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Author Archives: Sara Hardwick

Building communities or creating a divide?: The Digital Divide and Postnationalism

OLPC's "green machine"

OLPC's "green machine"

I tried to keep this short, as I’m sure everyone’s crazy busy with finals.  Have fun debating Dvorak in the comments!

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By Sara Hardwick 11:39, Dec 13th, 09 reading summary 11 Comments

Newspapers, Online: Conclusions

 
By Sara Hardwick 16:06, Dec 1st, 09 4-travelogue 2 Comments

Old Media, Online: all text and no voice makes this a dull travelogue

Apologies for the video, guys.  I’m sick, and have consequently lost my voice.  I couldn’t do a voiceover, so instead I had to insert slides of text.  It’s kind of a poor use of rick media, but it was the best I could do with no voice and a fever brain.  The next one will be better (assuming I have my voice back).  And if you really hate this one, I can redo it once I can talk.

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By Sara Hardwick 16:22, Nov 24th, 09 4-travelogue 4 Comments

Old Media, Online: Bad Examples of Online Newspapers

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Next week I’ll try to figure out how to use a music bed and edit my narration.  The bed worked on my test video–I don’t know what went wrong!

By Sara Hardwick 18:59, Nov 15th, 09 4-travelogue 8 Comments

How does old media function on new media platforms?

In this travelogue, I’d like to look at how old media (specifically newspapers) work on the internet.  It seems to me that the translation of journalism from print to web format has had vastly different success rates. I plan to spend the travelogue looking at different modes of coping with the shifting paradigms of technology and journalism, and how effective these are.

Some newspapers, like the New York Times, try to more or less replicate their print format online, leading to a not very user-friendly interface (I’m not the only one with this problem, right?  I can’t even handle their front page.  I have to go directly to individual sections, which are slightly better.)

Other newspapers have embraced the internet completely, to the extent that they only have a web presence.  To this end, I’ll be looking at The Huffington Post, a web-only newspaper, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which recently dumped its paper form to become a web-only presence.  I’ll look at how these newspapers differ from blogs, if at all, and how their blogginess might affect the level of reportage.

There are a few newspapers that have tried to wed the two extremes, The Guardian being my favorite.  I’ll look at how it uses new media aspects in some cases, but doesn’t fall into the blog trap entirely.

Finally, I’ll ask if trying to switch something from one media format to another will ever completely work, or if, in the case of the podcast The Bugle, it’s always inherently out of sync.  For anyone who doesn’t listen to the Bugle, first of all:  go subscribe now, because it’s great.  It’s John Oliver from the Daily Show and another guy doing a weekly comedy newspaper in podcast form.  Some favorite features include the audio crossword, the Hotties from History calendar, and longwinded cricket metaphors.

Of course, this is all assuming I’m able to figure out the technology necessary to do this.  If not, I’ll pick something else and do a webcomic about it using one MS Paint stick figure saying things in a million panels.  Since that sounds super boring even to me, I’ll spend tomorrow monkeying around trying to figure out my computer.

By Sara Hardwick 04:39, Nov 11th, 09 4-travelogue 2 Comments

Hotter Than Reality By Far: Idealized Bodies in the Digital Realm

In Friday’s post, I looked at how virtual bodies are created through the use of avatars in Second Life.  Through this, I learned that virtual bodies are always, to some extent, idealized. (There are exceptions to this, of course:  bodies in World of Warcraft are rarely beautiful, although one could argue that they are typically ideal for fighting, which has greater currency than looks when you’re facing off against a boss.  And of course, there are always intentionally ugly avatars, but this is usually done for the lulz.)

For my concluding post, I’d thought I’d leave the world of Second Life and talk about the current cultural discourse about avatars in general.  For, while I’ve had a somewhat topicality fail this week (suggestion for researchers:  don’t give yourself a week to completely master and perform ethnographic research in an entirely new technology.  It will be harder than it looks.), it is a topic that’s becoming more and more relevant.

First, I’m sure you’ve all seen the posters for the new-ish Bruce Willis film Surrogates in the subway.  Since I’m sure none of you actually saw it–I certainly didn’t–here’s the trailer.  The first minute or so is the relevant part.

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By Sara Hardwick 23:06, Nov 1st, 09 2-travelogue 1 Comment

Creating the Virtual Body: Long Live the New Flesh!

As this travelogue is a week shorter than I thought, and it took me much longer to make a non-horrific Second Life avatar than anticipated, I’ve had to scale the scope of the project way back (the furry post is gone, sorry).  I’ve decided to focus on the actual act of creation, instead of how those bodies go on to potentially lived experiences. Read More »

By Sara Hardwick 03:27, Oct 31st, 09 3-Travelogue 7 Comments

Our Avatars, Ourselves: How Do We Construct Bodily Identity on the Internet?

Most people think of their virtual identity as being made solely of their words and actions:  this is my blog post, this is my handle, this how I fight trolls, so this is who I am.  It’s almost the perfect end to the Cartesian mind/body split–the body types, the mind is the identity.  However, I’m interested in how the body is present in the virtual realm.  Most people with an online identity have some sort of visual signifier, usually in the form of an avatar.  What we have here is a pretty basic example.  While a lot of us either haven’t gotten a gravatar yet or are using pictures of themselves, that’s not universally the case.  Mine comes from the TV show QI.  Elisa’s is kitties.  I can’t tell what Gabriel’s or H-Man’s are because they’re tiny, but it’s probably not their faces.  They are all an attempt to say something about who the user is, even in the case of regular face shots (I’d assume you all think they’re quite good pictures of yourselves and not random, potentially unflattering, shots [it sounds like I'm saying they're really ugly, but really they're all too tiny for me to tell]).

We’re all associated with the visual image we put out on the internet, just like a physical body (true story:  I have a facebook friend whose picture was, at one point, some scary painting of an old sea captain.  One night I had a dream that he was in [not that kind of dream], and his face was the sea captain’s face.  It was completely normal in the dream, but horrifying when I woke up.)  The only difference is, we have complete control over our digital bodies.  How, then, do we construct our physical identities on the internet?  While I could focus entirely on lj icons and the like, which are typically non-humanoid, I’m focusing on how we make humanoid avatars to correspond with our actual bodies.  Are they always idealized, or do they correspond to our real bodies?  How does internet romance work with an unrealistic avatar being the only visual component?  Is the possibility of an idealized body liberating, or is it destructive?  These are the main questions I’m interested in looking at, but I’d love to hear suggestions for more.

By Sara Hardwick 22:47, Oct 25th, 09 3-Travelogue 6 Comments

Virtual Bodies or TwitRage: Two Ideas for Travelogues

I have two ideas for travelogues.  One is really really interesting, but doesn’t fit the topical requirements particularly well.  The other is not nearly as interesting, but pretty topical (so topical I don’t even know the topic yet!).  So I thought I’d throw both out there and see what sticks.

My first, interesting idea is to look at how we present ourselves as digitized bodies in the virtual world via avatars, and how we use this to construct identity and perform social roles.  In order to make this more or less fit the prompt, I plan to embed myself in Second Life (or another program if anyone has suggestions–I’ve never played Second Life before) to see how these ideas function in the virtual world.  I already have post topics, with their embedded activities, planned out:  one post will focus on how we construct ourselves through the creation of an avatar, one will focus on romance in the digital realm, and one will focus on creation of imaginary, idealized bodies (by looking at, God help me, furries).

It is an idea that’s fairly relevant right now.  As internet usage grows we construct ourselves more and more through our digital persona, and the visual representation of that is a large part of our identity.  It’s been getting some cultural play, like the music video for “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar” (I’m saving the embed for the romance week) or the upcoming James Cameron film Avatar.  But it’s not something that’s specifically relevant this week, so I don’t know if it will count (please let me write about this!  I have post titles planned out and everything!)

If that doesn’t work, I can focus on Twitter as a social activism tool.  This is assuming that the internet is going to get all het up over something in the next few weeks, but come on:  it’s going to happen.  A few recent examples would be the TwitRage over the Jan Moir article in the Daily Mail about Boyzone member Stephen Gately’s death, or the protesting against superinjunction placed against The Guardian over reporting on a Parliamentary question regarding Trafigura (side note:  does anyone else find that Twitter tends to focus disproportionately on British things, or do I just follow a lot of Brits?  The X Factor does take over trending topics every week).  I’ll also look at how it works on a micro level, such as corporations using Twitter searches to find and address customer service issues (I once saw UPS find a package for someone after they complained about it on Twitter.  Trufax.)

So, I feel like either one of those will work, but the first one is a lot more interesting.  Any suggestions on which one I should write about, or topics to cover within them?

By Sara Hardwick 20:19, Oct 19th, 09 3-Travelogue 4 Comments

Is Google Making Us Stupid?: Who Cares?

In my posts for the past two weeks, I’ve been discussing the question of whether new media technologies affect attention span. The answer so far appears to be a pretty clear yes: the internet affects how we think, making us take in small amounts of information quickly, rather than sustained, deep thinking. However, this isn’t the only question we should be asking. More importantly, we should be asking ourselves: who cares?

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By Sara Hardwick 01:15, Oct 12th, 09 2-travelogue 6 Comments