"Creaturecology is a fantastic new kind of virtual world. You create the inhabitants and then watch and help as they struggle for survival. Reports about the welfare of the creatures you make and other world events are sent to you via email. You also can take an active role in your creature's survival by growing its population. Your creature's population increases every time you send a creature card to a new person. You'll also get a small population boost when the recipient of the card comes to the site to view the creature."

Create your creature from a number of available parts and define its habitat, diet etc. Then, unleash it into the harsh world of online ecology and watch it flourish or perish!

Unfortunately, I cannot paste any examples here, I can only copy seperate body parts :), so check it out at www.creaturecology.com! 

I'm not sure what the subject of my final paper will be just yet. I have two possibilities:
1. IMDB.com; What kinds of participation does this site enable? What are the advantages of being a member? Is there a real sense of community, with, for example, returning members? What sorts of advertisements or links are used on the site, etc.
2. Comparing an official movie website with an unofficial one. What are the advantages of the official site when looking at participation (if there are any)? Than, what kind of communities do these sites offer? How do these sites make sure people will visit them and will want to spend further time on them, in terms of games, forums, videos etc? I will yet have to decide whether I will look at the site of one movie or several ones. 

Hutchby, I. ‘’The Communicative Affordances of Technological Artefacts’
Dodge, M. and Kitchin, R. ‘Geographies of the Information Society’                                 

 

Question

When looking at the ways of thinking about technological influences as outlined by I. Hutchby, where could Kitchin and Dodge be placed?

Answer 

In his article ‘The Communicative Affordances of Technological Artefacts’ I. Hutchby outlines a number of standpoints on the relationship between a society and available technology. One of these is determinism: technologies have specific ‘actual properties’, which are not affected by their socially constructed role. At some level, technological artefacts have capacities which cannot be affected by human interpretative actions. In other words, these technologies have inherent or necessary features which lead to determinate social consequences. The technology determines what the user will do with it. Another way of thinking about the influence of technology is constructivism: the technology only comes into being and gains meaning, because a person decides to read it as a text and interprets it in a specific way. Artefacts do not determine the form of social relations.

 

Dodge takes a stance somewhere in the middle, but closer to constructivism. He introduces the term affordances: not all technological artefacts lend themselves to the same interpretations. Some objects have qualities that others do not. A rose and a gun do not offer the same possibilities: even if a person would choose to commit a murder with a rose, it would not be possible. Affordances are the possibilities certain objects offer for action. It is something that will not change at the moment that the need of the reader changes. In a way this means that technologies do have some determinate properties, that do affect social relations. However, it is not given that human actors are certain to respond in a given way.

 

What do M. Dodge and R Kitchin say about the relationship between technology and society. In the first part of their chapter, it becomes clear that they uphold a deterministic way of thinking: cyberspace influences affect and transform cultures, spatial structures and institutions of societies. He sees this as a reinforcement of a capitalist model aimed at erasing all non-Western histories. According to Dodge and Kitchin, traditional forms of interaction are changed. This also implies a deterministic view, otherwise it would be the usage of the technology by the public that would determine how the new technologies would function. He states that ‘cyberspace is transforming the spatialities of modernism.

 

On the other hand, they acknowledge that online communities can create new political structures, which is an example of how people use the technology, not of the technology determining the usage. For example, people can use the internet to create alternative identities in cyberspace. This is a way the users can read the internet to fit into their own desires. They also acknowledge a sort of affordances by stating that communities have pre-existing structures that can be appropriated in a strategic way by participants in an ongoing interaction.

 

The deterministic view dominates however, for they explore the geographic qualities that are intrinsic to cyberspace. On the other hand they do not ignore that consumers can also produce new structures.

Check www.newgrounds.com for games, spoofs, toons, random fun stuff and the discover the origins of the 'All your base are belong to us' phenomenon! 

H. Vogel ‘Economic perspectives’ 
 

Question:

Vogel and Castronova have conflicting opinions on the notion of who will make use of leisure time the most. According to Castronova, very well-paid people will play more because they can afford many different leisure activities, but Vogel disagrees: people with high incomes will purchase less leisure time, because of high loss of income. What seems more reasonable?

Answer:

I agree with Vogel on the matter that people with higher incomes tend to spend less time on leisure, but I do not think this solely motivated by a loss of income. I think it has more to do with a sense of responsibility. People with higher incomes generally have jobs with more responsibility than people with lower incomes. I think that the choice to spend less time on leisure is more strongly related to this aspect than to income per se.  

What if, in the future, people will spend more time in virtual surroundings? What if the virtual world will become an economy on itself, like E. Castronova has argued? An economy where real money can be made by selling items that have been produced online, on forums like Ebay, 'foreign trade' (Castronova). How will this influence the balance? I think it will shift. People with more money will start spending more time online, because it will not result in a lower income. They will have an advantage on others, because they will be able to buy the most advanced computers and they will be able to pay for the fastest connections and they will be the ones that can afford the most expensive foreign trade articles.

E. Castronova ‘On Virtual Economies’

Question:

Castronova calls game owners ‘dictators whose benevolence depends only on the constraint that they must remain profitable’ and ads that they can make alterations to game mechanics ‘without prior consultation with the players’. He also assumes that virtual economies will become as important as real economies in the future. What will be the role of the game companies in this future?

Answer:

According to Castronova more time will be spent in virtual economies in the future. Assuming this is true and assuming that people will actually start living in these economies just like they do in real life economies, with real incomes and ‘real’ relationships, game owners cannot continue to act without input from the ‘inhabitants’. Just like in ‘Earth economies’, there will have to be arrangements that will ensure participation in decision-making from the people. In short: a democracy instead of a dictatorship, perhaps even with something close to elections. The game owners will have to integrate the desires of their users in to the virtual world; they cannot simply make changes without consent when the world they affect by doing so plays such an important role in people’s everyday lives, emotionally as well as financially. Game owners couldn’t even remain profitable if they would go around making changes without prior consent from the inhabitants of their virtual worlds. They will have to work together with the players like Will Wright, creator of the Sims, has already done by integrating player’s ideas in the game concept.

 

 

John Allen ‘Symbolic economies’ (Cultural Economy H2)

Question:

Allen states that ‘The symbolic interplay that constructs consumer codes is thus not something that is handed down through a marketing tradition but is itself open to manipulation by active consumer.’ (p41) How does the internet fit into this?

Answer:

The internet enables new forms of consumption by allowing consumers to react to what they see online and therefore make their own contribution to the content of the market. It has changes marketing traditions. New forms of marketing like forums and fan sites have appeared, where consumers can share their love for a certain subject with the world, at the same time producing a sort of word-of-mouth marketing for the owner of the subject. The internet greatly improves the possibility of consumer influence whilst granting, for example, movie companies a free form of promotion for their products.

 

 

Don Slater ‘Capturing markets from the economist’ (Cultural Economy H3)

Comment:

Slater looks at the advertisement industry in order to draw conclusions on the intertwining of culture and economy. He therefore makes a mistake John Allen mentions in his article: to assume that ‘any kind of creative inventiveness in the economy naturally follows the same pattern’ (p44).  He is analysing the marketing of a product like baby oil, but draws conclusions concerning the entire field of culture marketing. I do not believe that the way a tangible product is marketed can simply be applied to the marketing of a symbolic product like a movie or a painting. Some of his conclusions are applicable to culture though, like ‘categorization of things as similar or not’ (p68), which can be seen in the grouping of films in different genres. Here, all kinds of aspects like demand, taste and preference are to be dealt with. Marketing can be adjusted to cope with these aspects.

 

When looking at the possibility of player input, The Sims is a very good example. Especially the option of creating your own skins is very interactive. Celebrity skins, gothic skins, skater skins, glamour skins, name it, the internet's got it. Some sites also feature tutorials on how to create new skins, so there is a perfect avatar for everybody. Some examples:

Welcome!!