Studying Cyberculture

Today's lecture was on how the studying and reporting on how people interact with each other over the Internet has evolved over the years. The main reason seemed to be that initially researchers were from other fields such as psychology. This would obviously mean that their involvement in cyberspace had been very limited, only using the information from a small snapshot with an outsiders point of view. As the technology became more widely accepted and used specific studies were undertaken in this field by people with more experience and a real interest. These studies are much more balanced and reliable. We also watched a couple of videos. The first one, Epic, was in the form of a history lesson from the future. It portrayed a time where big business had battled and/or merged amongst themselves for domination of information technology and popularity. The decrease in the possibility of any anonymity was a bit reminiscent of Orson Wells 1984 with big business replacing big brother. The second video was about the virtual world of Second Life. It was pretty amazing the commerce that happens on line. People in the real world are making real money from this. The reporter interviewed a virtual fashion designer who works ten hours a day designing clothes for the characters on line that are paid for just like real clothes. Another lady in Germany employs fifty people that digitally build houses that she sells online. There is also a man in Melbourne who invested $260- to build a stock exchange that he estimates is now worth $48000- in the real world. By far the strangest though is the man who runs the virtual sex industry. The online characters, or avatars as they're known, spend a fortune with him. This really makes me agree with a line from the story that some people on Second Life should get a first one.