Last Group Assignment

Here is finally our blog post!

Our assignment was to analyse TED talk by Sherry Turkle -video with the help of following questions.

1. What does “alone together” mean?

Alone together means that even if you are with other people, you can still be "alone" cause not everyone is paying their full attention on you, because they are using their technology devices. To be "alone together" means to be physically close to someone, but mentally distant; it means to separate from our reality by diving into technological reality.

2. Have you noticed symptoms of this in your daily life or surroundings?

Yes, we have noticed these symptoms in our everyday life. For example students often use their phones on lectures and many people text etc. while having a cup of coffee with friends. Few times we have even seen couples in a restaurant, that were just sitting there with their phones without paying any attention to each other. Also quite alarming is seeing parents pay more attention to their phones than each other or even their kids. 

3. Is Sherry Turkle´s vision on technology more utopian or dystopian? How do you relate to that, does her talk appeal to you?

We think that her vision is more dystopian. We think that her points are interesting and agree with most of them. For example it is totally crazy that some youngsters don´t know how to have a proper face-to-face conversation.

 “We expect more from technology and less from each other": she wants to tell us that technology can change not only what we do but also what we are. We have lost the confidence in real life conversations  and we are attracted to new virtual worlds in which we believe to receive what is lacking in the real life: the control.

I.A & MM

Week 11 - Online Communities - Second Life

“Social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace”

 Howard Rheingold (1993)

Second Life is a 3D world where inhabitants are all real people and every place you visit has been built up by people like you. Enter an endless possibilities world and live a limitless life, driven only by your imagination. Created in 2002 by the American company Linden Lab, available since 2003, reached in 2008, the year of highest spreading, over ten million users. 

To enter Second Life you need to download a software on your computer and register by choosing an avatar with which you will freely act in the simulated world. 

Second Life’s basic idea is to offer the chance to simulate reality, creating virtual characters and situations that actually allows everyone to experience a second and virtual life, playing in it the role that we prefer, as if it was real (to substitute forms of real life by creating a "second life" in which we place ourselves as if it were real).

Additionally to build their own identity, users can create any type of object, develop their own story, share emotions and even have trades one with another. 

SL represents a “place” that provides the opportunity to create a wide and heterogeneous community able to connect reality and the most extraordinary and weird worlds: the architecture or the avatar themselves can either reproduce precisely what belongs to the real world, either be entirely imaginary (the avatar, for example, can take form of any fantastic animal).

An important aspect of virtual reality is that it allows the interaction of more people moving within a single virtual environment, even when they find themselves separate from thousands of kilometers; moreover users are allowed to reproduce any kind of environment and social situation in order to meet and interact.

SL is a “no man's land” and at the same time “everyone’s land”, easily accessible (registration is only 10 US dollars), creating a parallel existence to the real one, without physical worlds limitations. 

You created a virtual world, whit its own dynamics, its own rules and its own scale of values, which is an ethical, moral and social challenge. 

If you want to use it, although it sounds obvious, you should always keep in mind that it is nothing more than a simulation in order to prevent the risk of one of the most dangerous threats of nowadays society: alienation.

F.P.

The Sixth Assignement - Organizations

Our assignment this week was that, as a group we had to create a plan for a company’s communication in the network society:
Our product is a pill that gets you rid of a song that is stuck in your head. When you have heard some song on the radio and it just keeps repeating in your head for days on end. Just take this pill and it's gone! 

Who are the potential customers of the company? What does the company try to sell them?
Everyone who listens to music. But especially those suffering from a song stuck in their heads, by definition, because that's what the pill is made for. 
Where in the social media can the company be found? (the classification by Kaplan & Haenlein 2010 may help you)
On Facebook: our company communicates with (potential) customers. On Youtube we could have marketing videos, and pill commercials shown before movies at theaters
Our company could also contact lifestyle bloggers and send them the pills free and ask them to report from their experiences about the pill on their blogs. We could also give some money to them to get adds to their blogs.
What are the ways that the customers can be activated? How could you benefit from crowdsourcing, gamification or product placement? 
We could have a campaign on social media, like Facebook for example, which asks people to post songs that have been stuck in their heads or songs that annoy them.

We could use gamification: we could create a game similar to Flappy Bird where our pill is the "bird" and the player has to guide the pill through an ear to destroy an annoying song that awaits at the end of the ear canal!

Also the use of Vines videos which are short humorous video clips that are quite popular on the Internet. We could have a campaign that is built around people voluntarily making vines about annoying songs and new ways of using our pill. This could lead to hashtags stuff going on, like #annoyingsongs #magicpill, etc. This would be a form of crowdsourcing - our customers do the advertisement for us. 

CK.

The Fifth Assignment - Trustworthiness of Websites

This week's assignment was to find one trustworthy and one untrustworthy website. We settled on Onepopz as the untrustworthy (http://onepopz.com/) and Last.fm as the trustworthy site (http://last.fm/).

Here are the five arguments for Last.fm, supporting it being trustworthy:

1. The website's appearance is professional: it looks thoughtfully designed and marketable.

2. Ease of use: the website's structure is simple and clear. There is only what you need, nothing more, nothing less. Plus there are no advertisements.

3. The quality of pictures is high. The pictures are about musicians, and they're official promo pictures. This gives the website credibility.

4. The quality and style of text: there is not much written text on the website, but the bits included are grammatically correct and concise. The style is neutral, not flattering or too emotional. This adds to the sense of trustworthiness.

5. The website does not ask for anything unreasonable from the user's part. Creating a simple user profile with the basic information is all that is required, and it is free.


Here are the five arguments against Onepopz.

1.  Onepopz is full of stuff that makes the website hard to navigate. The content seems to flood through the screen all over the user. Simply too much stuff on display at once.

2. Style and quality of text: it's bad for the most part. There are no grammatical errors, but the style of writing is too emotional and advertisement-like; there are overtly personal expressions here and there, which almost jump in the face of the reader. It's all just so messy and unprofessional. This takes away a big chunk of credibility.

3. The quality of the content: it's quite low. The website seems to consist primarily of gossip and articles with informational value that is practically next to nothing. Content like this does not give a good impression.

4. One main section is dedicated to news and articles about a single band. This act of highlighting a certain artist gives an impression of Onepopz being some kind of a fansite, and thus, at least seemingly, may give away a semblance of one-sidedness. This is of course a bad thing for the overall credibility of the site.

5. Another main section on the main page is dedicated to the reality show X Factor. This raises the question if the website is somehow linked to it - in another words, Onepopz may not be an independent website, but on the leash of some production company or something along those lines. This possibly being the case, objectivity and the trustworthiness of the reportage are of course compromised.

-JS

The Sweetest Day of the Year

Our assignment for this week was to design a Valentine's Day invitation on evite.com. From a sender to a reciever of our choise. Evite is a website for social-planning, where one can create, send and manage online invitations. Attached to the invitation we wrote a short description about the evening. 

 We decided to send an invitation to a Valentine's Day Concert as a bar & lounge company to our customers and friends. We wanted the invitation to be simple and stylish, since the happening is going to be - well simple and stylish. We didn't want  it to be a regular tacky Valentine's Day party with pink balloons and chocolate hearts. But still to be easily recognized as a Valentine's Day card/invitation, so the colors are warm reds with a touch of pink. The message should be really clear since it reads with big font on the front page of the invitation: 

You & Me & Wine. Can't wait to see you tonight!

The invitation is great for a bar and lounge since it pretty much sums up the purpose of the evening: good time, tasty wine with friends or the loved one. The music even rises it to the next level. We considered if we should use pictures of musician, but decided to keep it minimalist. Sometimes less is more. We wanted to bring a little luxury to the everyday and to remind that we should enjoy and appreciate the company of our dearest friends and family.  And at times we could give them a little treat. 

Life is better when you walk it hand in hand.

MM

Photos on the pinterest

An assignment for this week was to make an account for our group on www.pinterest.com and to add some pictures there which belong to our theme. This web page is some kind of a social network where people can also create a thematic collection of the pictures or the photos. After the registration on the page there are some options what user can do: create boards, make pins, give likes, or following some others thematic collection. When you make Pin on Pinterest it means that you add some picture or video to your profile. All users can communicate with each other or like your posts as it is the social network. So it is really helpful page if you need to find some picture for a certain theme.

Blog 12 at Pinterest page

At our Pinterest page we made 52 pins of the different pictures. We also divided this pinned pictures into 5 boards and we followed 7 other users. 

We pinned images which have something common with music because a theme of our group is a music. There are a lot of pictures which show music in many different ways. Therefore these pictures are divided into 5 boards which are Musical instruments, Quotes about music and its effects, Music festivals, Bands and Nature & music. For example the board Musical instruments contains images of a piano what is one specific musical instrument. The other board Quotes about music and its effects contains images with a text where are some beautiful quotations about music. The board Music festivals contains some colorful pictures from some music festivals otherwise Bands board contains images of bands and the last board is Nature & music which contains images where is nice photos of the nature connected with some music thing.

Boards at Pinterest

We have pinned many photos on Pinterest and we also have many different reasons for choosing these pictures. For example we chose some image because it has a nice quotation or because a picture was beautiful and colorful. They also represent the feelings that music makes people to feel. Another reason is that we have pinned our favourite bands or favourite musical instruments.

However our pictures have some common characteristics. All the pins have in common that they are all positive and make people happy. They all seem to place music on a pedestal as something almost more than life. They also have in common the importance of music.

In the other hand they are different as it was mentioned about boards the pictures show music in a different way so they are divided into boards. In the most of the pins, music is associated with fun, unforgettable experiences, and a sense of being together, like some unifying phenomenon. However, more serious pins take kind of a philosophical approach to music with deep meanings.

Many of the pinned pics and videos on our Pinterest boards are from the other social media sites such as Tumblr, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. There are also pics from news sites.

We discussed about de-/recontextualised as the last point of this assignment. This expression means that original picture was changed for example by adding some text to it or when it is used in another or new context. In our pinned pictures are almost every picture in the same meaning as original picture. Only few pictures have added a text which changed the pictures meanings and it is called recontextualisation.

recontextualisation

M.K.

Guitar Forums

This week we decided to change our theme from social media apps to a very different but a simple one: music. It's something we all like, it's part of our everyday life and we thought it would be an easy topic to blog about. But anyways, more about the assignment we got for this week!

Since we changed our theme to music, we chose Guitar Forums as our "asynchronous online discussion forum". As the name tells you, it's all about guitars and everything guitar related. The forum has four sections: General with discussions that have something/nothing to do with guitars and music, Skills with discussions from guitar playing techniques to music theory and songwriting, In the Studio that has all kinds of recording and software discussions and The Gear which is obviously to talk about playing equipment such as guitars themselves etc.

A picture I took at a Haloo Helsinki! show a few years ago

The forum is mainly aimed at guitarists and of course to everyone interested in guitar playing and wanting to become a guitar player. It has 65,537 members total, but only 253 are active members that use the forum frequently. There is 34,334 threads and 517,919 posts and right now as I'm writing this post, there is 102 users online.

As a guest user, like me, you can read the discussions and scroll through the forum but not actually take part in the discussion. To do so you have to register and make an account. The forum has moderators who make sure the discussion stays clean and reasonable.

What comes to the linguistic characteristics of the forum, our group member Juho did a very great job on analyzing the lexical, syntactic and textual levels of it.
Lexical: The language used on the forum is quite standard. There's no signs of "internet language" or any swear words etc. The use of emotional words is also very rare. If we separate the terms ' an emoticon' and 'an emoji', no emoticons were used but a few emojis could be found.
Syntactic: The Guitar Forums seems to be rather careful grammar-wise, which is quite surprising since it's the internet after all! Most users write full sentences with proper English: every sentence starts with a capital letter, people use punctuation and apostrophes are where they belong. The whole forum has a very "grown up" feeling.
Textual: There wasn't really any slang or colloquial vocabulary found on the forum since the discussion is so formal and well written. Not really any signs of humor or wordplay either.


E.T