microserfs

5)Karla's statement is actually very easily deciphered. For years, theologists have been debating how Artificial Intelligence should be implemented. You come across so many moral questions when applying AI to machinery. On one hand, AI in video games can cause a greater sale, if only for the difficulty level. On the other, we wouldn't want to apply AI to a judge and jury system. Computers can only comprehend numbers so we must rely on the human brain for the actual AI systems. How scary would it be to face a judge with no sympathy or remorse; someone with absolutely no flexibility in their rules? The AI itself isn’t really the problem, however, it’s the programmers responses to the problems presented that we should truly fear. Now if we take this mentality and add it to the vast database of information hidden in the Internet we are faced with a near cataclysmic scenario. Susan stated a similar situation in her reference to the Borg and the “Village of the Damned” children. An ever evolving “entity” with access to our deepest secrets and no comprehension of human emotions. While the idea of artificial life is highly appealing to me I shake at the applications man would use this for. I like living in a world of science fact with the leaps and bounds we are making progress, but soon we may live in that world of science fiction. All those episodes of Twilight Zone I laughed at won’t appear so ridiculous. For the moment though we should be safe. Man may be faulted in many areas, except in testing and re-testing their new creations. As long as we use this technology with respect and responsibility, we may yet see a world of near instantaneous information.

4)Whenever you start a hobby or career that is perfect for you, you will always remember what got you started in that field. Whether it be an athletes first baseball or a racer’s first go cart you will never forget. Well, in this situation, I believe it was that first exploration of My Computer. I myself find it to be at the top of my all time favorite buttons list. It gives you access to every nook and cranny of your computer. This has to be his way of remembering that time. There is no physical trophy of that moment, so what better way to remember it than making a hymn to your inspiration for life? Even the way it’s constructed shows the authors enthusiasm. He had to learn and then repeat every line of binary to match up with his desired result. This takes a kind of dedication that you would only find with a die hard enthusiast of the subject. While I may be incorrect in my assumptions, because no one can truly know what was in the authors mind, it seems unlikely this was a “just for fun moment” in his life. This appears to be a genuine homage to something that is special to the author. The only other possibility is that it is a joke. Seeing as how I am unable to decipher the code I can only guess. In any case ,this is definitely a crucial piece to analyzing Douglas Coupland’s mind.

3) Have you ever been apart of something so profound, in your opinion, that it opened a new world for you? In Microserfs, the characters have been opened up to this event and unfortunately for some it ends up consuming them. If you look at a group of people who are introduced to a new comer you will find a very common pattern. The group and individual will start to absorb each others mannerisms. This is never more true than in the technology world. You begin to see computer code and problems everywhere in your life. Soon code becomes nothing less than it’s own language. This is shown in the authors comparison of Microserfs and Cyberlords. How many people can actually claim to know the difference? Look no further than any average teenager who is constantly involved in the computer community without even knowing it. I personally can’t count how many times I hear “LOL” from some kid on the street. At first, the only reaction I could give was a raised eyebrow. Now, I can not only reply but start my own conversations using this language. Now, I can’t help bringing over this language to a new group of people. More than anything else I believe it is a rite of passage. In many of the higher “geekier” circles the more “jargon” you know the higher your status. Much the same way sports fans trade secret information about their favorite teams players. All in all, it’s a matter of who you relate to and who your friends are. If you disagree try talking to a die hard fan of something you have no interest in.

reflection

I have taken three other classes online but this is the first class I have taken at U of M. I enjoy taking classes online because of the flexibility it allows for my work and school schedule even though I do have the tendency to procrastinate. This was the first online class that I really struggled in because there were some items that were not clear and hard to understand at first. I felt that the class would have been much easier to work around my other activities if what was originally posted stayed the same. I would start one assignment with the idea of what I wanted to do and how long I presumed it would take to find out later on that more had been added to it or taken away. The instructions were not as clear as I had hoped for either. I expected to be able to go online and read the assignment without having to then call you and clarify what I needed to do. Although I had some difficulties, there were some assignments that I really did enjoy. The visual advocacy project was very creative and allowed me to give and show my opinion on a topic that meant a lot to me. I was really disappointed though in the end because I had put so much time into the assignment but still received a less than perfect score. You gave examples of things I should have written about and what would have been interesting, but I wrote about what was important to me. I'm the one who lives with the racial snickers and comments from my family and thats what I felt was vital in my assignment. I also really enjoyed activity 2 because again it allowed me to express my thoughts on a song or poem that really meant something to me. I have really learned not to rely on the web for all my sources and there are other reliable references such as scholarly journals to research for the topic that I am researching. As for my blog, I will use it for future references but I do not think I will add any additional posts.

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activity 2

t h i n k

I try not to about

the P A I NIfeel inside

Did you know you used to be MY?

All the days you spent with me Now seem so

far Away

And it feels like you don't… care anymore

And now I try hard to make it

I just want to make you PROUD

I'm never gonna be GOODenough for you

I can't stand another fight

And nothing's alright
‘Cuz we lost it all

Nothing lasts

f o r e v e r. . . . . . . .

I'm sorry
I can't be PERFECT

Now it's just too late and We can't go bACK

I'm sorry

I can't be PERFECT

I chose some of the lyrics by Simple Plan’s “Perfect”. This particular song starts out with a young man asking his father if he grew up the way his father had planned. Now that the son is older, he wants to know if his father disapproves of the choices he is making in life. The lyrics of this song are full of pain, loss and remorse. The tone of the song is very somber and full of sadness. I believe this man really wants the approval of his father for the choices that he has made in life but his father disapproves. His father wanted him to be this ideal person and be better than everyone else, but the young man chose a different path. He is feeling abandoned and is trying to apologize for whatever he had done that pushed his father away. He is also letting his father know that what happened between them, and the words that were exchanged, could never be taken back. I feel that he is trying to apologize to his father, but is also telling him goodbye, because he feels that it is impossible to be “Perfect”. I personally feel this song is about being able to communicate our emotions and feelings to those whom we have had strong bonds. I also feel that every human being has their faults so how could anyone be perfect? This song affects me personally because it represents everything I have been trying to communicate to my family for the past six years. I tried communicating to them, but in the end, it just was not good enough. This song affects me emotionally as well because when I read or hear the lyrics feelings of emotions overwhelm me.

Simple Plan's song, Perfect, contains a lot of emotional words and phrases that were quite easy to place emphasis on. I made the letter I stand out throughout the entire song to show ownership in a way. It’s bold, and dark, because when I sing this song it’s not what anyone else feels, just what I feel at that moment. When I hear the words it becomes my song. I’m the one who is sorry and hurt.

I placed a larger advert font on the only positive emotions in the song such as proud and perfect because they are the artist’s dreams. He isn't mad while saying this, he is hopeful. He is telling is dad through all the heartache, as if he was looking right into his eyes with a small smile, and saying I know I’m not perfect but I want you to be proud of me anyway.

On the word pain I made it red and black in a rough draft font to try and give a feeling of anger and emptiness. I put a slash going through it as if a person themselves was being hurt, pulled apart in two by what was going on around them. I wanted the same sort of emotion felt with the word hard. It’s in bold and strong; it shows you that it’s more than hard to make it, it’s almost impossible to get past. The words are also pushed together to help visualize anger in the man’s face and hear frustration in his tone.

Finally, I think the last, and possibly most important change, was with the words I’m sorry. I put them in cursive, and in almost a loving text. It shows that through everything this young man and his father have gone through, there is hope. Through all the pain, anger, and resentment, he still signs his work of art, his letter with a beautiful I’m sorry. There is no pain behind those words, just maturity, wisdom, and maybe a little love.

screen capture

Looking at my screen as a photograph, it was all just a blur. I never really noticed how many different applications or tabs I have open at once. Gossip magazines, email and AOL music player are just a few things that I have open on a daily basis on the web. Because I have all these unnecessary tabs open while I'm trying to compose, I'm unable to concentrate therefor, I procrastinate. The web allows me to look up the research I need in order to compose but web pages are chosen carefully. I say this because some people create web pages or blogs to post their opinion and not facts that I really need. For me, the web is all around a huge problem, it makes me forget about what I am supposed to be working on. All this new technology that comes out on the web is just another distraction. I feel that when I compose, I should only be using Microsoft Word and searching the web for information that will help me and not for music or gossip. The screen capture that I took represents my everyday searches but I know that when I am doing a particular assignment I should only have tabs that I need to complete my assignment. The internet is helpful to me in getting the information that I need rather quickly but I take my time to assure the validity and creditability of the site.

changes

When I began to edit my draft I started out with just fixing the grammar and punctuations. As I re-read the essay, however, I began to realize what my fellow class mates were talking about. I used the word “they” a lot and didn’t really talk about who or where I was quoting from. I tried to make those changes the best I could, and I used a few more quotes and facts from the third article, just like I did with the first two. I also tried to calm my critical nature down just a little bit. For example, when I used the phrase, “ because I for one never would have thought of any of that on my own!” I realized that it sounded very childish, and that was not what I was aiming for at all. I wanted to show people how repetitive the authors were being, that they treated their readers as somewhat stupid, not how I thought I knew it all. Towards the end I also attempted to show that the third article did its best to defend fathers’ roles as parents, but I could not get away from the fact that they still lacked the proper studies. I also took professor Yerks advice and tried to cite after my quotes exactly where they came from, or at least who said them. I appreciated the advice from the class and thought that it came in hand when I re-wrote my essay. Their advice on repetitive words and description of who was talking ended up being very helpful.

Module 3

Everyone has always thought of Psychology as such a difficult concept to wrap their minds around. The study of human tendencies, how they work, how they feel, who they really are has always seemed to be a mystery. What we fail to see is that people are an open book, if you take the time to read them. Sweaty palms, stuttering lies, and nerves twitches are some of the most common ways we know how people are feeling, but what about those times when its just the two of you, and the third is on the way? The articles I chose are about the feelings and expectations mothers go through before giving birth to their first bundle of joy, the differences on how men and woman view these exciting times, and where they stand on parenting as time goes on.

When I read the first article, First-Time Mothers’ Expectations of Parenthood: What Happens When Optimistic expectations Are Not Matched by Later Experiences?, I have to say, I was slightly disappointed. For someone who loves psychology as much as I do, I expected more from the studies. In a nut shell, they wanted to prove that women become surprised and scared as time goes on they realize their sweet little baby was not exactly what they expected him to be.
Harwood, McLean and Durkin try to inform their audience that, basically, if you think positive good things will happen. If you are pessimistic, you are setting yourself up for failure. They spend page after page saying, “Expectations that appear to be overly optimistic have been associated with positive psychological adjustment in individuals in romantic relationships...”and “...optimism promotes favorable outcomes even when optimism takes the form of unrealistically positive expectations...” Now, I don’t know about any one else out there, but this just sounds like the same thing over and over again. They treat their readers as if they don’t have common sense, because I for one never would have thought of any of that on my own!

They then conducted the experiment with a group of women who they felt would definitely fill those roles. They chose women with no health care, the most VITAL necessity in giving birth, having their first child, then made sure that they were low to middle class families, and not necessarily married. As if that was not bad enough, the women were then confronted while in a free health care facility to take the survey. Would you really be happy if that was you?
However, much like the other two articles, the results after having actually conducted the experiments even surprised themselves. Women were not as depressed as they thought they would be. Men did play a considerable role in taking care of their children, and their experiences were more than they could have hoped for. In the first article they felt that if a woman were to have overly optimistic thoughts of their child after birth, they would learn that things were not as positive as they were planning. They felt that this depression and let down would cause a break in their relationships and what they hoped were strong foundations. In actuality, “women’s experiences were more positive than expected... mean experiences were significantly higher than mean expectations.” Relationships did not decline as expected, either. In fact, “[women] were fairly realistic about how parenthood would influence their relationships with others.”

Even while reading the other two articles, including, “Mothers’ and Fathers’ Differential Expectancies and Behaviors: Parent x Child Gender Effects” I was still slightly disappointed. Again, they put everything on the woman and in this case left the man out. They said that, “mothers continue to serve as the focal point for parental activity, maintaining responsibility for almost all child-care roles.” They made it sound as if the man, or husband, would not bond with a child if it was a girl like he would bond with his son. Moon made it a gender issue and forgot the most important factor in having your first born, love. In his studies, just like in the other articles, he found almost no notable difference in how men and women thought when it came to taking care of their children. Of course woman have a stronger emotional bond and men have a stronger physical bond, but nothing strong enough to drive a wedge between the care taking that needed to exist.

All in all, the articles sadly taught me nothing I didnt already somewhat know. Think positive, live well. Think negative, be depressed. Have a girl and spend the emotional time with her while your husband plays ball with his son outside. Its not bad advice for those who are scared, though. If anything these developmental articles can put a weary mind to rest. We all go through these difficult life changes, but we don’t all need someone to tell us when and why.

individualism in the digital age

In any experiment you can be faced with several problems. Raacke’s main flaw in his study for gratification and desire is a completely to small control group, resulting in an inaccurate account of group interests. By making sure your experiments are done correctly is what gives you the main and most important purpose of any study, the results. It is fundamental that any attempt at a project that tries to cover ground breaking research is going to be met with an inexhaustible amount of variables. Is the subject answering honestly to the material they’ve been given? Is the subject pre-disposed to not care for the Internet and MySpace in general? Would this experiments result differ or stay the same with a larger, more diverse, group? The last question is what I believe is most important. Sure, any one small test group can help you make a slightly informed opinion, but in reality does it show the community as a whole? All of these problems can be solved with an expansion of the group area and maybe into other test sites. because, no matter how you tweak it, one hundred sixteen students is just a fly on the wall for the entire computer literate world. .
Limiting yourself merely to a questionnaire leaves so much room for error that it nearly voids the project. You can never truly tell if a person is being one hundred percent honest when it comes to a yes/no basis question followed by a, “which one do you like more?” Perhaps, the questions that you have provided for only two sites doesn’t accurately reflect what the subject’s idea for personal gratification is. Also, you can never be sure how a group is going to respond to a set stimulus, especially if it has to be given orally or even written down. Now, on the other hand, if you were to only use this method on a larger test group it could alter the percentages of those that don’t even care for MySpace. A difference of ten and twelve percent would completely change the experiments findings. History, mood, diet, and numerous other details can affect a person’s responses when answering questions. If you go to any farming community and ask them where are their local WiFi hot spots do you think they would have the slightest idea?
Now I am sure that there are many who believe that one hundred sixteen people is a wonderful start, but as said by Raacke in his own article, “MySpace has over 20 million registered users , with a sign -up rate of over 230,000 users per day and Facebook was estimated to have approximately 9.5 million users as of September 2006." Thinking of these numbers alone would in many ways make this an impossible experiment to ever truly find an answer for. You could test all 29,730,000 people in the world, plus an equal amount of nonusers in all different communities and still face an additional over 30 million users with different opinions, feelings and ideas the next day.
The other flaw with conducting an internet experiment with such a small control group is that individual interests vary so much that you may have accidentally hand picked the wrong kind of people. Raacke chose his subjects from a four year public, East Coast University. Could he have narrowed down his subject area any more? Think of it this way, on the one hand, you could have a thirteen year old girl from the Bronx whose only interest with the internet is to keep in touch with her friends that live down the street. Instead of using MySpace, or Facebook, she simply sends a text on her phone saying to meet her in five. Does this mean she doesn’t like the communication sites, or that she simply has a better means of contact? Now take a college student who may have grown up thousands of miles away and ask them how they keep in touch with those same friends from home. Chances are, the internet not only fits their schedules better, but allows for communication any time of the day no matter how busy they are.
As I have said, the size of your control group is very important, but the age, race and ethnicity of these test subjects is just as critical. A test group of only adults over the age of fifty would show that MySpace and Facebook were nothing more than a waste of time and trouble source for teens. Now, looking at the same sites and questioning a group of thirteen to seventeen year olds would suggest that not only is MySpace and Facebook important, but that they spend hours a day just making it look like their own. “The media often compares Facebook to MySpace, but one significant difference between the two websites is the level of customization” says Brad Stone. Mark Sullivan says “MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets while Facebook only allows plain text”.Even though I do not believe that the color of your skin or your religious beliefs make you better or worse than another, they do affect how you view the world and what you see as important. Catholics generally wouldn’t view something like sexual communication with strangers as freely as someone who may not believe in consequences, that there isn’t anything wrong with a little foreplay before work.
In conclusion, Raacke tried his best to show the desire for internet communication, but as we all know, sometimes your best just isn’t good enough. All in all his findings were just to minute to convince me that, for example, Native Americans were the least likely to view theses sites when he only had 15.5% of these individuals to start out with. You can’t just take a group of people that you feel are split into the perfect size categories and call it a valid experiment. It’s a wonderful try, and I'm sure it took a lot of valuable time, but maybe his time would have been better spent on MySpace making his own account.






Stone, Brad. "Facebook Expands Into MySpace’s Territory." The New York Times. 25 May 2007
Sullivan, Mark. "Is Facebook the New MySpace?". PC World. 24 Jul. 2007

Raacke, John Ph. D. and Jennifer Bonds-Raacke, Ph. D. “MySpace and Facebook: Applying the Uses
and Gratifications Theory to Exploring Friend-Networking Sites.” Liebert, 2008.