My Life Bits

This blog is going to be about something that both made me think and confused me. Hopefully I’ll remember to add quotes this time, I keep forgetting.

The two main texts I will be referring to for this blog is ‘Cyber Goggles: High-tech memory aid’ and ‘Scientific American’ – March 2007 edition.

My life bits is a device that records everything. It is worn around the users neck and basically records their life onto a memory storage chip. It can record sight, sound, websites the person has been on, conversations, even how much carbon dioxide is in the air and the wearers blood pressure.

In the March 2007 issue of Scientific American, it states that ‘Because human memory is fallible, researchers are striving to develop systems that can automatically record communications, documents, images and video, storing everything in a searchable archive.’

In 2008 a device named ‘Cyber Goggles’ were brought into the spotlight. They were described as a ‘smart video goggle system that records everything the wearer looks at, recognizes and assigns names to objects that appear in the video and creates an easily searchable database of recorded footage’.

The debate we had in class was about this new technology, specifically with a project called ‘My Life Bits’, where Microsoft Research designed a device that recorded someones life and tested it using a subject named Gordon Bell. He kept the piece of technology with him for six years, it recorded everything he did for those six years and then he gave feedback on it.

We were split into two groups, one for the motion and one against. I was in the for group, and I think we had a really good case. There was only a few things I could think of that could be said against the device, one of them being that people would start to rely on such technology and the other about privacy. Of which I had counters for.

I could see in my head how the situation was going to span out, they were going to say something about reliance on the technology and I’d be like ‘OBJECTION!’ then state how people already rely on technology, because it’s true. If I took away your mobile phone then asked you to give me your mothers mobile number, would you be able to do it? If I took away all your technology then told you to tell a friend who lives in another country to be safe because of a disaster, would you even think about using a pen and paper?

So, the debate started. We had two jury members and a judge, then the two sides. Problem is, I’m not very good at debating, as it showed when we got into it, because I kept contradicting myself. Eventually our teacher joined our side to help explain what the hell I was trying to say, because I completely suck at explaining.

The against side had several arguments against the device, one we didn’t count because we weren’t going to bring religion into the whole thing. The main ones I managed to write down were;

> Invasion of privacy

> No copyright – We stated that if this technology became available to the public, new laws would probably be made to prevent the use of them in places like museums and galleries.

> People relying on it – This one was a given, I’ve already written down the counter we had to it.

> Paranoia – Basically people not wanting to be recorded and such. But we brought up the fact that we’re being watched all the time anyway, CCTV and all that.

The only thing we didn’t have an answer for was the privacy in people’s homes, but in the end we did mention that the things could simply be taken off.

We had quite a few things written down for the motion, to name a few we had;

> It could be used by the emergency services; doctors could use it to find out when peoples symptoms start and maybe use it to make new cures, police could use it when someone gets murdered etc.

> You would never forget again, everything would be stored so you’d never have to worry about forgetting where your keys are or an important date.

But our main point was that it was an inevitable trend. It had been proposed before in the past, our back up for this being a quote from the Scientific American text stating; ‘The vision of machine-extended memory was first expounded at the end of World War II by Vannevar Bush, then director of the U.S government office that controlled wartime research. Bush proposed a device called the Memex [short for ‘memory extender’] – a microfilm-based machine that would store all of an individual’s books, records and communications.’

Our back up to the statement that the trend was another quote from the same text, stating about how fast technology is evolving. It states that ‘today a $600 hard drive can hold a terabyte of data, which is enough to store everything you read [including e-mails, web pages, papers and books], all the music you purchase, either hours of speech and 10 pictures a day for the next 60 years.’ Then later on in the same paragraph it says ‘In 20 years $600 will buy 250 terabytes of storage, enough to hold tens of thousands of hours of video and tens of millions of photographs.’

Overall though, we won the case the judge voting in favour of the motion. So we won, yay!

At the end of the lesson, we had a quick talk about the device, and I was the only one in the class that said that I would have one if I could afford it. The whole idea of a large storage unit recording everything I do sounds like a god send to me, the amount of times I’ve gone to a gallery for a project, made notes and even taken pictures if allowed, yet still returned home and forgotten everything I saw. I have that problem with most lessons too, I’ll write notes, maybe even take pictures, yet still completely forget what I’ve done.

So to end this blog, I just wanted to say that if I could, I would use this technology, it’s a revolution that I would be interested in being involved with.

Stuff used –

Cyber Goggles: High-tech memory aid. Pink Tentacle [2009] available at http://pinktentacle.com/2008/03/cyber-goggles-high-tech-memory-aid/

Scientific American, March 2007 edition – www.sciam.com

The Family Album - What Happened?

Remember when you was a child? When your parents would bust out the good old family album and you'd sit around it looking at the old pictures? Something like this?

Do you remember that? All the embarrassing pictures of you as a baby sitting on the toilet or in the bath, pictures you wish never existed of you in a little dress or suit being taken to a wedding? How the family would react to them, the memories they stored...


Whatever happened to that? The modern day 'Family Album' has turned into this.

Families don't even have to get together to see images of their children or nephews, memories are turned into text speak slang, nothing but a picture on a computer screen.


So what happened? We evolved, that's what. The internet blew up and tore holes in many old traditions, such as photo albums, how we communicate, how we show the world our stuff. I mean come on, do schools even offer kids a chance to get a penpal anymore?


We evolved, and in some ways, not for the better. Communication is almost non existent now, instead of writing letters to far away friends people prefer to just talk to them on messenger or social networking sites, instead of taking photos carefully to keep the memories in an album, kids just snap at every moment when out with friends, not caring if the pictures are blurred, out of focus or misaligned because they can just edit them later or toss them into an online album.


Photography was one of the things that took a nosedive thanks to the internet. It used to be all about getting perfection, or the closest thing to it. Pictures were taken carefully with precision, they were developed the same way too because you only had a limited amount of space on some negatives. Same with colour film came out, budget was an issue so photos were taken with heed and care for their surroundings and posture.


But now? You can grab a camera off the internet for about £20, then kids go snapping away at anything that moves with no care in the world because the camera does all the settings for you. Those who go pro take more care in their work, but not as much care as they would if they were working with film as the only thing hindering them is the space on their memory cards which are very cheap to get hold of. Amazon sells 4GB SD cards for less than a fiver and most cameras take this as their main storage device. The only other thing that hinders them is their cameras limits, but at the end of the day it's the Photographer that makes the photograph, not the camera.


To be honest, I hate how technology has taken this away. Photos aren't private anymore. They used to be something only you, the family and trusted friends saw, maybe even the boy/girlfriend of an older sibling. Now? Now anyone can see it with just a simple bit of code.


It's literally a case of three steps. Step one - Go to someones Facebook page who you want to see photos of, you don't have to be their friend.


Step two - Type in this code into the web address bar you have open with the Facebook page on it.

javascript:(function(){CSS.removeClass(document.body,%20'profile_two_columns'); tab_controller.changePage("photos");})()

Step three - Result. All the images that person has shared using the default privacy settings Facebook uses [and lets face it, hardly any of todays youth bother changing them] will come up for all to see. It's as simple as that.


Until something is done, it will always be that easy to see someones private photos, no matter how private they have them.


Bibliography -


Photo 1 - http://www.memoriesdream.eu/memories-images/family-album-big.jpg
Photo 2 - http://img.labnol.org/di/facebook_photos.jpg
Amazon Prices - http://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-SDHC-Secure-Digital-Card/dp/B000WQKOQM/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1319631682&sr=1-1
How to know if your 'Private' albums are visible to strangers - http://www.labnol.org/internet/facebook-photo-albums-visible/13546/

Avatars and Identity

Identity. What does that mean if you think about it? Vaguely, it means something along the lines of 'the things that make you, you', basically what creates you as a person, such as your looks, habits, traditions, attitude etc.


But, in a way, people who use the internet have two identities. There's their real life ID, and their online ID, a 'mask' if you will. On some websites / online games, such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, these are shown using things called avatars. The website I'm going to be using today for an example is one I frequent and moderate on, Gaia Online. It can be found using the link below.


www.gaiaonline.com


But before I start, I thought I'd just quickly let you know what the site is. It's a forum based site with some games on, a virtual currency and other minor features, such as profile and avatar creation. It's main drawpoint however, is the avatar system that is used to create a virtual 'you' which is basically your display picture. That's the main difference between Gaia and other forum sites, such as minecraftforum.net. Gaia - Avatars. Minecraft forums - Display picture.


Ok enough of that. Back to the avatars. Avatars are a good way of showing yourself online, or showing off online, depending on your ego. A lot of people use them to create a 'fake persona', a mask to hide behind when on the internet. This can be a good persona [something simple, for example having the avatar of a vampire and acting like one instead of a human] or a bad persona [i.e - A 54 year old male pretending to be around 13 to draw in young children].


To show an example, a picture of myself is on my About Me for this blog site. I'm an average sized 20 year old female with brown hair and brown eyes. Now, below is an image of my avatar, Madsam123.

Madsam123 - One of her many forms.

Pretty different right? The last time I looked, I didn't have blue hair, red eyes and plasma wings spouting from my back, but thanks to Gaias avatar system, I can project myself like that. I could make the avatar look like me, but where's the fun in that?

Members of Gaia online recieve a default avatar when they first sign up. So, from the word go, they already have a persona to hide behind. Of course, there isn't much difference between the starter avatars, so to make up for this Gaia created 'Gaia gold', the virtual currency on the site.

Gaia gold can be obtained in so many ways it's ridiculous. You can run around the flash spaces and locate it by shaking trees and hitting rocks, you can sell items, you can play the websites unique MMO called zOMG! or the other games avaliable, or you can simply post, that gives you gold too.

Using the gold, you can visit the NPC [Non Player Character] stores, where there is a very wide selection of virtual clothing avaliable to purchase. Most of it is unisex, but there are some male / female only items which are currently being converted.

But it doesn't end there. If you can't find what you're looking for in the stores, there is also the user run marketplace and the exchange, where people are always selling items that can't be bought directly from the store. These items normally come from the sites cash shop, where you can use real life money to get Gaia cash, which can then be used to purchase even more clothing. One thing I like about Gaia is there is no such thing as exclusivity, everything sold in the cash shop is [eventually] avaliable on the marketplace to be bought for gold.

According to Venturebeat, paying Gaia users generally spend about $30 USD per month to purchase Gaia Cash, which is then used to buy virtual items such as evolving, chance, collectible, and limited edition items.

The best thing about an online avatar though is that you can be practically anything you want to be. Want to be a vampire? Go ahead! Be a vampire! Want to be a Nazi crow with a chainsaw? Well we have the means to let you become one! And the best thing is no one knows who you really are unless you show pictures, but then that counts as spam in many of the forums and is frowned upon in the gaian community.

But thanks to this 'online identity', people can also act like they want. Trolls [I spoke about them in my previous blog] use members avatars to judge how rich they think someone is on the site, whilst ego boosted cash cows [A user which is known for just throwing their real life money to a site for any little cash update they bring out] deem that they are higher than everyone else, no matter how rich you look. Then there are those who judge your knowledge on your real life age or how long you've been on the site, but ageist people are around in real life too, so they don't really count as an online only experience.

Gaia Online also allows you to make a profile where you can write up about yourself, add pictures or videos or if you're advanced in coding, create a portfolio. Not really knowing much about BBCode, I'm not the type to do such a thing. 

The profile comes with standard questions where you can fill in simple answers, such as Interests, Hobbies, Music, Movies etc, along with an About Me section. I filled all of my profile in with true facts about me, whilst others use it to just post a quote from a song or a movie, then spam up the area with gifs [small, moving images that are normally 3-5 seconds long] and photographs of themselves, demanding that they are the prettiest thing in the world.

But this freedom comes with a price. For every profile that is created, there is always at least a handful of fake ones. Problem is, how do you weed out the bad from the good? Well, you can't really. It's almost impossible to tell online when someone is faking something, be it a traumatic experience or what they look like [unless they have a picture somewhere of course, then you can call shenanigans on it.].

But creating an online identity to some is like creating a second life, a life you could never have. Madsam123 is my second life, I could never wear the clothes she does, or have plasma wings on my back, even if they were real. I could never change my hair and eye colour to whatever I desire, but she can, which is why I do it. She's my online dress up doll, but at the same time she's what other people see as me when I type.

To close my blog on Avatars and identity, I'll leave you with this, something I quickly whipped up using a website called tektek [Click on the image below to increase it's size.]. It's a fan made site where you can get access to every item on Gaia, no matter how rare, and create your dream avatar on. A lot of people use it to show Gaians what they want to achieve on the site, others use it to just mess around on. I've used all of these avatars in the past for personal usage, but it just goes to show that online, you can be whatever you want to be.

Bibliography

Avatar made and saved on - www.tektek.org

Information on Cash Cows from - www.urbandictionary.com

Venturebeat - http://venturebeat.com/2010/11/23/teens-virtual-world-gaia-online-lays-off-15-to-20-staffers/

More Information about Gaia Online found at - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_Online or at www.gaiaonline.com

MMORPGs - A Second Life

Any true nerd of the internet knows what an MMO is. MMORPG stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, or in simpler English, playing games on the internet with other people.


One major example of an MMO would be the all famous World of Warcraft. Thousands, heck, millions of kids and adults play this game, over time it's become one of the worlds biggest MMOs on the net. It's concept is simple, you create a character, then you level said character up by doing numerous tasks and quests for NPCs [Non-Player Characters], normally collecting certain items or killing a said amount of enemies before advancing onto the next task.


Since the Xbox 360's release, multiplayer games have been on the decrease. Games where you can just connect two controllers in and play with a friend in the comfort of your own front room are slowly dying out, being favoured instead for the whole 'connect to the internet to play with your friend', which I personally hate. It's a ongoing scam with console and game makers. In the past if you wanted to play with a friend, you needed two controllers. Now, you need two accounts. Two paid accounts which cost roughly £40 a year to keep, otherwise you can't play with your friend. Oh, and the internet, because it must be online so you can go through the internet to play with your mate, even if they live next door to you.


Anyway, back to WoW. The game was created back in November of 2004 and was created by a company named Blizzard Entertainment. The game is known as a 'Pay to Play', where the user has to pay in order to play, normally paid with a monthly subscription. It's not much, £10 a month is pennys to the hardcore gamers who have their parents credit cards at the ready, or even the nerds who sell their lives on EBay in order to make that £10 up.


As of June 2011, the game has a whopping 11.1 million subscribers and is in the Guinness world record books as the most popular MMORPG on the net.


But why is this game so popular? It's awfully repetitive, doesn't help with any real life issues and just takes £10 out of your wallet every month. It get's very banal, very quickly.


Simple. It allows you to play with a community. It lets you play with your friends and it makes you feel like you're achieving something. It brings people from other countries together without the need of letters or plane tickets.


For example, thanks to MMORPGs, I can interact and play with my two friends in Texas and Ireland, without having to pay for a plane ticket over in order to play with them.


But, with all it's good points, internet related stuff also has it's down points. Some of them include [but aren't limited to];


> Hackers - Those on the internet who are there to simply take what is yours by tricking you into giving them your password, or by using technology to figure it out themselves. They then change your password and either use your account to go on a trolling rampage [Troll explained in the next point] until they're banned, or they play using your account, knowing full well they haven't paid for it, so they're getting the game for nothing.


> Trolls - People on the internet who make accounts, but have no actual intention on playing or joining in with the community. Instead, they just try to make the game miserable for everyone else by spamming up the area where you can type chat with people [normally known as a 'chat box'] with off topic stuff, following you around and consistently challenging you to duels or basically making something pop up on your screen to hinder your vision. There are many ways trolls work, it all depends on where they are on the internet.


> Lack of social interaction - Otherwise known as a social life. World of Warcraft is dangerously addictive, so addictive in fact people are dying by playing too long. They just don't know when to stop, or they don't want to, because the world is huge and you can only continue through it by grinding [levelling up], otherwise you get eaten alive.


> Where one of my up points was that it could bring people together, it can also break them apart. Friends become enemies on such games due to jealousy or an overinflated ego.


Overall - MMO's are a great addition to the internet, but at the same time they're not. They patch the hole that was made by games providers, they help bring people together, but at the same time they split people apart. Sure, you can talk to people overseas and interact with them without forking out hundreds of pounds for travel, but egos and jealousy can eventually break that friendship and cause a rivalry. Plus the trolls. Do not get me started on the damn trolls!


Sources Used - 

Link One
Guinness Gaming world records
Top Ten Popular MMOs
Main Source