betajames

our online reputation management shouldn’t be limited to what we don’t want people to see or say about us. Let the understanding that you’re in public guide your judgment about what to post online.

Don’t these other people know what they’re doing more than I?

The answer to that question is the title of this post. No one knows what the f*** they’re doing. Not me, not those guys making bank, not anyone.

Each well-designed virtual world is based on a coherent theory of human society, history, and our options for the future. Thus, this is like an entirely new field of literature or a laboratory that develops and tests social theories with actual human beings, somewhere between philosophy and social science but also with utopian qualities. For example: Pirates of the Burning Sea is set in the Caribbean in 1720 and reflects a general view of society often called political economy. A Tale in the Desert, set in a kind of utopian ancient Egypt, illustrates principles of industrial supply chains, and fits theories of technology as ritual originally proposed by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Star Trek Online (which opened only two days ago) is based on the cultural relativist principle "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations." Tabula Rasa expressed a well-developed ideology of space exploration, and our avatars were actually taken up to the International Space Station. Of course The Matrix Online was built on European theories of false consciousness. In the 1960s I started studying utopian communes and religious movements, because I saw them as valid if risky experiments on new directions for humanity. That's what virtual worlds are today.

The Internet no doubt makes it easier to plagiarize—there's simply greater access to more material. But it also makes it much easier to catch plagiarists. Ironically enough, Posner's apology seems to echo (in spirit, not word) former New Republic reporter Ruth Shalit's excuses back in 1995 (the Cro-Magnon period of journalism, electronically speaking).

Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

It was like we had unearthed a long-lost city, the Atlantis of the Internet. But instead of treasures and gold we'd found a steady deluge of confused and frustrated users who had tried everything they knew to do and just wanted to log in to Facebook, damnit. But how had this happened? It certainly wasn't that thousands and thousands of people had just started searching for "facebook login" yesterday. This stream of people has been there all along and something is broken.

With students using channels such as Twitter or discussion forums in their normal life, it "only makes sense" for educators to speak to them through channels they are familiar with and proficient at using, said Netzley.

"Sometimes, as educators, we make the assumption that ideas must come first from us, the faculty member. We dislike anything that draws attention away from us as we deliver what we think students need to know," he said. "Frankly, I feel we sometimes over-elevate the importance of faculty in the complex process of student learning."

"Learning happens everywhere," he said. He added that the use of Twitter or discussion forums such as FriendFeed in the class opens up opportunities for students to participate and play an active role in their learning.

There are two ways to fall out of a plane. The first is to free-fall, or drop from the sky with absolutely no protection or means of slowing your descent. The second is to become a wreckage rider, a term coined by Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page—an online database of nearly every imaginable human plummet. That classification means you have the advantage of being attached to a chunk of the plane. In 1972, Serbian flight attendant Vesna Vulovic was traveling in a DC-9 over Czechoslovakia when it blew up. She fell 33,000 feet, wedged between her seat, a catering trolley, a section of aircraft and the body of another crew member, landing on—then sliding down—a snowy incline before coming to a stop, severely injured but alive.

the identity of an individual is constructed, maintained and developed simultaneously in several socially orientated environments. The representation of one’s identity depends on the particular environment and its functional dimensions since different environments serve different purposes as social realities. An individual’s existence and identity becomes visible through observable and accessible linear or nonlinear narratives that exists as fragments or concisely constructed storylines depending on the given environment (e.g. Google search results, Twitter status stream, Facebook activity history, photo blog). The context of a narrative affects its meanings and possible interpretations.

The main thing to note here is that, unlike many of the Silicon Valley and Alley Twitterati, who take themselves and their tweets oh-so-seriously, this crew is having fun. The tweets are meant to be funny, and the funniest and most outrageous of them will wind up getting retweeted. Yet despite the fun and the humor, the flow of the hashtag is uniquely Twitter-like in that it mixes people who already know each other with strangers who are interested in the same topic -- or joke, as the case may be.

are social networking tools, such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and ad hoc sites set up in the wake of a major event really useful tools or are they simply riding a publicity wave?

According to Connie White, of the Institute for Emergency Preparedness at Jacksonville State University in Alabama and colleagues there and at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, online social networks permit the establishment of global relationships that are domain related or can be based on some need shared by the participants.

video games are still not the great portrayers of believable romance, less accomplished at that feat than chick flicks and breath mint commercials. There may be some successes with romantic love in games, but not as many as there are attempts at depicting it.

Being a dad, however, is becoming nearly as popular in video games as health bars and shotguns and, to my playing sensibilities, nearly as successful.

Achievements offer a compact way for players to communicate with one another about their accomplishments. They serve an evidentiary function, affirming particular feats and prowess. This service value is similar to social value, but offers more than just status: it gives players a way of verifying their in-game acts during social encounters.

Video game: two words that have always been evil in my mind. And I have reminded my kids over and over how they shouldn't play them too much - they aren't good for you, they'll rot your brain - the list of horrible things goes on and on. Now, I was opening one for myself.

Right now, every military command post and every training center is packed with PCs. In the future, many of those machines might be replaced with game consoles — if the armed forces can ever work out their disagreements with the console-makers.

It’s good that there is some art that has a particular tone that’s prickly and intellectual, and then there is pop culture that’s embracing convention and is really accessible, but still capable of being profound. The Wu-Tang clan can be profound. To me that’s where games exist. That’s why Doom doesn’t belong in the museum. It’s heavy metal. It’s rock and roll. You don’t put rock and roll in a museum, that’s just silly. We like going to the museum and we like rock and roll, we have both of those things in our lives. We don’t think of one as higher than the other.