Response to two articles.

EverQuest: 77th Richest Country / The Blogs of War

I already know lots of online games though I am not a player. In Korea there are many online game players, and there are some problems between ‘virtual reality’ and ‘real reality.’ After I read this article, I searched “Virtual Realit” on online. I could find a game named “second life.” It is also an online game, but very different from others. According to my researching, there is no story in Second Life. Players can use anything as their avatars. In other words, the society in this game seems like real community. And in this game, there is virtual dollar named linden dollar. One real dollar is about 250 linden dollars. So, players can buy their estate or start their business using linden dollars. As the title of this game ‘second life’, players can build their second life. Second life is real ‘virtual reality.’ As this game is growing, some problems are growing as well. There are relations between real economic actions and virtual ones in the game. But it is hard to control virtual things in Internet. There are no specific rules between virtual economy and real one and it is invisible what rules we need. In my opinion, the biggest problem is that these are occurrences that are happened through Internet. Nobody can control Internet actions by now. As we can know through ‘The Blogs of War’ article, Internet information is very hard to control. And does this control is really necessary? If the answer is yes, then we have a major challenge: how can we achieve it? What is the right policy when it comes to Internet?

Internet is another big world. Everyone involves it. But the growing direction of Internet is equivocal. And Internet world and real world are very different things. Finally, can real reality control virtual reality?

Medialab

medialab.ifc.com

Among YouTube, GoogleVideo, film.com and medialab, I like the former's design most. The environmemt of medialab is very neat and is so arranged, so I could concentrate on videos easily. The other sites have so much information on the screen page that videos are playing and it bothers my sight when I watch videos. And medialab has very good quality short films. I found many videos about our daily life in YouTube or GoogleVideo, but in this site, videos are almost completely directed rather than just happened. I really enjoyed having an appreciation of these videos but I did not feel posting my video. Because mine is so amateur compared with them. Medialab is also big UCC site, but it does not have comfortable atmosphere that anyone can post any kinds of video like YouTube.

film.com

film.com

In this site, I could find out a lot of information about movies, TV, DVDs, entertainment etc. And information's format is like a newspaper. I could comment any kind of articles, and I could recommend it as well. The subjects of this site looked like very specify in terms of entertainment like movie, TV, etc. So we can get deeper and more practical information from this site.

Google Video

Google Video

Google is the biggest searching portal. When I visited google video for the first time, I could find very useful information. Although there are a lot of videos, information is organized very well. And google video has large range information from the entertainment video to educational video. But I could find people's private stories in YouTube more than google video.

This is Google Video main page.


After I logged in,


I could upload.




After about 3 minutes, my video was completely uploaded.


Here is my video in Google Video!

YouTube

YouTube_"YouTube – Broadcast Yourself."

Before I take this class, I’ve never posted videos on any sites. I heard YouTube is the biggest UCC site. So I decided to try to post on YouTube!

This is YouTube main page.

To upload my video, I clicked the ‘upload’ button.
But I had to log in.

I logged in. After that I could get a upload page.

I wrote some information and finally I uploaded my firstvideo.

Including the loading time, I took about 8 minutes to do it.

So easy!

Here is my firstvideo in YouTube

After I posted my video, I understood why YouTube is the biggest UCC site after. The process of posting was very easy even though this is my first time to post something. There are a lot of video, but these are categorized very well. Also I saw brief information of each video before I showed them. Most of all, I could feel very confortable to post mine because there were lots of amateur videos about daily life. YouTube keeps an open space to anyone and any kind of videos even though they are amateur videos and does not have an important message.

FirstVideo_Link_high quality

Click here to watch my First Video!

My First Video

09 / 17 / 2007 at the Tisch School

55 words

Yesterday was before today. Today is before tomorrow. Tomorrow will be after today. Today is after yesterday. Yesterday was yesterday’s today. Today was yesterday’s tomorrow. Tomorrow will not be before today. Today is not before yesterday. Yesterday is not after today. Today is not after tomorrow. Tomorrow will be today and today will be yesterday.

Orality and Literacy - by Walter J. Ong

In this book Ong studies the big change of our communication method from speaking to reading. In other words, before there was no letter people only used ‘the oral expressions’ and after letters were invented people have mainly used ‘the written words.’ Because of this change, the ability to communicate has changed from orality to literacy.

There are two major differences between oral expressions and written words: interactivity and residue. In oral culture, all verbal communication must be addressed by direct words of mouth. So when people communicate with others, there are always interpersonal relations which are kept until the end of conversation. In other words, verbal communication means real ‘interactivity’: we can expect direct response from our conversation partner. In literate culture, however, reading books have a different situation. Between written words and readers, there is no interactivity: questions are available but we can not get any answers.

In addition, Ong says “written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit.” We can store the oral expressions only in our minds. If we forget that expressions, there will be nothing. But written words always exist in the books until these books disappear.

These differences brought about the changes for storing and sharing information. We do not need to memorize information, as in the oral tradition; instead we can write it down and keep it without memory. Keeping information without efforts to memorize is more convenient than memorizing information, but it decreases our ability to memorize.
In oral culture, exchanging and sharing information happen through people, but in literate culture, it happens through people as well or another media such as books, newspapers, etc. These changes influence our consciousness and reconstruct the way of the human reasoning.

I agree with the author because it is true that media shapes the way we conceive the world. This is why I believe that we should pay attention to the change of the media. The main communication media that we usually use can change our thinking constructions. Nowadays we experience the revolution of media such as Internet, cell phones, etc. The media is changing rapidly: there are not only letters but also visual pictures and not only the interactivity between people and other people, but also between people and machines. Because of this, we have to think about media carefully and we should choose the main media wisely. Also, we should be aware of how new media is going to influence our lives or consciousness deeply in order to control it.

Welcome!

Communication Lab @ ITP!