Mar 29
AndrewLife in Digital Facebook, Internet, Technology, twitter
Raised on twitter and facebook and xbox games where you play against players in Indonesia, it’s no wonder that face time doesn’t have intrinsic value anymore to the next gen. These days, pretty much anything can be replicated and accomplished remotely. It allows us to date from afar, order take-out, even talk run a business without ever having a physical storefront.
Being old fashioned, I’m not so impressed that we encapsulate our experiences into 140 character snippets, nor update our so-called status everyday with vague and vaguely threatening lines like “I can’t believe that just happened to me.” It’s a breeding ground for misunderstanding and apathy. After all, a few non-sequitor status messages and it’s a lot like crying wolf too many times. It becomes totally meaningless.
I don’t think we’re completely beyond brunches and going out drinking with our friends after work, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the next gen is heading towards a mentality where those things become less the social norm. Technology has empowered us to communicate more efficiently but the cost hasn’t been measured yet. If everything is tasked and accomplished through an electronic medium, it essentially removes the need for human contact, the human element and devalues face time with other people. Is it crazy to suppose we are just turning ourselves into automatons where face time is replaced with remote time? One new generation at a time.
Sep 17
JeremyLife in Digital gaming, Internet, mod, modding, Nardi, NSF, social interaction, world of warcraft, WoW
It turns out that gamers might just be freaks worthy of academic study. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s website, the National Science Foundation has awarded Bonnie Nardi at UC-Irvine a grant to study how people play the popular online game World of Warcraft. According to the grant abstract published on NSF’s website, Nardi’s research will focus specifically on modding (basically, changing the game environment to suit one’s whims). Programmers, either commercial or individual, build add-ons that perform functions in the game environment that the game itself does not. Because the game itself is built to be collaborative (there are some things on it that are just damn hard to do alone), mods are usually a group effort, too, since a need must be both identified, then acted upon in a way that fits within the game’s larger framework. An example of a commonly used mod in WoW is an add-on that imposes a coordinate grid on the game’s maps to make sharing exact locations easier among players. Yes, I know this because I play.
So far, it looks like this research is getting a bad rap. I find this ironic since gaming is blamed for a whole host of social ills, from obesity to agoraphobia to just plain awkward social interaction. Here we have the opportunity to understand the effects of gaming just a bit better, yet many consider that not worthwhile research, whether conducted in a scholarly manner or not. This research is especially important as gaming continues to transition from something that’s done at home alone (ahhhh, I miss my old Atari and Nintendo) to something that creates a true digital environment in which people interact both in and out of character.
Tools such as instant messaging have already transformed the social environment. For me, it’s allowed me to develop close friendships with people around the country whom I haven’t even met in person, while allowing me to maintain communicate more easily with my “real life” friends. If IM has had such an impact, I can’t begin to imagine what the impacts will be of online gaming, in which groups of people are working towards shared goals in a collaborative manner. Perhaps this study will begin to answer that question and help us all understand the shape of the future.
Jul 08
JeremyLife in Digital, Society and Culture Facebook, Internet, social networking
The internet has really done it this time. It’s not enough that the ‘net has gone and made all this music free for us to steal. Now, it has done the unthinkable: it has created free-ware versions of classic board games that just anyone can go and play without a paying a dime! Now with game maker Hasbro to accompany it, the RIAA is no longer lonely in its victim chair.
The prime example of this internet controversy is Scrabulous, an application that can be installed on a Facebook profile that allows users to mimic a game of good old-fashioned Scrabble. The brainchild of two brothers in India, the game is free to players, its costs borne by on-page advertising. The problem is that it is not licensed or authorized by Hasbro, which owns the rights to the official game in North American (but not the rest of the world). So far, Hasbro has been unsuccessful in its attempts to shut down the Scrabulous application, which boasts 518,641 daily active users, according to its information page. Now, they have gone an alternate route by contracting with Electronic Arts Inc. to provide an official version (which is presumably simply a way to collect licensing fees). Which will only be available to those of us in the US and Canada, so anyone who likes to play with friends overseas would be S.O.L. in this scenario. That’s because Mattel owns Scrabble elsewhere and has already contracted with RealNetworks to provide an online version of the game. Confusing yet?
A friend of mine who recently created a Facebook profile asked me what all the hype was about Scrabulous because everyone seemed to be talking about it. She had never played Scrabble before in her life and was unfamiliar with the rules, but she decided that she would give it a try anyway. While she enjoyed it, she also immediately recognized that the electronic arena could never replace the fun of a true board game. Just perhaps, playing this online, unlicensed, unauthorized version created a new Scrabble player in the non-virtual world.
It has been suggested that illegal downloads of music have actually helped the music industry by allowing artists a greater breadth of exposure that has created new demand for legal purchases of their music. Despite this, the RIAA and music companies have chosen to treat internet downloads of music as dangerous and have pursued all possible legal action to stop it and punish offenders. Hasbro is on the verge of doing the same thing. Perhaps, in being so worried about the threat, they have forgotten that all publicity is good publicity. By letting go some control, they could instead create a new generation of players who, just like those who hear a good song and buy the CD, will go out and buy their own Scrabble board.
The internet and its endless possibilities for free content are a gateway for these companies to move forward in the digital age. If they choose to reject it, they lead themselves down the path of rejecting their own relevance. Soon, the victim chair that Hasbro and the RIAA choose to inhabit will be the quiet spot where they sit while society passes them by.
Aug 23
AndrewBusiness, Life in Digital Ads, google, Internet, youtube
You may not have seen ads that Google is running on your YouTube screen, but chances are, you will soon. Google Inc., which recently acquired YouTube, started testing overlay advertisements this week. The ads will appear after a 15 second interval across the bottom fifth of the video screen as you watch the clip. The ad space, which is partially transparent so it does not completely obstruct the view of the video showing underneath it, disappears after being displayed for 10 seconds.
Reaction from YouTube users is mixed. YouTube has been providing a service that users tend to think of as free, but it is not, and never has been, free of advertising. This is simply more blatant because it sits on the screen along with the video you are watching.
Since acquiring YouTube, Google has sought an alternative to the standard ad format for web videos, that is advertising at the beginning or advertising at the end of a clip. The company selected this ad format as the least intrusive to the viewer. In-video ads tested better than pre-rolls – commercials tacked on to the beginning of the clip – according to Google. When a viewer clicks on an ad, the clip itself pauses until the viewer returns to it.
The new ad format will seem familiar at least. It mimics what we see on television, secondary events which cover the bottom fifth of the television screen promoting other shows during the one you are watching. That will likely make the introduction of the new ad format a lot easier to accept for most users. And on second viewing of the same clip, the ad won’t appear again.
YouTube is taking care not to unnecessarily alienate its 130 million subscribers, at least not right away. The ads can currently only be viewed on a limited number of content-appropriate clips, and currently the advertisements only represent a select handful of elite advertisers.
The company has to walk a fine line with them as well. Because so much of YouTube’s content is user generated, even clips that are free of copyright violations could still be questionable content, inappropriate for or unacceptable to certain advertisers to suddenly find their brand names associated with it. The company will have to find a way to guarantee to advertisers that ads will only run on completely content-appropriate videos.
During the test launch, YouTube identified a select group of content owners who were willing to host the ads on their videos. Google announced that it will share ad revenue with these partners. Google will charge advertisers for every 1,000 times the ad appears, and has tantalizingly offered a cut of that revenue to content owners who want to cash in. Though to this point, there’s no guarantee that the offer to host advertising will be extended to just anyone.
In the short term, Google has to gauge reaction from YouTube’s hardcore fans, but more importantly, the company has to determined whether the model can be profitable. Preliminary results, according to Google, suggest that the overlays are in fact generating a higher click-thru percentage than traditional advertising. But how much of that is the novelty of the format is unknown. And how quickly will YouTube users become blind to that form of advertising if it starts showing up in every single video?
No matter how the YouTube fandom reacts, the new ads are hardly the end of the world. If anything, users need to be prepared for a much wider launch of the ad format coming soon. So far, Google has said it will stay away from ads on the iPhone or AppleTV, and the YouTube ads currently only appear to users in the United States. But Google has to justify its $1.65 billion investment in YouTube, and has made it clear that some form of advertising on its videos would be the inevitable result. If the last five years have proven anything, where there is a market, Google ads are sure to follow.
Apr 23
JeremyLife in Digital Internet
I talked to my friends a lot. Our relationships were practically 24/7. We voraciously exchanged news on our personal lives, our jobs, our current reads, the latest bit of celebrity gossip. All the minutiae that friends talk about, not to mention instant availability for any crisis, major or minor. Even at work, we couldn’t help ourselves but to sneak in conversation here and there, hoping our coworkers and bosses didn’t notice.
Then one day, it all just stopped. Nothing. Nada. Zip, zilch, and zero. No contact.
Horror of horrors, the internet had gone down! Oh, did you think I meant that we talked in person? Of course not. That’s so not the mode anymore. Verbal communication is so last millennium. We talked on instant messenger, exchanged thoughts through Myspace and its online forums, and occasionally resorted to the entirely passé email. When something particularly momentous happened away from the keyboard, at least we could use our cell phones to get the word out–through text messaging, of course. Voice calls are hip-replacement, not hip. Rather than sitting at my desk and talking to the schmoe in the next cube, instead I can seek out exciting people all over the globe who share my interests.
But without verbal communication, or even worse without communication in person, have we been losing out on something and just not realizing it? Perhaps so. We stop in the middle of a conversation and pick it up later, since it’s all floating right there on the screen. Seems great, right? But in reality, our thoughts are becoming fragmented. Forming a whole one at any given moment and then stringing it together with others has started to become a serious drain on the brain.
If conversation is an art, as the saying goes, virtual media have taken it to an entirely different level. We find ever more ways to cut down on words, on letters, to reduce language to its barest possible components for communication. In a few keystrokes, we undo the verbal richness that thousands of years of linguistic development to which we are heir, sacrificing this wealth for austerity. The art being practiced is minimalism, stripping language of all the cues we rarely even notice on a conscious level, such as intonation or body language, all the fine details we use to interpret the speaker’s mood and create context for conversation.
In 1994, when I joined my first primitive online forum, it took me weeks to puzzle out gems such as IMHO, ROTFLMAO, and TSIA. I couldn’t simply ask. That sort of gauche behavior would have instantly identified me as a newbie (as we were called back then). And I admit it: I was hooked even way back then. A few years later, I got my first AIM account. I joined one or two usenet news groups. Not long after that, web-based forums became available for every conceivable topic in which I might be interested, culminating in Myspace and Facebook and a hundred other social networking sites. Along the way, I gained new friends, a very precious few of whom have retained some longevity of friendship rather than just flitting in for a short while and then disappearing again on the stream of electrons. But every once in a while, the itch does crawl up my back and raise a question: have I missed out on something “real” while pursuing the ephemeral and immaterial?
So what happened when the internet went down? For just a few minutes, we all rose out of silence. We talked. We communicated. We emerged from our offices and our cubicles and got to know each other. Each wondering when the network would come back online, at least we had something in common to talk about in the meantime. Maybe, just maybe, we all went back to our desks an hour later a little bit better. And maybe, just maybe, we remembered to at least get a cup of coffee together or even lunch once in a while.
Dec 08
AndrewHumor, Life in Digital Internet
Yesterday at work, the internet connection for the entire campus went down. They blamed it on a physical hardware failure, though I am certain it was more like some guy spilling his completely full Dunkin Donuts Caramel Creme hot latte on the server because he stupidly removed the top because he doesn’t like the little sippy hole, and come on, he never spills! So instead of grabbing every available paper towel, or ripping off his shirt to soak up the spill before it leaked between the cracks of the casing and marinated the processor, this guy fell to his knees and screamed a holy “No!” into the stratosphere at having dumped $3.99 worth of caffeine and sugar (and some coffee) that was his only real sustenance until lunch. And that, my friends, sent the campus into a spiral.
Living without internet was a little like being blinded by solar glare. All of the sudden, the world no longer made sense. The day was washed out, hard to decipher. Everyone slowed down to avoid a crash.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I went well over five business hours without internet or e-mail, and my inbox was still empty at the end of the day. I did not really miss anything as a practical matter. But the internet has become so ubiquitous to my daily routine, that being without it makes me uncomfortable.
This paradigm unfortunately scares me a little. It is similar to watching your coworkers make plans to order lunch for delivery and no one asks you if you want to buy in even though your (rusting, metal) desk is perfectly placed in the center of the room so everyone has to walk by you twenty times a day and you actually bought (and already ate) your lunch. You know you are being irrational, but you feel hurt nevertheless.
I know I will survive if I don’t check my e-mail every five minutes. In fact, I sleep eight hours a night religiously and I never wake up in cold sweat because I hadn’t been able to check my e-mail 96 times since I went to bed. Some days, yeah, I do immediately race to my lap top to see what I missed (usually nothing) and some days, I don’t bother checking e-mail or read news recaps until I get into the office in the morning.
I have a very adversarial relationship with technology, but somehow that has not stopped me from becoming addicted to the web. Part of it is simply the nature of the modern life and part of it is the flexibility of information exchange that the internet offers. Either way, without hesitation, I pay for monthly high-speed DSL at home when I balk at the price of basic cable.
Periodically, I make a joke about what life must have been like before the internet. I mean, can you imagine how people communicated when there was no e-mail, and you couldn’t check your bank balance online, and you had to hand-write a check for every bill? Yeah, it was not that long ago. My first e-mail address was assigned to me by my college, and e-mail was read on a dos screen. In fact, for research papers in college, I still went to the library and combed through the card catalog or roamed the stacks organized by Dewey Decimal. But somehow in the last decade, that has become unthinkable.
Technology innovations have always changed the face of how we live to the point where we cannot live long without it. So maybe I should not be surprised that as soon as internet access collapsed on campus yesterday, it sent me and a lot of other employees and students into a (temporary) panic. Did I mention that I raced home after work and the first thing I did was boot up my laptop and check my e-mail? Pathetic? Maybe. But as soon as I saw my (empty) inbox, the world made sense again.
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