Second Life

A website called ‘Second Life’ is a social networking site, where users create  and design a new person in place of themselves. users are able to create a whole different life where they can do whatever they want. this site even goes to the extent of allowing users to convert real money into virtual money so that their virtual being is able to buy land etc in their ‘second life’. to me, this site seems like it is encouraging people to abandon their real lives and become a whole different person in a cyber planet. I can imagine that the users of this site tend to be people who feel that their real life is failing in a certain area, and so they feel the need to create a cyber person who can be everything that they are not, and can fulfill the dreams that the user has not been able to fulfil. in our lecture we were told about a couple who had a divorce becuase the husband was having a virtual affair! this, to me, sounds rediculous. It worries me that people feel the need to neglect their real lives and put time and moeny into a ‘life’ that means nothing. It worries me more, that there are plenty of sites allowing people to do this.

web 1 vs web 2

KEY DIFFERENCES

1. Web 1.0 was about reading, Web 2.0 is about writing
2. Web 1.0 was about companies, Web 2.0 is about communities
3. Web 1.0 was about client-server, Web 2.0 is about peer to peer
4. Web 1.0 was about HTML, Web 2.0 is about XML
5. Web 1.0 was about home pages, Web 2.0 is about blogs
6. Web 1.0 was about portals, Web 2.0 is about RSS
7. Web 1.0 was about taxonomy, Web 2.0 is about tags
8. Web 1.0 was about wires, Web 2.0 is about wireless
9. Web 1.0 was about owning, Web 2.0 is about sharing
10. Web 1.0 was about Netscape, Web 2.0 is about Google
11. Web 1.0 was about web forms, Web 2.0 is about web applications
12. Web 1.0 was about screen scraping, Web 2.0 is about APIs
13. Web 1.0 was about dialup, Web 2.0 is about broadband
14. Web 1.0 was about hardware costs, Web 2.0 is about bandwidth costs

Social Networking

Over recent years, social networking sites have become more common. One of the most recent sites is ‘Facebook’, which has over 31 million users. Over 100 000 people sign up to this site each day, it is growing very rapidly! This shows that common people like you and me are becoming more and more able to not only simply receive information from the web, but also upload and share information with people we may not even know.

New media is allowing more contact to be made between users of the web, which initially sounds good. However, people are unaware of the dangers this can lead to. And how much ‘private information’ is actually private.

this video explores what dangers social networking can lead to.

Watching this video, and listening to the lecture made me think more about the footprint I am leaving on the web, and made me question how safe using sites like Facebook actually is.

My Slideshow

http://www.flickr.com/photos/34781076@N04/sets/72157613028831306/

i made this flickr slideshow using my own phtot’s and text

People in the world

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=iDWcuBygAUw
this clip showed me how images can help a viewer to comprehend what a figure is, rather than just text on screen.- that was a peice by Stans Cafe.
‘Running the numbers’ by Chris Jordan uses a similar concept
http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7

i really like how people can use images to successfully give an impact on an audience. looking at charity adverts, they started to focus on individuals rather then a collective group, because more sympathy is felt for an individual rather than a large figure, however, now the idea of using shocking images is working to give a just as effective impact.

Hans Rosling

in my first lecture i watched a video of a talk led by Hans Rosling. through his talk he showed how when thinking about certain areas of the world we have a prejudice ‘an unfavourable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought or reason’- dictionary definition.
he came to the conclusion that we have a ‘we’ and ‘them’ idea about the world. ‘We’ acts as the Western world, and ‘Them’ acts as the eastern world. ‘We’ have long life and short families, and ‘them’ have short life and large families. he then gave a presentation on his statistics chart, comparing wealth and health.
his chart can be found on http://www.gapminder.com.
he then showed how different countries compared, some countries were surprisingly high, other were surprisingly low. i found this video helpful, as i understood how the accessability of statistics can change people opinions (the statistics were only available via the UN government, but after gapminder was created, the facts were accessable to the world). it also made me realise how we cannot summarise continents, in his demonstration he showed how within a continent , or country, there is such a wide spectrum of results- meaning we cannot always apply the same ideas for improvement to two different countries, even if they are in similar areas of the world.

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