Category: John Hartley

1. Just because we have things like video games and virtual reality doesn’t mean that we aren’t happy with our current reality. These alternate realities actually allow us to live a different life and do things we wouldn’t normally have the opportunity to do. With that in mind I think there is happiness in our alternate realities. In most cases the alternate realities have no severe consequences and we can get away with pretty much whatever we want.

As for the Holodeck, that seems pretty far off. In class, Whurley said that we probably would not see something like the Holodeck in the near future. To pull it off we would need a room full of cameras with walls created of screens. Although it’s not entirely impossible, the thought of it seems highly unfeasible. If we were to have a room like this, it would take a lot of programming and a lot of RAM.

2. The business cards looked like they had promise in the world of augmented reality, but they faded out pretty quickly. It was just a gimmick. BMW created a paper that allowed you to see one of their cars while holding the paper up to a webcam on a particular site. This seemed like a more reasonable use for augmented reality as users could interact with the car on a level they would not be able to interact unless they went to an actual car dealership. With this in mind I think companies will come up with some way to get users to continue to use augmented reality in the future.

3. ARrrr was a pretty cool augmented reality game. The user uses a piece of paper as the map and zombies walk down the street. The user is looking through a monitor as a helicopter and has to shoot the zombies. It’s a typical zombie game but adds an extra element. The problem with augmented reality games is that you have to have a lot of extra things in order to play. In the case of ARrrr you have to have a piece of paper that is the map, along with a table and space to move around. Doesn’t seem like the most reasonable piece of technology, I mean, why all the extras if you can just have everything on the screen that you need. The Kinect pretty much is augmented reality. It is applying graphics to a users real world and is manipulated through their movements.

1. With the newspaper industry losing over $1 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000, and network television taking a large hit as well, I don’t see it being too long before all media is on the internet. Already we are seeing new technology like Internet TV making television a little more obsolete. Many people surpass news and television altogether and hop straight to the internet because it is searchable and they can quickly find the information they want, instead of waiting for the reporters to eventually get to the news. The problem is, television and newspapers are not customizable. People can’t really bookmark a portion of a newscast as easily as they can on the internet. It is possible to cut out an article from a newspaper, but it’s easily lost in a stack of papers. As reporters begin to lose their on-air jobs, many will head to internet reporting, leading to an overload of reporters.

2. The question here isn’t one of credibility, it is a question of reliability. Subscription based sites have a tendency to be more reliable because they are in charge of dispensing new information. The coagulators may pull from too many sources and mess up important information. Although many citizen journalists and mass news sifting blogs will get all of the information eventually, the creators have the quickest and most reliable system. Some people don’t think that reliability is worth paying for, but many are okay with shelling out a few dollars a month for a subscription. Someone brought up in class that a subscription also had to do with paying for the style. The New York Times is going to have a much different flow in their paper than your local online paper. Also, as we travel into the citizen journalist era, I do think the information on the gathering sites will be less reliable. People writing about first-hand accounts may not have the same access or information as the standard reporter and will miss the meat of the story.

3. I think it goes back to the reliability issue. Of course people want their news as quickly as possible, but not if it comes at the cost of good information. With citizen sites having only half the amount of new news as the subscription sites, I’d say people will be more likely to head for the subscription news. Looking at it from an economic standpoint, you’re paying for the news, but you are getting twice the amount of news as you would if you relied on the free sites.

1. Lanier talks about anonymity in the online world quite a bit in his book “You are not a Gadget.” One of the first instances he cites of trolling is Usenet, which was a drive-by site where people could post whatever content they wanted. We see sites like this all over the place online today: Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, the list goes on and on. It’s on many of these sites that we see the worst trolling. Slanderous words, defamation, blasphemy, blatant lies, and why? Because no one has to take responsibility. No one is being held accountable for anything that goes on throughout the web. There are severe cases, the mother who bullied a girl from her daughters school to the point where she committed suicide, but for the most part, people don’t have to take responsibility for anything they say or do online. So yes, it is partially because there are no consequences, but another reason is because everyone is buying into the hive mind mentality. One person starts trolling and the rest follow. These malicious attacks won’t stop until reporting users is actually taken seriously.

2. We might not be venturing into a holodeck like they have on the starship Enterprise anytime soon, but I think this kind of technology is not a long way off. Video games are currently the closest thing to telegigging and gaming in general could possibly see something like this in the future. In the last decade, video games have become much more immersive, with deep story lines, character development and even one on one interactivity. Advances have also been made with how we play video games. Microsoft is releasing the “Kinect” which is able to read body movements and interpret them into game data, manipulating the in-game character to make the same movement. This technology doesn’t use any kind of controller. As the Kinect moves forward along with 3-dimensional gaming, we could begin to see something that resembles Lanier’s “telegigging.” If the visual soap operas were per household only, not allowing interaction with multiple users in different areas, trolling would not be an issue. But, if there was an extremely large area for the “telegigging” to happen, trolls would definitely start to emerge, wreaking havoc among users.

3. I think what Lanier is trying to say is that we are becoming much simpler in our vocabulary, so in a way yes. Polysyllabic words don’t fit well in our 140 character lifestyle. In the same way, we use small words to quickly convey to friends or family what we mean in any number of instant messaging chats. The more I read what Lanier had to say about speech, the more I thought about the book 1984. In it, one character refers to a new language they are working on, “Newspeak.” He says, “Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.” It’s scary to think that George Orwell actually saw this coming, but in some ways it has become a self-fulfilling prophesy. We are limiting ourselves in our speech to speak quicker, and in smaller words. Big words aren’t necessarily sexy, as Lanier poses, instead we sometimes think big words are snobbish or pedantic. Although our language won’t be slashed up as much as in 1984, Lanier brings up an excellent point, one that will make us watch ourselves and our language through the years.