Dr. Wagstaff began with the announcement, as she also emailed, that if you have missed a class, you can make up your missed participation points by posting “a thoughtful, contentful comment that shows you’ve read/understood/digested the material we covered that day.”
She also reminded us that presentations are next week. And keep them to 4.5 minutes so we have time for questions and discussion. We will be cut off at 5 minutes, so practice it with a timer to get down to 4.5 minutes.
Identity and Privacy were the topics for today. We passed around slips of paper with quotes about identity and privacy from the reading. We read the quotes and discussed them. We talked about MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon), MUSHs (Multi-User Shared Hallucination), and MMORPGs. A MUD is a text-based virtual fantasy game. Similarly, a
MUSH is a text based virtual domain, but not necessarily a game. We talked about how these games allow people to change themselves and be whatever they want. One aspect of these cyber worlds that we discussed was gender changing. We discussed the motivations behind pretending to be the opposite gender: curiosity, experimentation, challenge, TinySex (cyber sex). In these online worlds, you can pretend to be anything and meet interesting people, overlooking the fact that they are probably lying right back to you. Dr. Wagstaff recommended The Guild, an online TV show written by Felicia Day, which satirizes these communities.
We next talked about privacy. There are some scary concerns when it comes to internet privacy. One example is that researchers could predict with 78% accuracy whether a male is gay by analyzing his Twitter. Even social security numbers can be found by mining social network profiles. Another concern was that iPhones log all of your locations on-device. There is a cool app called iPhone Tracker, which shows you where you’ve
been and where you spend a lot of time. But since all the data is stored on-board, rather than a secure server, it could be bad if your phone was stolen.
We had to cut the class early so we could fill out class evaluations.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
It’s interesting how the MUDs and MUSHes of the past have essentially turned into the MMORPGs and forums of today. MMORPGs are based around the game, with some interfaces for community such as guilds, but generally just facilitate spending more time in the game. Forums usually have a focus, but oftentimes the strongest community will grow up around an off-topic or social board.
In terms of gender on the Internet, the first thing that came to my mind was the stereotypical “There are no girls on the internet” statement. In fact, in a lot of ways, that is characteristic of how the Internet and its culture have regressed: the gender-bending possibilities offended enough people that the stereotype that all those claiming to be women on the internet are men. This led to alienation of actual women, probably discouraging them, and further perpetuating the stereotype….a self-reinforcing loop of prejudice and alienation.
Luckily it seems like this is changing, but it seems like the internet has increasingly become a place hostile by default, rather than open to new things and welcoming as it was when a smaller community.
It seems appropriate to finish things up with an xkcd comic.
I’m curious about what led to your sense that the ability for men to impersonate women online has alienated women or discouraged them from using the Internet (as a whole?). Do you have friends who experienced this, or was it perhaps based on something you read?
As one departure, the players of role-playing games such as MUSHes based on Anne McCaffrey’s Pern tended (perhaps still tend) to be overwhelmingly female. Of course, her readership is probably overwhelmingly female. It seems likely that people will be drawn to online communities that reflect their own personalities and social preferences, no matter their gender.
Your comic is spot-on in terms of how online communication can be quite different than in-person interactions — still!
It seems to me (not personally being an internet junkie, full disclosure) that hostility is very much present, but isolated to specific places on the web (4chan, people that play call of duty / halo / etc. online, for example; obligatory xkcd plug here), and that a lot of this comes from elitist views towards people who aren’t in their little circles; 1337s pwning n00bs, as it were. I think this is facilitated by the internet’s (apparent) anonymity, as is brilliantly portrayed in the linked comic.
As for privacy, at least for myself it seems pretty much second nature not to trust anything at first pass on the internet, and to take precautions to keep my information safe. I’m curious, though, if people who make themselves vulnerable to things like identity fraud (for instance, by allowing 300 apps to access their facebook information, which they have filled out in great detail) do so out of ignorance or out of sheer apathy towards the consequences. It seems to me like the next generation, those who are currently growing up in the area of social media, have much less caution than those to which it was introduced at a greater age (this may be stereotyping, but I still think it’s true). It’ll be interesting to see if bad habits created using sites like twitter and facebook bring about more vulnerabilities when those kids grow up and start getting their own credit cards and online bank accounts.
It would have been very interesting if the current internet censorship bill vote had occurred during this course. The internet, made to increase the speed of the information traded in the scientific community, is now used primarily for social networking and pirated media. I feel like the expectation of both privacy and ownership has dramatically changed since the introduction of the internet, although I’m not sure it’s truly for the worst. Although cracking can provide far too much information that a user did not wish to provide, the average internet user can control how they’re viewed and what information they give out. To me, it’s all about a change in mindset.