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Week 14: 3.5 Conclusion

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Throughout the whole semester, I started to be aware of the media that appear subconsciously in our daily life.  From the ten entries in this portfolio, I found out a lot of useful information that I have never realized before. The convergence of media is the main topic covered the whole semester.  The way I think about and use the media have changed.  I noticed that the copyright and privacy issues that I have neglected before, is one of the important impact on using the media.  For example, Facebook has all the ownership of what we have post on it such as photos, information, and videos.  It is very important to acknowledge that we do not have any rights in Facebook.  We have to be very careful when posting information on Facebook.  Even though we set private for our profile, we only avoid the users of Facebook in accessing our profile and yet Facebook still own all the information in our profile. 

In the meanwhile, although the information in the World Wide Web, we called it the Web, is up to date, we cannot fully trust the content in the Web. It is not credible.  As the participatory culture, everyone who can access internet can create and publish information in the Web.  We can only refer to the information but not to rely on it. 

In the issue of gaming industry, I discover the connection between the movie industry and the gaming industry.  And we cannot differentiate between fantasy and reality, virtual world and real world.  As the offline world is like an extension from the online world, vice versa.  At the same time, the crime cases that have increased rapidly in the gaming industry, is a serious issue that we should look into.  

In conclusion, the unit has covered all these themes - ownership, privacy, ethics, participation and credibility.  It has been very beneficial for me and I have been well informed, from what I have learnt. Engaging media redefines the meaning of today's world and it is an interactive medium, which brings consumers and the people behind the screen closer. 

Week 13: 3.4 Who's listening? Mass communication in a networked, mobile environment

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Source: Tomi Ahonen upcoming book Mobile is 7th Mass Media Channel, 2008
www.tomiahonen.com


Key Point:

  • The 7 Mass Media
    • 1st - Print (1500)
    • 2nd - Recordings (1900)
    • 3rd - Cinema (1910)
    • 4th - Radio (1920)
    • 5th - TV (1950)
    • 6th - Internet (1995)
    • 7th - Mobile (2000)
  • The 6th Mass Media - Internet 
    • first media that could do everything that the previous five media could do
    • first interactive media, and Search
  • The 7th Mass Media - Mobile
    • can do everything the previous six media can do, including interactivity & search of the internet
    • five absolute competitive advantages
      • personal mass media
      • always-on media
      • always carried media
      • built-in payment channel
      • creative tool - always present at point of creative impulse
      • most accurate audience info
  • BDDO survey of 3000 customers around the world and found 60% of mobile users take the phone to bed with them (BDDO April 2005)
  • Nokia Survey of 5500 people a year later found 72% of phone owners use the phone as the alarm clock (Nokia June 2006)
TED Talk - Jan Chipchase on our mobile phones
Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase's investigation into the ways we interact with technology has led him from the villages of Uganda to the insides of our pockets. He's made some unexpected discoveries along the way.

Conclusion:
  • Connections and Consequences
  • The immediacy of ideas - if you want a big idea, you need to embrace everyone on the planet
  • The immediacy of objects - things become smaller as the functionality that you can access becomes greater. Thus, the speed of the adoption of things is just becoming more rapid in a way that we cannot conceive
  • Design stuff carefully - the ability to transcend space and time; it will innovate in ways we cannot anticipate; despite our resources they can do it better than us
  • The direction of conversation - we need to learn how to listen

Week 12: 3.3 Talk to me! Chatting/ Texting/ Twittering at each other

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Reading:
E.J Westlake (2008). Friend me if you Facebook: Generation Y and performative surveillance. The Drama Review 52 (4), 21-40
Fun Article about Facebook and how people perform themselves through digital media.


Summary:

  • Facebook: Facebook develops technologies that facilitate the spread of information through social networks allowing people to share information online the same way they do in the real world
  • Facebook was founded as a way to enhance face-to-face contact on university campuses, it has virtual and physical life unique on the internet
  • Argument: the predominantly Generation Y Facebook community uses Facebook to define the boundaries of normative behavior through unique performance of an online self
  • Facebook has become one of the fastest growing - and some will admit most addictive - pastimes in U.S.
  • MySpace is designed for global connectivity, has many features that allows for greater online creativity; Facebook is designed to allow for real-life social connections
  • The performance of self on Facebook always has the potential of carrying over into 'real life' and vice versa
  • Facebook take the concept of the personal web page and the blog further, enhancing the personal profile with tools for users to comment upon or even alter the content of fellow users' pages
  • Many sociologists worry that the increased internet use by Generation Y will result in their lacking the socialization needed to function in society
  • Facebook and MySpace made headlines in 2005 and 2006 for two reasons: 
    • they had raised issues about internet predators
    • they had caused concern about the availability of information for state surveillance
  • Users have jokingly referred to Facebook as 'Stalkerbook'
  • Facebook is a forum for the policing and establishing of normative behavior, more than the imagined forum of deviant exhibitionism
  • To some degree, the people of Generation Y trust technology, believing they can direct their performance to their chosen audience
  • GenerationY's political participant will continue to grow but political involvement seems muted when it comes to public protest
  • The people of Generation Y are choosing social cohesion over privacy challenges outmoded notions of individual freedom versus state intrusion
  • To some degree, both 'private' and 'public' are revealed as social constructs that shift and change over time
  • While Facebook operates as a forum for establishing social norms, the continual reinvention of Facebook by independent developers and users creates an opening through which Generation Y can push the boundaries of their online performance of self.


Watch: TED talk - Evan Williams on Twitter
In the year leading up to this talk, the web tool Twitter exploded in size (up 10x during 2008 alone). Co-founder Evan Williams reveals that many of the ideas driving that growth came from unexpected uses invented by the users themselves. Evan Williams is the co-founder of Twitter, the addictive messaging service that connects the world 140 characters at a time.

Week 10: 3.1 Inform me! news media

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Discussion:

  • How do you get your information/ news? Why?
    • Online: Borneo Post Online/ The Star Online/ Youtube
      • convenient
      • options
      • speed
      • updated
    • TV: Satelitte
      • live
      • visual
      • real
      • entertaining
    • Newspaper
      • cheap 
      • reliability
      • detail
      • respect proffessional
    • Radio
      • entertaining
      • up to date
      • convenient
  • How does this differ from old generation/ family?
    • the convergence from old media to new media
    • the existence of censorship
  • What do you find more credible? Why?
    • Printed newspaper
      • more accurate
    • Online news
      • not so accurate 
      • not specific
    • Wikipedia
      • not so credible
      • can change the content anytime, anywhere by anyone

New Sites that I'm interested in:
  • The Business Time: http://www.btimes.com.my/
  • The Borneo Post: http://www.theborneopost.com/
  • The Star Online: http://www.thestar.com.my/
  • News Strait Time: http://www.nst.com.my/

Week 9: 2.5 All the world's a game: virtual worlds, interactivity, convergence

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Summary from class lecture:

  • movie industry & media connection
  • virtual world & real world
  • impossible to switch off digital world
  • distinctive => senseless
  • curiosity
  • significant aspect of digital media & culture
  • expresses both existing & newly emerging possibility
  • negative & positive
  • politically, economically, socially, culturally
  • Why the film industry involved in the game industry
  • World of Warcraft (WoW) 
    • 11.5 million paying subscribers
    • pay US$14.95 every month
    • Plus: books, music, clothing, board games, calenders, card games, etc
  • computer games is not just a computer games, it is more than that
  • think of the production
  • Fans 
    •  Examples: the guilds, 'do you wanna date my avatar', south park, exhibition, video, remediation
  • Games stay 'alive'
  • we are not in Kansas anymore
  • commercial product
    • consumed worldwide
    • exploited worldwide
  • WoW - MMOs
    • large scale
    • mostly made by man ( 90-95%)
    • born out of Richard Bartle's MUD 1
  • Life in the MMO 
    • MMO is obviously a construct
    • rules enable the action and relations
    • rules govern behavior
  • open design: eg.Second Life, Project Entropia
  • closed design: eg. Wow, EverQuest
  • both designs enable different actions and experiences
  • on economic, ownership and gameplay - different designs different ideas
  • key issues: commercialisation of the game and commodification of information
  • Who owns the information 
  • Different designs explore/ enable different ideas
  • Why keep a design closed?
    • maintaining the game's economy
    • maintaining the player experience
    • perception of fairness
    • inflation and deflation
  • these economics are constructs
  • and their black markets can be big money
    • scarcity in game - senseless
    • value too therefore is constructive
  • in the digital world, time = money
  • gold farming - buying time
  • distinction between actual & virtual money 
  • The use of 'Bots'
  • Impacts
    • griefplay
    • minor
    • murder
    • marriage
    • addiction
    • crime
    • child labour
    • global inequity
    • discrimination
  • Korea online game industry is huge

Week 8: 2.4 Play with me!: Having fun with media

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Readings: 
Helen Thornton, (2009). Claiming a stake in the videogame: what grown-ups say to rationalise and normalise gaming.  Convergence 15 (2), 135-139
Very thorough take on gaming, analysis discourses of gamers, especially gender and sexualiy

Summary:
  • Argument: the political and social necessity of including gamers and their discourses into research on gaming in order to better understand the significance of gaming and gaming discourses on our social and political lives
  • The author indicates that games are simultaneously set up as escapism, fantasy and play but claimed by adult gamers as serious, rational and logical pastimes
  • ‘Pleasure’ is often used by cultural theorists and new media theorists, rarely actually interrogated
  • The issues of articulation enmeshed in issues of power, gender, class and context
  • The article focused on how pleasure emerges through articulation
  • The article also focused on the ways gamers rationalize, normalize and justify gaming underlying the factors: pleasure and play
  • The justifications gamers offer not only work to normalize gaming; they also seem to work to normalize it as particular kind of heterosexual, social and rational activity
  • If pleasurable aspect placed into defining parameters of the social, the pleasure of gaming is less about the games themselves and more to do with the presence of friends in a social environment
  • Conclusion
    • The author argue that it is precisely this unsettled relationship between pleasure and adulthood which makes the gamers quite defensive about gaming practices
    • Further investigation which takes into consideration the context, discourses and power relations upon which the activity of gaming is contingent in order to understand the complex relationship between pleasure, play and adulthood, which seems to mark both articulations and practices of gaming
Jenkins, H. (2006). The war between effects and meaning: Rethinking the video game debate.  In D, Buckingham & R. Willett (Eds.), Digital Generations: Children, Young People, and New Media (pp 19-31).  New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Ass


Summary 
  • Limbaugh ruled that video games have ‘no conveyance of ideas, expression or anything else that could possibly amount to speech’ รจ there is no constitutional protection
  • Limbaugh claimed that video games do not express ideas and they represent a dangerous influence on American youth
  • Effects are seen as emerging more or less spontaneously, with little conscious effort, not accessible to self examination
  • Meanings
    • Emerge through an active process of interpretation
    • Reflect our conscious engagement
    • Articulated into words
    • Critically examined
  • Games is partly a consequence of their growing importance in young people’s lives
  • Reformers argue that children are particularly susceptible to confusions between fantasy and reality
  • The author claims that education are being made in the public policy debates about video games; both sides talk about games as ‘teaching machines’
  • Grossman (2000), a retired military psychologist and West Point instructor believed that games represent a powerful mechanism for reshaping our behavior
  • But, Grossman’s model only works if we assume that players are not capable of rational thought, ignore critical differences in how and why people play games, and remove training or education from any meaningful cultural context
  • Games are most powerful when they reinforce our existing beliefs and least effective when they challenge our values
  • Students are encouraged to think about the media from the inside out, assuming the role of media makers and thinking about their own ethical choice


I agree that game actually is a very useful learning tool for educational function.  Children will prefer to learn knowledge from a game rather than a book.  However, violence element in gaming industry actually is a major issue that affects the impacts on gaming.  I suggest that we should control the playing times for children as children do not know how to differentiate both the positive and negative impact of gaming.  They will easily addict to game. 

In my experience, I seldom play games but I enjoy when I am playing.  I like to play Left 4 Dead.  It is very adventurous.  Normally I play game because of desire but not boredom.  I love to play computer games, but I control myself not to play too much.  Game is a kind of distraction for me.  



In this week tutorial, we are give a task to identify a video games.  This is the game that my group get:


This game is called Space War.  It is one of the earliest digital computer game developed by Steve Russell in 1962.  This game is a two-players modes.  Gamers control the game by using a front panel with four switches each.


Besides, the class also discussed a list of positive and not so positive impacts on gaming.

  • Positive:-
    • Relaxing
    • Entertaining
    • Killing Time
    • Stress reliever
    • Distraction
    • Passion
    • Fun
    • Educational
    • Exciting
    • Interactive
    • Challenging
    • Enjoyment
  • Not so positive:-
    • Violent
    • Wasting time
    • Disturbing 
    • Addictive
    • Mind consuming
    • Useless
    • Annoying
    • Corrupting


Week 7: 2.3 Entertaining the world: using media across cultural boundaries

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Readings:
Jenkins, H (2006). Pop cosmopolitanism: Mapping cultural flows in an age of media convergence.  In H. Jenkins, Fans, bloggers and gamers: exploring participatory culture (pp 152-172). New York University Press. 
Summary:
  • Pop cosmopolitan is someone whose embrace of global popular media represents an escape route out of the parochialism of one's local community
  • The increased centrality of teens and youth to the global circulation of media in an era where a teen's Web site can become the center of an international controversy
  • Corporate convergence (top-down) - the concentration of media ownership in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of multinational conglomerates who thus have a vested interest in insuring the flow of media content across different platforms and national borders
  • Grassroots convergence (bottom-up) - the increasingly central roles that digitally empowered consumers play in shaping the production, distribution, and reception of media content
  • These two forces intersect to produce what might be called global convergence
  • Global convergence is giving rise to a new pop cosmopolitanism
  • The author use pop cosmopolitan to refer to the ways that the transcultural flows of popular culture inspires new forms of global consciousness and cultural competency
  • Imperialism argument blurs the distinction between at least four forms of power:
    • Economic - the ability to produce and distribute cultural goods
    • Cultural - the ability to produce and circulate forms and meanings 
    • Political - the ability to impose ideologies
    • Psychological - the ability to shape desire, fantasy and identity
  • Western economic dominance over global entertainment both expresses and extends America's status as a superpower nation
  • The rise of broadband communication enables the foreign media producers to distribute media content directly to American consumers without having to pass through U.S. gatekeepers or rely on multinational distributors.
  • Global culture produces local differences in order to gain a competitive advantage within the global marketplace
Am I pop cosmopolitan?
I was slightly affected by the Japanese comic called Nana (Manga).  It is a comic series written and illustrated by Ai Yazawa.  I liked the characters and the story so I started to buy the merchandise products.  After the comics, there are films,anime and video games produced.  



Nana in comic

Nana 2 in film

I think the Japanese punk style in Nana is quite attracting and cool.  That's why I love Nana.

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