Travel Girl

More a decade after its publication, Starr’s article on seductions of simulation games seems a lot less relevant. The line of Sim games are not nearly as popular as they used to be, and in recent years, the computer (and video) game series has branched off onto a whole weird realm of having simulated people hop between night clubs to “enjoy the hedonistic side of life” (seduction of Sim on a whole new level!).

What has remained constant are Starr’s concerns about the assumptions upon which the games are designed. Sim games do not reflect reality, but rather what the designers and programmers think the world should look like, how it should function, and how people act and interact.

When Starr set out to analyze the framework of the Sim games, particularly SimHealth, he expected to find some political bias in how the program functioned. Instead, he discovered a whole web of mistakes and inaccuracies in the programming that revealed a lack of understanding among designers about the world they were trying to simulate (in the case of SimHealth it was health policies and legislation vocabulary).

This discovery challenges Starr’s original argument about the merits of computer and video simulation games. It’s true that simulation strategies have been around since the beginning of war and that simulations are valuable and educational in certain contexts, but I’m not convinced that the Sim series is part of that.

Though these games are of some worth when introducing children to city planning or the industrious world of ants, they run on a framework that is severely limited in capability and knowledge. And, in the case of Sim 2: Nightlife (referenced above), I would say they are detrimental to the proper development of human interaction.

As with all games, people must recognize that they are just that – games. They carry a lot of assumptions with them, they simplify many complexities of life, they have both the capability to educate and mis-educate children, and they are certainly should not effect policy decisions.

Unlike Budapest, journalists here like blogs. At least, Medill professor Jon Marshall does. His blog, NewsGems,”provide[s] positive examples of current quality journalism and counteract[s] industry ‘gloom and doom.’ ” You can read more coverage about his blog here.

At a meeting in Tunis, representatives from several nations decided that the United States would continue to maintain the Internet, instead of an alternative like creating a international committee to oversee the development of cyberspace. The article also touched on international efforts to bring computers and the Internet to the people of developing nations. Here’s the “rest of the story.”

Silence. Utter silence.

Well, more like silence with some uttering.

During my 5 minutes of trying not to think or move or interact with anything, I discovered that I seem to have a built in sound system in my head that doesn’t shut off. Though I had a nice, quiet environment (my bedroom in a totally empty house) and plenty of past experience zoning out (which came with many, many hours of sitting on airplanes and trains and buses last year), there was a persistent soundtrack that kept breaking in on the quietness.

Yep, that’s it. Music. I could control all of my random thoughts and the urge to check my e-mail, but I couldn’t stop myself from running through one verse of a song over and over again. Even when I switched my focus to my breathing, I would then sing along in my head to the rhythm of my breaths.

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Just after my last posting, I decided to explore The Scotsman’s Lazy Guide to Net Culture a bit more and found an article about people’s love and hate relationships with Google. This fits in very well to our readings and class today about online surveillance!!

Did you know that in addition to the search engine and Froogle and Google maps, you can “use Google to organise files on [your] computer, hunt through videos, search through academic literature and even aid scientific research.” There’s also “instant messaging and phone calls over the web.”

BUT, here comes the down side.

Google do a lot and they do it very well. Too well. And they gather a lot of data about my online habits along the way.

There are several websites all dedicated to hating Google. One of the more prominent ones is IHateGoogle.org. The Scotsman quotes from one of it’s postings:

Google, the world’s preeminent collator of information, has decided that they need to know what everybody is doing while offline, as well as online. According to Reuters, they have released an update to Google Desktop, “Google Desktop 2″, which contains a rectangular “sidebar”, which will display information relevent to the user. How does it know what is relevent to the user? Elementary, my dear Watson… it spies on your activities!

If you take the time to read the Google Desktop 2 privacy policy, you’ll see this ominous excerpt:

“Google Desktop uses the same cookie as Google.com and other Google services. If you enable Advanced Features, the Google cookie will be included in the information sent to Google. We may be able to make Google services work better by associating this information with information from other Google services you use and vice versa.”

Just think how much information Google can get from you with the vast extent of their services? It’s attempting to cover ALL of your Internet needs, while gathering incredible amounts of information about your online activities. Makes you think again about skipping over those privacy policies…and allowing cookies!

The Scotsman has a great section devoted entirely to informing readers about the in’s and out’s of the Internet and what’s being said about it.

If you want to appear like you’re at the cutting edge of net culture but can’t be bothered to spend hours online, then never fear. Scotsman.com’s pathetic team of geeks, freaks and gimps will do the hard work for you. While you sip wine, read a book or engage in normal social interaction, they will burn out their retinas staring at badly designed web pages and dodge creeps in chatrooms to prepare for you: Scotsman.com’s lazy guide to net culture.

The most recent article addresses concerns about the place of blogs in journalism. Basically, (1) American journalists think too highly of themselves and their blogs, (2) having a blog doesn’t make you a journalist, and (3) the Scotman’s webpage benefits because a lot of people who read stories there clicked in from links on blogs (hehe, like this one).

Oh yeah, notice how the author writes his e-mail address at the bottom of the article. He knows his stuff!

So, I tried to take the “road less traveled” (in my mind, the more creative route) when searching for information about Jason Gallo.

Alas, I was foiled. I tried searching for books or articles by him in the Northwestern Library – no luck. I tried searching for books by him at Amazon – no luck (it brought up Pretty Woman). I even looked-up his name on Wikipedia – still no luck.

Then I caved and did what everyone else did…a Google search for “Jason Gallo.” 1,630 results returned. “Darth Goat“, eh?

Too many Google hits for me. I decided to narrow it down and try a search on Dogpile to get “The Best of Breed Results from the Top Search Engines!” Only 72 results!

:( But the 2nd result on this page is sponsored by public-records-now.com…and number 11 was sponsored by Reunion.com. Did Jason Gallo run track? Because that makes up a lot of the results.

One final push…

No Facebook profile! ::sigh:: What a waste of an .edu e-mail address.

We are gathered here to witness the joining of
to
in the matrimony of information media. From this day forward, they will work together to ease the struggle of recording “must-see TV” and give people the chance to view online photos on their television screens.

And in the future, we may yet see this relationship blossom and bear the fruit of video streaming from the Internet directly into TVs so cable services will no longer be needed. Their union may even bypass the need for an $800 Media Center PC.

May the satisfaction of their consumers always be close to heart.

After reading Healy and Lessig’s articles this week, I’m convinced that copyrights today don’t necessarily protect the intellectual property of the original creator as they were formulated to do. Instead, they seem to protect the royalties of interested parties by keeping copyrighted creations under the law for as long as possible.

As Healy explains in his article “Digital Technology and Cultural Goods,” this misuse of copyright is a “threat to culture” and may result in “long-term” changes to copyright law and enforcement that are “bad for people both as consumers and citizens.” He gives the example of “The Wind Done Gone,” a book that retells the story of “Gone with the Wind” from the slaves’ perspective. This extremely creative idea built off of a story that is ingrained in American culture – a story that, by now, should be part of the public domain, free for comment, criticism, and as a source of future creative writing. Instead, people from the estate of Margaret Mitchell claim that they OWN the characters from “Gone with the Wind” and no satire may be created from the original novel.

How on earth does a copyright of her characters today “promote the progress of science and useful arts” as was stipulated for copyrights in the U.S. Constitution? Margaret Mitchell has been dead since 1949! She no longer has “intellectual property” to protect for the purpose of encouraging her future creativity and ensuring that she gets “a return on [her] investment.” Right now, people other than herself and her immediate family are profiting from continued ownership of her novel’s characters. To see evidence of this, one does not have to go any further than the Margaret Mitchell House & Museum Gift Shop.

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DiMaggio and Cohen’s article about the inequality of networks brought up an interesting point: the common language of people in our culture today revolves around media and information technology. No longer are the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer and Plato part of our dialogue, much to the dismay of the traditional orators of our time. Instead we quote Budweiser commercials or entire scenes from Star Wars movies.

As DiMaggio and Cohen observe, we expect our peers to recognize the characters and dialogue from television episodes of The Simpsons and Seinfeld and Sesame Street. And today, more than ever before, we expect them to understand what we mean by saying that we “IMed” someone or that so-and-so “friended” us on Facebook. These technologies are valuable to us because our friends and families use them and we, in turn, give them value by incorporating the lingo of the media into our everyday interactions.

The more that the language of information technology seeps into our “common knowledge” as U.S. citizens, the more we’ll be leaving behind the people who don’t have access to these technologies. In the future, they will be disconnected from policy making regarding these technologies and ignorant of how the technologies can be utilized to improve schooling for their children. The impact of shutting out a large section of the population from this shared language and knowledge could reach further than we anticipate now.

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