Robot humans, our future?

I saw this trailer("The Surrogates") this weekend and it made me think of elements of our discussion on Wednesday. This movie is about how technology evolves so much that humans don't even have to interact anymore, they live via surrogates. Web platforms such as Second Life scare me because they make me believe that we are headed towards a similar fate as that in the movie. Will humans cease to interact as soon as technology evolves and enables us to do so? Haven't we already seen evidence decreased/ strained person to person human interaction? is this bad? Will we let ourselves get lost in technology or will we find a limit?

SMS Spam

Over the last couple of months I have started to receive random text messages from people that say they are for my bank and that something has happened to the money in it. After a few seconds of freaking out the first time I proceeded to call my bank and get to the bottom of what was happening. They told me that they were having problems with people being able to hack into our bank accounts because of people responding important information regarding their bank accounts. After doing some research, I found that this type of produsage is growing not only in the United States but through the world and in other countries such as China and the U.K.

I have been lost as to how to handle this and when will this stop? What measures will people go to in order to steal money from others?

Monday 9/24 discussion questions

Jenkins, Chapter 1:

What is collective intelligence and how is it influencing the internet?

Levy argues that new political power will emerge from the current forms on online play (like spoiling). Do you agree?

Is knowledge production taking place via spoilers more democratic than traditional modes of knowledge production?

Do amateurs control the internet? What are some examples to support your answerer (whether it is yes or no)?

Lessig, Code is Law:

He argues that since code is the architecture of cyberspace it sets the terms on which life in cyberspace is experienced. What does he mean?

What are some of the things that code determine and in turn can threaten or protect our liberty?

How is code changing (and how has it changed since this was written)?

Does Lessig advocate regulation or not and why?

Gamer Bullying

As a frequent gamer, I've heard some things come out of peoples mouths that just plain shouldn't be said. There are lots of people out there that are flat out rude, racist, sexist, ect. and are not afraid to share their views with any and every other gamer out there.

Is internet game bullying something that should be taken into consideration for regulation?
Why are people inclined to say such harsh things to one another?

These are some of the questions I will be answering tomorrow during my presentation on Gamer Bullying.

Here is a little clip of xbox bullying I found on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUE8yDbDbsI&feature=related

Texts From Last Night..Remember that text you shouldn't have sent from last night. We do.

Even your private texts you send to people aren't safe . Texts from last night is a third person collective site that is fueled by users that forward texts they get from other people. The texts are filtered and rated by "best nights" and "worst nights" viewers of the site. Also on the site they have twitter/flikr from last night side bar if the texts don't interest you enough. There are other sites like FML that people are able to submit bad situations but the third part aspect seems to be unique for these types of collective sites.

More Convergence Culture

As I was reading some of the other blogs last week I realized there were many sites that I actually looked at and use that I never considered as much of a collective site as youtube or facebook. There is kuler which allows users to use or develop their own color palettes for designing. Kuler allows you to design your own colors based on complementary, monochromatic, analogous and other color variations.
Collegehumor.com is a more typical convergance site, it allows users to post humerous, video, photos, or stories to share. Many videos and photos are things that are reappropriated, made or changed by the users to make more of a statement on popular culture.
College-O-Vision on CollegeHumor

Crime in Myspace

In class, one of the questions was about the legal and economic issues of produsage. A main legal issue that comes to my mind is the story of Megan Meier, who killed herself after a myspace hoax. This brings up the issue of legality in the social networking world. We can never really know if people are real or not because people constantly portray others and it is a difficult medium to control for age limits. This is one of the sad results of what the negative sides of social networking can do.

Here is a link to an article about the case: http://www.babble.com/CS/blogs/strollerderby/archive/2007/11/19/teen-kills-herself-over-fake-myspace-boyfriend-created-by-adults.aspx