Week 10 – Games Culture

In this blog I am going to talk mainly on Game Cultures, and base it on week 10’s readings that were put up on Blackboard and using Ismaar’s lecture notes on Game Culture.
   I found very shocking yet biased opinions in the reading especially at the claim that in Romania up to a dozen workers are playing computer games 24/7, the author claims that “they are paid the equivalent of 28 pence per hour to play games”. So it’s no shock that in the last 5 years that the “the quality of life” in the industry has been heavily questioned.
  Whilst doing the reading I have come across the repetition of the word interactivity which I have come across in a previous blog, here its explained that “Originally a text was said to be ‘interactive’ when an individual could directly intervene in and change the images and text that he or she sees. So the audiences for new media become ‘users’ rather than ‘viewers’ of visual culture, film and TV, or ‘readers’ of literature.”  He then explains further “Audience studies demonstrate that watching television, for example, is not a passive activity; the viewer or viewers actively interpret programmes in relation to their knowledge of particular codes and genres”. 

 He then explains his reasons for believing this, he explains that as playing and watching and two different things, and that playing involved participation like having to “learn its interface and control systems” we also get “a very strong emotional effect in the player: often adrenalin-based, fight or flight reactions are physically provoked.” I do understand what he means and that I do also believe that watching a programme can be passive, but I believe it can be interactive as well if we do take interest and we may often get emotionally provoked as well e.g. if were watching a horror and we get frightened or if we get emotional whilst watching a sad film. But like watching TV or film, we may also experience “loss of a sense of time, place or self” hence why many people get addicted to games as Panorama later on this year investigated.
   (Prensky 2001: 296) explains that the military uses these gaming simulations to train their soldiers and teach them control equipment’s etc. Virtual words are extremely addictive, and cases increase as gameplay become more lifelike e.g. Sims, how did this company make millions of profit by creating a game where players can create avatars and then get them to live lives like us, how did players get more interested in the avatars lives rather than their own lives. Game culture continues to grow as technology develops, who would have imagined that we could use a Wii remote and virtually use it as a sword. Who knows what it will be in ten years’ time?

Week 9 - Social Media and the Commodification of the Self

It was reported on alexa.com that Facebook was the highest visited digital social networking site followed by Twitter then MySpace. I do find this shocking as I thought MySpace would be 1^st or 2^nd, I also find the results shocking because I never really thought of Twitter as a social networking site. Social media has developed greatly in the last decade, the first of its kind was a website called SixDegrees which ran from 1997 to 2000 but the website made no profit as it was purely experimental and had a lack of clear revenue model, unlike most sites on the internet today have a advertising strategy.
   The characteristics of social media have been described as ‘imagined egocentric communities’ that have a ‘need to belong’. As Web 2.0 is described as ‘participatory culture’, we create our Data Doubles on our Facebook sites, as we looked at our data selves online at our friends’ it was hard to think of them as the same person, with all the photo shopped pictures and confident posts etc, much of what we see online is exaggerated. 
  As a part of this week’s reading I read ‘the Introduction: “Worship at the Altar of Convergence” by Henry Jenkins 2006, in his reading he explains what Convergence is. “Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways”. In the book he mentions a story that circulated in 2001, where Dino Ignacio high school student experimented with Photoshop using images of Osama Bin Laden, he then posted it on the internet innocently. When a researcher used this image for professional work there was a huge effect,  Sesame Street threatened to take legal action and no one would have guessed that “from his bedroom, Ignacio sparked an international controversy…he ultimately decided to dismantle his site” explaining “I feel this has gotten too close to reality”. Jenkins continues to speak about

1.       Media convergence

2.       Participatory culture

3.       Collective intelligence

And that “convergence is, in that sense, an old concept taking on new meanings”. We see this all around, we are all a part of fan culture, taking on something original and turning it into a new idea, whilst doing this now we all feel that we can publish it on the internet, maybe because we feel we can do it anonymously, or perhaps innocently, others do it purely to offend. Another way of explaining convergence is to look at a mobile phone, now different inventions like digital cameras, games, television, laptops are all loosing business because we can now do it all on a mobile phone, just look at the image below as evidence.

Blog 8 – Privacy and Surveillance Cultures

The information that I have gathered to write this blog was based on this week’s lecture presented by Andy McStay and this week’s reading ‘The Intensification of Surveillance’ by Kirstie Ball and Frank Webster and ‘Surveillance after September 11, 2001’ by David Lyon.
   “Surveillance involves the observation, recording and categorization of information about people, processes and institutions. It calls for the collection of information, its storage, examination and – as a rule – its Transmittion.” It’s a day to day reality that happens without us knowing most of the time, whether we make “telephone calls, pay by debit card, walk into a store and into the path of security cameras, or enter a library through electronic turnstiles.” These are only a few examples of how we are surveilled.
    Following the 20/21th Century “public money is being poured into policing and security services”, but is taking part in this Big Brother society all bad? Bell and Webster develop on this idea by saying we get rewarded and in some sense we do choose to sell on our privacy; “To be included as a citizen in our society one must submit to being surveilled (to provide an address to the authorities, to enter a tax return when required, to submit to the recording of one’s health details…), but in return one gets access to a range of desirable services (the vote, welfare rights, medical benefits…).” Dennis (1999) also researches into if the above is correct “reports that 70 per cent of Britons are happy to let companies use their personal data, on the condition that they receive something back, such as a personal service or other benefits” If we look at Facebook as an example, to use applications you have accept the terms, which is that they have access to our pages and to our information, but we agree to this because we receive the use of the application.
   But with the improvement of technology the development of surveillance increases, especially since “The destruction by terrorist of the Twin Towers in New York city” it has “has stimulated, and perhaps even more importantly, legitimated, the acceleration and expansion of surveillance trends.” We now are familiar with the fact CCTV footages are now being “examined using facial recognition techniques to pinpoint suspicious people…searching a vast range of databases, it will be possible to identify terrorists, even before they can strike”

It was proposed in the readings that there are 4 major categories of surveillances, these being:

1.       “Categorical Suspicion involves surveillance that is concerned with identification to threats to law and order… Categorical suspicion encompasses all the policing dimensions of surveillance, and few dispute its necessity, though many are concerned about its boundaries and intrusion into the civil liberties of citizens.”

2.       “Categorical Seduction endeavours to identify behaviour of customers that they might be more effectively persuaded to continue as consumers. Consumer society is distinguished by its means of persuasion – design, fashion, branding, promotion, display, celebrity, product placement…  For instance, retailers have introduced ‘loyalty cards’ primarily to track the patterns of consumption”.

3.       “Categorical Care draws attention to the surveillance directed largely at health and welfare services” e.g. categorizing certain health groups such as ‘the risk’ group. I get letters during the flu season to call me in for certain flu jabs, because I’m in the risk group with asthma.

4.       “Categorical Exposure is signalled in the major development of media and its increasingly intrusive character in the present era. Most commonly witnessed with regard to coverage of ‘celebrities’.”

It was then discussed that there are “three main areas of privacy – territorial, personal (of the body) and informational (of information about oneself).”
   But where does it get too much? “Several countries have proposed new national identification card systems, some involving biometric devices or programmable chips; others have brought forward more limited ID card systems, such as the new Canadian Immigration Card or the ‘smart ID’ for asylum seekers in the UK.” With all this “iris scans, face recognition, smart cards, biometrics” etc, seems like it’s getting a bit much and that we have to watch what we say? Is it worth being watched whilst out in public and whilst on the net at home worth the tiniest of threat that terrorist propose? I guess if we check the news every so often we hear that some sort of terrorist is found. Or when some crime is committed it can be tracked via CCTV footages. I think there is more plus’ to the question, in my opinion anyway.

   A great example of the above technology work to our advantage is the Joanna Yates case, how police have been able to track her last steps through checking her debit card activity and CCTV footage, if not for this it would be a bigger mystery.
   Dataveillance is defined by David Lyon as a “collection and processing of personal date, whether identifiable or not, for the purposes of influencing or managing those whose data have been garnered” but in fact people do want some sort of consistency in their society whether its workers presence, performance, registration etc. We are even being watched through electronic networks, advertisers and companies want to know what, why, when, how and who. Through these questions our information is then Data Mined in order to find out patterns relating to certain people or times of the day, they will anticipate our behaviour, and you may find this true in cases where you log on to Amazon and on the page it may display ‘things you may like’.
   Now many of us don’t mind being watched, but those that do fear that their precious information may be lost and put into the wrong hands, which has happened, companies have lost thousands of consumer details and therefore trust is an underlying issue between companies and consumers. We don’t want people finding out that we spend on average e.g. £150 a month on online shopping and our name, address and bank details. Through companies being careless with our information it could lead to a rise of consumer or identity theft. Whether or not we trust what the government or companies do with our personal information is a question that seems to continue to test the most trusting of individuals in this  country and individuals across  the western world.