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.