A Former WoW Addicts View of Community

When I read "Online Community" in the title I first thought of online gaming. Not being a huge follower of any specific music group, I am how ever familiar with the online gaming community.My game of choice was World of Warcraft. I played other video games before, but this game was different. Like other games, World of Warcraft incorporates good graphics and a story line along with a remarkable amount of play time. What sat World of Warcraft  apart from other games was the community and followers involved with the game. 

At the time when I first started playing World of Warcraft the game was pushing 14 million subscribers. That's a huge fan base. Among all those millions of people, I managed to form friendships with a few. These friendship's were not real friendship's in the sense that we did things together outside the realm of the game. Inside the game we were friends and like any good friendship there was a sense of loyalty. My group of friends knew what to expect from each other inside the game even though their real life may leave more to be desired. 

Comparing the online music community and the online gaming community I would say they are very similar. Both communities brought people together who share a common interest. I would imagine a lot of these people would never associate with one another outside the area of interest. This to me is the magic and downfall of the online community. The power of the online community allows for people living in remote areas of the world and people who chose to live a remote life to engage with other human beings. This engagement, although artificial, may be the only contact some of these people have with other humans. Having human contact is good. Not having face to face human contact is bad. I know first hand how detrimental online gaming can be to real life. 

For about two years, my life was work, come home and play, eat, sleep, and start all over again the next day. Some days I would find my self late to work, not a good thing. Long nights playing a video game led to a lack of sleep and poor work performance. I was able to see the negative aspect of my actions and developed some control. I survived and made it through, but this was not the case for everyone I knew. The game of World of Warcraft is a community. Like any community talk gets around. People share things with others like they would share in person. News about birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, births of new children, all are shared openly. I even heard about at least two divorces and one relationship break up. This connection to real  life and the escape from real life is what makes an online community special. 

What was not mentioned in the article by Nancy Baym is the fact that people are different while online compared to real life. An online community offers people the opportunity to be someone that they are not. People can hide anonymously behind some kind of online profile hiding their true self. This opens the door for deceit and victimization of the weak and naive. Following the in game chat I was able to notice that people will fall for just about anything. Some people build so much trust with people playing the game that they forget how to figure things out for themselves.  

Nancy Baym describes the positive side towards online communities, but the dark side of online communities can not be forgotten. This is the internet we are speaking about after all. Like real life there are good and there are bad. I believe that online communities are great. They bring together a diversified group of people under one common theme. The internet was made to transfer knowledge and online communities does just that. 

The Culture Question

This article, and other things I've been reading and doing for classes, have really made me question what culture is. One part of the article was titled "Creative Destruction in the Cultural Industries." I felt really resentful toward that heading and the section it encompassed, even if it wasn't directly contrary to my views. According to the Internet God know as Google, culture is defined as "the arts and other manifestation of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively."

I feel like most people have a very narrow minded view of what culture is. I got pretty close to a good definition when, a few years ago, I was in a fine arts class and we started talking about, at some specific instance of time, high culture and low culture. This acknowledged that even the "lowly" things still had to be defined as culture. Most of the time, I think we refuse to acknowledge the low culture things as culture.

Some people lament that the internet and/or technology is causing us to lose our culture. Our culture is always whatever current "art AND OTHER MANIFESTATIONS OF HUMAN INTELLECTUAL ACHIEVEMENT" we experience and contribute to. So, haters, how then is the internet itself not culture. Not only is it culture, it allows us to experience different parts of culture.

What I did enjoy about this part of the article was that it didn't refuse to acknowledge the changes caused by the internet as destructive toward culture. Instead, the section shows how culture has rippled in the wake of the internet.

What does it mean to be cultured? You use to hear, back some time ago, about how so-and-so was so cultured. But if culture exists in every facet of our lives, how can we ever escape being cultured? Everything we do has something to do with some part of our culture. I think what those meddling mothers referred to is what I mentioned earlier. They were acknowledging someone's well versed-ness in high culture. The problem of high culture and low culture arises out of, I think, the class system. Plays were once considered low culture. Ballet was once considered low culture.

Through the course of human history, as observed though the texts we read, we can see that there is a constant pull to look back and think of the good old age. That golden age is never the one we're living in and almost always the one we left. Even one of our oldest English texts, Beowulf, follows this model. Currently, Donald Trump is running his campaign under the idea of wanting to "Make America Great Again." And lots of people agree with him that America is not as great as it used to be. Through the course of history, we have always unsettled by change.

Culture follows that model. The reason that plays and ballets were considered as low class was because they were new to the scene. The new was to be disdained. As the new slowly reverts inevitably toward the old, other forms of culture erupt and take the spotlight. We then cling to the old, referring to it as high class and battle against the new new.

One of the "problems" I see arising  in this time is a lot of change across a short space of time. This is a very rapid cultural shift the likes of which nobody has experienced before. The rising generation, instead of looking back, is looking forward, embracing changes. In class a few weeks ago, we mentioned how the biggest change in the recent decades is our reaction to change itself.

Just because a cultural shift is occurring doesn't make it evil. However, thousands of years of training have forced us into that thinking.

I read an article recently about some new thing they have that will radically improve the internet and get rid of servers. It's something call IPMS or such. I'm can't remember. These smart guys were talking about how more people need to embrace this technology to better improve the internet. I started thinking, isn't the future predicted to be an internet of apps? How will this tech be good in the long run if we abandon web pages altogether?

My favorite part of this article was early on when the thought was posed. "Technology change, inflected by economic incentives and regulatory constraint, guarantees that today's Internet will be as remote by 2025 as the Internet of 2000 seems today." I'm not sure when this article was published, but I do know that we need to better embrace and accept our new culture or we're all going to be really depressed as change keeps smacking us in the years to come.

Change or Not to Change, That is the Question

When reading the article from Paul DiMaggio I was wondering, what am I going to write about. The line where he states that, "Technologies don't change us", I thought was very true. Change is a choice that people either make on their own or are forced to undertake. Life dose not evolve from technology, other than the technology of biology itself. We are not born, at least supposed to be born, with a smartphone attached at the hip. Culture is a fundamental sign of an intelligent and evolved species. Humans create what is pleasing to the eyes, ears, and the overall self. So far, technology has not been able to recreate the true artistic nature of humanity. Technology, including the internet is a creation born from humanity. The internet is humanity made digital.

To a point, I will disagree with DiMaggio and say that just about everything we can do in real life can be reproduced via the internet. It is true that seeing a movie on the big screen is a unique experience, one that is hard to reproduce elsewhere, but that may soon change. Faster internet and 4k televisions sure make a good competitor to a traditional movie house. I can now watch my movies on demand and even watch concerts from my home. Virtual reality is the next big thing for entertainment. I believe that Virtual reality may pose a threat to live and in person events. With virtual reality there may be no distinction from a computer rendered experience and the actual experience.

I like to think of technology and the internet as the expansion of the human imagination. With or without technology, humanity will always create. Sometimes the things humans create are good and wholesome and other times what we create is destructive and evil. Either way humans will still keep on creating.

Will technology be the end to our current and past culture, I don't think so. Technology expands our current thinking. We are still a curious people even with all our technology. As we expand into other areas of thought and ways to express old ideas we will still be curious about the old ways. I would like to see our future like that seen in the Star Trek universe. While zipping around the galaxy and shooting down alien star ships, the captains and crew have always enjoyed reading from a good book and partaking of a live concert on board their ships.

Technology may help flourish our culture even more. Technology has freed us from many simple and mundane tasks and automated other complex tasks. Technology has given us a chance to experience a significant amount of down time. For the first time in human history we do not have to worry where we get the necessities of life, everything is a point and click away. Even our food production can be automated through technology. The modern human has gained so much free time, even when they think they have none they still have plenty, it seems now that a new cultural event has been created. Free time, what we do in our free time paints a nice picture of what our culture is like. We need to compare what life was like 25, 50, 100 years ago to today. This difference I am sure would be shocking. (So, maybe technology does change us.)

Say no to Theory. Say yes to Layman.

First off, lets be honest, I hated this article. I hate reading theoretical articles. All I really read is "blah, blah, blah, let's use big words to sound smart, blah, I totally know what I'm talking about, blah". I started reading this article like a week ago. I feel like theorists are too far left field. Theorists are Communist. They try to sound and seem like they're in control. Now with that aside, I'll try to write a post on her paper.

Dean’s main focus in the article is that ICTs, our globally networked communication structures, aren’t exactly helping in bringing radical change to neo-liberal capitalism.  Actually, they’re hindering. “The proliferation, distribution, acceleration, and intensification of communicative access and opportunity,” Dean writes, “far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance, results in precisely the opposite, the post political formation of communicative capitalism” (53).

We can point to plenty of examples where ICTs were key in mobilizing large amounts of people, several in a remarkably short amount of time.  Just look to recent movements, organized in large part through Twitter, like #Shoutyourabortion. While we shouldn't downplay or just shy away from understanding these occurrences, we also shouldn't lump them into a big pile and validate them.

Dean’s argument is structured around the debunking of fantasies/fallacies, two of which I’ll outline.

The Fantasy of Abundance
Lots and lots of stuff (opinions,stats, etc.) on the net equals Democratic potential. Phrased differently, what’s important is not that messages are being understood and responded to, as much as the fact that they contribute to the constantly enlarging steam of content.  For Dean, messages lose their specificity in communicative capitalism; stripped of their singularity, they simply become part of a massive data flow.

The Fantasy of Participation
A key point here is that the Net displaces political activity.  Struggles of everyday life are moved to a virtual sphere. Because we feel like posting a blog (like this one) is participation, political energy is redirected, or perhaps distracted, away from “real” organizing.  We feel like we’re participating, but it’s a protected space, containable, predictable, etc.

So I guess I did understand her, but I didn't enjoy a bit of it. Going back to my Twitter example #Shoutyourabortion, it's really just a fantasy of participation. How many of those women would actually speak publicly about how they're proud of their abortion. I would fancy that most of them wouldn't. But within the sphere of the Net, it's a protected space and containable. And let's be honest, how many of their comments were actually seen by others? It was more of the mass quantity of responses that were seen. Not their individual responses. The fantasy of abundance and participation. Why couldn't she say this is Layman Term's? Like I just did. Theorists need a lesson on Layman Terms but they won't. They get attention by not speaking in simplistic terms. BLAH!

Narrative for the Naive

I could respond to Dean's article with one sentence: The government will do what ever it wants, regardless of the means we use to try to communicate with it. However, this blog post has to be approximately 700 words, not one sentence.

I had a lot of issue with the article. Dean mentioned that "The proliferation, distribution, acceleration and intensification of communicative access and opportunity far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance, results in precisely the opposite - the post-political formation of communicative capitalism" (53). Years and years ago in a psychology class, my teacher showed us a graph. On one side of the graph was the amount of ice cream eaten. The other side represented the number of murders. The graph showed a positive correlation. The more ice cream we eat, the more murders are committed. The point of the exercise is to show us that just because two phenomena were demonstrated together didn't mean that they had any direct relation to each other. That's what this whole article felt like to me. Just because two items are represented together doesn't mean they should be. In the above quote, Dean places two items next to each other - "communicative access and opportunity" and "communicative capitalism" - and declares one the result of the other. While the two ideas coexist rather well, it feels a little off to me. Just because they have a positive correlation, does it really mean they are related?

Now, I'm going to pick apart his thesis: "First, I take up the fantasy of abundance and discuss the ways this fantasy results in a shift in the basic unity of communication from the message to the contribution" (54). The government does what it wants to do. In government offices, there are researchers. One of the jobs of these researchers is to look at the contribution to messages that are put out by the public. So, while the government might choose to do whatever they want based on their "superior intelligence" and better access to secret information, the size of certain messages put out by the public don't just become another bit of white noise. From what I can tell, Dean targets electronic forms of communication as being unable and the cause of the problem. However, earlier in the article Dean tells about a demonstration of 250,000 people OUTSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE against the Iraq war. How is the government supposed to pretend to not know about that, even if it didn't make it into mainstream news? They knew that people weren't in support of the war, not just the people in cyberspace. They did what they thought was best regardless.

Surprisingly, I do actually agree with Dean on the second part of her thesis: "Second, I address the fantasy of activity or participation. I argue that this fantasy is materialized through technology fetishism" (54), but only to a certain degree. I do believe that there are people who see the internet as a way to be heard. It's very easy for them to get their voices out there. However, it is only the naive who cling to that hope for very long. Because of all the white noise on the internet, it's very hard to become a recognized voice. I, as an unrecognized voice, know this fact. I've been blogging for years, mostly story stuff, and have had very few people jump on the Melanie bandwagon. Those who did outside of friends and family probably fell off a few years ago. Despite the work and ranting I put into this post, probably less than 10 people will ever read it.

The final part of Dean's thesis states: "Finally, I consider the fantasy of wholeness that relies on and produces a global both imaginary and Real. I argue that this fantasy prevents the emergence of a clear division between friend and enemy, resulting instead in the more dangerous and profound figuring of the other as a threat to be destroyed. My goal in providing this account of communicative capitalism is to explain why in an age celebrated for its communications there is no response" (54). I'm going to examine the first part of this closing argument. It goes back to what I was saying in the previous paragraph about naivety. There is a reason there is such a distrust of politics these days growing in the US (and across the globe?). We've recognized what Dean declares when she says "In the United States today...there is a significant disconnect between politics circulating as content and official politics" (53). We don't believe anymore that the "voice of the people" is being accepted by official politics no matter how much we rant online.

KISS the CSS

Keeping things simple and neat, that is what I like. There are two ways of using CSS in your web page. One way, I would call the messy way, is to use internal CSS in your page. This will work and as mentioned in the book, not widely used. A better way is to use an external style sheet for CSS.

I can only imagine what a web site from a large organization, take ESPN for example, would look like if they only used the internal method for styling their web pages. The end user may never notice, that is true, but I sure would not want to be the new hire that has to rework that web page, ouch. Keeping the CSS separate allows for easy style editing and portability between different web page projects. The good old cut, copy, and paste has become the best tool for working with CSS.

After reading these last few chapters I can now begin to see where web pages start to become interesting. Boarders, margins, padding, and CSS. Now my web page will not be so plain. Simple html that we have learned will only get you so far. If I am creating something that it's sole purpose is to be seen, then I need to use and learn the tools and techniques to make my creation the best it can be. Also using these methods of creating a web page will prove that you do know something and not just how to point and click your way through a web design program.

I am all about keeping things simple, yes, but also I like to prove that I have some sort of skills too. Understanding these last few chapters will help to build those skills. I would like to be one of the "many authors..."as the author, Jon Dukett describes.

Damned if you do...Damned if you don't.

“On the other hand are institutional politics, the day-to-day activities of bureaucracies, lawmakers, judges and the apparatuses of the police and national security states. These components of the political system seem to run independently of the politics that circulates as

content” (65).

This quote says everything I have been saying about politics for the last five years. We can squawk all we want, but what the authorities say goes, regardless of what the public thinks. The invasion of Iraq is a perfect example of how politicians ignore what the people say, and instead vote for what they want, or what will make them the most money over time. The administration will do as it sees fit and ignore what everyone else thinks simply because it can, however, they can only do what they want because we as a people have allowed it.

If I flip through the news channels, I find that they are all telling the same story, but it is slightly different depending on what network I am watching. That is a problem for me; the conflicting information makes it hard to make my own judgments about the world events and conflicts because I do not know what, or who, to believe any more.

Take Obama Care as an example. The Senate Republicans voted against Obama Care because they knew it was a bad deal. Unfortunately, for everyone in the United States, the Democrats dominated the House at the time the vote. The Obama Care bill was approved by a margin of 10 Democratic votes because they were only concerned with themselves and they know they can afford it. The People did not want Obama Care because we knew it was a bad deal and would screw the Middle Class (which is has), but the President of the United States (like the child he is) threated to use his executive power to pass the bill anyway.

What kind of man whines until he gets his way? The way Obama has acted to get his way is disgusting, just disgusting. The internet has only made things worse, too. World Wide access to other countries is a bad thing if we want to keep our information private. I have several friends who have shut off their Facebooks because they have gotten far too involved in online life. Yes, I said ONLINE LIFE. You can be anyone you want to be online, and that can be dangerous not only for you, but for everyone around you. Things get twisted and sullied online. It is almost like life has become a virtual, life-long game of Telephone where everyone hates everyone and cannot have a discussion any more.

We are all jacked into the internet all the time. Here I am again writing a blog...on the internet instead of turning in a paper assignment. I am somewhat of a self-proclaimed tree-hugger, so I appreciate not killing trees. However, the production of energy to run the servers for the internet, the servers for the Blogger.com website, and everything else electronic we have in the world is also not helping the environment in any way but saving trees. Some electric plants, like the one in Laughlin, NV, put out chemicals so hard that if you park within a mile of them the chemicals will peel the paint off your car. The more energy we need, the more electric plants will be built, and I do not agree with the side effects of too many power plants. Trees can be grown, but the ozone cannot be repaired, so I think we need to work toward more green energy sources. However, guess what? My opinions come from examining others research...mostly on the internet.

 I feel like everything has gone digital and I can’t get a physical copy of anything without having to either pay far too much for it, or scour the internet for what I want. The internet has made us lazy and taken the fun out of shopping, too. Granted, the majority of people get frustrated and just leave when they cannot find what they want, but I usually do not because I enjoy seeing all of the new stuff stores have without being glued to a computer screen to do it. The whole point of stores is to get you out of the house and off your ass. Let me tell you a secret...shopping is a great way to stay active and get your walking in for the day. Sitting at our computers looking for things we want is dangerous for our health. That is why I left a lucrative position at a call center, the job was killing me and no job is worth my life.