for the people, it is more relevant and expresses exactly what the public feels. Hence, I feel this is seen as a major reason for the success and growth of this type of media.

Reference:

Nguyen, A. (2006). Journalism in the wake of participatory publishing. Australian Journalism Review, 28(1), pp. 47-59.

Gillmor, D. (2004). We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. Retrieved March 30, 2007, from http://download.nowis.com/index.cfm?phile=WeTheMedia.html&tipe=text/html#chap3

Citizen Journalism. (2007). In: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 31, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Citizen_journalism&diff=118429022&oldid=116903986

STOMP (2006). From: Singapore Press Holdings. Retrieved March 28, 2007 from http://www.stomp.com.sg/

QotW7: Twitter

An online/virtual community encompasses the economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions of community. As defined by Rheingold’s (1993), virtual communities are "social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.” (Fernback, 2007)

Virtual communities may resemble "real life" communities in the sense that support is available, often in specialized relationships. However, virtual communities also, differ from "real life" communities, in the basis upon which participants perceive their relationships to be intimate. People on the Net have a greater tendency to base their feelings of closeness on the basis of shared interests rather than on the basis of shared social characteristics such as gender and socioeconomic status. So they are probably relatively homogeneous in their interests and attitudes just as they are probably relatively heterogeneous in the participants' age, social class, ethnicity, life cycle stage and other aspects of their social backgrounds. The homogeneous interests of virtual community participants may be fostering relatively high levels of empathetic understanding and mutual support. (1996)

Thus, after discussing the characteristics of a virtual community and the reasons for people to look for friends online, I feel that Twitter qualifies for an upcoming and exceptional, online community. To join Twitter, one simply needs to fill the online form with personal details and information, like interests, hobbies etc. Doing so, I realized it was very basic and easy to follow the instructions needed, to set it up and start conversations by adding my classmates.

People in virtual communities, like Twitter, use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk. (Fernback, 2007)

Twitter, for instance, is for staying in touch and keeping up with friends no matter where you are or what you’re doing. For some friends you might want instant mobile updates—for others, you can just check the web. (Twitter, 2007) One can invite one’s friends to Twitter to keep in touch and for groups. The topics of conversation on such virtual communities can range from the political (feminist groups etc), technical (computer hardware and software groups), to the social (abuse recovery groups, singles groups) and recreational (book reviews, hobby groups, sexual fantasy groups). (1996) The use of anonymity and pseudonymity is common when one makes new friends or adds old ones on Twitter. These nicknames are used purely for privacy reasons.


I feel that, there are several things that make Twitter unique from other virtual communities. For instance, when you send in a mobile text (SMS), Twitter sends it out to your group of friends and posts it to your Twitter page. Also, if your friends do not have phone alerts turned on, they may check the message on your web page instead. Likewise, you receive your friend’s mobile updates on your phone. Another thing I found interesting, differing from other communities like Friendster was, Twitter’s live updates. “Updating live every two minutes or right now,” is what is mentioned as you open the Twitter page, which is very fascinating and it can result in instant conversations. (Twitter, 2007)

In conclusion, personally, I would just like to add, that Twitter is an excellent online community and I feel that with its unique features, it will surely overtake the other virtual communities in terms of popularity and frequent usage. However, one should be careful and should protect their personal information online as identity deception is growing steadily and caution is better than regret.

Reference:


Fernback, J., & Thompson, B. (n. d.). “Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?” [On-line]. Retrieved March 15, 2007 from the World Wide Web: http://www.rheingold.com/texts/techpolitix/VCcivil.html


Wellman, B., & Gulia, M. (1996). “Net Surfers don’t ride alone” [On-line]. Retrieved March 15, 2007 from the World Wide Web: http://www.acm.org/%7Eccp/references/wellman/wellman.html

Twitter. (2007). [On-line]. Retrieved March 15, 2007 from the World Wide Web: http://twitter.com/faq

QotW6: Privacy...Where??!!

‘Privacy is an elusive concept (2006).’ It is the ‘ability of an individual or group to keep their lives and personal affairs out of public view, or to control the flow of information about themselves (Privacy, 2007).’ However, this is nearly impossible in today’s day and age with the advancement and progress of technology. ‘In the contemporary age of the internet, we are experiencing something that might be called the 'Omnipticon' in which the many are watching the many, even though no one knows precisely who is watching or being watched at any given time (Naked Crowd).’

I believe that "information is power" and personal information in whatever form, or of whatever nature, confers power to the owner of that information, (Privacy, 2007) which is why I suppose that privacy should be maintained at all cost unless for something which is a necessity, like i-banking. When it comes to dating services and other match making services, I feel that these services recommend people to divulge their personal details. These services make one feel that, “It's impossible to know someone on the basis of snippets of information; genuine knowledge is something that can only be achieved slowly, over time, behind a shield of privacy, with the handful of people to whom we've chosen to reveal ourselves whole.”(Naked Crowd) Even though this maybe true to an extent, I feel that people should be more cautious about their details, and should probably wait and meet the person a couple of times before revealing intimate details.

In earlier days, people believed in "surveillance." It denoted the "eye-in-the-sky," the concept of watching from above. However, describing the modern times, "sousveillance" has become a concept, which denotes ‘watchful vigilance from underneath’ using gadgets and other technology like the camera phone or other means of observation down to human level, either physically or hierarchically (Sousveillance, 2007).

As we have seen, it is now commonplace on a website to reveal hobbies, favorite foods and music, and pictures of children, in an effort to create an illusion of intimacy. Even the most intimate moments of life, such as a wedding, are now being posted on the web for public consumption (Naked Crowd). Personally, the closest I’ve gone to revealing information about myself, is on the blog for this class, or the other virtual communities I’m a part of, for instance, Orkut and Friendster. For me, topics like name, age and place of residence are the general topics that are covered under the ‘allowed to reveal’ heading. More information than this, according to me, is an encouragement to identity theft or online stalking! We have heard so many horrifying stories about trusting strangers that with time, we have become more careful with what should or should not be disclosed online. For example, even in last week’s deception blog, I mentioned how people can invade others space and privacy without the original person being aware of it or its consequences.


I feel that the risk of being exposed and making ourselves vulnerable to others is simply too high a price to pay for disclosing our personal details. Therefore, in conclusion, I want to say that, ‘privacy does matter – at least sometimes. But it’s like health: When you have it, you don’t notice it. Only when it’s gone do you wish you’d done more to protect it (2006)!’

Reference:

Rosen, Jeffery (2004). "The Naked Crowd" Retrieved March 9, 2007 from http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA5FF.htm

Sullivan, B. (2006). Privacy Lost: Does Anybody Care? Retrieved March 9, 2007, from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15221095/print/1/displaymode/1098/

Privacy. (2007). In: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 9, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Privacy&oldid=113024808

Sousveillance. (2007, February 7). [On-line]. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved March 7, 2007, from the World Wide Web: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? title=Sousveillance&oldid=106389703

QotW5: Online Identity

Internet has allowed for a unique form of interaction: group or “many-to-many” interaction, unfettered by geography. Part of the attraction of CMC is that it allows participants to separate their physical selves from their writing and actions online (2004). Thus to be a part of this computer mediated communication and participate in discussions, one must create an online identity.

An online identity is a social identity that network users establish in online communities. Although some people prefer to use their real names online, most Internet users prefer to identify themselves by means of pseudonyms, which reveal varying amounts of personally identifiable information. In some online contexts, including Internet forums, MUDs, IRC, instant messaging, and massively multiplayer online games, users can represent themselves visually by choosing an avatar, an icon-sized graphic image. As other users interact with an established online identity, it acquires a reputation, which enables them to decide whether the identity is worthy of trust. (Online Identity, 2007).

One such online identity I created was on Orkut. Orkut is an Internet social network service run by Google. It claims to be designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Similar to Friendster and MySpace, Orkut goes a step further by permitting the creation of easy-to-setup simple forums (called "communities") of users (Orkut, 2007).



Some features of Orkut include rating your friends’ system where Users have options to rate their friends in the order of "Best Friends", "Good Friends", "Friends", "Acquaintances" and "Haven't met". A member can view profile details of people only on his/her network, Orkut allows anyone to visit anyone's profile, unless a potential visitor is on your "Ignore List". Importantly, each member can also customize his/her profile preferences and can restrict information that appears on their profile from their friends and/or others (not on the friends list).

People are always bothered about what other people think about them. Reputation is the most important key for growing social relationships. If one does not have a good reputation in the market, they will be isolated and not associated with. Orkut has to bother about its users’ and its own reputation too.

Reputation online can be earned by increasing number of positive remarks on your profile. On Orkut, anyone can scrap or leave a message, for anyone. People leave comments, feelings, thoughts and ideas on various subjects, on each other’s accounts. The more the number of fans of a person, the popular the person is and is considered to have a good reputation, depending upon the content of the scraps posted. I feel that because one may receive a message from an unknown person, one is not judged partially as compared to receiving messages only from friends. Thus, one’s reputation is of greater value. As it is a public community, everyone who is a member of this community can view these messages and the number of times one’s profile is viewed, and the number of friend’s requests, determines the popularity of the person.

Identity plays a key role in virtual communities. In communication, which is the primary activity, knowing the identity of those with whom you communicate is essential for understanding and evaluating an interaction. (1996). People have many reasons for not wanting their real names to be revealed online to prevent identity theft; for instance, protection of privacy and anonymity are two reasons for creating online identities.

Identity theft is the new crime of the information age. Just as a criminal collects enough personal data on someone to impersonate a victim and racks up debt in the person's name before disappearing, similarly, an identity thief steals your individuality and uniqueness and leaves you behind with nothing. (2005)

As the number of Orkut users increased, there was a rise in the number of fake and clone profiles, something that can be achieved just in a matter of a few minutes. These fake profiles are normally created to troll, to spam, to flood or just for fun. Later, the clones started to flood communities and scrapbooks by submitting topics or scraps hundreds or thousands of times manually.

With so much personal information given about myself, like my birth date, address, email, age, friends and pictures, it is very easy for anyone to fake my identity and create one similar to it.

Another example of fake identity is the one below. It’s aparently Richard Gere’s online community, created by a fake. Celebrities are often targeted for identity theft.



Thus one should be careful and should protect their personal information online as identity deception is growing steadily and caution is better than regret.

Reference:

-Donath, J.S. (1996). Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. Communities in Cyberspace.
http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html

-Schneier, B. (2005). Schneier on Security: Mitigating Identity Theft.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/04/mitigating_iden.html

-Lackaff, D. (2004). Norm Maintenance in Online Communities: A review of Moderation Regimes. http://lackaff.net/node/20

-Online identity. (2007). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved February 18, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Online_identity&oldid=108207999

-Orkut. (2007). In Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Orkut&oldid=110026276

QotW 4: Gift Economies

A gift economy, also known as “sharing economies” (“Gift Economy”, 2007), is one in which help and information is offered without the exception of any direct, immediate quid-pro-quo (Rheingold (1993)). As mentioned in the reading, "A gift economy is an economic system in which the prevalent mode of exchange is for goods and services to be given without explicit agreement upon a quid pro quo (the Latin term for the concept of "a favor for a favor"). Typically, this occurs in a cultural context where there is an expectation either of reciprocation--in the form of goods or services of comparable value, or of political support, general loyalty, honor to the giver, etc.--or of the gift being passed on in some other manner." ("Gift Economy," 2007). An example of such an economy is, an online community; like the Usenet discussion groups. In such groups, there is an enormous amount of free help and information given out, often to complete strangers whom one may never meet again. (Rheingold (1993) [(“Gift Economy”, 2007)].

I feel, the gift economy is important, not only because it creates openness, but also because it organizes relationships between people in a certain way. For example, open source software development relies on gift giving as a way of getting new ideas into circulation. This also implies that the giver gets power from giving away. This power is used as a way of guaranteeing the quality of the information (Thomas, 2004).

Rheingold suggests that the reasons for contributing to online communities are to receive emotional support or intellectual companionship and having an interest in the domain of the community (Rheingold, 1993). Gift economies are necessary for knowledge production and dissemination. For instance, the online academic articles are intellectual gifts given in return for receiving the intellectual gifts of others. Gift economies serve to bind people together. They create and maintain social groups.

Gift economies differ from Commodity economies, as the latter works against bonding. The rules and expectations, which govern commodity exchange, serve to define and delimit mutual responsibility and future obligation between the parties involved (Baird, 1997). Ideal commodity exchanges occur when the parties involved understand at the outset just what each gives and receives and when the interaction is to be concluded. In a sense, commodity exchanges aim to establish—ideally, mutually beneficial—conclusions of interactions. In contrast, gift exchanges aim to initiate and maintain interactions. In stark contrast to commodity exchanges, gifts cannot have a dollar-measurable value. Such a value would allow a gift recipient to close the interaction; a gift of equal value could be returned leaving neither party obligated to the other. No further interaction would be necessary. Assigned dollar values work against social bonding (Baird, 1997).


Online interaction, an aspect of gift economy, can reduce the costs of contributing to the production of a public good in numerous ways. Any piece of information posted to an online community becomes a public good because the network makes it available to the group as a whole and because one person's “consumption” of the information does not diminish another person's use of it (“Gift Economy”, 2007). Also almost everyone spends most of their time online, participating within the gift economy because users receive much more information than they can ever give away and there is no imposing of equal exchange on the Net (Barbrook, 2005).

There are many examples of gift economies. Any medium, that promotes exchange of information online without any expectations of returns, is a gift economy in its truest form. Blogspace is one example of an emerging and an interesting social space for free, independent, and widely distributed information production. Another example is discussion forums. Personally I am a fan of discussion forums. These forums give people like me, a chance to learn about something or enhance our knowledge on a topic that interests us. Nowadays, one has forums for everything ranging from poker, to dance to education. I am a part of many such forums but my personal favorites are my school discussion forum and The Beatles discussion forum. I am passionate about both these forums and they form an integral part of me.

My school, Mayo College Girls School in India, set up this forum with the help of some alumni students. It informs us about what’s new in school, uploads pictures for us to see and also helps us keep in touch with our teachers and school friends we left behind. It not only has weekly updates but also has information about students and reunions too. I feel it is a nice way to keep in touch and revive old memories.

Another discussion board I am heavily into is The Beatles discussion forum. As mentioned earlier, I am a hardcore Beatles fan. I have grown up listening to their music and own every CD released by them. For those who are not very familiar, I recommend the Anthology Series, which is an 11-hour footage of them, their lives and their music. I am sure once you watch the DVD’s you will become a follower! Coming back to the forum, I feel it is an interesting forum as Beatles fans from all across the globe come together and talk about their experiences and discuss a variety of topics like their music, tours, lives, break up, and even the controversial death of John Lennon. Thus Gift Economies are a blessing in disguise in today’s competitive world.

Reference:

Kollock, P. (1999). 'The Economies of Online Cooperation; Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace" Retrieved February 8, 2007 from http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/economies.htm

Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Addison-Wesley.

Wikipedia (2007). Gift economy. Retrieved February 8, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy

Thomas, C. (2004) "other people benefit. i benefit from their work." Sharing Guitar Tabs Online. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Retrieved from
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2575.2001.00111.x/abs/

Baird, D. (1997) Scientific Instrument Making Epistemology, and the Conflict Between Gift and Commodity Economies. Retrieved from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v2n3n4/pdf/baird.pdf

Barbrook, R. (2005). The Hi- Tech Gift Economy. Retrieved from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/

http://www.aboutthebeatles.com/forum/index.php

http://buffalo.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2210656003

http://buffalo.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2210722433