Kilby: A Knight Who Says Ni!

Finally, it’s over! I’m so glad to have finished the web project.

We chose Time Warner as our company to expand their services into the Second Life virtual world.

For a small subscription fee, we plan to offer an in game ‘cinema’ experience that players can share with their friends, who are also subscribers. The films shown in the game cinema would mirror the release in traditional cinemas. Paying subscribers will also have access to exclusive trailers, interviews and other content only for Second Life. There is also the possibility of expanding the companies services to also offering products related to the companies intellectual property, like virtual shirts with the film logo for people’s Second Life character to purchase and wear. This will allow users to bring further consumer aspects of real life to their game experience, while maintaining social links.

For my Second Life persona I plan on acting as absurdly as possible. Beginning with physical appearance, I was to make her look as incredibly grotesque and unbecoming. My character will be overweight and disgusting, unlike everybody else who plays Second Life who seems to make themselves as thin and attractive as possible when in avatar form. I’m clearly rebelling against the norm. In terms of clothing choice I also plan on being as unconventional as possible, especially considering my choice of physical form, because Second Life caters to this, allowing you to make your own clothing.

This character I will use in Second Life will be as trollish and vulgar as her physical form in her personality. This character is the exact opposite of my classy, sophisticated  self and is no reflection  on my brilliant mind.
As for my avatars name, I chose Sleiphy because I use Sleiphnir (and Sleiphy as a derivative nickname) as my online alias for all internet activities. The name for my avatar  is in no way reflective of her character or physical form. However apart from this minor link to myself, I intend to have no actual connection to this character, therefore I shall write no information about myself in the ‘first life’ tab.

I do not expect to find any enjoyment with this trollish character, but are merely using it humorously for the class exercise.

For my web project to create an online persona I was a MMORPG noob playing World of Warcraft for the first time. I aimed not only to have this persona in game, within gameplay and game guilds, but also outside of the game in the surrouding WoW community, across social networking sites and other supporting websites.

For the reflection essay I’ve decided to focus on three areas to discuss and reflect on my experiences with the online persona and related new media and cultural aspects.

1. The online world aspect

I would like to focus on how the online world ‘works’ - how online, in game socialisation operates in WoW, question if social hierarchies are created and maintained and how people interact in game. This also may include a perspective on how people present themselves as a persona like I have attempted to.

1. Social Community out of game

This refers to the socialisation that occurs outside of the game in places like the dedicated support websites for WoW like forums and communities as well as how the interaction shifts from in game to social networking platforms.  This area also briefly touches on how the growth of web 2.0 has facilitated the strength of the community.

1. Gender

Here I’d like to focus on how my experience as a player was influenced by being female. Games are traditionally viewed as being a male area and many people perceive there to be a culture of sexism towards females in game. I want to analyse if the experience for me reflected the stereotypical views of gamers and how my femininity effected my social interactions in and out of game.

After viewing all the submissions for the academic integrity video competition I vote for ‘Food for Thought’. I found the message of the video was simple but effective and it wasn’t swamped in overcomplicated talk or too abstract. Furthermore, the production of the video was excellent, making it very deserving of an award.

This week we split into groups to being creating a video about academic integrity.

Our initial ideas were inspired by the ANZ eagle/hawk ads, which were about inspiring fear in people for doing fraudulent bank dealings. Instead of just telling people what academic integrity is, we wanted to focus on the potential consequences as well. Keeping with the idea of fear of consequences, we decided to use the style of the Blair Witch Project with frenetic camera, fast paced movement and lots of action. For the script, we didn’t want to discuss academic integrity by dialogue to the camera because it may be boring to just be talked to about academic integrity. Instead we’ve decided to use quotes from the UOW plagiarism guide  because it has authority and relevance to UOW students.

When discussing style, we threw around a couple of ideas. Our first ideas were split between stop motion and black/white details. Stop motion would have involved using a camera to take a series of photos that when put together form a video rather than a static image. Black/white would have removed the distraction of colour and made the video a lot more simple. We didn’t want it to get lost in complexities and distractions and heighten the dramatic effect. However stop motion may be too complicated for us to create in a few weeks.

After this lesson we’ve split the tasks amongst the group. I will be part of writing the script and getting the appropriate quotes from the plagiarism guide. We will all be part of the filming and Tom will be editing the video together for the final result.

My social networking use began many years ago and has since diversified as web 2.0 technologies have developed. Across all my use of social networking sites I have maintained my own personality instead of creating a fake persona to hide behind. At the same time I remain brutally honest and do not hide my opinions. However another continuing theme across the social networks I use is my strict control over who sees my accounts, what they see and other aspects of privacy.

Livejournal

I have had a livejournal account since 2003 and used it primarily as a journal service for my life. However Livejournal has elements of social networking in that users connect with each other as ‘friends’, communicate and participate in communities over common interests and topics. My use of this site does not extend into my ‘real’ life - I maintain it totally private and separate.  I achieve this by not allowing anyone from ‘real’ life access to my lj entries or information - you can’t really bitch properly about people if you have them added as a friend.

MySpace/Facebook

I joined Myspace. I tried. I really did, but that website is absolutely atrocious, even for the month I gave it a go. I’ve not seen anything so pointless than self promoted vanity and completely fake created personalities and a facade of friendship.

Instead I found solace in facebook, where people are more likely to be themselves than hide behind stereotypes. Facebook, with its singular layout for all meant people couldn’t mess the page up. There seems to  be less spam and interaction with friends (actual friends rather than mere randoms from the netterwebs) occurs over every aspect of the site. As a result I have developed that terrible facebook addiction. The content of facebook maybe mere boring life stuff, but it remains a central social networking site and place to maintain friendships (without the hassle of actually seeing the person) amongst my various friend groups.

Twitter

I had a twitter account before the beginning of this DIGC101 class, but only for the purpose of following Stephen Fry. I failed to see the point of a website that only has a single purpose - to post a restriction equivalent of a facebook status update. However since actually beginning to tweet for class, I’ve become , er, a little bit fond of it. My dedication to the site isn’t set in stone and I’m finding it hard to find friends from real life to follow.

This week in class we were introduced to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, how they can be helpful for daily use and also in our web project. We used google reader to condense our feeds into  one manageable place.  Previously, I have integrated RSS feeds into my livejournal account, with the subscribed feeds being included in my ‘friends page’ amongst posts from friends and communities.

However for this task I took the feeds from the following websites:

Relevant for Web Project:

World of Warcraft Vault from ign.com

World of Warcraft: Warcry

World of Warcraft Stratics

World of Warcraft from Top Ten Hammer

Other; General Interest

Engadget.com

Gizmodo

Passive Aggressive Notes

I Can Haz Cheezburger

PostSecret

The New Adventures of Stephen Fry (blogs)

Triple J News Feed

When searching for the online presence of these social media experts it became apparent that the way these people present themselves differed based on aspects like

danah boyd

danah boyd has a diverse online presence that spans many websites from her own personal site to having accounts on others like twitter. She presents herself across such a broad spectrum as a ‘social media researcher’. Her main website provides a short biography as well as links to her blog, twitter, popular essays and recent publications. In essence it serves as a self maintained aggregate of her academic and online presence. danah is a prolific enough to have a wikipedia biography and be featured on tv shows and other media as an expert. Whilst her website does link to her own accounts and publications, shee does not link or appear to ‘mix’ with other academics or individuals. One of the most notable aspects of how danah presents herself is by not capitalising the first letter of her name, as is common with proper nouns. By doing this she has created a unique identifying feature.

Steve Jones

Unfortunately for Steve Jones, the commoness of his name means he is not very identifiable online. His personal website is the 6th entry on a google search for his name. He provides links to his books but his website is very bare and basic. It doesn’t have the same personal aspect as danah boyd. He also doesn’t seem to interact with the online community via any social networking sites or public accounts. I would deem his online presence sheltered at least.

Yair Amichai-Hamburger

Yair has the exact opposite online presence to Steve Jones. His name is very unique so a google search only brings up sites with reference to him. The first link is to his personal homepage, with others being links to his involvement in the academic community. His personal website merely operates as a listing of his academic contributions. Curiously, the third link is to his facebook page, which is a private page. His online activity is public, but there’s very little interaction.

The internet has become an ingrained feature of 21st century life as computer-mediated communication has developed and changed into web 2.0 online technologies. Web 2.0 online technologies are those that are participatory in nature, such as social networking websites like Facebook, rather than a mere publication of information like a personal website. These participatory technologies often promote interpersonal communication whilst also reflecting a lexicon particular to computer-mediated communication. My own experiences with online technologies can be divided into 3 sections; social networking sites, blogs and forums.

Communication Online

The types of communication online varies between the platforms we use to present ideas and content to each other. Different websites utilize varying methods of communication as their main purpose. For example, Flickr primarily uses visual communication with text, whereas social networking sites like Facebook utilize as many as possible to provide the user with a vast array of content to maintain interest.

The main difference between computer-mediate communication and other forms is the immediacy and efficiency of relaying a message online like an email or comment to a friend. However this online communication takes away the element of face to face interactions. Lewin and Donner believe that these ‘paralinguistic cues’ (2002) like facial expressions are mimicked in the different platforms of online communication such as the use of emoticons in text in everything from instant messaging to blog posts. They also suggest that online communication favours this speed over accuracy, which is commonly manifested in the vast amount of misspelt and abbreviated words and phrases turned into acronyms (eg btw = by the way, tbh = to be honest). These acronyms and misspellings have become wildly accepted, especially on communication platforms where the main demographics contain teenagers like Myspace.

Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites (SNS) merge the notions of personal identity and friendship in forms that promote interpersonal communication. Websites like Facebook and Myspace allow users to create a profile about themselves – much like the popular personal websites of the 90’s, where users list personal information, likes and dislikes. They also allow or a system of interpersonal networking and communication via the friends feature and commenting element. However, as danah boyd stated on the O’Reilly Factor (boyd, 2006), websites like Myspace are not solely about meeting strangers, but instead maintaining pre-existing relationships with friends and wider associates. There is also an adjoining issue of the ‘cheapening’ of friendship where people become ‘friends’ after a single meeting and thereafter a number on the profile (Ellison, 2007).

My personal preference within these social networking sites is with Facebook rather than Myspace. There is an image of Myspace being for teenagers – where the discourse is affected by contextual factors like the maturity of its demographics. Furthermore, Facebook has a more ‘adult’ image with a singular site design for ever user than the “design anarchy” of Myspace (Perkel, 2006 in lecture), in addition to more subtle advertising, reducing the imposition on the user experience.

Although primarily used as an online communication form between friends, problems like identity theft and using the network as a platform to spread malicious content are a concern for social networking sites. The privacy of users is open to exploitation unless people make the effort to screen the links they click on in Myspace or the people they add as friends. However while these concerns are not affecting the popularity of such social networking sites it is becoming more apparent that users need to be cautious in maintaining different relationships online to offline. Recently as result of a widely circulated presentation of workers complaining on Facebook and their bosses’ online reaction, people are becoming more aware about the potential consequences of failing to take due care with the use and publicness of their social network profiles and associated published content.

Blogs

‘Blogs’, the portmanteau of ‘web’ and ‘log’ have always been a popular form of discourse online. They are a primary source of original user generated content which is an element of the participatory self publishing nature of web 2.0. They are utilized in a variety of different formats from personal journals that litter sites like Livejournal, to community and individual productions based on common topics (eg technology on Engadget).

The type of discourse in these blogs therefore also differs. Whilst a personal blog will tend to remain an individual’s experience monologue, community blogs are a multilogue where all users have input. These community blogs and blogs that allow for comments promote a form of ‘social participation’ (Warschauer & Grimes, 2008) by readers, which infuses interactivity in a form of communication that traditionally was restrained to a monologue structure. However there are an immense number of blog hosting sites from the ‘original’ Livejournal, to its knockoff Deadjournal, to Tumblr, Blogspot and beyond. Those that have maintained popularity have a few common features like ease of use, customisation and a network feature.

Some blog hosting websites like Livejournal and tumblr also promote a kind of social networking, allowing users to network with each other over the common website. Livejournal which was initially launched in 1999 by creator Brad Fitzpatrick now hosts the blogs of 21,759,693 users (SixApart, 2009) who have an option of adding friends and following communities. It is this networking feature that has led to the popularity of sites like Livejournal and Tumblr because they create a sense of interconnectedness between previously isolated users.

Recently the idea of a blog has extended beyond simple text entries, with sites like tumblr promoting a multimedia approaching to blogging with the inclusion of support to photos, video and audio. A particular type of blog that is achieving a popular fanbase at the moment is the ‘photoblog’ where the primary source of content is photos like ‘lolcats’ on icanhascheezburger or ‘Passive Aggressive Notes’. These blogs are easily ‘consumed’ by users with minimal text and focus on humour rather than serious discussion.

However the latest trend in blogging is the ‘microblog’ – also known as Twitter. While others are expanding the media types, Twitter restricts users to 140 characters but still includes networking capabilities. Twitter is commonly shrugged off as merely pointless ‘babble’, (Pear Analytics, 2009) but as evidenced by the recent Iranian election, it still provides a prominent voice despite its character limitations (BBC, 2009). My own avoidance of twitter stems from my indifference to the idea of telling everyone what you’re doing, but it has been highly promoted by celebrities like Stephen Fry, who give worth to the site.

Forums

Forums are all about the multilogue between users in an isolated space that is split up into individual threads within topics. They are a common addition to many large scale websites but can also exist on their own, like that of Hyper Magazine. These forums create a sense of community over a unifying topic, facilitating discussion between users, often to help solve problems, post content like reviews or simply give people a place to talk about a common topic. This community does maintain its own enforcers in the form of moderators who put into effect the rules and regulations of the forums, like removing illegal material or simply reprimanding a user for bad language.

Different forums often abide by different sets of rules, for instance, the Australian Whirlpool Forum is moderated for the good of the community, whereas sites like 4chan that are more of forum in a chaotic sense allow user free for all. For individual users, they can often be one amongst many, but their identity and persona comes through posts and interaction with other users in forums like Whirlpool where smaller groups have a sense of friendship like that in the Sony Ericsson Xperia thread that has now reached 8 sections. 4chan however openly dissuades users from having an identity, promoting the mass anonymity of its user base.

Computer-mediated communication through online technologies draw upon a number of different types of discourses, but in the web 2.0 society the ‘monologue’ structure of tradition publications has been replaced by a dialogue and even multilogue between users. Between the various forms of web 2.0 sites, there are more minute differences in the types of media they utilize, as well as the kinds of issues they raise in terms of privacy and copyright. Furthermore, the communication style of such online technologies has evolved to utilize acronyms and abbreviations as commonplace and also present the notion of an identity of the user as a core factor to their experience across a broad range of online communities.

Reference List

Web 2.0 Sites

Livejournal - http://www.livejournal.com

Myspace – http://www.myspace.com

Twitter – http://www.twitter.com

Tumblr – http://www.tumblr.com

Deadjournal – http://www.deadjournal.com

Blogspot – http://www.blogspot.com

Engadget – http://www.engadget.com

Passive Aggressive Notes - http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/

Icanhascheezburger - http://icanhascheezburger.com/

4chan – http://www.4chan.org

Australian Whirlpool Forums - http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum.cfm

Sony Ericsson Xperia thread - http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1249389

Hyper Magazine Forum - http://www.hyper.com.au

Academic Resources:

Boyd, D (2006), ‘The Pornographic Web’ on ‘The O’Reilly Factor’ broadcast 30/03/2006, accessed from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Nfyw2KYHWw on 26/09/2009

Boyd, D and Ellison, N (2007), ‘Social Networking Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship’, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, vol.13, no.1, pp. 210-230

Ellison, N and Steinfeld, C, and Lampe, C (2007), ‘The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends’: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites’, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, vol.12, no. 4, pp. 1143 -1168

Lewin, B & Donner, Y (2002), ‘Communication in Internet Message Boards’, English Today, vol.71, pp. 29 - 37

Warschauer, Mark and Grimes, Douglas 2007, ‘Audience, Authorship and Artefact; The Emergent Semiotics of Web 2.0’,Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, vol. 27, pp. 1–23

Livejournal User Statistics accessed from http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml

Pear Analytics in BBC, (2009), ‘Twitter tweets are 40% ‘babble’’, accessed from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8204842.stm on 26/09/2009

BBC (2009), ‘Twitter Iran delay ‘not forced’’, accessed from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8186720.stm on 26/09/2009