Sep 30 2010
Response (Week 5)
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.