Revision: Cyber Bullying

Our society today is becoming more and softer. We are starting to treat issues like self esteem with medicine that damages your body in the long-run. Kids and teenagers nowadays especially are starting to deal with issues like bullying, popularity, or school tumultuousness by taking medications for depression or cutting themselves, instead of grabbing the bull by the horns. Parents by coddling their kids are not helping the situation either making their kids even more vulnerable and open to these types of threats.

                Suicide is one of the furthest steps that these kids or teenagers take nowadays and it is sad. The suicidal rate for 5-24 has increased in the past decade and we need to look at it and ask is it really because people are so much more depressed nowadays or is there a bigger different issue at hand here. With the use of internet cyber-bullying and other types of online harassment has obviously increased the opportunities for bullies and others to harass someone from school or a social setting.

                The case of Megan Meier (13) is a pretty unique one. Here it was a mother to one of her former friends who ended up using a fake online identity to harass Megan and eventually lead to her committing suicide. This is a terrible thing when an adult manipulates the mind of a young teen in a way that would make the girl commit suicide. That being said are there not things that Megan’s parents could have done to prevent this? Limit her from using the computer and in this case MySpace. Perhaps meet with her former friend and her family to sort out the issues? There are more actions that could have been taken to prevent this from escalading to the point it did.

                When I grew up my parents taught me that if somebody treated you not right or bullied you, you stick up for yourself. This is more of the case of face to face bullying and not really on the internet, but the internet is an easy thing to control for parents. You can limit what websites your kid goes on and not let them use the internet at home, or at least unmonitored. For most teens this is not the case, but parents should spend enough time and know their kids well enough to understand if there is an issue that needs to be dealt with.

                What happened to Megan is tragic and inexcusable, but to prevent this from happening to more kids and teens something needs to be done. Parents and schools instead of babying kids and teens need to deal with the issues that cause stuff like this to arise. Whether that is telling someone that it is reality or punishing a bully, action needs to be taken. When it comes to the threat of the internet and cyber-bullying monitoring what your kid is doing on the computer is probably the most effective way to stop this. There is plenty of software and technology today to where this can be stopped and nipped in the bud, before it is too late.    

Re Write: Habbo Hotel (AIM Project)

For my aim identity I wanted to choose an animal and not like your everyday pet either but an unusual animal. I thought that a regular animal might be too easy to recognize perhaps, considering I have a pretty goofy personality, so I decided to go with Willie the Whale. Unfortunately Willie was never brought to life. So have decided to write about a different experience I had online with a separate identity through the game Habbo Hotel.

Habbo hotel is an online game where you get to customize your own room in a hotel. There are private rooms and there are public rooms. Each room had different themes or activities and different people. Basically you can go to different rooms and interact with other players and participate in games, or perhaps, go to the night club and dance with another user. It is basically like living an alternate life but online. There is money involved, gold coins, which you have to buy with either a credit card, gift card, or text message from the real world. It is not necessary to purchase coins in order to play but like in real life the more money you have the more you can do.

In my experience I decided I wanted to be a club owner. So I started up a club called Vancouver Club. Obviously in order to buy furniture and other amenities in the game I had to buy coins. When I played this game I was about 13 years old so I didn’t have any income. I asked my mother to fill up my pre-paid card on my cell phone, that way I could use text messages whenever I wanted to buy coins. Life was good I bought a lot of coins and soon I had one of the five most popular private clubs on the game. I started employing people to work for me, I organized games where I would give away prizes and I also started charging and entrance fee to my club making a ton of coins, it was all good.

What ended up happening was I started liking the game reality more than my actual life so I began playing the game at home instead of going to school. I started showing up late to hockey practice etcetera. When my parents found out about all these things they were not pleased. So what happened was my mother ended up cutting me off from my phone and computer. This was a disaster I was a huge club owner and didn’t have access to funds. I still had access to the game through our school computers so I wasn’t cut off from it completely. Desperate and naïve in my search for coins, I took an offer from another player who said they could offer me a large amount of coins everyday to help him out. I knew there had to be a catch so asked what he wanted me to do in return. He said that all he wanted to was be partners in owning Vancouver Club(In the game you had to allow people access to roam freely and move stuff in your room, that is how you could employ or split ownership with other users). I thought this sounded like a good trade-off. I agreed to let him be part club owner and he held is end of the bargain as well. I received a large some of coins. Life was great once again. Later that week there was an issue with some members of our club and my partner asked me if he could get the password to my account so that he could take care of it. I felt like I trusted him at this point so, not thinking anything of it, I agreed. Next thing I knew I was logged out. When I finally logged back on after three or four tries, everything I owned was completely gone. It was as if the Grinch had been to Vancouver Club. I was ruined so I gave up the game forever that day.

This experience taught me that even though you are online and you think you know somebody you actually never really know who it really is. He was using a separate identity just like me and he plain and simply conned me. This could be the case on any social networking site, or chat room. You never really know who is on the opposite end of the conversation and it cost me. This definitely was an eye opener not just because I got conned, but also because I spent so much time in this game it started becoming my reality and there was no thought in my mind that someone would try and steal from me. Habbo Hotel was my reality and I thought I was in full control of it, like in the real world. That was not the case here.

 http://www.habbo.com/

Truly Dependant

The internet was anarchy before Google existed. The World Wide Web was a hard place to navigate in and often specific information about certain things was a challenge to attain. Obviously other search engines existed before and side-by-side Google but none of them could achieve the rank and status that Google did. Google is the perfect search engine and through our needs we are becoming dependant on it.

Everybody and everything uses Google nowadays; as Siva Vaidhyanathan puts it, there is a “Googlization of everything”. What Vaidhyanathan means is that Google is affecting us on a larger scale than just being our favorite and best search engine. Google brings everything in the world together under one single place. We can access library archives, government records, everything within entertainment, information on anybody in the world and endlessly more things. Google collects an immense amount of information that is all organized and made easy for us to access.

We as humans are by nature lazy and Google with its mission being “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” plays right into that nature. Probably the most attractive thing about Google is that it is effortless. With a couple of keystrokes you are able to access essentially any information you need. Google’s ambition to create the perfect search engine is very dependent on the user’s appreciation of the service. Playing into our nature and also with help of accessing our personal information, opinions, habits and judgments; Google has undoubtedly accomplished the feat of its ambition.

We have become extremely dependant on Google and what it offers. Google is absolutely great but as Vaidnynathan explains also dangerous. “It’s dangerous because of our increasing, uncritical faith in and dependence on it … for the worse.” Vaidnynathan is saying that we use Google far too much. We are moving towards being incapable of functioning without it. Just like when automobiles and planes emerged we became dependant on them not knowing the full effects of how dangerous they actually are. Vaidnynathan mentions that this dependency is not necessarily an altogether terrible thing, as Google is also helping change our culture for the better prospering our world markets and culture. However, the way we will let Google shape the future needs to be proceeded with caution.

Our dependency on Google has helped it thrive and it is now truly amazing. Google has become the perfect search engine and continues to improve every single day.  Every time you go on to the internet to do anything today you basically use Google. If it is to cook a turkey for Thanksgiving or to see how your stocks are doing, Google is where you will first go most of the time. The amount of information that can be found through Google is unimaginable and is why it is so very important to us. If Google were to shut down today it would be very hard for us to manage and would affect everything poorly worldwide. “The perfect search engine”, Google, has us wrapped around its “cyber-finger”.

Piracy is Wrong

The past decade has offered us technologies that have never existed before and has made downloading and pirating extremely easy. There are numerous ways to share files on the internet, but the number one way to download anything today is peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing. This allows anyone to go out and buy music, video, or programs etcetera; download it to their computer and share it with the world. Often times this sharing is illegal, not always, but most often. When it is illegal it is bad and affects many people involved in producing these shared files. Plain and simple piracy is wrong and P2P sharing needs to be controlled.

What is being pirated is copyrighted material without the consent of the owner or producer of the material.  This is very common within the music world right now especially. It is stated in Lawrence Lessig’s book that, the recording industry estimates that it loses about $4.6 billion every year to piracy. That is an outrageous amount of money, anyone would agree. What happens is private people either download music off of ITunes or purchase a CD's; put the files on the computer; then through massive P2P sharing sites distribute the content. There is no justification that can explain or make this massive sharing as well as huge profit loss right. It is plain and simple stealing.

Another industry that is massively affected by this piracy is the movie industry. Lessig says the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) estimates that it loses $3 billion annually worldwide to piracy. People will rent movies or buy movies and do the same thing as music sharers do; distribute the content over P2P sharing sites. These are sites such as the Piratebay, Limewire, Frostwire, and many more. The piracy that goes on does not just affect the major corporations, but also everyone involved in the industry, for example: actors, camera-men, extras, producers, and set-designers. The industry and everyone in it is affected as a whole and this can eventually lead to major problems, like mass-unemployment and strikes.

Not all pirating is wrong though. Some sharing is very rewarding for the distributers of the content. Lessig describes four different kinds of content that is shared, the fourth one also the non-illegal one is: “there are many who use sharing networks to get access to content that is not copyrighted or that the copyright owner wants to give away”. Lessig also describes a great example of this where science fiction author Cory Doctorow, released his first novel on both the internet and bookstores hoping to gain popularity. Others follow this example as well especially in the music industry to gain popularity before they become mainstream and big in the music world. Lilly Allen started on MySpace and released songs before she signed with a record label. That is how she gained her popularity. These are two examples and there are not a large amount of artists that have successfully done this and also despite the fact, it does not change anything when it comes to illegally sharing.

Ultimately what is happening is that massive file sharing through P2P is killing certain industries that have existed and brought us so much for years. The motivation for new artists and movies to arise I dwindling rapidly and something needs to be done to protect the rights of artists and creators in the movie industry. It is obvious that there is a huge amount of people worldwide who enjoy this entertainment and would like to see and have more of it in years to come; therefore something needs to be done before something bad or permanent happens to these industries.  

Attack of the purple dragon

The evening of October 12 was as calm as any other evening. I went to the library to meet up with a few classmates to work on a Flickr project for school. After a while He felt he was hungry and wanted to go to the grill, so Evan, Alex and I decided to walk him there. On the walk we noticed a bike lying on the ground. But this was no ordinary bike. It appeared to be beat up, like it had been thrown viciously, or dropped from the top of a building perhaps. After spotting it we couldn’t draw any conclusion to what had happened, so we continued walking to the grill. Alex, Evan and I, didn’t stay long at Warch and the three of us proceeded to walk back towards the library when we saw something in the night sky. It was a strange figure; its dark shape contrasting in the moonlight. You could see that it was long, big, and that it had distinctive sharp wings. As we continued to observe this odd figure we noticed it flying closer and closer but, still we could not make out what it was. Then out of nowhere, flying faster than imaginable; there it was a purple dragon. We started running in chaos as we looked back at this great purple beast. Poor Evan, with his broken leg didn’t stand a chance; he was the first to go. Then the beast snatched up Alex as him and me were frantically running side by side. I could only run and anticipate what was next to happen.

In the meanwhile at the grill He witnessed the whole thing happen. Little did anyone know He was a trained and very powerful Warlock. After seeing the dragon claim three victims He went into action and hunted the beast down. He caught up to it as it was resting on top of main hall. It was an epic battle between the two, but He with his fire power managed to subdue the purple dragon and drain its life. The triumphant hero He, was upset about not being able to save his friends, but saved many more lives in the sacrifice of the few.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/68302494@N06/sets/72157627747755145/show/

This was our story for the Flickr project we were assigned in class (slightly embellished). Our storyline was awesome; once we had it lined out we figured that the purple dragon part of it would be a great twist for our professor. We got together Wednesday night and set up a plan to go out the next day in the daylight and take as many pictures as possible, individually. Thursday evening when met again, we decided that we didn’t quite like the day-time pictures and set out together to capture the pictures at night. With He’s digital camera at hands, we went out on the adventure.

Once out in the night it kind of just all came together and with our storyline in hand we started taking some great pictures to use. We knew that there were not going to be any real dragons out, so we had to take some pictures which we could photo shop (see below He standing at an angle to make it look like he’s fighting the dragon). We also had to use photo shop on the Lawrentian one, and the dragon in the night sky picture. In the end they all turned out well, especially the dragon in the moonlight one.

            Another cool aspect about the photography part of it was the use of perspective. We had one where Evan was holding his cast in the air and we had laid his scooter down to make seem as if he was being picked up by the dragon. In the meanwhile, Alex and I are running in the background, this one is by far my favorite picture.

I honestly have to say that I have never had as much fun with a school project as I had with this one. I have never made a slideshow story with just pictures before. Like what Jennifer Woodard Maderazo says in her article, ” The way Flickr is designed makes discovering new images and new people easy and even fun.” I think this goes for our project too. Maybe not quite the Maderazo means with discovering new people through Flickr community, but I got to know the members of my group better and that was fun, also seeing/discovering our class photos was a blast. Because of this experience with Flickr I have decided to open an account and do some amateur photography. I have done some photography at sporting events in the past but there is not a lot of freedom in that. I figure with Flickr I can now definitely broaden my horizons in photography and get the freedom and feedback that I need.  

Is the Internet Killing Journalism?

There has been a definite shift in all news media in past couple decades. Because of the way the internet is evolving and has evolved, written news media and television news seems to be dying out. Not only are these different types of media dying out, but also the professionals involved are losing their jobs and their professions as a whole are dying out. This is all caused by the internet and so called “citizen journalists”. This seems to make the internet out to be a “bad guy”, but is it really or is the internet just revolutionizing media? Internet the way we see it today is definitely revolutionizing the world of news media.

In the past the way we used to get our news was through morning papers and/or through television. Even though the news might be same no matter what paper you read or channel you watch you still only get one news media outlet’s story. Now if you wanted more opinions or a different telling of the story you would either have to subscribe to more papers or order more news channels. What is revolutionary about the internet is that you have it all with just one click of your mouse. Video, text, pictures it is all available right on your computer screen. Not only do you have that but also you can easily go from one telling of the story to the next, by just clicking on a different site. This definitely puts any written or televised news to shame.

With the internet as well you get outside sources to tell the story other than just the huge news corporations. “Citizen Journalists” and other amateur writers who may have caught a different side of a particular story share it through blogs, social networks etcetera. This is a completely new way to get news and in this way we can read or hear about things that aren’t greatly emphasized by the big news corporations. A great example of this is in Clay Shirky’s book, Everyone is a Media Outlet. Senator Trent Lott holds a speech at former senator and presidential candidate Storm Thurman’s birthday celebration. Lott says, “When Strom Thurman ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country would have followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.” Because the major news corporations didn’t feel like this was an important enough event to cover, they did not think it was important to report anything from the event. What was said in this speech though was leaked over the internet through blogs, and this ended up being pretty catastrophic for Lott.

With this type of news sharing there is a lot of doubt as to if the stuff we read can be accurate or not. It is, as Clay Shirky describes it, “mass amateurization” instead of professional journalism. Is this really a bad thing though? Even though professional journalists are checked and edited on what they write and say, it is still edited upon the opinions of the corporation. This may not always be accurate as well. The only difference between a “citizen journalist” and a professional journalist is education. This does not mean that people who tell us about a certain event, which do not have an education, are inaccurate.

Internet, “Mass amateurization”, and “citizen journalists” are what is revolutionizing the world of news media and will continue to do so for many years to come. Just like there was a shift from news media being delivered only through written newspapers and magazines to being able to get it on television, there is now a shift of all the above to the internet. Will the internet kill the profession of journalism? I do not believe so, instead it will broaden the profession to make it more global and intelligent.

Dictatorship to Democracy

Honestly, I can’t remember the internet before Wikipedia existed. When you search for information, facts about people or basically anything, Wikipedia is the first site that comes up in 90 percent of all search engines. Wikipedia is truly revolutionary and a great thing, but has it like Andrew Keen says, gone from a dictatorship of experts to a dictatorship of idiots?

The information on Wikipedia is very flexible. Anybody can go on to the website create a username and password, then start editing or creating. This cannot be a good thing if you want the information to be very credible. This also becomes a hazard when you have pretty biased people writing stuff on the website that expresses a point of view. Wikipedia still finds a way to stay very credible though. With the people who manage it and control the content, there is little information on website that cannot be confirmed as true.

Wikipedia is a tool to get information, but also you cannot know if the information on the site is true. The site therefore becomes a great introductory to your research. You can go on the site find the information and then do further research to check the credibility. The information on Wikipedia is typically condensed and summarized so you cannot always just use it as your source, it is definitely where most start though.

How come the site is never really vandalized or tampered with? There are people that voluntarily work for the website to help prevent this kind of thing. Also there are just people, out of the goodness of their heart, that help and stop these kind of actions and promote the website’s wellbeing. An example of this would be a couple of years ago in one of my classes we were asked to go onto Wikipedia to get some of the study materials for the class. I thought it would be a great idea to log in to my account on Wikipedia and change the information that the class needed so I was the only one with the accurate readings. This plan seemed to work great. I deleted a whole paragraph from the text and wrote something completely absurd. Well, as it turns out it only took Wikipedia two hours to ban my account and another four or five hours to fix the damage I had done. Not so great in the end for me considering I lost my account and everyone still got the information.

The site is not just for idiots, everybody is collectively involved and it is great that everyone can share information and add to it vital facts that may have been left out. I do not see it so much as a shift from dictatorship to dictatorship, but more of a shift from dictatorship to democracy. With Wikipedia everybody can share facts and information and it can definitely be the truth. We do not always have to trust the experts to provide us with all the information we need. We get a more social and diverse aspect out of Wikipedia and there are plenty of things that the experts do not know that somebody who has experienced it firsthand will know better.

Does Friendship Have Limits?

This is a response to Friendship Has its Limits by Erin Biba. The article is basically about how our social interactions have changed and become more impersonal because of “friending” via Facebook and internet. The studies that were mentioned in the article said that it was not possible to maintain a relationship with more than 150 people at one time. These studies most probably had been conducted and proven upon a median or average. It is my belief that this is wrong, I believe you can have over 150 close friends and that your friend count on facebook can be accurate.

The average person gets up in the morning, eats breakfast, and goes to work. They will see their family, neighbors, and possibly a clerk or someone at a coffee shop on the way. At work they see the same co-workers, a lot of the time same customers, and then leave for home. My point is the average person sees a lot of the same people every day and is one of the reasons people can become pretty bored with their life or the routine of things. If you were to now ask this person if they had 150 close friends, the answer would most probably be no. does this person have a friend count of 150 or higher on Facebook? Probably, but that is one person in an average survey.

Let’s take a look at a pro soccer player. My friend Emir Bajrami plays professional soccer in Europe and I’ve known him since I was a kid. His friend count is currently 3,428. Does he have 3,428 close friends he can call on a whim? I don’t think so. Does he however, have 150? I would most definitely have to say yes. People that do a lot of things, go to a lot of places tend to meet and start relationships with a lot more people, common sense. I myself have played hockey on five different teams in the last two and a half years. That alone is 125 teammates combined between the teams. Can I call anyone of these 125 guys up and have a heart to heart, or ask for a place to stay when I am in town? Absolutely yes! I spend every day for months with my teammates and develop a very close relationship with each and every one of them. That is one of the things that bring a team together. I would definitely consider all of these guys close friends of mine.

It is definitely true that I have a closer relationship with a few very close friends and I do not talk to 150 friend’s everyday day. If that is what constitutes having a close friend then I can’t say I have any. There is a very large grey area as to what you can consider a close friend though. In the text Erin Biba says, “Your real friend would call you in tears to pick her up from a car accident”. Does this define who a close friend is? If so I definitely have over 150 close friends, and I am pretty sure there are more people out there that do as well.

To me a close friend is someone you feel very comfortable with and you always have a good time with this person. You can tell them anything without them judging you or ridiculing you, they are someone who will always have your back, and they can take your mind of stuff, and relax you. I would agree that not everyone has an accurate friend count on Facebook but that kind of is what Facebook is about too though, connecting with people from your past. It is possible to maintain a relationship with more than 150 people at once? Call me naive, but I believe one hundred percent yes! It is possible, and it is equally possible that someone’s friend count is true to the number.  

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