Older Generation + Internet = Romance

In recent years, the Internet has reached an all time high in popularity. You could strongly argue that it has become an essential part of our lives. The majority of our youth today has becoming fully invested in the Internet, allowing us access to it’s wide range of services. The Internet has not only become popular within our younger generation, but it has also started to creep its way into the daily lives of our much older generation (Grandparents, Senior Citizens).

Nowadays, the Internet offers many different services to our older generation. Dating sites, chatrooms, forums, and discussion boards have been set up all over the Internet with the sole purpose of attracting senior citizens. Popular websites such as overfifties.com, and seniormatch.com offer a wide range of services that are specifically targeted towards the older generation. These sites provide our seniors with a new lease on life, allowing them to make new friends, create new relationships, and possibly find love. With recent changes in attitudes, senior online dating has become increasingly common. Seniormatch.com is the “best dating service for senior singles, senior widows, senior widowers, senior admirers and senior friends to share golden times.”

Online romance has become extremely popular throughout the older generation. The Internet has allowed its users instant access to a whole new world. This world is full of alot of lonely older people who are looking for something to fill their days. This new medium is providing them with something to look forward to, allowing them to brighten up their days. A 62 year old woman named Marilyn Rogers, describes herself online as a “1950s model that has a few dents and dings”. Some days Marilyn receives up to 200 messages; it is these messages that have given Marilyn her new found confidence.

The Internet has provided our older generation with a new way of finding love, one that allows immediate communication from the comfort of the user’s living room. The Internet is not only affecting our lives, it is creeping its way into the lives of all ages. The Internet has reached the lives of a generation, that isn’t always so accessible. It has provided them with the ability to communicate with their peers, bringing them certain joys that previously weren’t as accessible. Romance is just one of the many services that the Internet has provided our older generation with.

Stephen Hawking 2.0

I'm not a fan of films where aliens or robots attempt to exterminate the human race. Too predictable. $200 million and 2 1/2 hours later, we've won through a series of improbable events. Like Independence Day, when Jeff Goldblum takes out the entire fleet with a computer virus. This only works because the ships are running on Windows. Blue Screen of Death.

Personally I'm all for space travel. Not enough room on this rock. But the idea of artificial intelligence is... a little worrying. Though the "in" term now is Artilect. By the end of the century is it predicted we will be able to construct artificial intelligences millions, if not billions of times more intelligent than humans. The stuff these intellects could do is literally inconceivable. And therein lies the problem: if we make machines more intelligent than us, machines capable of churning through millenia of human thought in seconds (if that), what happens to us?

Computers now are basically number crunchers: we put in the algorithms and out comes the physics. Or it plays ping pong. Mmm, progress! My laptop is excellent at maths but its not intelligent. It doesn't think. Human endeavour still matters because we're still the ones punching in the numbers. But what would be the point of anything if we had a machine that could run literally trillions of scenarios and give us all the answers to every question put to it?

For example, there are 88 notes on a piano and for arguments sake, most music works within this parameter. There are only a certain number of notes. And if you add words, of which there is also only a finite number, there is still only a certain number of songs possible. An artificial intelligence could write every single possible piece of music, without the personal and artistic processes. Such a machine would be beyond humanity in any conceivable form.

So far I'm still working within mathematical sequences. Personally I think it is important that we create artificial intelligence, but even more important that we don't bite off more than we can chew. The first digital person would be a landmark achievement in human history. It would help us understand ourselves. I cite "Bicentennial Man" as an attempt to grasp this idea, at least in popular culture. Andrew Kennedy in his book "Who is human anyway?" presents the idea that artificial intelligences will have severe personality disorders and will fall into four groups: the autistic, the collector, the ecstatic, and the victim. This makes sense. Just because a machine would be extremely intelligent, it would exist within an artificial environment and wouldn't be immersed in a social context like humans.

Just so you know, I'm confused by all of this and I'm trying to work out something. The difference between my laptop and an AI is that the former comes preprogrammed but the latter... doesn't. We shouldn't anticipate SkyNet coming to destroy us all. If you think about it, that entire franchise could have been avoided if they didn't give SkyNet access to the internet. Or set up an 'Off' button. A computer without internet is effectively useless.

I think what people are scared of is the complete redundancy of the human race. Hell I know I am. A future of indolent humans lying around while our robots do all the work? I think not. AI will be most useful in science I think. Leave the Arts to the meat bags. And don't forget the 'Off' button.

Just so you know I'm aware this isn't the most elegant grasp of the AI debate.

The iPodfather

Who is Steve Jobs? Only the CEO of Apple, the leading consumer technology company in the world. No biggie.He's not an actor, musician, model or anything important like that, so why dedicate a blog to him?

I've previously not even given this guy a second thought. But Steve Jobs matters more than any celebrity, not merely for the fact that he helped to engineer the pretty MacBook that I'm typing this on.

A quick bio reads like this:

• Jobs founded Apple, out of his basement, and basically revolutionised personal computing.
• He was fired from Apple, the business that he helped create, in 1985.
• He went on to found NeXT (a computer company) and Pixar.
• Apple purchased NeXT and in 1998, Jobs was back at as CEO of Apple.
• From there till now, Apple has given the world the iPod, iPhone and iPad alongside several personal computers

Steve Jobs basically then, can be credited with the content that we study in this paper. For instance, the iPod introduced us to the first ultra-portable music player, which meant that you could carry your entire music library with you, with a ten hour battery life. Unheard of. On top of that, without Steve Jobs we wouldn't have had Toy Story or Finding Nemo. Eek.

Without these technologies, some of the current issues and debates would possibly not be circulating, such as Mark Bauerlein's concern's of "The Dumbest Generation", or more recently, the health risks such as hearing loss and pedestrian deaths associated with these technologies. Not to mention the issues of advertising, gender and many of the other topics discussed in this course.

Without Steve Jobs at the helm of Apple, would the phenomena of the personal computer of the ultra-portable mP3 player have occurred? Did Jobs merely accelerate the inventions? Or is he simply a face behind a collaborative effort?

In light of what I have discovered about Jobs, I would like to suggest that he has not singlehandedly, but in large part, transformed and moulded the present technoculture. He is The iPodfather.

3Gs : Girls, Gender and Game

I called it the 3Gs. Not because it is short, but it is also the most interesting discourses that emerged within new media platforms. Gender is a relatively new notion that arise within the discourse of gaming culture and it is interesting for us to see how the discourse of gender is interacting with the gaming culture as a whole.

I see gender in gaming culture in two distinctive ways : Either as a role model for the female or an eye candy for the male. The famous game 'Lara Croft' has stirred up furious debates within the scholars, whether the fictional character of Lara Croft can be seen as a feminist icon or merely an eye candy. The point being made here is that, when the discourse of gender intertwined with the gaming culture, contestation over whether gender has become a commodity to sell to the masses comes into the spot light.

In many games, the female characters are highly sexualized, and their body features become one of the selling point of the game. For instance, Lara Croft's body become such a hot topic that every guys on the street will talk about when the game first came out. Croft's body represent the perfect body that a female can have, and she is smart, tough and can be as strong as a man whenever she wants or have to. She is the role model to the female gamers; but on the flip side, she can also be the eye candy for the male gamers, where her highly sexualized body are perpetuating the sexist stereotype of female.

In gaming culture, the female characters are being stereotype and portrayed as a hyper-sexualized object of desire ,and they often appears to be a supportive characters or a member in the group to provide 'motherly' touch to the members in the game, such as having 'healing ability that takes away our pain', or 'power of love to overcome obstacles'. But Lara Croft is different. She is crossing the traditional boundary of gender. She is seen as a threat to the masculine system due to her Fatal Femme quality. According to Helen Kennedy (2002), she referred Lara Croft as both the hero (active) and the heroine (to be look at). Lara Croft can be tough as a man, but her body is still subjected to the male gaze.

Lara Croft is one of the iconic female gaming figure that influence the gaming culture. Before that, there are no female gaming icons that are as versatile as Croft is. She blurred the distinction of being a man or a woman, or she can perform both at the same time. But, on the other hand, Lara Croft as an iconic figure are still subjected to the male gaze and perpetuating the female sexist stereotype.

Zapping the Masses

The idea of being able to send out electrical frequencies and ‘zap’ peoples minds in order to then download certain behaviors, actions or ideologies sounds like an average day on set of a psi-fi series.

The shocking thing is that its not fiction, nor does it appear to be a thing of the distant future, but it is a reality of today.

While we may not quite be to the point of zapping peoples brains, technology has been developed that allows the interpretations of human conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions. Along with this the technology for sending out signals which can alter or affect the human brain in particular ways has also been on the rise sense the first known experiments in the cold war.

Imagine what this could mean. People who have lost the use of their limbs could, through the power of their own mind and technology, move once again, could speak, could become artist or virtually anything they desired to become. So long as the brain was working, anything can potentially come into existence.

The possibilities for the mind itself may also be transformative. Signals could enter the brain to reduce anxiety, create regular sleep, or keep the mind positive.

Of course, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility.

And who should be able to control this power? Would it be any safer in the hands of the people as it would be in the hands of the government? Power corrupts, of that there is unyielding proof. The selfish streak in humanity runs deep, and any kind of ‘electronic telepathy’ or signalaing that can be used to bennifit an individual, a group, a nation, will undoubtably be used to benefit one to the detriment of others.

But should such fears of control and manipulation really stop such exciting ventures into unkown possibilities? People always have and always will find ways to manipulate others, be it with words or actions. While the consequences could be on a more dramatic scale with such technology as this, the doors it could open and the benefit it could create would be ten fold as well.

I guess what it really depends on is peoples faith in ourselves and the world in which we live.

Pornography : Prosumer in our era

Well, who hasn't visited a pornographic websites before?

Recently, there's bunch of news about hollywood celebrities' home-made porno is leaking outwards onto the internet. This is nothing new for us. It seems that internet become the biggest 'exporter' for pornographic materials. Through new media platforms such as the Internet, we get exposed to millions of sexual materials that challenge our sense of morality and the discourse of identity.

As mentioned in class before, pornography is the leading economic driver for internet growth. I am arguing here that how pornographic changes our identity, perspectives and our society today. Sex has always seen as a taboo, and pornography has always been identify as a taboo because it is sex that is divorced from its original emotions, which is 'love' (Geoffrey Gorer). The society before our era treated pornography as something that is shameful, guilty and filthy. But with the invention of internet and its ability to reach billion of people, the discourse of pornography seems to be going through a drastic change. Our world is bombarded with informations, images, topics and conversations about sex. This is due to the change of media platform through out the years; pornography were originally circulated within the public through traditional printing medias, such as books, papers and et cetera. But when it switch to operates on internet, it floods the world and reach out more widely than it was on printed medium.

This widespread effect has an impact on us in a macro and a micro ways: such as our society on a macro level; as well as our identity on a micro level. Pornography are no longer exclusive to be produce only by big film companies, but at this stage, the notion of 'prosumer' emerged and more and more normal, ordinary people in the society started to produce their own pornography materials, and they actually become products that other people can buy online. That links to my second point, where our identity and relationship with online pornography has been re-constructed. The traditional notion of intimacy no longer have the same meaning, as more and more individuals started to share their intimacy relationship online with billions of other people; and individuals in the society are most likely to get their sexual impressions, educations and stereotypes from online pornographies. Thus, online pornography structured our relationship as well as our attitude with and towards sex.

What really struck me was the increasing amount of homemade pornography materials nowadays. Internet can easily circulate products, informations and so on easily. Therefore, individuals in the society get exposed to different materials that they have never encounter before. Internet re-shape our sense of intimacy, and construct sex as something that does not comes with any consequences, and it can be derived from emotions. In the end, sex becomes a product on the internet, and everyone can just buy it without much thinking. The frightening side of this is that, sex no longer seen as something that is just between two person or a private matter; new media platform offered us a way to commodify even our sexual intimacy.

Online pornography have shifted our perspectives and identity in a subtle but drastic way. We no longer view sex as a taboo, and sex can become a commodity to be buy and sell. The anonymity features of internet also contribute to the fact that anyone can buy or sell anything obscene without worrying one's identity getting exposed.

An advise for people that decided or going to publish your intimate moment of you and your partner : once your material get online, it will never go offline...FOR LIFE.

With my weak ties, I find no tie...

Source

If not for Donath's reading and Week 6's lecture, I wouldn't have noticed how much I actually don't pay attention to friends on my facebook list that are not affiliated with any other friends or interests of mine. I went through my friends list and I must admit, 1 quarter of the list (of approximately 600 people) are people who I either went to secondary school with back in the days but was really never friends with them, or people on the other side of the world I've never met or have any reason to meet in the future. With the former, you'd think I'd have at least something else apart going to the same school in common, but really I don't, so they qualify as weak ties. With the latter, these set of people might have at least 5 friends in common with me (the only reason I accept their request), but these 5 (or more) friends in common are most likely those I'd met online and got to develop a degree of friendship with over time - virtually and offline (thanks to Skype, Instant Messaging, E-mail and phones).

To reiterate the term 'weak ties' for the lost one, weak ties are people on our friends list on social networking sites who we may never be close to, but through them, we can gain new insights and ideas, learn things and be in-the-know. This (apparently) gives us new forms of opportunities when we connect with these wider diversity of people. Personally, this doesn't apply to me, and I know a lot of people it doesn't apply to either. Not all weak ties are constantly engaged in the act of 'fashioning' - that is, not all of them are consistent and up-to-date with facebook and its features. In fact, I don't have much weak ties that frequently update their pages or engage in multiple social interactions, I find this odd because you'd expect the opposite, as in, the outgoing stranger who add you is most likely looking for new friends to include in his/her social grooming habit. This being the opposite in my case, this is why I rarely notice people I have nothing in common with, but are on my pals list.

So if I don't notice them, how exactly does this idea of weak ties as a way of gaining insights apply to me? 'Me' here represents an imagined group of people whose weak ties are also almost obscure. I must however acknowledge the very small group of weak ties that are only an exception in this argument because they have something to offer. That is, the aspiring musicians, writers, fan groups, activists, and so on. I find what they all have to post or say interesting, but that's only just a small number. What about the 1/4 people silently sitting in my list? Surely I cannot delete them, surely they probably don't know I exist, I'm actually curious to start getting to know them, but for now, there's no advantage, no signals, no grooming, nothing that connects us together in any verbal or textual way. Do I have the time? Of course, that's the beauty of SNS addiction... a semi-addict like me can always make time for facebook and social grooming. Do I have the resources? Yes, thanks to facebook's constant useful new features, for instance, the side box that instructs you to "Say Hello to *insert the name of someone passive on your friends list* ". And the 'Chat' (which I never use though).

Long ranting short, how influential are my weak ties on my experience online daily? On a scale of 0 to 10, I'd say a 1 (and a half).

Forget that IT degree

Eric Sherman, author of the blog Wired In, says the "brutal reality of cloud computing" is that as machines get to do more, people get to do less. A lot less. As in, so much less they get made redundant.

Nothing new there - that's what the Industrial Revolution was all about. So why is Sherman worried?

In a post discussing Hewlett Packard's announcement regarding its new US1 billion technology investment, which HP says "will benefit clients through new offerings and improved service delivery", Sherman points out that in fact 63% of that "investment" will be spent on redundancy payments for the 9000 high-level IT workers put out of a job. That's a lot of money to decommission people. But it seems that is the price to be paid for the transition to cloud computing.

This echoes a recent post from Martin Ford. Ford is a software developer and blogger who has looked at Google's recent announcement of a machine learning app (read Artificial Intelligence) which can learn from processing data and eventually take over task it is doing (read exit human operator). Ford sees the progressive application and growth of this sort of AI will result in the concentration of power in the hands of a very few, and predicts the white collar worker will follow the blue-collar worker down the road to oblivion. His provocative title Will Google Destroy Itself comes from his analysis that without a middle-class with discretionary income to buy what is advertised on Google, Google's current income model will fail.

Maybe, maybe not. Depends if Google remains smart enough to adapt and re-source its income.

Both authors however see the same outcome for IT workers, no matter how smart or educated. Without the entrepreneur gene, you're just a worker - and therefore expendable.

Which leads to an obvious question: what is it that people offer that machines don't? Something to do with personality maybe. So it is interesting to look at HP's blurb regarding their new investment offering "improved service delivery" and think about the word "service". There's the service that a machine can offer, and then there's the service that a human being can offer - two very different things.

I guess the outcome will depend on how fast AI can be developed to include emotional intelligence. I'm betting on a long time-frame.

Online Privacy

It seems like privacy is becoming more of a issue with the internet becoming more mainstream. Everyone and anyone can look at someone's profile and know what school they went to, what job they do, who their friends are, what they look like, where they live and even their cellphone number - if they're silly enough to list it.
People need to be more aware of the World Wide Web. That's exactly what it is, world wide.

With profile sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, they allow users to personalise their profiles with pictures and personal information. They also allow people to add and decline friends as they please and by doing this, it means that more friends they add, the more people out there in the wide web can see their information and pictures due to links.
However, it seems as though Bebo and now MySpace are a dying breed, at least in my opinion, people are now moving onto Facebook. I think it may be because of the simple design and it's a lot more private. By this I mean that they allow an option where you can select people to see your "Limited Profile". This is an option that allow users to customise and put things that they want their "weak ties" to see, for example. I think it's a good idea, especially if you're a serial friend adder, i.e. someone who values the amount of friends they have. It allows people to add whoever they want but also keep personal details private and open only to those they know in person.

I do think that people still need to be more weary of their privacy...profile sites such as Facebook can only protect your personal information to a certain point. I think it really is down to the user to make good decisions on who they are adding. Many profiles are fake and only want to be added so they can gain information for marketing purposes or even hacking purposes.

Maybe think twice before you add the next "friend" to your profile, even though they might be the one who will finally achieve your goal of hitting one million friends!

Facebook: Who Belongs and Who Doesn't?

I was never a user of Bebo or MySpace, or any other social networking sites....until the huge wave of response towards Facebook. That was in my first year at University. What attracted my attention to Facebook? Believe it or not it was the fish tank I could have on my wall that could be fed or new fish and sea critters gifted by my friends or myself. No, I didn’t have any real concept of a social networking site back then.

But now, things are different. I appreciate the way I can find people I knew from school, even kindergarten, and see how they are doing. Sometimes I get annoyed by that one “friend” who fails to not have something significant to say every day. I say “friend” with quote marks because that’s the concept enforced onto us by Facebook and other social networking sites. These maybe people who I walk past at Uni or in town and don’t stop to say hi, or just people I felt obliged to accept a friend request from but didn’t really want to forge or re-forge a “friend” relationship.

It’s sad really.

Going back to what I said before, I realise now that I have this understanding that Facebook is for grown-ups (by that I mean, people between the ages of I’m-not-in-High-school/Intermediate to I-don’t-have-grandchildren). And, anyone who doesn’t fall in this bracket, I look at them as being out of place within my friends list. Even seeing those who did not end up as successful as they were made out to be in childhood are made displaced.

I’ve become quite pedantic with the use of text speak on Facebook. The recent thing that I have observed in the younger users is this replacement of g with q...yes, people are shortcutting individual letters now, not just whole words. The next generation isn’t just talking anymore, they’re talkinq...

I guess it’s been socially constructed that Facebook is for the mature, academic, and/or working professionals and that feeds in to my rather irksome experiences with those who don’t fit that criteria.

Incognito?

So, "you've gone incognito"...Or have you?


If you read the small warning when you first open Incognito mode, you'll see a brief outline telling you that Google Incognito doesn't actually protect you from very much at all-- I think it's safe to assume however that most people will ignore that warning.


It seems safe to say that what Incognito mode is protecting your from is anyone on your computer snooping around, checking up on sites you've been visiting. Effectively, this protects you from anyone you share a computer with finding out that you've been looking at private material online.


What isn't Incognito protecting you from?
Pretty much everything else.


Here's a small list of everything that can still record and store information about you and your web searches and browsing (according to Google itself):

• The websites you visit in Incognito mode can still record your visit and store information about you. Having said this, Google Incognito does rid you of any traces or cookies the site may leave on your computer, but everything you do on the site is still known to them.
• Anything you download can still store informationa about you, and malware can still infiltrate your computer.
• Your ISP can still store information about your web browsing. Information that they can hand over, as we have learned in tutorials, to any Government officials that ask for it.
• Following on from this, Government agencies can still store, and get information about you and your web browsing history.
• Finally, Incognito doesn't protect you from Google itself. If you sign into your Google account whilst using Incognito mode, from then on Google will store all of your searches and webpages visited.

So, while Google Incognito might keep you safe from anyone else with access to your computer finding out about the sites you've been visiting, it actually doesn't keep you safe from anyone looking to gain and store information about you or your web browsing history.


It seems those "surprises" you might be planning in Incognito aren't that secret after all.

Facebook friends - 'real' or not?

My first post was about Facebook and here I am, again, posting about Facebook. Referring to the title, I call it an obsession, as these days, even though my broadband speed has been reduced down to dial up (thank you Telecom!) I still have to check it every morning and then maybe several during the day; and this is even though I know that nothing much would have changed, or that I wouldn't have received any new posts.

What I don't get then is, why does this obsession exist or how it even came about in the first place?! Considering that social networking sites are quite a recent phenomenon, the extensive use of these sites is quite intriguing.

In terms of the use of social networking sites, especially Facebook something that is particularly striking is the whole concept of having friends whom one doesn't know in their otherwise daily life or hasn't ever met. But adding them on Facebook and developing a 'friendship' online is regarded as something real; something that would happen in the offline life. Personally I have never done this, simply because I've never looked at social networking sites from a perspective of a site where one might make new associations, I have always only added those people as friends who I know and I have met, basically have had some sort of association with in real life. However, a lot of people seem to use social networking sites for the purpose of making friends and this does intrigue me a lot.

Failbook

I must say my mind drifted a little in our lecture about social networking and self identity. "Differentiated Identities converging" I wrote down in my lecture notes to describe what social networking is doing to our identity. This could almost be a tag line for Failbook.

For those unfamiliar with this website, the general idea of it is users post screen shots of stupid statements put on Facebook by their friends, (block out their names and photos) and leave them there for the pleasure of the world wide web. There are some ridiculous comments on the site, which make just perfect examples of differing identities people have converging on Facebook because people forget they have added their relatives or work colleagues. Within the first page (at the moment) there are two statements where family members have found out more information about their loved ones than they needed to know.

I think the best one on there, has a girl bitching about her "fucking boss" who she forgot she had on Facebook. There is a wonderful comment under the statement from her boss who comments that she must have forgotten she was only under a 6 month trial, and as there was only 2 weeks left she might as well not bother coming in anymore to work. Although I laughed, its the kind of thing that could easily happen to me. I have my boss of Facebook.

It almost gets awkward if some of your work friends or your boss add you on Facebook, because they are going to see you everyday and will know that you have declined their request.. It becomes easier to add them, but then you run the risk of them seeing something on your Facebook which shouldn't have been put up there.

Are we all going to learn to adapt to this merged Identity or is Failbook going to have many more victims to come?