I found myself being quite skeptical about a lot of what Lisa Nakamura wrote.  I found her self-assessment of being paranoid as probably not being too far-off.   Also I thought she was guilty of in some cases only providing one example and making it seem as if this was just the tip of an iceberg, rather than an anomaly of ice in an otherwise warm environs.

One thing (an analogy) though helped me to begin to with a more open mind read her work (I'm far from finished).  My roomate is from Dubai (he's in fact Indian) while I am from Jamaica.  I moved into the apartment we live in, about 3 weeks ahead of him.  And in that time, I setup and designed the apartment (exception being his room) as I saw fit.  It later occurred to me that being the seond one there, his input was relegated to minor adjustments, as opposed to the general design which I was responsible for.

Lisa (if I may be so familiar as to call her by first name only) makes this point as well.  The internet's design in large part was done by the well-off in this country and certainly not by poor 3rd world citizens of Jamaica.  As a consequence, the inherent worldview of these designers (which I do agree is quite homogenous given their similar backgrounds) is probably inlaid online.  At least as much as my apartment bears more semblance to a Jamaican home rather than one from India/Dubai.

Based on our readings, it seems to me that there is an online utopia which offers perhaps liberation from the restrictive characteristics of our bodies such as race, ethnicity, identity, gender, and age. This utopia in the “We’re Teen, We’re Queen, and We' Got Email” article allowed teens an escape from the real world. In this context, Nakamura takes a different approach and focuses on two topics: Race and identity tourism. From race perspective, this is the first book I read on racism in cyberspace. Based on Nakamura, race matters in cyberspace and we form and manage our race through our online interactions. For instance, finding the color you like rather than ethnic identity. Among the chapters, I found chapter 3 most interesting due to reference to popular movies such as the Matrix. I think it would be interesting if the author included the following dialogue between Neo and Trinity.

Neo: The Trinity?… Jesus, I thought you were a man.

Trinity: Most men do.

In Nakamura’s study of the Matrix movie, the analysis of the character Cypher was interesting because the author stated that “the only white man on the crew betrays the humans precisely because he wants to jump the ship of multiculturalism and reclaim his possessive investment of whiteness." (p. 78). But wasn’t there another white man(Apoc)?

At a high level, I think the author makes good observations of the Internet because it seems that the utopian vision was more valid before the dot com bubble.However, Nakamura tries to set a more realistic view.  
   

I found Avital Ronell's article really hard to read, as she weaved in and out from plain speech to metaphor, and seemed at some points to hop from topic to topic, all under a proposed topic of the effects of VR.  Despite this however, I remained convinced that she had something pertinent and possibly quite wise to say.

I did pick up on a main point of hers on the sterilizing of war and hence the disconnect created between not just the public and what was occuring but even between the actual soldiers and the reality of their work.  She also made the bold move of terming what America was doing in the Gulf war as Fascist and even implied that "Desert Storm" was reminiscent of Nazi philosophy.

 

“In his essay entitled “Our History,” French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has argued that an “ideology must be called ‘fascist’ in the general sense in which themes of spiritual and national regeneration, of the vigorous recovery of health through firmness and discipline, correspond to a fascist or fascistic vision of things.”  What this means basically is that in the name of symbolic health, a unity of world that sees its image in wholesomeness and the project of renewal, we have waged war on what was repeatedly represented as degenerate, sickly, something that carried the threat of contagion.  In this regard, America has been carrying out its newly transcendentalized project of killing the unwell, the contaminated.  The enemy is imagined as being disorderly, inefficient, tactically illiterate, dysfunctional; and to a certain degree the projected solution, cybernetics, promises to overcome such instabilities.

Since I want to get my blog posted before class begins, I think I will start with Rheingold’s article, The Virtual Community.

 

In the opening pages of the Rheingold article, Rheingold discusses the virtual community he belongs to, WELL, as being grounded in real life. However, it is in fact more so, since he meets the people he interacts with online in real situations. Much of the research I have been conducting over the past couple of years has been grounded in building virtual community at CGU. Since many users already have interactions around the campus, this too would be a hybrid model where the online environment (Claremont Conversation Online) fosters greater face-to-face and virtual collaboration.

 

Like many social applications today, Facebook is looking to bridge this gap between the physical and virtual. When a user logs into Facebook, they can immediately set their status “What are you doing right now” to be whatever the user wants. Some users put something provocative that represents neither a virtual nor physical state such as “Brian is contemplating the Big Bang”, while others place themselves in an actual physical setting, “Brian is hanging out at Star Bucks.”

Over the past couple of years I have encountered a lot of creative research into this phenomenon. One of the cooler projects is being done @ NJIT where 500 (I think) students are outfitted with RFID. When they start up their mobile applications (i.e. social networking tools), their status is updated immediately. Although I’m not exactly sure if it’s the wave of the future, I am definitely interested in finding out more about the project and how students ‘TAM’ with the idea. In any case, it beats another Second Life study.

 

Lastly, as an interesting fact, according to Wikipedia  Craig Newmark started his original Craigslist mailings through WELL.

The Virtual Community As a book written in 1993, The Virtual Community, expresses Rheingold’s vision for the potential impact of “a community of accessible only via computer screen” on various issues such as education, science, and intellectual life. Among these issues, I like to focus on education because there has been numerous papers focus on the impact of a computer based community on learning. In this context, my main question is what makes learning effective?  Does simply adding a wiki, blog, or a discussion forum to a class mean that it will be used effectively to enable learning? What are the roles to do students and faculty need to take in order to overcome the “coldness” in the electronic media. Perhaps we can talk more about these issues in the class. One excellent source in this context is a paper written by Hiltz on Building Learning Communities in Online Courses. In this paper, Hiltz compares an effective online instructor to a less effective online instructor.  

Source: Hiltz, S. R. Building Learning Communities in Online Courses, IADIS International Conference, Web Based Communities 2005, Algarve, Portugal

  The Virtual Barrio @ the Other Frontier 

This essay talks about the author’s Latino identity and how it influenced his understanding of the technology. From my perspective, this is the most fun article that we have read this semester even though there were deep implications behind it. I like to point two things that I found interesting in this article. The first one is the author’s following point of view regarding to digital technology:” I don’t quite understand them, yet I am seduced by them” This sentence I think pretty much explains teenagers’ attitude towards MYSPACE. If they fully understand all implications of the MYSPACE perhaps they will be less likely to use it. Along in this line, a recent paper I read ( I can’t remember the author) focused on the relationship among mental model, trust, and security. This paper basically said that an incomplete mental model regarding to security could lead to trust on a social networking site.

 

My second point is on “politically neutral/raceless/genderless territory”. We have discussed this issue a little bit in our earlier classes. Would this really provide an equal access and unlimited possibilities of participation interaction and belonging to an individual?

 A Disappearance of Community 

This is a difficult read and it made me question what virtual reality is and what is its influence on virtual community. A reason for this besides “where are we?”, is that the author never did actually defined the term. At a high level, I think this essay makes an analysis of the first gulf war while considering AIDS, national budget, feminism etc. My main criticism is “how does the title fit to the essay? When I fist saw the title, I thought the essay would be on elements that make forming a community difficult in the online world. Also, I did not understand the author’s position in the essay. What is the author’s point in this article?

Facebook

 

SecondLife on BBC

The main argument in this book is that “can we describe internet studies as a field or discipline” As I read through the introduction, I remembered the times we discussed the identity crisis in information systems (IS) discipline. Some similarities that I recognized between IS and the potential Internet studies disciplines are:

 

• Researchers in both areas come from very different backgrounds. Therefore, their research topics have a large variance. On one hand, each essay in the book focuses on a different aspect of the effect of the Internet. For instance, one essay focuses on government, while another essay focuses on gender. On the other hand, in IS some scholars have positivist research philosophy and focus deeply on technical aspects of designing an artifact while others take a post-positivist research philosophy to solve an organizational problem by using IT.
• Quality of qualitative research seems to be an interdisciplinary topic. In IS, qualitative approaches such as grounded theory, ethnography, and case study started to gain acceptance in late 1990s. (Avison et al, 1999). From this perspective, I did not understand why the author wanted to include this essay in a book published in 2006. Was the debate between quantitative and qualitative approaches still going on in 2006? Or perhaps the author wanted to justify how Internet studies could be conducted in a skeptical, ethical, and systematic way by using a qualitative approach. In this context, I am curious on whether there has been a grounded theory study on this potential field.    
• “Have we generated new theories of our own?” I think this is an excellent question. (p. 5) IS relies on and contributes to cognitive science, organizational science, and computer science in order to understand interactions among organizations, technologies, and people. However, if we look at the theories used in our discipline (http://www.fsc.yorku.ca/york/istheory/wiki/index.php/Main_Page), we see that these theories are not pure IS theories. Hence, IS relies on and contributes to kernel theories. As for the Internet studies, I think the situation is not different because in order to understand wide diversity of the effects of the Internet, one needs to know a wide diversity of knowledge from related fields. In this context, a common saying in IS is that an IS professional should wear both business and computer science hats in order to broker knowledge between business and computer professionals.   

From my perspective, a discipline leads to profession which has three identifying characteristics: Exclusive education, self regulation, and competitive entrance (McConnell, 2005). Exclusive education requires an extensive education and mastery in a “specialized area”. In this book, it seems to me that each particular essay focuses on specialized area such as government, business, or gender. For instance, I found the following conference on the Internet related to this topic.

 Critical Cyberculture Studies: Mapping an Evolving Discipline April 26-27, University of Maryland 

Session One: Political Action in Cyberspace                                    

Session Two: Theoretical Cyberspace                                   

Session Three: Ordinary and Extraordinary Cyborgs 

Session Four: Different Literacies 

Session Five: Cyborg Bodies                                   

Session Six: Hegemonic Notes                       

Session Seven: Painting With Pixels                                   

Session Eight: Agency and Artifice in Cyberspace                                   

Session Nine: The Business of the Web                                   

Session Ten: Identity Technologies                                   

Session Eleven: Divides 

Session Twelve: Cyberculture Defined                                   

Session Thirteen: Publishing in a Virtual Field (Roundtable)                                   

Session Fourteen: Talking Online

References

Avison, D., Lau, F., Myers, M., and Nielsen, P. A. Action Research Association for Computing Machinery. Communications of the ACM. 42, 1, 1999

McCoccell, S. Professional Software Development.Pearson Education, Inc Boston, MA (2005). 

As it turns out, I don't have the convergence book, so I figured I make a retro post on a book I missed earlier in the semester.  *Sorry*.

 

To make up for my sins, I'll also post the link to a blog site I'm working my way through which may or may not be pertinent to the class.  What it is though is funny (in a very cynical sarcastic sense...so beware).

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/full-list-of-stuff-white-people-like/

 

*********Legitimate blog post starts here********** 

The White Hand

In previous blog entries, I have lamented the villification of the white male, and I am not currently retracting that theory of all blame being somewhat unfairly placed on white males as devious individuals out to maintain and strengthen where they can a societal power structure that caters and favours them.

I did agree though with a number of Michelle White's observations.  I had never noticed the white hand, in the sense that it was white and didn't need to be.  I noticed, for sure, that women were a selling point in many advertisements, but I hadn't notice that many of these commercials also pass along a message of the female as being uninterested and possibly incapable of using technology.  

In chapter 1, the "entering in" phenomenon in internet and computer settings, is something I have clearly experienced, especially since I play computer games, I have a complete Yahoo account (Yahoo wallet et al) and I have used and prefer technology that brings me closer to the object on the screen while blurring out the fact that this is somewhat "artificial" or simulated.  What I haven't noticed nor can I comprehend, is the extent to which these notions of image and identity she mentions  affect me.

Lastly in defense of the white man, I will say though that advertisers are constrained (maybe that's not the right word) by the theory or goal to play to your widest and most affluent audience, otherwise they may stand to not make money.  Not that this is actually a good defense, but it does lean to towards there being other motivations apart from maintaining dominance.