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.)