Week 6 - Take Two - Interconnectivity

Take your pick of which post you want to read. Thank goodness I saw Tomica’s post and realized I did not read the right documents for this week. Three cheers for Tomica for posting early. And three cheers for the internet and letting me find out in time to do something about my mistake.

To start I tried playing the games while I printed up the reading material. So far I tried to play three of the games: Fat World, Finding Zoe, and one I tried a couple of weeks ago about finding water if you live in a refugee camp. I liked the premise of each of these games and the graphics weren’t too bad. Fat World was engaging and cute. I was looking forward to plumping up my avatar. But when I opened the tutorial I found out I had to visit about 20 places in town before I could start. Then I found out my avatar moved so slowly it would take at least an hour just to get through the town. That was a complete turn off. It isn’t that cute. So then I tried Finding Zoe. Graphics were really cute on this one. I liked how they used note paper and had cell phones with text messages and doodling pages. But again, too slow. My girl just hung out with a boy forever before she started looking for Zoe. Maybe this is real life, but girl . . .you need to get moving if you are going to find Zoe. Hurry up! I had the same feeling on the water game, I couldn’t get anyone to move fast enough to get the jobs done in a reasonable length of time.

So my point is that I think the games are good, but I also think that the point the game is trying to make could be made in much less time. Or they could make the point many times over in the same amount of time. I don’t think any kid has a longer attention span than I do either.

Whitworth and Friedman (2009) presented information about the importance of expanding theory and knowledge and problems associated with that process. Seems like in this age of expanding knowledge, the transfer of knowledge to the people who need to know is problematic. Historically, the system for this transfer has been via professional journals, specific to the subject. In the very olden days, people would go to the university library, find the one copy of the journal with the article they wanted and then go to the copy machine and copy the pages they wanted at 5 or 10 cents a page. It was assumed that by the time you were in a profession, you could afford to buy that journal for yourself. With the internet, everyone hoped that materials would be easy to access online and for free. Woot! Wouldn’t that be great. If someone learned something really important everyone could find out about it and use it. For a while that was true. But it didn’t last. Most professional journal articles require a fee to read them. PubMed, mentioned in the article, is a very fine cross reference system for medical information. But try finding a whole article. Not likely. Sad to say, I have written many a paper based on abstracts. Yes, I know, someone has to pay. But really, I can’t pay anyway, and how does it help everyone if only the rich people can have the knowledge. That is what is feudal to me.

I like the KES system. I like that it has quality indicators and hopes to publish all submissions. I like the reader evaluation too. I do think that people in general need to learn to read more critically though and that this could be a problem. Many people seem to think if it is in print it is true . . .and there is nothing further from the truth. One problem I can see with KES is that it will need to be flawlessly indexed. Key words must be absolutely on target and there needs to be enough key words to distinguish that particular paper.

Rycroft’s (2007) title page made me laugh. A “long project” indeed. Please note on his second page the excellent abstract, 10 keywords, a citation, and a URL. That is as good as it gets. According to the abstract, young adults are building a new political culture that is more open than cultures of the past. Rycroft posits that this may move society closer to a true democracy. He bases the new culture on the increased interactivity and intercommunicability facilitated by the technologies of the internet and virtual worlds.

Young people prefer the Internet for their news source and participate in online communities. Rycroft points to a multiplicity of public spheres evidenced in online forums and references Habermass’s (2004) association of public spheres with a vibrant democracy.

Rycroft studied several populations of young adults. He observed some in public and surveyed others. He joined Facebook. He noticed a lot of multitasking. He was interested in online avatars and similations. He joined “Second Life” and he felt that it functioned much like real life. His descriptions of the political activities were interesting. He brought up the very democratic possibility of multiple concurrent conversations in addition.
Basically, Rycroft did an excellent job of telling how young adults are using the Internet to further intercommunication currently.

I think the idea of belonging to multiple communities is most interesting. Because it allows a person not only to see a situation from multiple frameworks but also to contribute to multiple frameworks. In a way, belonging to one community reminds me of living in a small village where everyone gets to speak his opinion and everyone listens to that opinion. Then everyone talks about what was said and evaluates it publicly. They can gather more information. In virtual communities, people can respond more quickly. No one has to say "Oh I will read that paper and get back to you in two weeks on it." What I imagine is that they will open a new window while they are chatting and look it up and then talk about it right there. And people can be talking to many others at the same time. And all the information will just flow around and kind of congeal when it feels right to everyone. That would be a true democracy. And then multiply that by however many spheres there are.

Another really great thing is that there could be way less discrimination based on external factors. Because if you don’t know any of those things about someone, you can’t discriminate. What will distinguish people is the way they act. If they are rude, selfish, or prejudiced they will not have as much influence.

Kahne, Middaugh, and Evans’ (2008) study discussed the civic potential of video games. They were very clear in their desire to increase the propensity of young people to participate in civic activities including awareness and participation. They found that many people in games did participate in guilds and did help other members though I didn’t get the sense that this had a direct correlate in the real world. It might though.

However, I don’t think that humans are all that altruistic. I would submit that while there is a rare person who is gentle, kind, and giving of time and substance, most gamers realize that they will not reach their goals without guild participation. In some games, you will be repeatedly killed without being in a guild. So in a sense, it is the small village model. Furthermore, guilds expect you to help newbies. It is part of bringing up the next crop to help everyone out. Being civic minded in a village is a matter of survival in a cruel world. This may transfer to real life experience. Who can say? I do think the researchers would have more information if they got inside the game themselves however. The researchers pointed out that females do not spend as much time in video games as males and therefore will not have the same experience. I don’t know if this is lamentable or not.

One of the problems I had as I skimmed this reading was that I guess I am really not very civic minded myself. I don’t mind doing a neighborly thing, but I absolutely hate public meetings. If there is something civic I need to do or learn I would like to do it in my own time frame. Sad to say, I am fairly skeptical of the whole process. As such, I thought the study was a little biased in favor of the absolute value of civic mindedness. Thank goodness everyone is not like me.