#smcs2015

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Week 14- Anonymous Communist

This week in class we discussed the Internet organization “Anonymous” which is a group that conducts shenanigans on the Internet for various reasons. These reasons include anything from doing it for a laugh to actually changing a social issue.  In anonymous, there isn’t a person with a position of power. Everybody has an equal say so nobody abuses power. This way, they accomplish what they set out to do as a group effort.          

        There was another group in history that attempted to divide power equally. They were known as “Communist” but unlike anonymous, they didn’t work out. In Communism, certain people rose to positions of power despite the fact that power was supposed to be divided among the masses. People were able to do this because there wasn’t a sense of anonymity. Because people could be well known, certain people were able to rise up to be a harsh leader. They kept this position of power because they were recognizable. People feared them. In anonymous, however, leaders are not easy to rise up because when one tries to rise up, everyone counters it very quickly.   The people are able to rise up because there is minimum consequence for doing such a thing online, which makes them more inclined to act. The people who were oppressed by a communist leader, however, had a much higher risk of failure that even could have resulted in death. The person in power already had an established name, and was able to get away with punishing the people revolting.   The fact of not knowing who people are makes people more inclined to fight injustice.

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Week 13- The /b/rothers Grim

      The article “Now Ten Years old, 4chan is the Most Important Site You Never Visit,” discusses how many Internet memes and phenomena’s start on 4chan. 4chan is essentially the heart of the Internet.  However, as these things move onto other, more general population websites, the content tends to get diluted. Things that start on 4chan tend to transition to websites such as reddit, and then progress down the line until they end up on websites such as 9gag and Facebook. At this point however, the content is less intense than it was originally, and many of the people viewing it do not have any idea where it started.

       In a sense, what happens with memes are what happened with fairy tales; many fairy tales, specifically those written by the brothers grim, were not for children. Instead, they were filled with dark, violent content. As the story passed through the generations, however, they became much more family oriented. Eventually, some even got made into Disney movies. Although these movies are meant for everyone, if you analyze them closely enough, you can see the dark beginnings, like how the step sisters abuse Cindarella. Many people who view these movies have no idea where they began, much like how many people don’t know where memes begin. Take the lolcatz, for example. They began on 4chan , but icanhazcheeseburger made them popular and everyone accredits the meme to that website. 

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Week 11- Star Wars, Governments, and Other Things

Collaboration is an essential part of the creative process. Whether it is with media, school projects, or software engineering, having one person in charge of something without anybody to consult him or her never seems to go over well.  A huge example of this in pop culture is the prequel Star Wars Trilogy. George Lucas had complete creative control of the franchise, and therefore, nobody told him that Jar Jar Binks was a bad idea. Who was going to question George Lucas, the creator of one of the most successful movie franchises of all time?  This dawned on me as I read “Open Sourcing Horror The Slenderman, Marble Hornets, and Genre Negotiations.”

The article discussed open sourcing, a form of software collaboration in which many people are allowed to work on something, and how it applies to internet mythos, such as the Slenderman. This also reminds me of the Star Wars expanded Universe, which is a term for Star Wars Media made outside of the movies. Unlike the movies, anybody was allowed to make content for it, and therefore, the legends of Star Wars continued to expand, until Disney made the expanded universe non cannon. Many other franchises are expanded this way. Sometimes the big entertainment corporations hire people to collaborate with them in order to produce more content.  I believe that it is better this way, because fans write many of these stories, and fans are what keep the spirit of a franchise alive.

Collaboration is even effective on a much larger scale. There is a word for somebody that has complete control of a country. This word is “dictator,” and dictators tend to not be good for the well being of a country’s inhabitants.  Countries that are run by collaboration tend to flow more smoothly.

No matter how big or small the concept is, working together will always make things better. I believe that hearing a second opinion will always have better results whenever new ideas are being thought of.

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Week 10- Playing Games

The reading “The Labor of Fun,” describes how to some people, video games have become like a second job.  To some people, video games are more of a burden than a tool for enjoyment.   They feel they have an obligation to do certain things in the game, like level up, and buy items. This has especially been prominent in “freemium games,” which are games that are initially free but have the potential to make the user pay hundreds of dollars over time.  These games are especially prone to make people devote a certain amount of time to them, because most of these games only allow a limited amount of actions each day. But sometimes, people devote too much time to these games, and horrible things happen. In 2010, a lady in Jackson, Florida shook her 3-month-old baby to death for interrupting her Farmville session by crying.  

 The lady was so engulfed by the Farmville game that she lost touch of reality.  And 3 months prior to that, a South Korean Couple spent so much time nurturing a child in an online game that they forgot to nurture their real life child, causing him to starve to death. Video games were so urgent in the lives of the people in both of these cases, that their real life obligations no longer took priority. It is evident that in modern times, video games are much more serious than one comes to expect. While most people who play video games don’t end up committing murder, a lot of other people waste the time they could have been using to accomplish something else.