Tiernan Ray has published an interesting article on blogging, called Why Blogs Haven't Stormed the Business World: "Whatever you may think of the publishing revolution known as blogging, the advent of technology for posting "top-of-mind" thoughts to a Web site is an intriguing development in Internet history. Weblogs, or "blogs" for short, dramatically ease the process of uploading simple kinds of content, thus facilitating a loosely organized kind of collaborative publishing. We're at an important moment in the evolution of such publishing, and it is worth pausing to reflect on how things could go terribly wrong. The main virtue of blogging is that it closes the arms gap between informed, individual users and official outlets of information. And it has potential not only in the public world, but also in the corporate sphere. "

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Seemingly the topic-complex of 'real vs. virtual' has spawned another related discussion: Can computergames be art? Matching the topic, ConfigSys.boy! has published a lengthy article called Arts and Electronic Entertainment, which spawned a lot of feedback here and here. (Prematurely jumping into the discussion, I already made a fool of myself over there). The newly published revised and expanded edition of a book by Oliver Grau deals with the same issue:

GRAU, OLIVER. 2003. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge: MIT Press. [Rev. and expanded ed.]

"Virtual art is all too often precisely that - almost, but not quite, art. Much of Oliver Grau's book, especially the part dealing with immersive virtual reality environments, is replete with reservations about whether what he is writing about really qualifies as important art, given that it lacks the quality of distance that is essential for critical reflection. When one experiences a totally immersive environment one is in the image, and so one cannot step back to gain an overview, nor is one supposed to be aware of the illusion-creating technology used to produce the image. Moreover, as Grau points out, many examples of virtual art are suffused with mystical or mythological undertones that do not sit easily with the criticality and irony that are the hallmarks of today's art.". (Taken from the review by Michael Gibbs in Art Monthly. Read the complete review here.) Also related is a book by Mark Wolf:

WOLF, MARK J.P. (Ed.). 2002. The medium of the video game. Austin: University of Austin Press.

Wolf wants to get to grips with computergames by means of media sciences: "Currently, they [videogames] are best approached and analyzed using conceptual tools developed in film and television studies. The study of video games overlaps these fields in many theoretical areas, including those of the active spectator, suture, first person narrative, and spatial orientation, point of view, character identification, sound and image relations, and semiotics." Telepolis carries a recent article, called How to read videogames (in german), critically discussing Wolf's book. In there Tilman Baumgärtel writes: "Just recently the analysis of videogames by the humanities has started. In Germany it was not before last year, that two books were published which deal with computergames beyond the ever-resurfacing question 'do they make the youth violent?'." [my translation] Media sciences, the humanities ... but nobody mentions either cultural anthropology or online-communities clustering around games explicitly -- that's where my own project will jump in ;o) via Anthro-L, Telepolis, and ConfigSys.boy!

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"During the past 20 months, more than 10,000 Persian weblogs have been emerged. Their authors mostly live in Iran, where the number of Internet users hardly exceeds a half million. This means that blogging is extremely popular ... (read more".

It's a paper from Hossein Derakhshan, who will be talking at the weblog conference BlogTalk in Vienna, Austria. Via Mediatic

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Pelau Java, a far northern island in Polynesia (Solomon Islands) went online some days ago, reports the People First Network. The interesting thing is that this is done by a special short wave radio technology, which is use also to connect other islands. It's seems to be part of a UN-funded project to develop distance learning in rural regions and to higher information flow between the islands people. And don't forget: "When sending messages, please write the name of the person in the subject line, as this is a community facility." :-) Via ITW

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"TechnoSphere is a 3D model world inhabited by artificial lifeforms created by WWW users. There are thousands of creatures in the world all competing to survive. They eat, fight, mate and create offspring which evolve and adapt to their environment. When you make a creature it will email you to let you know what it has been getting up to in its world. Using the creature tools you can find out how your creature is surviving, what it is doing at any time, and where it is in the terrain" As an anthropologist you might ask: " Do those little lifeforms show any kind of rituals or culture ?" Link: www.technosphere.org.uk

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"Today in Japan there are over 40,000 sites that can be viewed on Internet-capable mobile phones. A recent addition has been an Internet service via cell phone that calls on smokers to "enjoy the challenge of quitting smoking." When a smoker who has been hit by the desire to smoke presses a few buttons on his or her phone, words of encouragement and advice show up on the screen, complete with illustrations." :-)) The japanese seem to love it because : "Sotsuen Netto was launched on February 1, 2001, and in just a month close to 2,000 people applied for membership" You can find it at: jin.jcic.or.jp

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Andrew Phelps has dug up an absolutely astonishing story: "[...] the thing that blew me away was a fairly recent development on the Stormhammer Server of Sony's Everquest Legends. The names here are removed to protect the innocent, and most of the threads I read on this have now been deleted which is why I [almost] think its ok to talk about. It seems that one of the "guilds" on the Stormhammer server has recently had a moment of crises with it's guild leadership. The group of RL (real life) friends that formed the guild apparently had a very different purpose than those intended by Verant and Sony Online Entertainment. After months of leading the guild on several high-end raids and gaining all kinds of in-game items and loot, this group of friends took those items from the guild vault and sold them on Ebay, and then vanished from the server. Online identity and trust issues abound. But before you dismiss this as 'oh, well, who really cares about some gold pieces and magic swords that are really just numbers in a database', take a good look at what's happening in online communities of this size. One economic study by California State University at Northridge Professor Edward Castronova placed Norrath (the virtual world of Everquest) as the 77th richest world economy, based on the value of the items in the world adjusted to their value in then-current Ebay auctions. This was reported in WIRED and several other sources. So the folks that perpetrated this virtual heist won out with what could have amounted to thousands of dollars in US currency. Now, this is devious, I suppose, but I personally know people who make money starting new characters, powerlevelling them up to god-like status, and then selling them off and starting again. Any cheat program or automated levelling system is just an advantage to reduce the time between character creation and profit on investment. So what makes this different? In a word, trust. What's interesting as a social phenomenon is the idea that people are willing to sell "virtual relationships" and/or reputation for real world currency. [...]" In my opinion it's even more interesting, that there are people who are willing to BUY "virtual relationships" and/or reputation! Now where has the difference between "real and virtual" gone? :o via Got Game?

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This article from BBC reports about a study which is disprooving the stereotype of a pimple-faced teenager locked in his bedroom. With 540 questionaires, it seems to be a huge study and it would be interesting to hear more about it if its finished. Via Slashdot

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Torill Mortensen is an assistant professor at Volda College. She is writing a weblog about Multiple User Dungeons (MUDs), media studies and reader-response theory, role-play games and online communication, called "thinking with my fingers". And she just submitted a Ph. D. thesis on Computer Games in the beginning of March 2003, to the Faculty of the Arts, University of Bergen. The title is Pleasures of the Player: Flow and Control in Online Games.

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Lisbeth Klastrup is Assistant Professor at the Department of Digital Aesthetics and Communication (DIAC) at the IT University of Copenhagen. She just reached in her Ph.D. thesis: Towards a poetics of virtual worlds: multi-user textuality and the emergence of story. Abstract will be online soon. And she's writing a research diary with a lot of interesting information on persistent online worlds, games and interactive stories (selfdescription).

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Spiegel today has a article (german) about the influence of the information overflow on children, how they change their habits, and how it may change the future of our culture.

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Alexandra Samuel has published an interesting exercise which she did with her students: "This is an in-class exercise that I developed for The Internet and Politics, a third-year undergraduate political science course at the University of British Columbia. It was received very enthusiastically by the students, and succeeded in fostering a solid grasp of the material.The exercise had four purposes:

1. Complement course reading on the use of diverse telecommunications technologies as development tools. 2) Expand discussion of ICTs beyond a narrow focus on the Internet. 3) Develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. 4) Foster a sense of ownership of development issues and challenges." For this exercise she dug up some interesting projects: Cell-phones in Bangladesh The hole in the wall in New Delhi The simputer in rural India Solar computers in Cambodia Community radio in Sri Lanka

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