They can take our DVD's but they'll never take our F word!

Stalking around on The Times Online in the Tech and Web section...I found that there is new technology from America...that allows you to clear and screen parts in films, so that your children can watch a grown up film without being mentally scarred. So adults can choose to screen...Violence, sex, swearing, drug use...What's the point? I mean, what child is going to want to sit down and watch a film like that anyway?

Let's imagine, for a moment, one of my favourite films....Goodfellas. The beginning ties up the turning point in the middle of the film...a man repeatedly being stabbed and kicked in the face. Yes alright it's not a nice image, but what six year old is going to even know about the film let alone desire the need to watch it? Ok so that scene is gone. There is a whole section devoted to cocaine, a part of his downfall from success...That’s gone...a scene where his wife holds a gun to his head...that is of course gone...where he punches a guy repeatedly to protect his lady...Is that gone? Because according to the company making this, they can report if it is a good guy or a bad guy shooting, and what are the moral obligations of the attack...so we can watch the hero killing repeatedly but not the villain? So basically...Goodfellas would consist of the title screen....and the rolling credits.

And is there a desperate need for it? Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press did a survey in America and found that although a third of Americans are upset by violence and swearing, even more are annoyed at reality television that tricks and humiliates people! And about half of the people are worried about government censorship.

While I can see the logic in what Clearplay are doing...I think that grownups and children are more than capable of what they watch on TV or what DVDs they pick, anyone heard of parental control!?

The ways Disney, Pixar, Fox are churning out the DVDs and new blockbusters why is this even important? But, is it based for children?

According to Clearplay, the largest demographic is for the elderly. The elderly?! My gran couldn't even work terrestrial TV, when it was around, let alone a DVD player and then the software that comes with it to sensor anything! What is the point? It seems like a waste of time and money. If children want to watch these types of films, wait until they are the age where they can handle it without having nightmares for years to come. So what if parents have to watch Lion King repeatedly until that time comes, it's a great film! Or would some of that have to be cut? The bit where Scar holds him on the cliffs edge and then lets Mufasa plummet to his doom is pretty horrific for a child...so that's gone and four year olds are wondering why one minute Simba had a Daddy and now he's running into the sunset alone....

Is a Second Life all it's cracked up to be?

As part of the digital media course, we have been persuaded to join the social networking site, Second Life. And I did mean to say persuaded. Normally it would be a simple task for Uni students to be 'playing' on a social networking site rather than discussing that weeks reading, but somehow trying to look at Second Life with an open mind is a bit tricky. It's the same if I was told I would have to join World of Warcraft...For me, it's just not very...cool.

However, we must look at things with a, very, open mind.

But starting up your Second Life isn't as easy as a person may think, after all, you are creating a whole new life.

Step One: Choose a basic advatar to start your new life with, either as close or as different to your own personal self.
Step Two: Choose a first name. [I went with Scarlette, a bit more exotic than Kate...Also slightly American] Step Three: Choose one of the pre selected last names Second Life has created for you [I finally, after much deliberation, settled on Mikado...Yes like the chocolate]
Step Four: Start your Second Life. Now this is easier said than done, for starters, I had no clue what I was doing, just wandering, and flying, a very fun but constantly glitchy way to get around. Then I found;
Step Five: Personalise your advatar This is where it can get interesting. Now I made my advatar blonde, with blue eyes, and pale skin....Which I then made to look like I had spent a few months in Greece getting a nice tan. So far, so close to the real life representation. However when I say you can personalise your advatar, I mean you can alter every little thing about your advatar, changing the shape of your eyes, the wideness of your behind, even the amount of your love handles... Let's just say that when you are able to create an image of you that you would truly like, i ended up shaving off a few pounds, made my upper assests a little larger, made my hair a lot longer and blonder.... So maybe even the most cynical will follow the crowd in making an image of the ideal self.

So I then ventured deeper into the world of Second Life. Except for I couldn't really work out how to move from place to place, or indeed what place to go too. So I typed in something random into the search bar and found myself transported to a nice log cabin with plenty of other Second Lifers.

And then came the perverts. Ok ok, maybe that is being very cynical. That didn't happen for a least a couple of trips into the virtual world. However when I did have some rather disturbing invitations from 40 year old men who, scarily, work at a University and was having a 'sickie', meaning so he could stay home and play on SL (as it's known in the world), I turned the subject around to ask why he was on it. He didn't seem to understand and pushed on with his advances, so I turned to a guy who, in SL was tall, tanned, muscular, and with a full head of chocolate brown hair, as far as computerised advatars go, he wasn't too bad. Until I asked for his RL (real life to any Second Life 'noobs' out there) age....63. Curiousity got the better of me, I asked him why he didn't make himself look like 63 rather than 23. I offended him, and he snappily told me that it was because in SL he could be anything he wanted to be, no matter how misleading. However he then felt bad and gave himself a pot belly, winkles, and quite spindley legs and arms. I wonder how long that lasted.

But it's interesting. I got rid of my insecurities in SL, however I think I could still have passed off for a 18/19 year old girl, rather than shaved 40 years off my life. But it's true. You can be anything you want to be.

I took some further research into SL and found some newpaper articles in it. Here are the links if you want to check any out in further detail.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article5151126.ece

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4523668.ece

David Pollard and Amy Taylor, A true love romance. Met in Second Life. Married in real life. Also married in Second Life.
(To the right is a picture of Mr and Mrs Pollard's advatars.And their RL counterparts.)

True love. Until however Mrs Pollard took a break from her computer and, I quote "she caught a glimpse of her husband's avatar in a compromising position on a sofa with a female avatar." And it wasn't just any advatar...It was an advatar playing the role of a prostitute. Mrs Pollard hired a private investigator to get evidence of her husband's infidelity. A private investigator IN SECOND LIFE.



As if there isn't enough fidelity problems in the world. It now continues into virtual worlds. Am I the only one who finds this a bit much? And that the private investigator has the worst name ever? Markie Macdonald?!

The second link is about Universities using Second Life to teach students.
"Students can go to lectures, tutorials and seminars anywhere, from the garden to the beach, without leaving their rooms. Enthusiasts say this will revolutionise distance learning and help students with disabilities who may not be able to go to all lectures." Thousands of pounds has been spent to create these campuses.

Professor Philip Gibbard was the first Cambridge University professor to give a lecture in Second Life. He says the experience was a bit awkward: “I thought it was a very good idea in principle, but the downside is that you don't have any sense of an audience because it's virtual.”

THE ONLY DOWNSIDE? Does anyone not know students? "Hey, so your lecture tomorrow is in Second Life, you don't have to physically come into class, you just sit at your computer and learn ok?" If any students actually made it out of BED to even sit down at the computer I cant help but think their thoughts might stray to Facebook, to their email, even leave the lecture and wander around Second Life. I may be the only one to think it, but I pay thousands to be taught at University, don't fob me off with a pixel created advatar of my lecturer! They could be 55, with a beer belly and bald, and their advatar could be highly misleading!

I refuse to allow Second Life to become my only life, so I guess I shall have to stay in the 'noob' category for a lot longer.

Here come the girls...

So Kathryn Bigelow....She's broken the mold and won Best Director at the BAFTAs. Yes that's right, the very first woman to win Best Director, EVER. Or so the newspapers tell me but then again, that's not always the best reliable source.

Ironically, it was for her film 'The Hurt Locker'. A war film. So it's probably more by CHANCE she was the director and won it, in fact I wouldn't be too surprised if many men watching the show went "WHAT? That was done by a WOMAN? Shouldn't she have been doing COSTUMES? Well I feel like I have been tricked!" Or some kind of drivel like that.

So maybe it is a win for women, it'll be interesting to see if the Oscars follow suit. However I will find it a real victory when it goes to a female director of some soppy girlie epic romance film, however I think we might be waiting some time!

I have my head in the sand, or so the BBC is telling me

According to the BBC lab, I am an ostrich when it comes to the internet. Using "The Virtual Revolution" and their web behavior test, I have worked out my web surfing animal counterpart. Though to be fair, it could of been something a BIT more interesting than an ostrich? I could of been a bear, or a fox...I could of been an leopard!

But each to their own, I accept my animal companion and will keep venturing into the internet. Only, I don't really understand how you can put people into categories when using the internet. Surely we each have our own styles and we are all individuals? Though, and what I find highly ironic, was when "The Virtual Revolution" announced that the test was available for people to start taking...the surge in people trying to do the quiz caused the server to crash...what's so revolutionary about that?

But the test itself was...interesting. Being bombarded with the normal survey question of "how long do you spend on the internet" or "how many hours do you spend on social networking sites" I thought it was going to be a tedious twenty minutes with a non reliable outcome. I have to say though; I was slightly disgusted with myself, over 40 hours at least on social network sites? You'd think I lived with my cats or something. The worst part is I most likely spend most of my time...talking to my flat mates...Who live directly opposite me....I think I need Facebook Therapy or something..
However, it then introduced games, and no matter if you're in University or Primary School, when a game is part of a survey, that survey is therefore, to say academically, awesome.
Using things such as multi-tasking games and memory games it comes up with your results in a bit more of reliable, real life sense.
But, I do feel a bit cheated. On one of the games, where you type 'Y' or 'N' if a red candy bar changes positions, I was totally unsure as I was doing it, and therefore my score was a pitiful...3.

Ah well, maybe it's for the best. If I had been a majestic member of the cat family I would of become too cocky for myself.
So Ostrich is probably the best way to go. Who knows, I could get used to sand. Or Facebook, whichever the internet counterpart is.

You are a Web Ostrich

Fast-moving - We can tell from your results that you are a speedy surfer - one of the characteristics of the Web Ostrich, whose real-world counterpart has an impressive top speed of 45mph.

Sociable - The web is a social place. You take full advantage of this when you search for information by using social networks and other sites whose content is created by its users. Real-world ostriches are also highly social, even keeping eggs in each other’s nests to share the burden.

Specialised - The real-world ostrich is a true specialist, highly adapted to survive in hot, dusty African grasslands. You might not be at risk from lions when browsing the web, but you are still very focused. From your test we can tell you do best when you concentrate on one task at time, rather than several things at once.

Pyschogeography...

I was looking back on my notes over the weekend; I came over the lecture on media art, and our pyschogeography project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxuBY2b2-cc

Unfortunately, for some reason, YouTube won't allow the music to be played for "copyright" reasons, even though I purchased the song from iTunes, but then again, the copyright/copyfight debate is for another day.

I loved the idea we came up with, leaving our journey to the game of chance, by throwing a die to know how many stops we would have to wait until we got off. Using only First buses it meant we would at least stay inside the city of Leicester, however if we had more cash, and more of a sense of adventure, i would of loved to have ventured out on the "out of city buses" and seen where we ended up.

We used a mixture of film and photography to track our course of where we went and ended up in. We started a trend of taking a picture of the bus stop, the number of the bus, and the first landmark we saw as we got off the bus on our chance decided stop. So when it came down to finally making and editing the footage, the only sound I used was at the very beginning, and then put the rest of the film in silence, with "King of the Road" playing in the background, using the old country song as a comparison with the new age type of art we were creating, making a contrast between the two types of creativity. I also put the films and images in a weird, almost A-Ha style effect, everything was just like a drawn outline, rather than full images, showing the fact we didnt really know any details of where we were, just the general outline of the place.

As it was, our bus took us to the most deserted streets of Leicester, with only rubbish blowing on the pavements for company, to then the more "suburbia" type estates and cult-e-sacs, passed a primary school, passed a Tesco and, quite randomly, we ended up at Dale's Mum's house.

The game of chance is a powerful, and quite coincidental, thing.

Looking back though, I would of loved to have tried something a little different, maybe on foot, mimicking 'The Thought Project' by Simon Hoegsburg, stopping people in the street, asking what they were thinking about just before we stopped them, and using their quotes and pictures. I think that would have been so interesting just with random strangers, yet you never can tell what kind of answer you'll get, like Simon Hoegsburg did with some geeky looking man telling him he was thinking of a rude, intimate joke about a hostess...

Looking at more professional New Media Art, I feel like ours lacked a lot. I love the Listening Post done by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin...Though it would have been a lot harder to mimic that, maybe taking a status from each of our Facebook, from a random friend, and writing it up on a wall, till they all form together in just a bundle of words and random people's thoughts. Some call it graffiti however...