DTC 101 – Spring 2013

@brandonluc01

In Deanna Zandt’s article “Sharing for the Rest of Us” she briefly discusses the timeline of the development of social media websites such as facebook and myspace. She discusses the important qualities that these developing social sites have that revolutionized the way information is shared among internet users.

In the 90’s using the internet was a complicated task that was utilized mainly for advertisements (Share for the Rest of Us Zandt). As the internet developed and became easier to access and use, with the development of other technologies, social sites such as forums had come to light. Blog/forum sites were very popular during the WTO seattle protests of 1999 because activists could share  information about the protest status (Share for the Rest of Us Zandt). Later in the early 2000’s websites like myspace and friendster were released and greatly simplified internet users ability to share videos, photos, and documents withholding information about virtually anything.

Blogging websites and social websites have many qualities that bring people together. They can give direct lines of communication between users that are miles apart and they can present information which can be seen by thousands of others and they can choose to share their own opinion about the information. A movement currently happening on social media sites is the sharing of the profile avatars containing a red box with an equal sign, symbolizing equality among between heterosexuals and homosexuals. More and more facebook users see this shared avatar everyday and are joining the movement by making the red box their avatar as well in the hopes of sharing information about the gay rights movement.

@DTC_AlexTDTran

Social media environments are able to mobilize people to seek social change because of a few different things. Deanna Zandt cites a type of communication that occurs when we “map” our relationships with people. She says that we are able to map our relationships in a pathway sense, that we can engage in immediate, and many-to-many conversations in our social media networks (Sharing for the Rest of Us). This allows us to communicate easier in order to spread the message. For example, take the Kony 2012 campaign. This campaign started as a video that became viral on the internet. This then got taken to various different social media networks in which people began to spread the message about this horrible leader and how they can help the Ugandans (http://invisiblechildren.com/kony/). Furthermore, take a image site such as imgur. This site allows one to post images of various different things to be viewed by it’s community. Similar to facebook, people can use this site in order to spark different movements. While these people on the internet are easily influenced, what Zandt says about mapping our relationships but also her idea of strong ties and weak ties (Page ). In this case, everyone that we talk to on the internet that we don’t know personally contributes to our weak ties. People that we meet under a common idea are weak ties but people we know in real life contribute to our strong ties. These ties bring people together in order to contribute to a campaign or some sort of call for social change.

@brandonluc01

I love gaming…I love walk off home runs and head shots. I love drifting a turn at 120 mph, and boss battles with a 5 hundred foot tall Greek god who may or may not be your real father. Gaming is having a ridiculously large high definition television in a tiny one bedroom apartment…staying up until 3 am to win a trophy that isn’t real. And girls of gaming know that the way to a man’s heart is through a critical melee attack. Anyone can criticize what we do, what we see as accomplishments, and what we deem worthy of our time but it doesn’t matter because gaming is our passion, our creativity, and reality. One can argue that gaming is ridiculous because it is not real nor is it really an art that requires creativity, but to them I quote Pablo Picasso “Everything you can imagine is real.” In the world of gaming anything is possible and nothing is improbable. Gaming is a wonderful world without boundaries and limits…anything is possible.  It gives anyone a chance to excel, to become someone who was formerly no one.

In our gaming world there are no qualifications to being a gamer…no discrimination. Sure some gamers are called “newbies” or ‘feeders,” but everyone in the gaming world is acknowledged as a gamer, and nothing else matters. The color of your skin, your beliefs, and your gender is insignificant. All that matters is the creativity one brings to the gaming world by the movement of their joysticks or the clicking of a mouse. I love gaming…we love gaming.

@alweyman

A manifesto by definition is a public declaration of policy and aims towards a specific subject. Online freedom of information is a big issue that goes unnoticed I believe. Every time you go online to a website for homework, or anything really, you’re accessing a lot of free information.

I, like many other people I know, love using Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a freebased informative website designed to help people learn about particular subjects. It is a peer edited site, meaning that anybody can go on and change the information that is presented. While this is great, it also has side effects, such as false information and plagiarism. With the vast amount of information on the web, it is more than likely that  you will come across false data without knowing it. The obvious choice would be to go to an official site, which is known for having true data. The catch to this, is that these sites are owned by someone, which means that there is a form of money being spent on it. If someone has good information, they’re going to want to put a price on it. Now as a user, I know personally that I would rather look up a free version of something than spend money to find out the same info. This puts competition on the sponsored sites who slowly lose customers. We are now so far into this hole that the line between true and false information has become minuscule. If it were possible, I would limit the internet to only truth and cast away the others.

@ColleenBurke85

Samuel Johnson famously once said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”  Well the internet is the last refuge of a racist.  It is the one place, where people feel comfortable using, language they would never use in real life.  The jokes that people are afraid to tell out in public, are given platforms and praised as funny by other online users.  It is true that if you look hard enough every group is demonized online, yet if you are a different color, religion, or even the other gender there is a likely hood you will face more abuse.  Google play had an app called make me asian, where you took take a photo of yourself and add crude asian characters to it, the same company also had a make me Irish app,   both are equally offensive, yet both stereotypes often get a pass today in America.  This app is rather tame compared to other racist apps and games.  Years ago sangent games released an incredibly racist game called “Border Patrol” where your only object was to shoot and kill Mexicans crossing the border they were either a breeder, drug dealer, or a Mexican Nationalist, you got extra points for killing the breeder.  While “Border Patrol” is an example of overt racist imagery, many mainstream games use racial stereotypes.  Almost any game can consist of racial stereotypes, and while we shouldn’t necessarily get offended by every single one we see, we must be aware of them.  Often we become desensitised to the stereotypes that surrounds us in the gaming world and in the online world, this translates to us being oblivious to racism in the real world.  If you don’t believe me, think of your favorite video game from childhood and critically list all stereotypes within them.  You would be surprised by how many there are.  To combat racial stereotypes, one needs a critical mind, as well as insight from others.

A manifesto is a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer. I would say that the intentions of the Hacker Manifesto were to show that not all hackers are criminals but that most of them actually just want to break things down, see how they work and share that information with others. Because when you share information with other people, they can take that information and go farther with it and hopefully create something new. I think this idea is best stated when the Manifesto states, “We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals”.

On the other hand the Cyborg Manifesto is more about the accepting of technology in our lives and how technology could create a better world and society. Haraway talks about how socialists and feminists seem to be against technology when she says, “One of my premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formula-tions, and physical artefacts associated with ‘high technology’ and scientific culture”. She then goes on to present her idea about how cyborgs could lead to a better world when she states, “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints”.

My manifesto is about the gamer culture.

Track games.

Field games.

Sports games.

Board games.

Out of all of the games in existence why do people have such a negative view on video games?

Video games require concentration.

Video games require cooperation.

Video games require creativity.

Out of the many things a young person could be doing why would we encourage them not to partake in an activity that require them to think and expand their minds.

Video games are new.

Video games are different.

Video game can be scary.

But new, different, and scary are usually good things for society.

If we took a step back and gave the gamer culture a chance, perhaps we would see how it is not a culture of wasted time, laziness or worthlessness but one of awareness, teamwork and imagination.