As always, the INC-group is a merry talkative bunch of people:
We miss you guys….come back!!
Within certain quarters of game studies an attempt is being made to make the argument that virtual worlds can serve as laboratories for the study of real-life behavior (pardon the crude distinction). All in all, I think this is a reasonable attempt, but it’s not without its problems.
Anyway, Yee et. al. have an in-press article entitled The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments (get it). The authors conclude, among other things, that norms of interaction relating to gender in the physical world get reproduced in Second Life (which I have recently blogged on) based on avatar gender. For those of us in the intersection between games and communication, this research is quite fascinating.
Importantly though, certain Second Life insiders beg strongly to differ.
Yee, N., Bailenson, J. N., Urbanek, M., Chang, F., & Merget, D. (In press). The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments. CyberPsychology and Behavior.
UPDATE: The complete program is now online, find it here
On October the 6th Aalborg University has a seminar on web2.0. Søren will be giving a talk with the above titel, and the abstract is here:
Are blogs the savior of modern democracy or are they the biggest attempt till date to flatten our culture with superstitious narcissistic babblings? Are moblogs and videoblogs the liberation of consumers in a process of making them into content producers or are we witnessing an overflow of reality TV addicts gone crazy in exposing themselves online? Are social networking sites the rise of globalized friendships making the world more coherent or are they just narrowing the scope of people to only being interested in their closed circle of friends? Are users the new designers in a strategic employment of user driven innovation or should we rather talk about loser driven innovation? Are we witnessing the break down of the public and private?
Are we asking the right questions to address the social software and web2.0 movement? In this talk I will give an account of social software, from both a personal and academic perspective. What kind of questions should we ask? How do these technologies provoke our concepts in academia and culture more generally?
Expect more questions, personal confessions, theoretical babblings and a few answers.
Not surprisingly I do not think we are asking the right questions, the above questions only continue the AlphaGeek and AlphaGeist dichotomy. So how and what should we ask? I’ll try to come with suggestions in the weeks to come.
Michael Zimmer from New York University and Mikkel Holm Sørensen from Actics are speaking as well so should be really interesting
Via John Macgregor Wise:
a) pick up a book which is the closest to you at the moment
b) open page 123
c) find the third sentence
d) post it in your Live Journal (plus the instructions)
e) don’t choose the book, just pick up the one closest to you
The one closest is my notebook and it only has 100 pages, turning around I find Adrian Mackenzie: Cutting Code – Software and Sociality, here goes:
“network configuration and management.”
A rather short line, the book is not that long too, but it is very good. N. Kathrine Hayles writes in the paratext on the backcover: “As soon as I finished this book, I turned it over and began reading it a second time; its deep clarity and compelling power demanded nothing less.”
According to this article from New Scientist, people become more altruistic (in not exploiting the “commons” when paying for coffee in apsychology department kitchen) when a simple pair of photocopied eyes was felt to be watching. The researchers seem to conlude that the “innate altruism” thesis might be on the wrong track. Personally, I’d like to beleive that we are naturally altruistic, and that it speaks more of psychology faculty and students. Also, what kind of altruism are we talking here – the kind of “turn the other cheek” unconditional altruims or the kind of reciprocal altruism (as in tit-for-tat in game theory?). In terms of InC, what are the implications of altruism and cooperation for Social Software, Creative Commons and stuff like that. I’m sure there’s at least a Pscyhology of Animal Behaviour masters here.
