NU INTERNET 2L!

I HAD 2 PLAY WIT TEH AOLER TRANSLA2R!11!!1 OMG WTF LOL I CUD NOT RASIST!!!!11 LOL

!!!1! WTF LOL ITS A HOT SENG MAH M3SSAEGS TRANSFORMED 2 AOL SPEAK!!!1!! OMG WTF

I L3ARN SOMETHNG NU 3VERY DAY!!!!!! WTF

I DONT SAY WTF NORMALY I PROMIES!1!1111 OMG WTF

The above text was translated into how a 12 year old would write it using aolertranslator

My original text before the AOLer translation:

“I had to play with the AOLer translator! I could not resist!
Its a hoot seeing my messages transformed to AOL speak!
I learn something new every day!
I don’t say wtf normally I promise!”

Now I understand why school English teachers are a little anxious! Apparently high school students are writing their school work using text messaging jargon. But then as Federico Fellini would have said (if he had had access to the aolertranslator):

A DIFAR3NT LANGUAEG SI A DIF3RENT VISION OF LIEF !1!!1!11! OMG LOL

“A different language is a different vision of life.”

 ♥

Funny article in The Portland Press Herald

Dude, is that your mom on your MySpace page? By MARTHA IRVINE, The Associated Press

This article was in yesterday’s Portland Press Herald. It describes the alarm felt by teenagers as parents find their way onto social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. ‘…young people are feeling uncomfortable about their elders encroaching on what many young adults and teens consider their technological turf.’ Obviously, there is no faster way to lose your cool than to have your parents hanging out where you are! I would bet that there are new sites popping up on the internet that will provide a ’safer place’ to show photographs of yourself drunk and semi dressed!

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What is Web 2.0?

What Is Web 2.0
Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software by Tim O’Reilly

The Machine is Us/ing Us
YouTube video by Michael Wesch Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology. Kansas State University.

What is Web 2.0?
YouTube video by Andi Gutmans

♥

Living in a Painting: Introducing Second Life and Windlight

When I first began to explore the virtual world of Second Life I was amazed by the weird and wonderful creations that I found there. Second Life’s website uses the phrase: ‘Your World, Your Imagination’ as their banner line and they explain that ‘Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely created by its Residents’. What that means is that people can literally make what they want, they can build things in 3 dimensions and colour them and add scripts to them. When I travel round Second Life it is like walking through a painting.

In one of my past lives I was a freelance photographer and I traveled round the UK taking photographs of landscapes and architecture for magazines. So when a friend in Second Life showed me how to take photographs of the virtual world I was intrigued. It took me a while to learn how to use the camera controls and I took a few uninspired pictures in the beginning. Then the creators of Second Life launched ‘Windlight’ and my virtual world changed! The clouds moved across the sky, the sunlight played on the water and I was hooked.

This strange virtual world created by artists and programmers is a communal art project that we can all visit and photograph. Pretty wild!

♥

‘Growing Up Online’ – Frontline TV Program

Last night I watched this Frontline TV program investigating ‘just how radically the Internet is transforming the experience of childhood’. If you go to this link you can watch the whole show online and you can also read background information on the Frontline website:

Rachel Dretzin one of the program’s makers said her interest in making this show stems from how she finds ‘the interplay between online identity and actual identity increasingly interesting’ and she ‘wondered how it played out in adolescence, a time when identity is profoundly in flux’.

The kids in the show were communicating with each other using IMs or text messages, they did not care for email ‘They described e-mail as a slow, archaic way to keep in touch with your aunt halfway across the country or apply for a summer internship.’

The teenagers use the social networking sites to explore identity trying on different personas and looks. The most astonishing aspect of the program is the way these kids reveal their most private thoughts and feelings online. They simply don’t care about the strangers who might read their posts; they aim their disclosures at their online friends.

The most disturbing part of the program addresses ‘cyberbullying’. A heartbroken father whose son committed suicide talks about discovering his son was a victim of cyberbullying. The boy was accused of being gay and then hounded by other kids in IM. It is interesting to consider that the internet is a place where kids can express themselves online as long as they ‘fit in’ to the values of their group.

Clearly anyone who is a little different is ruthlessly attacked if they fail to conform to the adolescent code. Kids are attacked by other kids just as they were attacked back in the dark ages before the internet. The internet is simply a reflection showing us to ourselves. Adolescents have created a perfect mirror to see themselves with their social networking sites MySpace and Facebook. Perhaps they are simply sites where norms can be mass produced and studied?

With ‘Cyberloom’ I am trying to work out whether the specific means of communication we use might change us? If we write a letter with a pen, make a phone call, send an email or an IM do we alter our self concept in some fashion? That is, does the mode of communication also define us? Certainly relationships shape us and define us but does the method of communication also shape who we are? Are the kids using social networking sites shaping themselves or being shaped by the medium they are using?

♥