Week 12 - Utopias and Dystopias

This week our assignment was to watch the TED talk by Sherry Turkle. The questions we had to think about concerned how technology today affects our relationships, have we noticed symptoms of this in our daily lives or surroundings and is Sherry Turkle’s view on technology more utopian or dystopian.

In her talk Sherry Turkle discusses the idea of being alone together. By this she means the way people nowadays spend time with friends, taking part in conferences and classes but at the same time we are connected to the Internet via our mobile phones. Sherry Turkle presented one picture of her daughter and her two friends. They were spending time together probably at the Turkle family’s home, but all the three were browsing the Internet via their mobile phones. Turkle mentions that we participate in presentations, for example, but during those kinds of meetings we still use our mobile phones and are not really present.

I have noticed many times, how the use of smart phones takes time off of conversation. Sometimes I have been waiting for a class to start with a friend. I would have wanted to talk with her, but because she is browsing the Internet via her mobile phone, I feel that if I say something, I will interrupt. It is more difficult to start a conversation if the other person is focused on their mobile phone. One time I entered a classroom and greeted a friend, but she did not notice me because her eyes were fixed on her smartphone. The situation made me feel a bit annoyed and maybe also sad. I myself do not own a smartphone and that makes these kinds of situations even more annoying to me. If I am eating lunch with some friends and they all are browsing their smartphones, I just have to focus on eating, because I do not have a gadget to focus on instead of a conversation. Technology can be a great thing for human kind but I think for example the use of smartphones has already gone too far. I have heard some people complaining that no one is talking with each other in parties but they all sit together while browsing their smartphones. This is not how people should act in social events.

Sherry Turkle’s view on technology is more utopian than dystopian. She mentions that technology can be harmful for us and our relationships but it can also be of benefit. According to Sherry Turkle we must learn to use technology in a responsible way and to take time also for real conversation.

J.J. 

Week 11 - Online communities

This week’s theme was online communities and more specifically our assignment was to inspect an online virtual world called Second life as a representative of the online community phenomenon.

Second life is an online virtual world, sort of an alternate reality. It is in many ways similar to Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (usually simply called MMORPG). The main difference is that, whereas games have clear set objectives, Second Life has none. The players are basically free to do whatever they want whenever they want, there are very few limitations.

According to Linden Lab (the owner of Second life), the virtual world had about 1 million regular users in 2014. The average age of users is 32 and about 40-50 per cent of the users are women, so Second life seems to be quite popular among both genders. The users create a 3D-modelled resident, whose appearance they can freely customize. The residents can communicate through a chat platform.

At first glance, Second life seems like a poorly animated roleplaying game. However, the deeper you go into the rabbit hole, the more interesting, diverse and bizarre it gets. Unlike many of its more violent and darker counterparts, this virtual world is a place where the grass is green and the sun is shining all the time. Most players seem to live their virtual lives just as they live their real lives, concentrating in having fun, consuming, making money and meeting new people. The players can also use a three-dimensional modelling tool, as well as a special scripting language created specifically for the game to create their own content. This emphasizes the idea of Second life: freedom to do whatever you want, literally. You can even make money by selling the content you have created.

It is quite tricky to try to define what kind of community Second life is. It keeps evolving with the ideas of the users who consume it. Due to its excessive freedom, the players are the creators of the game at the same time. The most accurate way to describe Second life is to say that it literally is a second life. An alternate reality for people to do things they could not do in real life. A place where one can live a life without laws, rules or boundaries. Some players do it for fun, others maybe to escape a reality they don’t feel comfortable in. It will be interesting to see how this phenomenon develops in the future. We are talking about something that a few decades ago was merely something that science fiction writers wrote about.

R.C

Week 10 - create a plan for a company’s communication in the network society

Our sixth  group assignment was to create imaginary company that fits our theme and plan how it reaches its customers via internet. Since our theme was movies, we chose to be company that virtually rents movies, for a price. So far nothing new, there's Netflix and Viaplay for that. What sets us apart from our rivals, however, is how we interact with our community

Social media proves that everybody likes to have their voice in every discussion. Everybody has opinion and wants to show it. We are there to help that; to help people become critics. Our website/app has guides how to write good review, tips from professionals critics. encyclopedia for terms related to movies etc.

We strongly exploit gamification in our business. The term means using video game elements to activate our customers. People love collecting, competing and showing their superiority so we have levels and achievements. You can points towards levels from everything you do: watching movies, writing reviews, rating and commenting reviews of other people and so on. New levels grant you benefits such as new ways to customize your profile and discounts for certain movies. Achievements on the other hand are there just show your milestones, like watching 100 movies, writing 50 reviews, commenting 200 times, attending certain competition in our website etc. This type of gamification enables so-called "whales", term commonly used in free-to-play -games. It means people that spend huge amounts of money, possibly tens of thousands of euros to small game just to achieve highest rank in the ladder and maintaining it. There's always people like that if there's even single element of competition.

Aside from gathering levels by watching movies we have lots of other ways to activating and gaining customers, We hold competition related to movies, such as making new trailers for movies people love. Since we of course have right for these trailers, we can use them as effective way of advertising us and our passionate community. We also attract new customers by sharing our polls all over the social media. These polls have little hook in them: you do poll, for example about which movie protagonist you are. If you then proceed to create account for our service you can watch that specific movie for discount. Aside from those we also have quizzes, interviews with movie directors and actors and of course statistics about everything related to movies, just to increase our reliability as number one movie-related company.

We also are strongly present in social media. Users gain benefits from sharing their content in websites such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. This strategy is nowadays very common in all smaller applications for phones and tablets and makes it easier for company to advertise itself. Grapevine often works way better than any ad.

HS

Week 9 - Trustworthy and untrustworthy websites

This week our assignment was to find a website that is trustworthy and other one that is untrustworthy. These websites are of course related to our blog's theme which is movies and TV shows. Web pages that are untrustworthy often do not have a professional appearance, they have too much information, the quality of the text is low and they lack sources. These websites are often easy to recognize by their appearance and content.

The trustworthy website we chose to use was IMDb.com. This site is a source for movie, TV and celebrity content. Here are five arguments for why this website is trustworthy.

1) IMDb has a professional appearance on their website.
2) The website is easy to use and the information is logically structured.
3) IMDb states on their website that they verify their information with filmmakers and studios.     IMDb's data also goes through consistency check before it is published.
4) There are lots of information about IMDb on their site.
5) IMDb is very famous among its users and it is active in social media.

The untrustworthy website we are using in this assignment is called Movie-blogger.com. It is a website where people can publish their own movie reviews, write their own blogs and so on. Here are five arguments for why we found this website untrustworthy.

1) The website has lot of information but it is not easy to navigate and the front page has too many links.
2) The website doesn't offer much information about the operators or who founded the site.
3) Most of Movie-blogger.com's information comes from anonymous people writing their reviews and blogs.
4) Because the language isn't checked, there are some grammar mistakes.
5) The content isn't very reliable since there are reviews and blogs that mostly contain people's opinions.


R-M. M.

Week 7 - Valentine's day invitation

https://txwes.edu/campus-life/upcoming-events/gsa-movie-night/

In the beginning we considered our topic (movies and series) and then we decided to do Valentine’s Day movie night with our friends. We think that invitation design fits because it’s Valentine’s Day and we have chosen mostly romantic films and event is aimed to a couples but still every friend of ours is invited.

When we were writing a text of our invitation we tried to form it briefly but still with a lot of information. We thought that it should be divided to maximum of four or three paragraphs.  In first paragraph we are inviting everybody and there is also a name of our party “Movie Night”. In second paragraph we tried to tell most of the information such us what we will be doing what films we prepared and our projector equipment. And in the end we urge everybody to come to our party.

The main goal of this event is to hang out with other people, watch some movies a have a nice chat about movies and TV series. Also spent the Valentines day how it should be spent - in good mood and with friends who share the same opinion.

Here is the link to the Event - evite

http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/p/keep-calm-and-stay-tuned-25/

A.P.

Week 6 - Visual characteristics

This week we went on and searched for pictures linked to our theme. We found so many pictures of movie titles and tv-serie quotes it was unbelievable how many pictures there were! It almost felt like they never end... Anyways we found some cool pictures and made a board for them. You can check it out here !


Most of the pictures we pinned are the covers of different movies and tv-series. They all aim to be very inviting and attractive. There is always text (the title of the movie or series, names of the main actors, slogan that the movie or the series is using..) and pictures in them. In the pictures the viewer can see the main actors. The style of the pictures usually describe very well the theme and the atmosphere of the movie. For the audience, it is the first sight of the film and it aims to make the audience want to see that specific movie/tv-series.


For example the cover photo of Lord of the Rings: the photo really gives an appearance of a big adventure. The characters have worried facial expressions, they are carrying their weapons and riding horses. The font and the colors also tell audience that this movie is no romantic comedy. The audience desires to get to know how the adventure ends.


Another cover photo that has an interesting meaning is the cover photo for the movie Forrest Gump. The photo is interesting because there is a man sitting on a bench and looking to his left, like he is glazing to the future filled with hope. It also has nice bright colours red and nacy blue. The background is white and looks like he is sitting in sunshine. The audience will have some kind of idea that this might be a happy movie. Of all the pictures on the internet, movie titles are one of the easiest pictures to point out. They follow a same pattern; a picture of almost anything and the movie title written somewhere on the picture. They are easy to spot.


A.A & H-L.S & A.P

Week 5: Linguistic Characteristics of Difital Communication

As we mentioned in the post before we will be interested in tv-series and movies. One of the largest web site which collects information’s about almost every film, TV series and even more is IMDb. Link to this site is IMBD. We can also find there something that reminds forum but it is more like message board where people are sharing their own opinions on TV series, films, awards and many more.

I think there are many kind of people. The largest group creates people who are really interested in movies and TV series. They are posting their own opinions (we can say reviews) in understandable form (some of them in an incomprehensible form) on movies and TV series they have seen. These people are forming evaluations on films and TV series because they can rate them. Of course nobody can rate films and TV series after registration.

First of December (last count) there were 15,191,834 unique visitors. In average this site have 15,2M unique visitors per month. It is 96 most visited page in USA. Statistic can be found here .

Their forum is organized in sections. First section is called “Trivia! Trivia” there can post people for example who cant remember name of film. Other people can help him find the name for the film. for example (“There was an alien which wanted to go home”). Also in this section we can find Best and Worst. They defined it as “Discussion of the best and worst that film and TV has to offer“. And many more … Link to this forum is here.

Before posting you have to be registered. It is for safety and to avoid some kind of bots which can spam the forum and even to make DDoS attacks. Registration is limited. You have to be at least 13 to create an account on IMDB. Forum is moderated by IMDB staff which is composed of people which are basically living for movies, TV series and happenings in the world of show business.

 Behind the ”Best and worst” topic you can find many different discussion threads about people’s favourite and most disliked movies and tv-series. A few discussion threads that I will concentrate on are called “Best of 2014”, “Poll: Top 25 snubs of the 2000s” and “What movies did you watch last week (26/01-01/02)?”

Generally, there seems to be quite few characteristics of netspeak on the threads I looked at. Many people write comments with good English and many of the sentences they use are almost full or grammatically correct. One example of this is a sentence in one comment by MusicDefined: “To expand my acting ranks out a little further I’ll follow your lead.” This example is on syntactic level. Before going any further on this level, let us start on the lexical level which consists of the smallest parts of language, such as individual words and symbols.

An example of lexical level on the thread “Poll: Top 25 snubs of the 2000s” is a sentence in a comment from Scott-101: “So glad to see that someone agrees w/ me.” In this sentence the word “with” is shortened to “w/” which is very common for examples on Internet forums and in text messages. In the same comment, Scott-101 uses “b/c” for “because” and “#” for “number”. These ways of shortening words and using symbols for words are too very common in netspeak. Also, Scott-101 answers like this to another person: “Wrong thread. Jerk.” On almost every web site that offers some kind of way to comment the content of the site there are always some people that quite aggressively insult other people. It is of course much easier to call people names behind user names than to their faces.

You can find examples on syntactic level in almost every comment in the three discussion threads I mentioned in the beginning. For example, in the thread “What movies did you watch last week? (26/01-01/02)” Darksidecrew has posted a comment: “Wont be seeing this.” The sentence is not grammatically correct because it has no subject. Daksidecrew has even left out the apostrophe in “won’t”. Of course it is easier and faster to write without any apostrophes or commas, for example. It is very common for netspeak.

http://abroadblogs.newpaltz.edu/blog/2014/04/stayed-tuned-for-application-openings-and-due-dates/

A.P. and J.J.

Week 4: Inventing a New Word

Welcome to our blog! We are the Brave of Seven, a group of students on a course called Communicating in the Digital World, at the University of Vaasa.

Why did we chose this name for our group? Well, obviously there is seven of us. At the first lecture of the course we were taught to step out of our comfort zone. We decided to be brave and defeat this course. That’s why we are called the Brave of Seven.

We also had to choose a theme to our blog. We had little difficulties to come up with a theme that is interesting to all of us. Anyway, the theme is now is tv-series and movies. It means that our blog posts are always somehow related to this theme.

After coming up with the name, theme and creating a blog we started working on our first assignment. What we had to do, was to decide an interesting phenomenon of digital communication which does not yet have a name and give a name for it and write the name and description in Urban Dictionary.

At first it seemed difficult to imagine a phenomenon that doesn’t have a name yet. Quite soon one of us came up with an idea: to define the phenomenon of using memes as the main way of communicating in the social media. The rest of us thought the idea was very good, we didn’t have to argue about it. We don’t have a word for that kind of communication even though it is very common. It was also quite easy to create a word for the phenomenon. There was already an existing word meme so what we had to do was to adapt the word to our needs. To create a verb out of it. We decided to combine the words meme and communicate.

Writing the official definition wasn't as easy as we thought: we had to post and edit the definiton three times before our new word was accepted to be part of the vocabulary of Urban Dictionary. It is actually very difficult to define a new word so that everyone can understand it. 

So, nowadays we have a word for this phenomenon. The phenomenon can be called to memecate. The official definition is to use memes as the way of communication in the social media, to describe and comment events and facts on social media by using memes, usually in a humorous way. Usually used by heavy Internet users (Geeks). There is a pre-knowledge of memecating or memes needed, to use memes in the right context.

You can find the definition also on the Urban Dictionary when you click here.

The first assignment was very interesting. Time will show if our new word will actually be used in general. Anyway, it was interesting to notice that this is how the process actually works: someone is in a need of a word for an unnamed phenomenon and comes up with an idea. He/she starts to use the word and if other people find it good enough, it becomes part of people’s daily vocabulary.

In conclusion, let me memecate a little by using the favorite memes of our group!

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQglTs5mCLvdrV2i5wWD3WdnNbTwh4HMpKkh6xrjyVLy-YFRwZrOw

http://www.digitallydanielle.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Blog-meme-2.0.png

http://cdn.crushable.com/files/2012/04/Offensive-Forrest-Gump-1.jpg

https://scontent-b-ams.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/10522094_10203620098772785_7755325129432332811_n.jpg?oh=1efee317d1e30205ed1af51ca43cc8d1&oe=556918E2

http://www.quickmeme.com/img/a9/a99abdac727ddfc3646fe9b55d8b0f10c943f8e813bd1d84b9102d0c48c09519.jpg

Stay tuned! :)

H-L S.