With blinding criticism

With tears in their eyes,
a blinding smile
and a cool fairy tale

Cynics serve his country.
American Idol-haters mockery
Tragic heroic coverup

Cncredible criticism for a 17-year-old.
week after week you demonstrate.
cute american teenage race, your power is blinding us.

Digital Art and Literature

Artport Withney supports, according to their "about" information, net art and digital arts. They encourage innovativeness and originality. In comparison, Rhizome.org supports more traditional art but that is using new technologies. The support preservation of contemporary art that is using new technologies rather than encouraging new ideas as Artport Whitney does. The artwork at Artport Whitnay appeals more to me, they are exploring and stretching boundaries of traditional arts while the works on Rhizome seem more static and held back. I do not argue that the cultural quality of the works on either site would be better, only that the works at Artport Whotney makes me start thinking and makes me more involved in what is taking place.

Artport Withnay stated that they support “net art and digital arts”. Netart is according to Wikipedia defined as art that “uses the internet as its primary medium”, while they define Digital Art as “art created on a computer in digital form”. Rhizome is more interested in new technologies and New Media, which Wikipedia describes as “media that can only be created or used with the aid of modern computer processing”. Rhimzome seems to focus on remediation, repeating old forms of media, traditional ways of art, but with a new medium. Artport Whitney on the other hand might end up remediating things but do not have that as goal, rather they are trying to create something as unique as possible.


Ilovebees is an alternate reality game where players participate in story. The story takes place in real time and is affected in how the players respond to it. The story is basically a mystery that needs to be solved, in the Ilovebees case, the players tries to find out what happened to the ilovebees.com website.

Implementation is a collaborative novel. Every piece was printed on a sticker and handed out to different persons that was instructed to place the sticker somewhere in a public space. I would describe that work as collaborative literature, but simultaneously art, like street art but also in a sense new media art since the stickers directed the user the homepage where the project was explained further.

What you can see in Digital art, net art, New Media, ARGs and in novels like the one above, is the importance of collaboration. All of these things have some element of collaboration involved, some more than others, like the novel. Maybe we have reached a new era where cultural works are not anymore mainly to be seen as a one man creation, but rather as a participatory, collaborative group process.

Snow Crash/The Matrix

SL in the news

Recently about SL in the news:

Barncancerfonden holds the first Swedish benefitconcert in Second Life.

About Media in Second Life. www.sr.se chose SR1, show "Medierna"

Another world

I found this quote in flair mondadori. It's about life in Seoul but I think it could be applicable to anywhere in the western world.

"there's another world, parallel and extraordinary - high tech. It's part of us, it's in our DNA. It's as if everything were digitally connected to everything else. We don't even question it any more, we just take it for granted. [The city] is both real and virtual.[...]We live on the streets in the same way we live in the blogs."

Yi Hyun, Kang. "Io, Seoul e il blog” flair mondadori. March 2007: 130-131.

Simulated Worlds

Why do we seem to need virtual spaces to socialize in? No matter if it is a networking community, a chat room or a virtual world, a place to meet others outside our bodies seem to be fulfilling an increasing need. But what kind of need is that? Humans are social creatures by nature and has a need of interacting with others, but why online? Why in worlds that our not our own and in bodies that are not physical? The reason why we wishes to be in another world could be very simple; fulfilments of fantasies and escaping reality - experiencing something else than your everyday life. Maybe that is an unfairly plain explanation of it but let us say that is why we need another environment for our socialization. The body then, Taylor states in Living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds that to root oneself in a digital space the user needs a digital body. Not only to display oneself to others but to confirm the user that s/he is in fact in that space (Taylor, 42). The way of using and altering the digital body as a material to state and carry out identities brings ones thoughts to cyborgs. The digital bodies are created, electronic material but at the same time the user, it is a part of the users (online) identity and in the virtual world an actual body, constructed material but controlled and with the mind of a user. The boundaries between what is human and what is machine get blurred and the relationships between gender, body and identity get challenged. The choice of digital bodies is a choices of how to display your identity to others, not much different than in real life where you appearance is highly readable to others to convey information of who you are. But stepping into a simulated world means being given the opportunity of conveying other information than you do in real life. Some physical attributes such as skin colour are in real life not changeable and brings with it a certain meaning. In your online world the users can choose what kind of information their bodies should display, the body tell the other users of who you are in a way that might even be more real than the users physical appearance would. Maybe the biggest reason to use digital bodies when socializing in an online space is because one wants to be seen and takes pleasure in the esurience of seeing that other is seeing oneself.

Discussing online worlds is not about questioning however it is a “real” world or not, it is a part of our reality and of our world and therefore it is real. But what about my digital body? My avatar is a character based on myself but at the same time she is me, my online me. When I walk into a coffee shop in Second Life it is not me who is doing it but me who decides it. When my avatar meets other avatar, it is she who meets them but me who decide if she will interact with them. When my avatar is having a business meeting it is my avatar who is speaking and gesticulating, but it is the offline me who is performing in real life what was discussed at that meeting.

Maybe spending time in a virtual world is merely an escape from our not so perfect real world. By entering Second Life I enter I world free of gender assumptions and prejudices, a world where the possibilities are endless and every user has the same conditions as others and where no multinational companies can achieve their power only because of their size. Or maybe our “real” world is to much connected to the virtual for letting the virtual spaces be as perfect as they have the capacity to be. Where there are humans there will be the effect of human behaviours on the places in which they are in. Second Life for example, by letting the users create the space, provides endless opportunities for creating whatever you wish but people rarely wish what is perfect. Kathleen Ann Gonan writes in More than You’ll Know: Down the Rabbit Hole of the Matrix that Neo “creates reality” (110) and that is exactly what users are doing in simulated worlds.


References
Goonan, Kathleen Ann. More than You’ll Know: Down the Rabbit Hole of the Matrix.
Taylor, T.L. Living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds.

Social Networking Websites

With help of new technology, the world that we live in today is constantly growing and expanding at the same time as it is reducing distances within it. We get closer to the world in general but at the same time there is a common fear that we also get more and more isolated from our friends and family and from people in general. I would like to argue that it is there within that the need for social softwares is to be find.

Social networking sites such as Friendster, Classmates.com, WAYNE and iWiW are only a few out of hundreds of similar sites all with the main purpose to help people to sustain their exsisting networks and to create new networks.The user connects via the site to people they already know (for nourishing their relationships) and for regaining friendship with people they might have lost contact to. The ways of doing this vary slightly between the different sites but the idea remains the same, find your friends, find old friends and maybe also find new ones via for example a common interest.

The group of people to whom the site is targeting varies of course between the different theme connected to the otherwise quite similar sites. WAYNE (WhereAreYouNow?) have a travel focus and therefore target people who have the possibility to travel. Classmates.com targets of course adults who has graduated (and after that lost contact to their classmates). Friendster is more general and seems at first to be open to everyone but functions such as searching old friends via former school or company are only avaible for a few countries and is therefore mostly geared towards citizens of these countries. Surely, people that do not live in those country can still enjoy using Friendster but it will probably never get as successful and widespread in the countries where many of the functions are not avaible.

It seems to be quite even gender divided on all of the sites but all of them except iWiW and Classmates.com seem to have a majority of members born in the 70’s and 80’s.

The main common interest for people using these sites is networking but within several of these sites, discussion groups are also formed around common interests. WAYNE features a function that display where people have or will travel and connect people in that way.
There are three main categories of groups to be found within social networking sites. The first group is friends who already have a good contact in real life and only want to sustain their network by an easier or alternative mode of communication. The second group consists of people rebuilding old relationship, trying to get in contact with old friends (rebuilding a broken chain in a network). The third group is people networking and creating relationships with people they do not know from the beginning. This third group is more common within other type of social sites and not as much at this friend-finding sites but they exist there to some extent as well. My Space for example, is one that probably has a rather equal share of group one and group three.

In some of the sites, popularity of a person is shown in one way or another and some users might find the site turning into a contest to achieve as many friends or clicks on their name as possible, leaving those with only a couple to feel outside and not as successful user, hence the original meaning of the site might get lost.

The most revolutionary aspect of this type of social networking sites are those where one can find old friends with an easy click, friends you would never have been able to find again without the help of online resources. When the social networking sites works like that it completely changes the rules that we were used to play by before online networking became part of our lives.

Networking is the key to our society, this is how we evolve and develop as person and our society in general. Social networking is as important in business-, tolerance-, community- as it is in a personal aspect. Today are social networks differs widely from how they looked 20 years ago, they spread across the world and between people who might never had met. At the same time, we seem to have a growing need of keeping online address books, RSS blogs, join different communities that one get invited to, all to sustain the relationships we already have. When did it get this hard to uphold our networks? We have been fine sustaining our social networks long time before the social sites and internet came into use, so why this need? Maybe it is internet itself that created this need, in a time of constant information overload we might get afraid to loose our contacts within the constant information flood we receive every day. Suddenly it is easier to meet or neighbours online than at your doorstep and when the need to physically move between places decreases (and with that also the person to person interaction possibility of it) the need to stay in contact online increases.