Midterm Self-Evaluation

My self-directed learning over the course of this semester has relied on consuming from class lectures and discussions as well as online resources; creating via brainstorming, moments of inspiration, and flexibility in synthesizing ideas; and connecting with the social proof of others.

The influence and role of other students has been essential to my learning process and project selection. For example, my literary work (A Hazard of New Fortunes, by William Dean Howells) and subsequent blog post touched briefly on the idea of echo chambers. I became more interested in the idea after receiving feedback from Professor Burton and several classmates who seemed to connect with echo chambers more than the other ideas in my post. Subsequent blog posts on echo chambers benefited from the input of Nyssa Silvester (an enthusiast or expert on the subject), which got me really excited to learn more.

My excitement over the feedback I was getting combined with more self-directed interests in virtual reality and cyborgs (initially stemming from my nonfiction book review of How We Became Posthuman), which led to my blog post about the potential benefits of video gaming, particularly with the connective capabilities of new games. All of this culminated in my choice to participate in the Little Big Planet 2 project.

The ideas that have most intrigued me and which I'd like to continue to learn about are echo chambers, virtual reality, crowd sourcing, regulation (or deregulation), corporate influence, and production bias, specifically as these concepts relate to Little Big Planet 2, of which I'm a big fan.

Little Big Planet 2 Project Proposal

Description: Little Big Planet 2 is a game with the slogan "Play, Create, and Share." Using the unique medium of Little Big Planet 2, we propose to create a level immersing users in a sort of learning environment. Our LBP level will teach users the study-based benefits of video gaming in a fun, friendly manner. The level will show how video games are in a position to promote creation and collaboration, now more than ever. It will also encourage users to make creation and collaboration a more fundamental part of their gaming experiences. Throughout the level, we plan to use digital culture vocabulary and concepts (these we'll explain in simple terms).

Project Members: Casey Deans (group leader), Grace Kim, and Brandon Healy. Heather Andersen is an advisory member.

Social Proof: The evidence of social proof for this project will come from our classmates, peers, and enthusiasts and experts in the gaming industry, including Martin Andersen, Evan Andersen, and others.

Literature Review: See Heather Andersen's blog and Brandon Healy's blog for a discussion about the benefits and consequences of gaming.
Casey: Reality is Broken, Persuasion
Grace: Cybernetics, Howl's Moving Castle
Brandon: How We Became Posthuman, A Hazard of New Fortunes
Heather: Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Northanger Abbey

Format and Audience: Our project will be formalized as a published level on Little Big Planet 2 with an accompanying YouTube video walking users through our literature-based, digital culture world. The audience will be our peers and classmates, enthusiasts and experts who offered social proof, academic literary communities, and those who play or would like to play LBP in the future.

Success Criteria:

1. Number of users who access our level online
2. Amount of social proof we obtain
3. Number of YouTube hits our LBP walkthrough generates

Prototype: All of our prototyping has taken place in Little Big Planet itself. Our group is currently testing the game's limits and unlocking increasing flexibility for the game environment. Screenshots will be forthcoming.

Thanks! Please leave feedback below or on Google+ :)

Cognitive Benefits of Video Gaming

Heather Andersen's blog recently asked an interesting question about video games: "Can certain video games improve brain function and athleticism? I hope to find out." You can find my attempted answer below.

I'm not sure about athleticism (maybe some Wii Fit games would help out?), but there are many studies showing how video games improve particular aspects of brain function, including visual acuity, spatial perception, the ability to pick out objects in a scene, working memory, reasoning, and strategy (more so for pre-adolescent players).

I've cited some articles summarizing studies below. Here are some interesting tidbits:

- Studies from Iowa State University and Beth Israel Medical Center in New York show how regular video game play improved the dexterity, speed, and error efficiency of laproscopic surgeons.
"One study of 33 laparoscopic surgeons found that those who played video games were 27% faster at advanced surgical procedures and made 37% fewer errors than those who didn't"
"The single best predictor of their skills is how much they had played video games in the past and how much they played now. Those were better predictors of surgical skills than years of training and number of surgeries performed . . . So the first question you might ask your surgeon is how many of these (surgeries) have you done and the second question is 'Are you a gamer?"

- A pediatric neurologist at UC-Irvine's School of Medicine showed how Tetris expanded portions of the cerebral cortex of test subjects.

- Researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that World of Warcraft "encouraged scientific thinking, like using systems and models for understanding situations and using math and testing to investigate problems." They found that "86% of test subjects shared knowledge to solve problems in the game and 58% used systematic and evaluative processes."

- National Geographic summarized the findings of researchers at University of Rochester in New York: "Action video gamers may be more attune to surroundings while performing tasks like driving down a residential street, where they may be more likely to pick out a child running after a ball than a non-video gamer"
"action game playing might be a useful tool to rehabilitate visually impaired patients or to train soldiers for combat"
"people who play action video games can process visual information more quickly and can track 30 percent more objects than non video game players."

- Neuroscientists at MIT have called video games "stunningly powerful" for learning.

Articles:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2008-08-18-video-games-learning_N.htm
http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2009/10/12/how_video_games_are_good_for_the_brain/?page=1
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0528_030528_videogames.html

Here's another article about a video game designed to help teens beat depression in New Zealand. It helped 44% of depressed teens completely recover, compared to 26% of depressed teens who completely recovered via traditional therapy: http://healthland.time.com/2012/04/20/study-playing-a-video-game-helps-teens-beat-depression/

Addressing BYU's study, there are several Pew Research Center studies claiming that multiplayer video games improve social experiences.

Most video game studies generally seem to agree that playing violent video games affects behavior in negative ways, and that excessive game play can lead to (childhood) obesity and other negative consequences, especially in the case of addiction.

Personally, I played video games growing up because they provided cognitive challenges that stretched my abilities, pushed me to improve, and offered emotional rewards (kind of like the feeling you get scoring a touchdown after hours of football practice). It was also fun to get together with friends and play Starcraft, Super Smash Brothers, or Halo. I don't disapprove of adult gaming, but only if you're in a position to handle it. Halo: Reach every other week on a Friday or Saturday night can be a fun, harmless stress reliever.

However, I think the amount of time children play video games should be carefully regulated by parents. Excessive play clearly affects moods, although I'm not sure how. I've noticed that sometimes when I start playing video games, it's hard to stop.

Thanks for the thought-provoking post, Heather!

Echo Chambers in 2012

The idea of the digital echo chamber definitely applies to our upcoming presidential election. Echo chambers suggest that when we, as voters, become myopic or merely reaffirm our own political views with the online content we digest, we experience several negative consequences. For example, we may limit our own perspectives. We may find it more difficult to relate with others. We may have more trouble discerning between facts and opinions. We may disengage with crowds. We may even lose cognitive function, at least compared to those who experience a diversity of thoughts and perspectives.

Proposal

I propose we create a class project aimed at taking steps to eliminate echo chambers in the 2012 Election. These steps would include (but are not limited to) the creation of a digital Wiki, eBook, or other publication to curate quality political websites from across the political spectrum into one simple location to inform voters on the issues. Each site we include in the publication would have a bio (with data like who made the site, for what purpose, when, how many hits it gets per month, general accuracy, party bias, etc) with a short, critical review written by a group member. Sites would be categorized by political issue (general, foreign policy, economy, gun control, etc). The publication would be aesthetic, colorful, and user-friendly. It would also be freely distributed, comprehensive, and easy to understand. 

The existence of this publication would fill a real gap in the online voting community by providing a quality, politically diverse website directory (with content reviews) from an objective, academic source. Increasing the diversity of quality information readily available to voters and encouraging diversity are two extremely effective ways of combating echo chambers.

Badges

I also had a tangential idea we might try. We create badges with each badge representing a distinct political view. This would divide the election into issues and move people away from voting strictly across party lines without examining each issue in detail. Once a participant has examined an issue in detail, he or she will take a basic information test. The last question of each test would allow participants to decide where they stand on that issue. The names of the badges would not be generic, like "Healthcare," but political statements, like "I strongly support Obamacare!" or "I mildly oppose Obamacare!", etc.

Homies, peers, enthusiasts, and experts would earn these political statement badges via Mozilla or another site and categorize them under some sort of "Election 2012" heading. We would then direct participants to seek out those with different viewpoints on key issues to ask them how they came to their conclusions. (If I could create a full-scale social media site based on this idea, I would, but I definitely don't have the resources for that.)

I know there's been a lot of proposals to work with badges this semester, but I thought it was an interesting idea, anyway. It may be too different from the original proposal to attempt, but at least we know badges are an exciting concept. Maybe it's a good thing for several different projects to experiment with them. Maybe not. The final word is Professor Burton's, of course.

Prior Art

There are lots of amateur lists of political fact/opinion sites on the internet (probably too many to count). However, most of them are myopic, incomplete, biased, ugly, disorganized, or otherwise impaired. This proposal encompasses more than a simple list or bibliography. Its goal is to present diverse, researched, quality resources in a reliable, objective manner to help assist voters this Fall and into the future.

A Recap of Social Proof

Contrary to the comic above, my blog post here doesn't refer to the type of social proof commonly associated with herd behavior. Rather, I'm referring to digital social proof, the idea that social media unfolds in phases of development, and that in each development phase ideas are passed to a community of homies, peers, enthusiasts, and experts for feedback. If feedback is received (and depending on the quality and frequency of the feedback), social proof is provided. The underlying premise is that ideas validated by others are worth exploring.

So, what kinds of social proof have I received now that my critical study of digital culture has been underway for over a month? Thanks go out to the following homies and peers for their extensive, insightful feedback on my ideas and blog posts thus far (their names with links to their digital culture blogs are found below):

Gideon Burton
Casey Deans
Greg Williams
Rebecca Ricks
Gwendolyn Hammer
Nicole Black
Katie Cannon Wilkie
Allie Crafton

Largely due to the social proof I've received from these individuals, my digital interests now encompass a small, pre-screened selection of (shockingly) cohesive issues: internet regulation, echo chambers, corporate influence, hacktivism, and personal identity. For me, the point on which these issues converge is capitalism. In future writings, I plan to explore the effects of capitalism on the internet using these lenses as vantage points.

Communities and Echo Chambers

After my last blog post, Gideon Burton directed my attention to Nyssa Silvester's chapter in Writing About Literature in the Digital Age. Here, Silvester explores "echo chamber theory," the idea that an excessively personalized internet environment limits a user's exposure to throngs of opinions and resources available to otherminded users. The concept extends itself by claiming that users who fail to actively seek out alternative opinions or resources on the web lapse into a perpetual cycle of reaffirming their own beliefs, as output matches input matches output.

In the first place, the internet's disregard for privacy can be frightening. In its algorithmic, illimitable (though still often awkwardly-executed) ability to troll our lives for data and personalize content for us, the internet reminds me of the story of the Target shopper whose father discovered she was pregnant after receiving baby ads based on her purchasing preferences. Yeah. Awkward. Life's a moving target; apparently we're all moving targets.

Privacy violations in the name of internet capitalism are frequent enough that most of us are used to the idea of trading our rights for access, effectively using our personal information as currency; well, they have to fund this thing somehow, or I can trust x company with my location as long as they don't have my birthday, or, in the tradition of the dilemma of countless Facebook users, something doesn't feel right here, but I guess I can trust Zynga with a majority of my significant personal information so I can play a few games.

Anyway, whether we knowingly consent to the use of our personal information online, advertisers and other entities inevitably find pieces of us and assemble pictures of who we are. The result can be an affected--even false--web experience for us in which the boundless internet becomes focused advertisement. The echo chamber produced may have a much greater influence than we're willing to believe. After all, what does the internet lose by refining its understanding of us? Isn't that what it's supposed to do? Doesn't it serve me when I Google "dermatologist" and the top results are for doctors in Provo, UT? Doesn't it make sense that LinkedIn tries to connect me with friends and colleagues from BYU before those at other institutions?

The problem here is that the internet tries to function as a free market and a local tool while simultaneously asserting a global experience. How do we eliminate the echo chamber this conflict creates? Silvester encourages us to leave our comfort zones, refrain from being elitist or relying on dogma, and reach out to other communities. I agree with her prescriptions.

However, there's also an underlying problem to address: most people don't recognize they're in echo chambers in the first place. At least one reason for this seems clear. Often when we surf the net, we frantically shift in and out of communities without realizing it. How is it that we seamlessly switch from talking to a single friend in Rhode Island to a class of peers in Utah to a global retailer in Shenzhen to a local market in New York all in a single internet session while barely realizing we engaged with different communities? Instead, we say we talked to our friends on the "internet," or on Facebook or Google+. We shopped on Amazon. Yahoo gave us a search result.

The fact that we're traversing communities gets lost in translation. The experience becomes less personal. Everything starts to run together. We delude ourselves into thinking of the internet as one big community rather than many small, interrelating parts. Subsequently, we stop thinking critically and default to cruise control. Focused advertisements and manipulated search results begin to define our internet experience and we turn inward, creating echo chambers. The internet becomes more amusing, entertaining, and self-serving as we become less interactive, attentive, and socially tied to communities.

So, how can we solve our recognition problem? I think Google+ is pointing the internet in the right direction by making the boundaries between internet communities more clearly defined. Its segregation of users into Circles will, if nothing else, remind users that they share membership in communities, which bolsters social responsibility, strengthens social contracts, and makes the Google+ experience more personal and meaningful. Google's strategy turns users outward to communities and, at least partially, prevents them from hooking inward on themselves.

A potential pitfall of Google+ Circles may be that they aren't sufficiently standardized; for example, if Bill puts Suzy in the "Digital Culture" community and Suzy puts Bill in the "Friends" community, it could complicate their relationship and may allow echo chambers to form. Any thoughts?

What Are Your Motives?

There's a fundamental discord in the way various groups treat the internet. Purists, for example, see the internet as an art form that should be kept free, unregulated, and consistently advanced. Entrepreneurs see the internet as a free market where advertising and online sales points can be established quickly at low costs. Visionaries see the internet as a way to change the world. Friends see the internet as a social gathering place, artists see it as a new medium or tool, and students see it as a place to learn and share ideas. Most people instinctively realize that the possibilities for content generation on the web are virtually endless. As with other endeavors, motives behind content generation directly influence the types of content produced.

In Howells' turn of the century novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, a variety of characters with different motives converge along a trend toward American industrialization and city living. The group meets in New York City to create a chic magazine called Every Other Week. They include March, a complacent businessman who goes with the flow; Fulkerson, an enthusiastic advertising spin man; Lindau, a German-born socialist; Dryfoos, an anti-union bankroller; Woodburn, a former Confederate colonel who believes slavery could still work if they improved the system; Beaton, a shallow cover artist; and Leighton, a beautiful and inadvertent feminist. The way each of these personalities approaches content generation for Every Other Week is at once similar to the way different camps approach internet content generation today.

Consider the ad-man: on page 141, the Every Other Week provides a mechanism for Fulkerson to talk candidly about the state of women and the potential redefinition of women's issues in the urban landscape. The conversation occurs in a private board meeting, but the content Every Other Week produces in its wake is reflective of its motives.

"We want to make a magazine that will go for the women's fancy every time," Fulkerson says. Then later, "[w]e've got to recognize that women form three-fourths of the reading public in this country, and go for their tastes and their sensibilities and their sex-piety along the whole line . . . it'll make the fortune of the thing. See? . . . they haven't got the genius of organization. It takes a very masculine man for that."

With a dearth of opinions on women's issues in the group of men at the board meeting, Fulkerson's perspective goes uncontested, as does his motive to generally make a fortune of the magazine. Every Other Week thus begins to target women to create content for their fancies and unintentionally begins to redefine what the fancies of women should be. The magazine becomes as much a part of the development of women's issues as a generator of its content.

Do we see Fulkersons on the internet today? Are there businessmen or women who seek profit at the expense of all else? Are particular groups targeted? For what purposes?

Here we see that motives shade content generation and can even produce unexpected results. A Hazard of New Fortunes parallels the internet in its recognition of production bias. It's a particularly good parallel because the Every Other Week represents a diversity of content generators collaboratively striving to influence a large audience.

Here's an invitation: before you create your next blog post, podcast, audiobook, ebook, or store front, review your motives. Which camp(s) do you fall into? Are you a hobbyist or a professional? An academic or an entertainer? Is your content meant to inspire, provoke, transcend, or amuse? I think these are important questions. More posts on this topic to come.