The Disembodied Computer User

In the early 2000’s Sony released a commercial to promote their new line of game consoles, The PS2. The commercial is set in the flying car, white chromed future of 2078 and shows a young man and his adventures he endures while playing video games that have computer graphics so real it looks like it is impossible to decipher what is real-life and what is virtual-reality. The gaming system of the PS9 is shown as being ingested by the user and directly attaching itself to the central nervous system thus creating a cyborg human (as described by Lupton) that appears to interpret the world as a hybrid of virtual gaming and real-life. During this hybrid state the body becomes separated from its usual state of mortality and allows the gaming system to take over the vital systems to allow the user to become super human. This suggests that in the future instead of playing a video game through an avatar of sorts, you alone become the true gamer.
The point of all this in the commercial is to imply the relationship of the overly real graphics of the fictional PS9 of 2078 to the current day PS2. By showing this incredibly advanced game of the future the commercial creates the notion that Sony entertainment is the leading creator of gaming technology and will bring forth the next generation of gaming into your own living room today!

Part 2

The discussions we have had in class on the topics Marshall and Rosemblum’s writings about recognizing preconceived notions of ideologies within advertisements, images, layouts, and programs is one of the most significant things I have learned . Noticing these social aesthetics of ideology that would usually go unnoticed could be a very important thing to remember when creating my own advertisements, or web layouts that speak to a certain demographic or have a possible offensive tone.

Bell, David, and Barbara M. Kennedy. eds. The Cybercultures Reader. 2nd Ed.
London: Routledge. 422-432. Print.

"Playstation 9 ( HD VIDEO ) & STEREO SOUND ." Youtube.com. Web.
23 Sep 2010. .

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Part 1: Using the virtual and RL communities you are a part of for evidence, describe how you agree and/or disagree with Bell and Bauman's notions of virtual communities as peg communities.


As a user of many forms of online communities I feel I adopt a slightly different persona for which ever social site I may be apart of. Bell refers to this occurrence as "peg communities". This term is a reference to online communities being compared to pegs on a coat hanger, infering that a person wears a different coat for different occasions. This is the comparison for the notion of one adopting different (appropriate) identities for online communities.

This occurrence of my split personas across the internet is for two main reasons. One being that the particular online community might be very topic oriented , for example, an online photography community based on sharing a critiquing photos will mainly only portray me as a photographer with an artistic eye and opinion. The subjects of my photos may create subtle aspects of my life and identities, but most all of my personal life will be kept untold in this space merely because most of the happenings in my day are irrelevant for my audience. The second reason for creating a sort of façade of an identity is to hide characteristic about myself from certain public eye. On websites like Facebook and twitter I am watched by a diverse array of acquaintances, ranging form family members, business associates, teachers, and close friends. To ensure I don’t embarrass myself or offend any of these diverse categories of acquaintances in any way that could result in unwanted actions RL and RL aspects of the VR world I must filter myself to this audience. I choose what to say in order to portray myself in my best interests. This leads to another topic brought up in the reading. The points about "bonds without consequence"(258) as stated by Bauman in the year 2001 I find to be an outdated statement. Much has changed about the online world since then. Society has gone from a world where full names would ensure identity-theft to a world of searchable home addresses/phone numbers via Google, high school reunion communities, and full name screen names of Facebook and Myspace. So the idea of “bonds without consequences” is easily untrue due to the ability of all VR communities being intertwined with RL interactions.

Bell, David, and Barbara M. Kennedy. eds. The Cybercultures Reader. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge. 254-264. Print.

Part 2

http://www.deviantart.com
http://www.Flickr.com
http://www.photobucket.com

I chose these three websites because they are based around the same idea of uploading images to a users personal account but are vastly different in aspects of photo sharing, community interactions, and image content. When viewing other user profiles on these sites a person can take an interesting look into the daily life of that profile users image store and could create assumptions about that user and their life, hobbies, interests, or agenda.

Yahoo users

The current day homepage of Yahoo is the evolved successor of the basic html coded yahoo page that rose from the primordial ooze of dial-up internet.



In contrast to the old Yahoo page of the late 1990's, today's modern Yahoo page is loaded with information through images, hypertext, advertisements, and videos, all of which are scattered across the page in a seemingly disorganized fashion compared to it's predecessor which was just a page made up of an alphabetized list of categories. But when looking at today's yahoo homepage instead of being overwhelmed and lost in the amount of text and imagery, the user is able to navigate their way through the information, scroll through the numerous lists, desifer the images thrown infront of them, and find exactly what they are looking for.

How is this possible?

As discussed by Burnett, Robert, and Marshall in their book Web Theory: An Introduction we learn that all modern day media aesthetics are derived from previous forms of media. When looking at the Yahoo home page it is easy to see its resemblance to a Sunday morning newspaper's front page. Our society has been trained for more than a century on how to decipher the information in a newspaper so the switch to similar displayed information via cyberspace could be seen as an easy transition.

When looking at the yahoo hompage one may even ask themselves why didin't it start out this way? why did it look the way it did?

This is due to the technology that was available at the time. Burnett, Robert, and Marshall also discussed the evolution of the interface and how innovative mechanisms through the computer such as the mouse brought on the easy to use desktop associated with modern day computers. Internet at the start of yahoo was much more basic of a connection than what it is today. Graphics were not transmitted well and dial up was slow, but through the innovations of technology we are able to digest the maximum amount of information as needed.



with modern day computer components that make the using of a computer easier comes more challenging interfaces to navigate.



Work Cited

Burnett, Robert, and Marshall P. David. Web Theory: An Introduction. 1st ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 2003. 81-104. eBook.

Images provided by onlyjames.com

The digital divide is the figurative border between peoples with access to technologies such as computers and internet and people who don’t have or have extremely limited access to computers, internet and other related technologies. The border of the digital divide is created by a variety of issues plaguing our modern day society such as culture, education, and poverty. Relating these issues of education and poverty often leads to certain races of people thus causes the digital divide to be a civil rights issue as well. The digital divide is a global phenomena and if not dealt with in a timely fashion, it may become worse and cultures and communities will only be spread further apart by the inability to interact with modern day technologies.

A good metaphor for the discussion of the digital divide in contrast to the metaphor of Windows and Macintosh is a comparison to a person who has a television with full satellite with access to thousands of channels compared to a person with basic air cable antenna access that would only receive one or two channels. Having access to only one or two channels would greatly reduce the amount of information the person watching the television would ingest and may only receive biest information on news coverage. The person with the thousand channels would have almost an unlimited amount of information to receive and could gather the sides of news stories from a variety of sources.

This idea of televisions could be a better metephor when discussing the topic of the digital divide because it actually deals with the distribution of information and it is also a topic that everyone can relate to. Everybody has witnessed the difference between satelite television and antenna television.

Work Cited

Carvin, Andy. 2000. “Mind the Gap: The Digital Divide as the Civil Rights Issue of
the New Millennium.” http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/Jan00/carvin.htm

Warschauer, Mark. 2002. “Reconceptualizing the Digital Divide.” First Monday.
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/967/888