Creativity and New Media

Not by me, but I figured it was creative and interesting: DC Superheroes in World of Warcraft

Batman, Robin, Batgirl, and Superman slaying dragons in the world of Azeroth?  Sounds cool.

Here's something my friend and I both made over the course of experimenting in the game Terraria:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgVHluQXXRk
The game is an open world 2D sandbox that can be played with up to four people.

In the beginning, you can see our "rooms" - the bedroom is where you "spawn" (born, created) and there are rooms for all the non-player characters (NPCs) where you can buy and sell items you've picked up.  Each room must have a chair, a table, and a light source, while being separated by doors.

Under everything is the basement, where things that don't fit in the inventory are stored.  Also, my friend and I store our currency there because dying in this game punishes you by dropping your money, and we die a lot.  We decorated it a bit with statues and different colored torches.

I then show a little bit of the right side, and then go to the left side where I have an Obsidian generator.  In this game, obsidian is made when water and lava make contact.  I built a structure in the sky with two funnels of water and lava, and I am free to harvest at the one point they meet.

After that, I show the hole my friend and I dug to hell.

My first impressions of this game were that it was dumb and boring, but it was surprisingly fun to explore.

So this is an example of a virtual world that my friend and I molded to our liking.  Anyone else with the game can see it if I send them an invitation.

However, my little Terraria world is pretty bland - I've seen some amazingly detailed and complex things on the Internets.  

Creativity

New media, through convergence and collaboration, most definitely fosters creativity.  Two different ideas that converge can often have a vastly different impact than what most would expect.  An example is in Brooks Barnes' article.  Taking the notoriously popular "Crank Dat" song and combining it with popular cartoons targeted towards children, ridiculously entertaining videos are created.

New media and technology create convenience, thus simplifies the process of sharing information.  This again brings up the problem that the convenience and simplicity also makes it easy for pirating and taking other peoples' credits, which goes into the topic of patents, copyrights, and other rights.  Unfortunately, these tools have a severe negative impact on creativity.  So although new media fosters creativity, rules have been implemented to restrict creativity.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds can do many things - entertainment, training simulations, experiments...
Games often take place in such virtual worlds.  These kinds of games are great escapes from reality, but as good as it sounds, it also can be a problem when used without moderation.  There are a plethora of news articles of violence and children being neglected due to these games.
What's so addictive about these virtual worlds is that it replicates the real world... except you can be a completely different person and it does not have the restrictions and negative aspects of real life.  Thus, it is an escape from reality.  But living still eventually boils down to prioritizing real life over virtual life, and some people really prefer virtual life over real life.

Personally, back in high school, I knew a friend that pretended to be a girl over the Internet in a virtual world.  I don't get how people never found out - the things he would say and do were pretty much "dude" traits.  He even developed a "girl voice" and "befriended" a bunch of strangers in the virtual world (of Warcraft).

Virtual worlds foster creativity by removing the limitations of real world, thus allowing more freedom.  Portal, for example, is a product of creativity (originally Narbacular Drop, a student project) in which... well... see for yourself.  Additionally, areas can be duplicated for uses such as preservation like Hotel Chelsea in Saki Knafo's article, or simply, just for fun.  In Houston, Texas, a student from Clements High School recreated his school as a map in a shooting game.  Unsurprisingly, he got expelled from the school for generic ignorant "video-games-cause-violence" reasons.

In the future, virtual worlds can be convenient alternatives to real life events.  The first time I have heard of such was actually in this article by Dave Itzkoff.  Instead of going to an actual concert because there were too many factors that was a turn off, he just logged onto Virtual Lower East Side (VLES) and viewed the concert streamed from there.  Maybe, as technology improves, virtual worlds at one point will be difficult to differentiate from actual reality, besides the limitless aspect.

Social Networking Sites

Facebook:
Facebook is great, and it's the most popular social networking site for a reason.  As stated in my previous post, it has every practical form of electronic communication, like messaging, instant messaging, voice, and video.  I also like how they require(d) you to use their interface, although it can be customized.
I don't use Facebook as much as I used to, but I can see why people can waste hours and hours of time browsing it.

Myspace:
It was fun using this during high school / middle school.  My only problem isn't really with the site itself, more so the people that use(d) it.  Myspace allows a lot of HTML customization, so people throw on obnoxious, flashy designs with clashing colors making it hard to look at.  Then there were people that had music autoplay when you view their site, usually very loudly and thus shortening my lifespan.
The one thing I felt positive towards within Myspace was the music makers.  It was where unpopular artists could advertise their works without really imposing on others.  But currently I feel that YouTube is the spot for that.
Another significant problem was the "Top 8" which instilled lots of conflict with my classmates.  It was big news when people were rank 1, switched ranks, or added/removed from the Top 8.  Now that I think about it, it was very silly, but it was also what made it so popular.  Facebook even had a "Top n" application at one point, if I recall correctly.

Twitter:
Although I have not personally ever used this, I feel as though this is the best one out of this list of 4.  The simplicity may be restricting, but I really like the simplicity which prevents clutter and useless information.  The limit for tweets also promotes creativity - some people have long messages to write and they shorten it down in interesting ways.  It's like Facebook status updates... and that's it.  Those are usually the most interesting parts of Facebook anyway.

Xanga:
This was the blog-to-use during my high school.  I see very few people use it nowadays, but back then, I don't think people really had a variety of blog sites to use.  The community had similar problems with MySpace, but more tame in a sense.  There was a high level of customization available, but from my experience, Xanga users were much more experienced with social media than MySpace users, so they kept it under control.
Also, at some point, there were addons that people could use to show things like "who reads my xanga" in which some of my classmates made a big deal about.  Kid drama, in retrospect, was pretty entertaining.

Social Networking

Social networking technology, like all other technology, can be used to make things more convenient.  The most obvious implementation of this is advertising, as you see specified ads due to certain strings that people use in email, Facebook updates, or even search engines.  Also, as most already know, social network sites have a hold of their personal information and can do generally anything with it.
In the sense of convergence, the article "Real Facebook shop in virtual world breathes life into Mars" states that Facebook and Mars are working together to sell real products through Facebook.  This is a splendid idea, as they are combining two convenient tasks done often over the Internet - online shopping and Facebook.  Maybe in the next step, they can somehow implement celebrity gossip collaboration blogs.

Social networking technology provides both detriments and benefits to society.

Benefits, as stated, is a much more convenient world.  Facebook has pretty much every personal communication method I can think of available on its own site - including voice calls (phone), video chat, instant messaging, messaging in general (e-mail), and short publicly-viewed messages (happy birthday!).

Detriments, or the "dark side," are defined briefly in Facebook Exodus.  People have compared Facebook with the devil and North Korea, two things often viewed in a negative light.  I particularly agree with the point of how people become dependent on Facebook, while Facebook increases the users' dependency.
Personally, though, I am not a huge user of social networking sites.  My first twitter account was made for CIS 3810, and I post a random Facebook update maybe twice a month.  The only time I check Facebook is when I'm bored on the commute.  However, I have heard comments from my friends many times about how "blah blah blah blah on Facebook."  Maybe it's true - maybe Facebook is slowly turning us into sheep, and we'll eventually be throwing money at them so we can waste more time.

Additionally, while convenience is usually viewed as a positive value, convenience also makes it easier to do negative things.  "Facebook stalking" is a popular term I hear a lot, and although it is usually used between friends as fun and jokes, it can be interpreted as simply creepy.  Of course, this eventually merges with privacy, but that deserves a post of its own.

In the future, I believe that social networking will continue to evolve into more complex entities.  In the beginning, Facebook was very simple and wasn't plagued with extensions, addons, modifications, etc.  But several years later, we see Facebook with n optional extensions.  There are often people that click bad links and start sending their friends weird messages that are obvious phishing/spam attempts.  There are applications that bloat one's Facebook page, making it tedious to view, or bloat the newsfeed increasing the amount of junk one must sift through.  As time progresses, social networking will become more and more complicated, and I am not looking forward to it.

Blogs vs. Wikis

Wikis and blogs are very similar things with very similar structure used for very different purposes.  Wikipedia is basically an encyclopedia with contributions from anyone that wishes to contribute.
Blogs are "web logs" in which people may regularly post whatever is on their mind.
Thus, the content of Wikis are often objective, and blogs are often subjective.  Content always varies, but in general, people go to wikis for information, and people go to blogs for an interesting read.  Unfortunately, not all blogs are interesting.

Convergence is important in today's networked world because within the network, nearly everything can be accessed without even getting out of a chair.  If content never converges, it creates unnecessary complications.  An example is the use of wikis - most people know that the core of wikis is wikipedia and how it is used as an encyclopedia.  But as you google new things, you may learn that there are very specific wikis that focus on things such as your favorite TV series, or video game company.  Personally, I have made good use of "how-to" wikis in the past, especially when I had a minor emergency and had no idea how to handle it.

Blogging and collaboration can be a power unified force.  If one person says something, not many people will care.  However, if a significant number of people all share the same view AND they show their views through public blogs, it is more likely to raise awareness.  Since blogging is anonymous, it is difficult to measure the power that people hold behind their words.

Let me express how I feel about Internet anonymity first - I believe that no one should take anything said on the Internet unless it can be seen as stalking, or putting someone in physical harm's way.  In the article "Stung by the Perfect Sting," the celebrity that got offended over some anonymous blogger's insults should not have won the lawsuit against the blogger.  I'm not celebrity status, obviously, but thick skin is required to experience the Internet.  Sure, anonymity brings out the worst in people, and as a celebrity, everyone knows you yet you don't know them, but that's part of being a celebrity.  Growing up, especially as a teenager, I played lots of games competitively online, and the amount of garbage I've experienced has provided me with resilient skin.  Newcomers to the Internet are considered "fresh meat" to the anonymous jerks of the Internet, and many people (my friends included, fortunately not me) get a kick out of making people cry on the Internet.  People need to learn that Internet is significantly different from real life, and should adjust their reactions appropriately.

Back to collaboration, if the blog user had the backup of collaboration, there may have been a different outcome to the lawsuit.  I'm no law expert, but I think that it will be very difficult to sue a large group of anonymous people.

Wiki ideas that are new, I am quite stumped on this one.  I feel that wikis are there to answer questions, and people have made wikis for anything I can look up.  The only problem is that people can make wikis, but no one will contribute, and thus there are just a number of blank wikis floating around in cyberspace.  Maybe someone can make a wiki that encourages contributing to and maintaining dead wikis.  I really like the idea mentioned in the article "Wikipedia to Limit Changes to Articles on People" as I personally know people that have edited Wikipedia articles for kicks.  This fixes the problem on the other extreme - people bloating Wikipedia with redundant, useless, and false information.

Wikipedia - a business model that should have flopped

I decided to pick this topic for a few main reasons.  First, it was a suggested research topic.  Second, I am somewhat familiar with Wikipedia like most of you.
I believe that Wikipedia's success was unexpected - who expects a site that can be anonymously edited to be so full of mostly correct facts?  Over the years, I have heard arguments about how Wikipedia pages are full of misinformation but I have yet to see any actual pages where it directly contradicted with the research of universities, or something else comparable.

So I guess I will write about (1) why it should have failed, (2) why it didn't fail, and (3) why it is still working so well.  Probably more as I actually start writing this paper.