Adventures in Second Life - Part II

This week was somewhat different from my last experience in Second Life. I saw the more educational side that the application had to offer. My assignment was to collaborate with a group of my peers through our Second Life avatars and explore locations based on the readings. Finding these places wasn’t difficult seeing as I was paired up with the two co-facilitators from this past week. They had already researched islands that pertained to our readings about open source software, net neutrality, and intellectual property. Our first stop, after leaving Purchase College Island, was a location called Free and Open 43 on ama gi Island. Here my group and I were able to get information and access hyperlinks for companies and programs that promote open source software, such as Mozilla, Linux, and Ubuntu. We were also able to get free promotional in game objects. I walked away with several different virtual shirts, a pixilated Debian notebook, and a digital can of GNU Linux classic soda. Not a bad haul.

Next up was a landmark called Open Source Information Center on Watarrka Park Island. This is where we spent a majority of our time and learned a lot of useful information. Upon arriving at the island we were greeted by an avatar by the name of Catherine Pfeffer. Catherine told us to look around and ask her if we had any questions. After looking around the Open Source Information Center for a while, watching streamed videos and gathering information about open source software in the form of text documents, our group engaged in a lengthy discussion with Catherine. We discussed a lot about the benefits of open source software, intellectual property, and much more. She also provided us with websites where we could download our own open source software. At the end of our discussion Catherine reveled herself to be a technical writer from France who was very knowledgeable about what we are currently learning in class. When we were ready to move on we thanked Catherine and teleported to the next location. Our last stop was a place called the Old School Gaming Zone where we looked for examples of copyright infringement. After searching for a while, we decided that this area didn’t have what we were looking for and decided to part ways since our class time was almost up. After we all bid each other fare well, we logged off and went about our days. That pretty much sums up my second classroom experience in Second Life.

Our First Class in Second Life

Last Monday we had our first class held within the online community program of Second Life. Going into this I had no idea what to expect. To be honest I wasn’t too fond of the program initially because of its unpolished look, lack of responsiveness, and glitchy behavior. The lag alone turned me off to using it and only kept me online long enough to figure out what I needed to be prepared for class. I tend to have little tolerance for slow and unresponsive programs. Needless to say when it came to sign on and meet with a whole class full of users, I was skeptical. Now that it’s all said and done I would have to say that this was one of the most entertaining classes I have ever experienced. Because of the interactive nature of the program, time seemed to fly by and there was no lack of activities to experience. In fact there was so much too see and do that I even stayed logged on for an hour after class ended just to explore some more.

I also noticed that being around people who are represented by digital characters makes for some interesting interactions. It seemed that many people were quicker to participate and interact with other users when they were masked by a digital representation of themselves. Meeting in Second Life did not have that traditional classroom feel. It felt like there was less of a hierarchy and that everyone participated equally without hesitation. As far as learning goes, initially I felt that I didn’t learn a whole lot, other than how to use some features in Second Life. The more I thought about it though, the more I realized that I learned much pertaining to computers and society just by observing my fellow classmates during our three hour session together. It is amazing how not shy some people will act when they feel like they are hidden within cyberspace. Just observing showed me a lot about computers and how they have affected our culture. Overall I had a lot of fun meeting in Second Life. There were many moments when I would laugh out loud, amused by the actions of another classmate. I am glad that we will be meeting more in Second Life this semester. It is a great example of how society acts inside the false reality of a computer generated world.

New Media Lecture 1

It is always interesting to see the way that different people incorporate their art into what they stand for or what they are passionate about. Last Wednesday night I attended the New Media Lecture at the Neuberger Museum. The guest speaker was a woman by the name of Amy Franceschini. Amy is a New Media artist from San Francisco, California and has had considerable success in the field. Her work can be seen on the website www.futurefarmers.com as well as www.free-soil.org. Both of these websites are also founded by Amy.

She started off the lecture by showing us some of the projects that she worked on in her earlier days as a New Media artist. The first project was a website where users can deface a picture of President Bush, as well as view some of the creations made by other visitors. There were some funny interpretations of the President made, including a drawing of him as Adolf Hitler and of him as a puppet with strings attached. Although amusing, I didn’t see much purpose of this site other than to mock the President, which has been far from innovative or hard to do based on his actions during his tenure. More examples of this can be seen at this website, www.futurefarmers.com/texasdrawl, worth checking out if one is bored while surfing the internet and looking for a good laugh.

Amy went on to show us other projects ranging from a site based on avatar creation and representation to a slide show of pictures based on her time at a San Francisco museum where she and other colleagues hosted an exhibit based on interactive media. This was interesting to me. From what I saw of the pictures she showed us, it looks as if she hosted this exhibit based on interactive media, but failed to incorporate one of the biggest forms of interactive media that exists today, video games. She did mention that she had some form of video games there, but being that neither she nor any of her colleagues were gamers, they neglected to add more, not knowing the culture that well. She did have some other rather interesting, more hands on projects, which she showed during the exhibit, such as the lemon powered Gameboy, but none of them seemed to really encompass what interactive media is today. Being a gamer myself I figured that I would point this out since it doesn’t make much sense to me. I respect Amy and think she is great artist on the path to do big things for this society and nature, but the fact that she kind of brushed over video games for an exhibit that was supposed to be based on them left me slightly confused.

Ultimately what this lecture led up to was Amy showing us some of the work she has done reinstating the Victory Garden program, reminiscent of the World War II era. I thought this was admirable and a very good idea. Even before it became popular to do so, I have always been for the environment and expanding of plant life and nature. What Amy was working on was a government sponsored program that encourages people to build gardens in the unused spaces of their backyard, both to add to food production as well as to make the area more “green”. She showed us videos of her work so far and talked to us about where she intends to take this program in the future. She concluded with the Victory Garden project and answered any questions the audience had. Overall I thought this was an interesting and beneficial lecture.

Computer Love

* Photo courtesy of www.penny-arcade.com *

Recently we were assigned the task of using the internet to research a song. The song is one that we heard in class and were not given any other information about. Having deduced the songs name, “Computer Love”, from hearing it and reading the syllabus, I sat down at the computer and started where all of my online research usually begins, www.google.com. Like most search engines, Google is really helpful for leading one in the right direction through a multitude of relevant hyperlinks. After I typed “computer love song” into the search box and hit the search button, many links showing sites that had useful information appeared. From the links that popped up I could tell right away that the song was by a band named Zapp & Roger. To find out if this was the song we heard in class I needed to research further. While the internet may be a very useful tool, you can not always believe everything it offers. It is usually best to do additional research to confirm that what you are reading is true.

Recently I have discovered that You Tube is a useful site for tasks other than watching pointless videos of people performing senseless acts. It is also good for viewing music videos, particularly old ones that are hard to come across on television. Once at www.youtube.com , I typed the name the name of the song in the search box and hit search. A new page popped up with a bunch of links to videos of various versions of the song. Remembering the band name Zapp & Roger from my previous Google search, I clicked on the link to a music video by them, called “Computer Love”. When the web page came up, the song started to play and the video screen displayed a picture of what appeared to be the album cover. While the song was called “Computer Love”, it was not the one we heard in class. This was a more funky Seventies style electronica version of the song, which I assumed to be the original song, since computers were a newer technology during that decade. Intrigued and wanting to find out more, I went back to the You Tube search engine and found another version of the song, a remix by a band called Kraftwerk. Clicking on this I listened to a different version of the song, much more like the one we heard in class. This seemed to be a faster-paced techno version of the song. While I’m not certain they are the same song, it is very close to the version that we listened to in class.

To get additional details of these songs I needed to go to a more informative website. For this I choose to go to www.wikipedia.org, a site that I believe to be one of the more useful resources on the Internet. In the Wikipedia search box I typed in “computer love” and three different results came up. It appears that this particular song has been preformed by three different bands, of which Wikipedia knows. Both bands that were mentioned before, Zapp & Roger and Kraftwerk, have articles for their version of the song here, as well as a band name that I have not seen before, Eruption. Since the article about the Zapp & Roger version appears first, I clicked on that link and proceeded to read about it. It turned out that this version was released in 1985 on the album The New Zapp IV U. Other details about the song are given in the article too, such as the fact that it was featured in the soundtrack to movie Menace II Society and that it has been sampled by many rappers.

When I went back to the Wikipedia links, I discovered that there is no article for the version of the song by Eruption, just a link to the article about the band. All that left me with was the link to the version of the song by Kraftwerk. To find out more about this version I went back to the previous page and clicked on the link to the article. Once there, I found that I was wrong in my earlier assumption that Zapp & Roger were the first ones to create a song by this name. Kraftwerk’s version was released first, in 1981 on the album Computer World. The article also gives details about the song, such as where else it has been used and that the song is about finding love through a computer. I found this description to be very relevant because it explained why the song has significance in our Computers and Culture class. The song is about a person who finds love through a computer, and this was back before Windows, or any other operating system for that matter, even existed. Before computers had even become a mainstream part of culture, this song was evidence of the impact that computers already had, and even served as a premonition of how they would further influence society. Keep in mind that Kraftwerk is a German band and that this song reflects the impact of computers on European culture, not just American culture. This songs meaning even holds true today, almost thirty years after the song was written. Millions of people turn to the computer as a method to find love with sites such as www.eharmony.com. While internet research is not new to me, I have never documented my methods while searching for information. I found this exercise to be an interesting one and a good of example of yet another way computers have influenced our everyday life.