Rise of the Planet of the Frapes

Is it cool to make light of rape? Obviously not.  Is there any way in which non consensual sexual intercourse, most often violent and incredibly traumatising, is at all humorous? I cannot, therefore, understand why the term ‘Facebook rape’ as a flippant description of modifying another party’s Facebook profile to amusing ends has entered uncontested into the vernacular.

If it’s done well, meddling with some poor, trusting fool’s information can be very funny; most of the time, however, false declarations of homosexuality and poor genital hygiene get old very quickly. Whatever. It’s not the act that I have a problem with, but the entirely inappropriate name that it has been given. Ask someone why this is so, and most of the time they will tell you that it falls under the jurisdiction of ‘banter.’ Banter is a word that is used, mostly by the congenitally ignorant, to justify saying and doing completely unacceptable and unjustifiable things. Racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, sexism, physical and emotional bullying; all of these and more are constantly dismissed as mere ‘banter’ by the perpetrators, and often by bystanders or witnesses, unwilling to get involved.

Messing around with someone else’s online information is, on the whole, fairly harmless, and any problems or misunderstandings that arise from such an endeavour are easily explained as such, such is their frequency. So why does it have to equate to rape? You pull a prank on someone – you don’t ‘trick sodomise’ them. I wonder how actual victims of sexual assault feel when they skim down their Facebook newsfeed...

Hacking the Book Portfolios

Hacking the Book is assessed by portfolio and group project.  The reason for this is that the course is about applied knowledge so we want to assess how what is learned is put into practice.  As the first half of the course is mostly conceptual, the portfolios give students a chance to reflect on what they have learned and consider how this material might apply more widely.  The second half of the course is much more practical and so the group projects allow students to demonstrate what they know through the production of some sort of digital resource.  Writing an essay is one type of practice, but on this course, we want students to do much more.

For those of you taking the course, remember that your portfolios are due in next week, week eleven.  Full details about the portfolios can be found via the link on the course schedule.

The Social Experiment

This week my housemate, who studies Media, Culture and Society, asked if we could take part in a four day ‘social experiment’ for her dissertation. She requested that the whole house (five of us, all girls) would cut ourselves off entirely from all forms of social networking, emailing and ways of communicating technologically. That’s right…four days with no twitter, facebook, my.bham, gmail, Hotmail or the like. At first we were slightly outraged by this request, all complaining that it seemed somewhat demanding; after all we are final year students, and in the words of one of my housemates ‘need to check our emails’. However, we reluctantly agreed to take part. On the first day I continuously forgot that I was supposed to be ‘cut off’, and as if by some primitive reflex of social survival, automatically hit facebook every time I loaded my internet explorer. However, after a couple of days I managed to force myself to adjust, ‘proud’ on the Saturday when I’d only cheated the ‘experiment’ once. By the Sunday the experiment was over, and my housemate asked me to write a paragraph reflecting on my experience. What did I learn from these four days? That our need for the technology of communication has become so great that it is, indeed, now a need. The reaction of one of my housemates on being asked to take part was that she simply ‘wouldn’t’…indeed it was too difficult for her to cut herself off in this way for a few days. It has made me wonder, at what point did we become so technologically dependant? When did our need for constant social interaction become so prevalent? Indeed there was a time when, if information needed to be relayed it would happen over the course of a longer period of time through written forms, and when we needed to socialise with friends it would be over lunch once a week. One thing I did realise though was that I seemed to get a lot more work done during the days of the social experiment, and the other elements of my life have not fallen apart at the seams, just because I couldn’t check what my friends were thinking every hour on facebook. Perhaps the need for technology is not as great as we think.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Some of you may have noticed the news apps that are popular on Facebook at the moment, laid on by the likes of The Guardian and The Independent where you can see what online newspaper articles your friends have read and then if you sign up to the app, you can read them as well. Unfortunately some of these, after reading, I've looked at the date and realised they were written in 2005 or earlier, I even read an Independent one the other day which was written in 1999, but I've seen a more recent one which I thought brought up quite an interesting but serious and relevant danger of the internet. It was written in 2010 and was about a Korean couple who allegedly let their own baby starve to death while they were obsessively raising  a 'virtual baby' on the internet. (1) The article mentions at the end how there are thought to be links between depression and internet addiction.

This got me thinking about  how the internet has such a moreish appeal. This story is definitely not the first one circulating about the consequences of internet addiction, and definitely not the first time that it has actually proved fatal.  I wonder what it is about the internet which is so appealing? No one seems to be addicted to reading novels or watching TV, and I think this is because these things only really serve a single function, where as the internet can cater to all sorts of different needs. In a way it is a kind of umbrella device which cannot be singularly defined. Its breadth seems to exacerbate addictions that are already present , perhaps to gambling, gaming, shopping or pornography, and as using computers can be quite a solitary activity, I can see how excessive use  is linked to depression.

I think again this related back to our discussions earlier in the term about social networking websites like Facebook, where you can create your own persona and can hide behind a computer and not have to face up to reality. Similarly perhaps, with something  like online gambling, you do not have to be seen walking into a bookies or a casino. I think some of the appeal of the internet that is at the same time a large risk, is the veil it casts over reality, which seems to place people a step back from what they are doing. The news story referenced really shows the power of internet addiction and how it is a complex psychological disorder. Similarly, the statistics mentioned in the middle part of this Guardian article (2) are quite shocking. If you're worried you about being a internet addict, there are plenty of online tests you can do to find out (3). A bit ironic don't you think?

(1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/05/korean-girl-starved-online-game
(2) http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/23/news.internet
(3) http://www.netaddiction.com/index.php?option=com_bfquiz&view=onepage&catid=46&Itemid=106
(All accessed 18th November 2011)

The Information

For those of you who are interested in the concept of information and how it is defined, stored, transmitted, there is a good popular science book on the topic: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick. Quite fittingly I read the eBook version, and here I got confused by the difference in medium.

The Kindle app on my phone (where I was reading the book in spare moments when waiting for the kids or other opportunities) told me that I was about 60% into the book - obviously there are no page numbers, as it is just a stream of text... and suddenly there was a chapter titled "Epilogue". This I found weird - why is the epilogue in the middle of the book? Was the book split into two parts with their own, independent structure?

Wrong. It was indeed the final chapter of the book. And the remaining 40% were notes, references, and the index. This is something you easily forget when dealing with a paper book, as you can identify where the book 'really' ends, and you have a much better idea of your position within it. The 60% mark offered by the e-reader gave me a false sense of accuracy, as you don't normally consider those appendages as part of the book proper.

Anyway, I guess this is something we need to get used to in the future, unless e-readers do the sensible thing and exclude references etc from the progress indication.

The book is easy to read, and contains a lot of interesting, erm, information. Ever wondered how those 'talking drums' work? Or what entropy has got to do with information? And you don't need a PhD in computer science to understand it!

We've come so far...

I was watching Friends today, which I am ashamed to say I do too much. Series Two, first broadcast in 1995 I believe was the one I was watching, and I couldn't help but laugh at the opening line after the credits of Chandler boasting about his new high-tech laptop computer:

"All right, check out this bad boy.", he says in a proud and gloating manner, "12 megabytes of ram. 500 megabyte hard drive. Built-in spreadsheet capabilities and a modem that transmits at over 28,000 b.p.s."

Now you don't have to be a computer-whizz to see that if someone came and boasted about that today, you'd think they had something wrong with them. Were computers ever like that?? When you consider that that was sixteen years ago, while it may seem not so very long ago for us, I can guarantee the older generations will think differently and maintain that sixteen years is not such a very long time at all. I remain as ever baffled by the speed at which our technology is improving.

I remember not so long ago when I got my first mp3 player, holding about 17 songs. And that was only maybe seven years ago when I think about it. Now we have ipods that can hold an insane amount of tunes, more than your battery power can even last for. And it isn't just memory, it is all of our technology. For my Twenty-first birthday two weeks ago, one of the things my mother gave me was an original paper from the day I was born. Seeing a cassette player on sale for about ninety quid certainly made me chuckle! But again: I'm not really very old!

My theory is that the technology of today is going through a phase of rapid expansion. In history, there's the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution... Are we currently in the middle of the technological revolution? Computer revolution? I don't know quite what to call it, but when it is the title of a chapter in the history textbooks of the future, then we'll know.

Cont:Facebook: Satisfying our Desire for Permanence?

It seems I could not post as a comment on campus so here is what was meant to be a comment on the earlier thread:

Lucy's comment caught my eye and reminded me of how damaging a frape can be.

A flat mate of mine had his relationship ruined by a frape. The initial false posting was on his (then) long-term girlfriends' wall. asking her to marry him. He had no such intentions. She thought that it was a genuine question and answered positively. Once it was established that it had been a frape, both parties knew that the other had entirely different ideas about the future of their relationship, and it soon broke down.

Whilst typing this I was reflecting the meaning of the term 'Frape' i.e 'Facebook Rape.' I wont go into the psychoanalysis details but to tell the truth I don't think that the phrase is all that hyperbolic.