From User to Creator

One thing I love about the Internet is how easy it is to learn new things. As a media student, I have a huge interest in Web Development. No only does the Internet offer (what seems to be) an endless supply of website examples, but it also offers an overwhelming amount of tutorials on how to create Web pages. One of the most popular (and great for beginners) is W3 Schools, a tutorial based website created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). With the Internet, you can learn almost anything you can think of.

Second Life or Second Beginning?

A popular topic of discussion in Media and Cyberspace is the game Second Life which tries to virtually replicate your ideal life. The ethical discussion here is whether an ideal virtual life is better than real life. What I’d like to discuss though, is a new game that replicates something interesting: a new beginning.

Welcome to MineCraft, the in dependant game that took the Internet by storm in 2010. The ironic thing is, it did it without even being finished. The game came out in its Alpha testing form, and by the time Beta was out, it already had over 1M sales.

MineCraft, essentially, replicates the beginning of time. You’re simply placed in a randomly created world that’s completely natural, and as a human, you’re free to do as you’d like. However, you must follow simple rules based on real life. For example, the first thing you must do is cut down a tree with your bear hands in order to make tool out of wood. From there on you’re free to mine and craft your way through life.

What strikes me as interesting is the animated style of the game. It’s extremely cubed and pix elated. This is opposite to most First Person Games which try their best to replicate real life. In Plato’s critique of poetry (the main form of entertainment in his time) he argued that it entertained false realities and obstructed one’s self-realisation. Later, artists like Brecht began to realize that as long as people were distanced from believing their entertainment was reality, it was helping their self-realization. I think MineCraft has this effect. The pix elated style puts no doubt in your mind that you’re playing a game. With that said, as the sales have shown, the addictive nature of video games is very present in Minecraft.

Animation I Made

Snopes

For thousands of years, the truth of content has been an important issue in communication. People will create false rumors, often to create interest in an audience. As I’m sure you already know, this is still a common issue today. In fact, it’s only increased as spreading messages has become easier through advancements in technology. We see it every day in things like tabloid journals, chain mail, and more recently, blogging.

Snopes.com is a website that’s trying to tackle this issue. Snopes.com looks into common rumors and urban legends, researching to find out if they’re true or not. Due to their consistency of thorough, honest reports, Snopes.com has been profiled by several news networks such as: CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC News, and many others. People are tired of the rumors, and thirsty for the truth, as shown through the hundreds of thousands of hits received every day.

On a personal response though, Snopes.com doesn’t seem to offer the service they advertise as well as resources like Google News and Wikipedia. The cite is run by a husband wife couple who create almost all of the content on the website. Unfortunately, two people just aren’t good enough to keep up with amount of rumors being spread around the internet. I love the idea of Snopes.com, but the few times I’ve used it to find out about a rumor, there’s been nothing reported on what I’m searching for. As opposed to open sourced resources that accumulate knowledge from all over the internet, like on Google News and Wikipedia. This shows through the trend of interest around Snopes.com. On Google Trend, it shows Snopes.com to be searched less and less on Google. I believe this is due to the fact that their content just can’t keep up with the content of other websites that offer similar services. Unless Snopes.com changes their format, I doubt they’ll keep up with the competitors.

Jealous of Facebook?

I remember the first time I used Facebook. Within a matter of 6 months, almost everyone I knew had portrayed the digital version of themselves on this nifty little website. I could connect with my friends on a different level; I could see everything that was none of my business. In turn, my friends were able to see everything I posted, weather I wanted everything to be seen or not. This lead me to create what I like to call the “highlight reel” of my life, where I only posted what I was willing to have everyone see. It’s not that Facebook became a false reality, it was just a selective reality displaying the “me” that I wanted people to see. It’s pretty easy to see the ethical dishonesty here, but what's harder to recognize is the effect this can have on spectators. Recent psychological research is beginning to show that using social networking sites like Facebook can actually cause jealousy or stress thanks to little “highlight reels” like mine.

People are overestimating the happiness of their friends. Alex Jordan, a Ph.D. student at Stanford lead a research paper in the January issue ofPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin which studied people’s reaction to Facebook profiles. Jordan asked the 80 freshman’s about their friends and recent events. The study showed that these students were unable to account the negative events in their peers lives. The arguments here is that people naturally want to be happier then their peers, so when we have fabricated images of our peers, it becomes increasingly unrealistic to reach this goal. In other words, seeing our friend’s have fun on facebook, makes us jelous in real life. Another study lead by psychologists at Edinburgh Napier University analyzed how Facebook causes stress. They surveyed 200 students and found that they were often stressed by turning down friend requests, deleting unwanted contacts, and the pressure to be entertaining. Looking at these studies, I question if Facebook is the social saviour I originally thought it to be.

Now, it’s a little unfair to look at a few studies that show the negative effects of Facebook and label it as evil; if that were the case, I could probably prove anything to be evil. The question is weather the negatives outweigh the positives. Unfortunately, it’s a little tough to practically answer this question, but it should be questioned weather Facebook is necessary to our lives. Were our lives really that bad before these websites took over our social lives? As for me, my account has been deactivated for almost 2 years now, and I don’t plan on reactivating it without a practical purpose.

Here are the some reference to my sources:
Misery Has More Company Than People Think
Dies Facebook Stress You Out?

Here are some other sources I found interesting:
How Facebook Breeds Jelousy
Jelous Much? MySpace, Facebook Can Spark It