Walter's Midterm Exam: Practical Activity ds106, Marines, and wine haiku xD

Welcome back to my blog. As I've been sick this last week I've been MIA (missing in action), UA (Unauthorized Absence - of duty in the USMC), and AWL (Absent Without Leave), all at once. I've also been lost in the sauce on what's new in my Computers in Society class since I was absent for a very important lesson/lecture on something new. This "ds 106" concept/entity. It sounds like an AWESOME internet society, from what I've heard, but I have to admit I'm not too sure what it is. All I know is that I'm far behind my class and I need to catch the heck up. Fortunately I have Otto Paertz's blog for encouragement! For now I'm rejoicing being back on line, in my blog space, doing what I love to do and I'm good at--writing.

With that, I have to reveal the reason why I'm writing a new blog now: It's part of my midterm exam. That's right. yeah. But most definitely love writing, specially my blog. Before I roll the red carpet on writing with prejudice and undiscerning pros, I'm using this paragraph to write down an epiphany. As I've always been an over-achiever, I'm now realized I'm overambitious...in a bad way. I'm taking 5 courses this semester, not much, but all my other legitimate free time I'm basically working. There's a great market for charismatic gaigin in Tokyo, and I've been exploiting that. Now, however, the wheel is turning the other way. Midterms have come crashing down on me this week, that has nearly made me loose all consciousness of time and events, and that near loss of consciousness has been completed by other pertaining life things. Bills, due dates, and of course, money matters.

I feel lost in the most crowded place and all I can grasp is the most obvious thing.
It was easier when I used to work hard and get paid really good before college, about a year ago. I just have to throw it on in here since linking to blogs is part of my assignment: Steven Moyer blogged about my unit while we where busy kicking ass in the city of Hit, Iraq. I think that is so awesome that he kept that record of us, while we didn't get much glory since we were stuck in the middle of nowhere and not Falluja.  I miss all those guys, and working hard and getting paid. College is is cool, too, though.

Umbrella Woman by Extra Medium through CC Licensing

But! This is not a whiny complain! This is an epiphany! A positive realization! I desperately want to spend my time on my studies. With that, I will enter "sd 106" and the purpose of this blog. ds 106 (I keep on purposely spelling sans capitalization) seems to be a society started in academia by college students and their brilliant professors, but now has widen to the cyberspace society. (Very Ghost in the Shell sounding.) They're essential life source, from my belated, limited understanding, is this "Digital Story Telling assignments. That's right, communicating digitally through a specified assignment. Very college-like. These are nothing but awesomeness, bound by positivity, only paralleled by the imagination of those undertaking this assignments.

Listen to this while you read :)


I am choosing to write about the assignments of writing, for writing is the noblest form of human communication of ideas, art, and transcending cultures. As a matter of fact, I should add how much I despise imagery. Though beautiful and ingenious, imagery in our contemporary electronic society has led to nothing but emptiness and zombies running around. Kind of harsh, but if you think deeply about it, you will agree. People are too easily attracted to imagery, with out first critically thinking or analyzing anything. Take Hollywood movies, for example. They love the explosions with out appreciating a story line. Anyways, Back to not pissing people off, ds 106 has many visual assignments, these are extremely creative and appealing, and I like them, they're way more elaborate in content; however, still simple. I chose to write about their writing assignments for digital story telling.

The writing assignments from ds106 are quite inspiring. Have a look. Although the one about "taking down google" is pretty biased, naive, and extremist; in my unprofessional opinion, we all know numerous companies are evil, but in this day in age, you have to cyberspace privacy, and if they're making money through people's stupidity, then that's what America is all about then. But of course I'm biased my self, and I haven't read into it to see if they're serious or just comical...Oh! Also the one about haiku, because after living in Japan I've found it extremely difficult to write a haiku in English, since it's originally written in Kaji and all :-/ but of course it fun and creative! Here's ncghost a blogger with a good perspective, on his wine haiku.

Anyways, if a picture is worth a thousand words, I'd much rather write the thousand words, so come back after my midterms to see the story I choose! :D

Political Gossip

Would you believe the gossip on Democratic Rep. David Wu?

As a project for Computers in Society class we were assigned groups with a specific "Pop Culture" topic to be considered in the context of social media and cyberspace. Solid assignment!

My Group is "Gossip 1." The group was initially composed of six students, left to decide on what to work on. We figured to divide such a broad topic into popular categories. Movie stars, pop divas, etc. In the end I was left with gossip in politics as the most common were taken.


Quite a challenging task, as I came to figure that political gossip is much different than your average gossip topic...mainly due to the fact that politicians are in charged of responsibilities that can easily affect your own life! But also because these politicians are already well-defined public figures to be scrutinized and criticized in every speech and action they take; political or not. Their reputation is their profession's livelihood. Rumors and gossip are of the most harmful essence.

But first let's review what gossip is, and how it manifests it's self in our contemporary lives. As most sources agree, gossip is the spreading of negative and unverified information about an individual.

The Wikipedia page defines gossip as malicious in nature, and it is popularly regarded as such by popular opinion (that is, what we can derive from pop culture). I liked the definition that Wisegeek.com has to offer:

"In general, gossip involves the creation and repetition of rumors regarding an individual who is not present to offer his or her perspective on the purported events under discussion. Generally, gossip has little or no basis in fact and is sometimes intended to convey a negative image of an individual. This process of spreading rumors is utilized in just about every setting from reporting on the movements of public figures to discussing situations involving family, friends, and acquaintances"

I like how this definition included the fact that the individual the gossiping is being done about is NOT present to defend his/her self against the allegations. Thus, gossip is just bad in general and the more considerate individual will usually avoid it. One can perceive the correlation of gossip with teenage school girls. As much of a stereotype that is, it is only by experience that people learn the dangers of gossiping.

What ever gossiping has been trough out human nature, it is now amplified by the improvement of the tools humans have made. Now, the most useful tool is the internet. Gossip now spreads instantly around the world, with a filter on which gossip to read/watch about in the web. However this all applies to your average gossip. Everything gets weird when we introduce the Political gossip into the web.

Since politicians are already set to be criticized under scrutiny by every one, the news and reports about them are presented upfront by major news companies. Big names such as ABC and CNBC news companies present politician's current events right upfront. This reporting gets spread around by people, and as all gossip works, soon more opinions will be added to the facts, and thus a fallacious image of a political candidate is made.
 Here the First Lady is stalked at Target, forming a scandal with gossip:

People who are into this make their own political gossip websites, such as ObamaTwits.com and Cracked.com. Here the blogger/writer will present this political scandals with their opinion or bias.
But where is the line between these political scandals and gossip drawn? What ever gossip arises from political events will harm the politician's reputation. This collective bad image perceived and reciprocated by the people is the advent of gossip rather than the original factual scandal it self.

People, specially politicians, are prone to making mistakes. This mistakes continue to happen with technology, specially the internet. This is how Democratic Rep. David Wu of Oregon resigned from politics by accidentally emailing pictures of himself in questionable outfits. Yeah, the hilarious tiger outfit.

One of the biggest phenomenons in politics for me has been how the internet has crept it's way into our politicians smartphones: Twitter. Anybody who is somebody in the political world has Twitter. All their tweets can be found here, with each politician having their personal "@your_favorite_candidate."


Twitter is now the stage where most of the political dirt and gossip comes into play, in a hand held device near you! Mainly because it isn't just updated by their administrative counterparts--no--they personally write their comments and opinions on the matters at hand; specially during on-going speeches by their competitors.


Now not only is this gossiping harmful for the individual politician, but the biggest reason why political gossip is different than other gossip is that leadership capabilities or political competence in a candidate may all go to waste by  negative perceptions of this person formed through gossip. The good politician might have a scandal that could ruin his career forever, while the genuinely bad politician will get away into office and affect every ones lives negatively.

Bringing the internet and cyberspace into politics can of course be a good thing, as most political administrations like Obama's have a facebook page where he can reach millions of varying demographics using such websites.

Twitter, however, can be the downfall as the politicians' comments and opinions get recorded and spread faster than ever before, giving them much of a less change to defend themselves. As Rep. Wu showed us, politicians have to be careful on how they use their technology and present themselves through cyberspace.

Pop Culture

If we Google "Pop Culture" we can find many sites on the web with pretty good explanations. Here's the wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_culture

So, a succinct explication would be Pop Culture derives from the popular cultural themes in one group of peoples, usually a nation. These themes range and vary with all that on the surface of the mainstream media. Examples are movies, music, current events, fashion, and other phenomena. The internet has definitely played one of the biggest roles with the impact it has had on society by providing the fastest and broadest medium for all this things to be transmitted to everyone and anyone. With out the internet, there also wouldn't be a fairly new addition to the themes of pop culture: Memes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme

Which has certainly provided most of us with great sources of entertainment.

I really liked this other pages:

http://culturalpolitics.net/popular_culture

http://english.berkeley.edu/Postwar/pop.html

I like the way that last link sums it up nicely:

"Popular culture has been defined as everything from "common culture," to "folk culture," to "mass culture." While it has been all of these things at various points in history, in Post-War America, popular culture is undeniably associated with commercial culture and all its trappings: movies, television, radio, cyberspace, advertising, toys, nearly any commodity available for purchase, many forms of art, photography, games, and even group "experiences" like collective comet-watching or rave dancing on ecstasy. While humanities and social science departments before the 1950s would rarely have imagined including anything from the previous list in their curricula, it is now widely acknowledged that popular culture can and must be analyzed as an important part of US material, economic and political culture. "Pop culture" is also one of the US' most lucrative export commodities, making everything from Levi's jeans to Sylvester Stallone movies popular on the international market. "

These group experiences they mention, such as rave parties, and fads such as Planking:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planking_%28fad%29
 
Certainly fall under pop culture.
At the end of the paragraph they mention how Pop Culture is one of the U.S's biggest exports. Like wise, as the U.S's counter part in Asian, Japan also exports and sells gargantuan amounts of "pop culture," most prominent in other Asian countries, but also big in the U.S, such as video games and anime/manga. May be some music...but in ALL absolute honesty, Americans don't consider Japanese pop music to be that great, unless they are "otakus" (Which Otakus from the US are inherently different than Otakus in Japan) or REALLY just love Japan.

The way I like to think about pop culture is the collective preferences of the masses, since when boiled down to the individual, their unique preferences will be very different from every one else's, but when all added at ones, they will lose their singularity and become the huge mess of pop culture out there.

I personally dislike most pop culture as most of it is painful to bare, hear or watch and choose to enjoy what I want, when I want, and if it happens to coincide with pop culture then it's on mere coincidence. This is why I feel like I'm an 80 year old man.

As for pop culture in social media, there's Youtube.com, Facebook pages, and all sorts of other links to follow. Here's one that apparently keeps up to date:
http://www.popculturemadness.com/
For Japanese craziness of pop culture, Dannychoo.com would be your best gateway.

Quick Rant

 How many of us have tried leaving a comment on a peer's blog and all of the sudden--POOF! All that we've typed disappears? It's happened to me often. :( Damn it! And there's explanations.

• I wasn't logged in when I clicked the link to their blog, once I try to select a profile, it recognizes my IP, and logs me in while totally deleting my comment once the page is reloaded.
• From my laptop, the mouse pointer is out side the textbox. As I quickly type I accidentally touch the touch pad mouse pointer, and click outside the box. When I press backspace on a typo, the page, not the textbox is selected, then the backspace activates the useful "hot key" of going back to the previous pages! Now I come back to watch my comment deleted!
• Lastly, the big reason that happens to experienced computer users like myself, or total n00bs: RANDOM THINGS HAPPENS WITH TECHNOLOGY THAT CAN'T BE EXPLAINED! 

I think I just type and move my hands too fast because I'm impatient and all. Either way after typing so much of my feelings or opinions about something just to watch it disappear when I'm trying to post it makes me want to...

LOL, just kidding, I would never throw away 500 bucks like that (at least the $100 screen) more like this:

 

My girlfriend may be right at saying that I need anger management...and you think so too now!

**UPDATE**

What the HELL now?!?! Even though I'm logged in, it logged me out, I just tried logging in with the same account and now it works...blogger sucks.

Screen shot:

The Internet in Our Society

Many praise the internet as the greatest phenomenon to occur to mankind. As I also share this opinion, for the longest time I've also felt disappointed on how the internet has impacted humanity. It's actually been a continuing paradox in my mind where the internet is the best thing ever, but at equal times the worst thing for people in our current society. Since our class revolves around information technology and the internet, I'm sad about feeling so pessimistic...it could have been caused by reading some of Ted Nelsons opinions. Ultimately I can't get it out of my head, so this rather negative things about the internet is what I'm going to write my blog about.

I should state that the negative things are not in the internet itself but rather in the people that use the internet, therefore it's back to the "humans are bad but some are good" argument or theory that presents it self in every aspect of human life, whether politics or entertainment. Here's my opinion on humans being bad with the internet. There's a lot to cram in, so let's just take away the obvious evils and focus solely on the technical side of the internet and computers.

I'll begin with the founding fathers: Vannevar Bush,  J.C.R. Licklider, and Douglas Engelbart all envisioned something that would facilitate the access to human knowledge and information, but most of all, be able to share this information. Early in their writing/thinking, they've either said it, or we can derive that, they meant this initially for the elite few scientists and researchers that really needed this information and to share it, for peer review or future improvements. Which makes perfect sense, they're the thinkers and researchers that bring about technology and human advancement. By "elite" I don't mean they're better or smarter than most of us, but rather that they've chosen quite a noble profession to help humanity. Later on, they've fancied that this information would be available for all mankind to benefit from. Noble, and truly great. Their visions can be seen at work now and it is inevitable to ignore the impact the internet and computers have had on mankind. The biggest thing right now off the top of my head is the role the internet played in the political events in Egypt and elsewhere in the world. Work has become more efficient and certainly life has facilitated and this "Globalization" was possible because of the greatness of the internet, to say the least. Just like the founding fathers of America were elite, they were forging something for the average man, and now we have the noblest nation and constitution that has ever existed, in my utterly biased and prejudice opinion.

But I did leave one guy out of the Benjamin Franklins and Thomas Jeffersons of the internet world, and that is Ted Nelson. I guess in a way he has inspired my pessimism. All you have to do is Google his name and click on any link, most all those pages will have a quote of his that...unfortunately, sum his character up; which is,

"most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong"

From an optimist point of view, it is sad that this intriguing enigma of a person leads his life buy this four principles...but in the back of his head, he knows there's plenty of truth in that quote. Let's take out the God thing, that always leads to arguments that can't be proved right or wrong...and um...let's take out the authority out of that, too...because that will lead to the recent craze of conspiracy theories that have swept America since September 11. So that leaves us with the base that most people are fools, and the consequence that everything is wrong. I can't help to agree more that most people are fools, and let's emphasize that MOST. Any writer or author that wants to keep a decent occupation has to always say things not even from an unbiased point of view, but even a point of view that satisfies all. In conventional terms "sucking up" to the people. With that in mind I will say how there's some great people out there that have done so much we all have the potential, yada yada. All these is true. But we can't deny the vast majority of people that just don't contribute much to humanity, and just live life wasting others hard work. They're everywhere.

Now before I get lynched, I'll have to emphasize that I'm an extremely positive and optimistic person, and through my positive thinking and actions, I've lead a successful life and continue to be happy. REALLY.

Now back to Nelson, if you read his history, as an amateur psychologist we can derived that he might be a frustrated individual and the above quote is a reflection of that. Compared to the noble pioneers of Bush and  Engelbart, he's the egoistic pessimist. However, there's truth there. The hard work of many of these internet and information visionaries is being laid to waste by these mindless internet operators. Cutting aside the truly negative things on the internet like racist pages and the overwhelming amount of pornography sites more than anything else on the web, the negativity of the internet is right there. Right next to you at the computer lab or at cafes. The people that spend countless hours on Farmville on facebook and the likes of mindless, zombie things to do in the web. Humans are so naively given into pretty pictures and colors. There's so much useless stuff on the internet, perhaps there's more useless things than useful ones. 

Sure facebook, twitter, and pictures can certainly benefit humanity, but humans are just not aiming to. People have to be nurtured into things. If never taught manners they will not develop them on their on, and as a society as a whole, these norms are hard to develop. Think of the brutality the previous centuries considered normal. Yeah. Therefore, the average internet user is either an older person lacking higher education, or a young person who has grown up wasting their time with the internet. Even though a scholarly lifestyle will completely turn that internet usage an 180 degree, there's still only a fortunate few that attend universities. The result is all the negativity of the internet caused by ignorant users. People just don't know any better. To describe this negativity and to vindicate good or bad internet usage--as I my self and many scholarly peoples play flash games or video games form time to time--would require a college level research paper...and I've already written to much. I'll leave it up to the scholarly public that reads this to fill in the blanks.

And every public will have the whiners: Those who consider this thoughts blasphemy. Mainly because they're in denial and just enjoy their indulgence in life-wasting too much. Hardly any individual would find a balance of work and play in life, which leads to all this negativity in the internet, not because the internet is bad, but because people them selves are just...unproductive.   

CIS Class

I guess I have to make an ACTUAL post here, my bad. I guess I'll be following the whole class soon.

So to fill in the void, On the history of the internet article, they failed to mention Yahoo! :( Man, when I was in High School, Yahoo was awesome. Just saying....damn I feel old now. By the time the article hit 1995 I liked it more, mainly because I could relate with my own experiences doring those years.