May 2010
15 posts
"Everyday Life in our Wired World"
Ben Agger writes about how media and technology control the lives of human beings in our modern world.
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The author of “Everyday Life in our Wired World”, Ben Agger, writes about the relationship between the everyday lives of people and their social structure,...
Texting in Public
Imagine yourself in a really crowded bus, full of strangers all around you, pushing you as they moving, touching you as they shift in their seats. In this situation, you take out your phone and start texting your friend about this very uncomfortable situation. The person next to you looks over at you, and makes a comment about the crowded situation and how they can’t wait to get off the...
Self-Respect in Cyberspace
Julian Dibbell, one of the victims of the famous cyberspace rape incident in LambdaMOO, wrote about his experiences as he saw the crimes occur in front of his eyes. An analysis of his work shows us just how important it is to be able to protect our online identities.
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Dibbell, Julian. “A Rape in...
Class Divisions between Facebook and Myspace
The following is a research analysis of a very interesting piece written by Dana Boyd in which she describes the class divisions that can be seen along the lines of Myspace and Facebook.
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Boyd, Danah. “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace .” Apophenia Blog Essay. June 24,...
"Adventures in Capitalism"
Another reading done by our rhetoric class was Ben Agger’s chapter called “Adventures in Capitalism” in which he talks about the uses of Capitalism in our postmodern world.
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Agger, Ben. “Adventures in Capitalism”. The Virtual Self: A Contemporary Sociology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007: 98-123. Ben Agger, in his...
Mindmap
In my Rhetoric class, we made a mindmap explaining the activities of our online identities.
The Ways In Which We Communicate
The writing tone is different between the different types of communication such as texting, social network messaging, public posting, emailing, etc. This is because in each of these ways, we are addressing a different type of audience. For example, when we text our family members, the writing is very short and informal. When we post a message on our friend’s facebook wall, we are very...
Controlling our Online Identities
How much control do we really have over our online identities? We can make hundreds of profiles in various sites online. We make an identity on each website while we are in the process of making profiles. Each identity is unique in its own way and has its own factors of significance. My amazon identity for instance, is very different from my facebook...
Universal Logins
All around the world, people are logging in to different accounts from different places, trying to get some shopping done, or read online publications, or watch their favorite videos, etc. Each site will have its own password, its own ID and username. These details can sometimes become very difficult to remember and writing them down is completely out of the question- why?...
Day 4 of my Virtual Life
I now took Nerwen from the walls of the White House and took her over the oceans and far away lands to- St. Paul’s Cathedral. She teleported, of course.
St. Paul’s Cathedral wasn’t only like the real cathedral. It looked like it, on the insides and outsides. But the surrounding area had so much more activities than the real place (at least that’s what I imagine- I’ve...
Day 3 of my Virtual Life
So again, with Nerwen, off I go to other lands. Lands different than my own. This time I took Nerwen to the White House all the way up to Washington D.C (which of course didn’t bother Nerwen. She teleported.) Anyways, visiting the White House, the Second Life White House, was a unique experience. It wasn’t very much like the real White House. I remember the real one with my own eyes,...