What Color is the Sky in Your World March 28, 2007

   EVOLUTION PERFECTED  

World of Warcraft came out and I was very excited.  Luckily, I did not have any money at the time, so my family has not left for warmer emotional climes.  There are support groups for those who have lost their significant others to massive multiplayer environment lovers.  My wife has already informed me that she is not going to be one of them.  After all, its all fun and games until someone loses a husband (or wife).

Up until I did the readings for sociology, I had never consciously considered video games from a sociological perspective.  I say consciously, because on a basic level I was very intimidated by the on-line multiplayer environments.  I probably had a right to be because my initial experiences were less than completely positive. 

The first time I really wanted to participate in something of this nature was with the game Dungeon Siege.  To boldly, and I am not jst splitting infinitives here, venture online would be exciting I thought.  I had finished the single player story of the game and thought I had built a pretty impressive character.  Since there was nothing left to explore on my own, I decided to take that leap into the unknown and new world of the on-line environment.  I had a level 70 that looked pretty darn impressive in his magical glowing armor.  I was welcomed at the entry at the by another player that was level 999 (as high as the counter goes) who saluted me with a sword thrust to the head,killing me in one stroke and then began to loot my hard-earned gear for rare items.  He didn’t find anything he wanted, so he walked away to find the next poor slob. 

This left me with a sour first impression.  The perpetrator had obviously hacked the program as there is no way I knew to make my character’s head into a burning skull, and no way to get to level 999 without further skulduggery. 

I later tried Magic the Gathering Online which had its own unique sociological environment.  I never got into tournaments in this game which would have pitted my significant skills against people that were committed to their opponents.  This was by necessity, as I we had just had a child and my wife was of the opinion that a video game had a lower priority than newborn poop.  I was often annoyed when my opponents, who were apparently in a similar situation, left me hanging without explanation for minutes on end, or dropped offline altogether after I had invested the time in humiliating them.

I still remain reluctant to invest the time and emotional commitment to these types of games.  The reading comparing EQ guilds to the mafia was apropos.  I just don’t have the contacts to be initially successful.  My time would be spent building on-line relationships to the point where I could compete. 

I read a lovely sci-fi book series named Otherland that talked a lot about these on-line environments.  The technology today is not quite up to this fantastic level of sophistication, but as a prediction for the future, it was very interesting.  I was very excited and at the same time apprehensive about where the technology is going and the new types of social interaction it would engender.

Gender Confusion March 21, 2007

This weeks readings were interesting.  If I ended this post with that, everything would be hunky dory.  Instead I am going to put my foot in my mouth and chew until my toenails become purple.

First off, I was a little annoyed with the Ingham article.  The subject matter is fine.  The topic is important and changes are needed in female portrayal  across the board in mass media.  The author makes too many conclusions however that do not follow logically from the premises she presents.  She also sites numerous statistics without giving mention of their source or the way this information was gathered.  Statistics can say just about anything the person that made them up wants them to.

Getting to the subject behind the article, I think just as Ingham does that there is a serious problem in the way women are portrayed in the media.  These stereotypes demean us all, and do need to change to reflect equality between the sexes.  I do think however, that some feminist thinking goes a little overboard.  For instance, sometimes in promoting the idea that women should have equal opportunity in the workforce–an idea for which I am in enthousiastic support, women who choose to stay in the home are sometimes ignored or almost demeaned for this choice.

I like to contrast this article with the advertising reading by Jhally ,who sited studies that show greatest happiness is garnered through interpersonal relationships.  Wouldn’t this mean that mother’s would find greater happiness in the home developing strong relationships with her children rather than spending time working.  And not to be gender biased, wouldn’t the same thing go for men.  So instead of most of us spending most our time out selling, developing,or supporting products which bring no lasting happiness, wouldn’t it be better with respect to personal fulfillment to stop defining ourselves by our jobs and possessions and instead by deepness of our relationships.  I mention this as I musingly reflect on an ironic article I read from the 50’s that said by the year 2000, because of technological advancements, we would only need to work a 20 hr work week to enjoy the same comforts as they had then.  The goal then was to work less and enjoy family more.  The objective now seems to be get more people working longer.  Hmm?

Moving on . . .

I liked the Friends article.  Those episodes are very memorable, but I offer the conjecture that they were funny because the first several seasons of this series were spent establishing the unquestionable heterosexuality of the characters.  This then allowed the writers to explore quirks of the roommates’ relationship without any implications of homosexual attraction.  A funny contrast could then be made with those feelings that arise in a heterosexual relationship (ie. Jealousy, personal independance vs interdependance, ect.) 

I thought earlier Friends’ episodes were funny because theystood out in stark contrast from gender sterotypes usually shown on TV.  As a male, it was nice to see real feelings men have but generally hide because of learned acceptable male response–reinforced and propogated in the mass media.  It was also nice to see this from characters that were not confused about their sexual orientation. 

Buying Happiness March 14, 2007

This week I will be responding a little on last week’s music centered class as well as Sut Jhally’s article about the evil advertising agenda.

I quite like last week’s class.  I find it interesting how people define themselves by their music preferences, and was happy to see that the exercise was not just a popularity contest with the most recent hits sweeping the awards.  There was quite an eclectic mixture of tastes.  I almost chose the Four Seasons as my favorite piece of music, but didn’t since it is so atrociously hard to sing to–having no words and all.  Pretending to conduct just doesn’t hold the same level of participatory satisfaction.  It would have been interesting to see how classical piece would have compared in that setting with the irreverent but decidedly funny song my initial selection went up against.  I am ashamed to admit that my loyalties would have been torn.  Whoops, I think Vivaldi just rolled over in his grave.  I had better move on to safer topics.

Who else thinks global warming is a big hoax . . . Just kidding, more or less.  I just don’t know why every subject I read about comes back to weather.  Sut Jhally was making some great points about advertising, and then stretched to include world resource depletion and global catastrophe through rather abrupt climate change and ozone depletion to the list of advertising’s perpetrated atrocities.  I bought into the resource scarcity angle and the accompanying pollution.  Those are fairly intuitive when considering the wastefulness of Western culture.  I have just not been sufficiently convinced that global warming  is going to end the species.  (Feel free to make an angry comment . . . now.)  It is a complex system for heaven’s sake, and the Scientists have yet to produce one prediction or model that has proved accurate. 

More interesting in that article was the way advertising seems to be drawing us away for the idea of a society and the social and family interaction that can truely bring happiness.  If one honnestly lists the top 20 happy moments in his/her life up to this moment, you can’t help but see that he has a point.  Advertising has ingrained the most toys wins philosophy at great detriment to personal happiness found through decidedly less expensive and wastefully means.  I am not a huge Karl Marx fan, but his ideas provide a nice contrast to the propaganda shoveled by advertising.  

There were several quotes in the article that I found illuminating.  The foremost  these was the one from Ehrenreich where he talked about T.V. advertising offering solutions to all those little problems we never realized we had.  These problems usually relate to personal grooming habits–which so many of us lamentably ignore–and how to increase the joy we receive from other products we already own.  We are so busy acquiring these new products that no one has time to address the real, pertinent social issues.  Although my life is not wholly driven trying to keep up with the Jones, I will have to admit that I have bought into the hedonistic advertising philosophy.  The really sad thing is that I don’t have the time or will to change, and I don’t think I am alone among the mesmerized zombies.  At least I have my laptop.

Don’t Take Those Old Records Off the Shelf March 7, 2007

Music is not really my thing. I currently have a very small music collection which consists of a whopping two U2 CDs and a Gig of varied selections I have downloaded over the last decade. I do like music, but it is not an activity that I participate in for it’s own sake.

That said, the readings for this week appealed to the collector in me. I collect hard cover, first edition books as well as a few other items that are too nerdy to mention. I recently did my Dad a favor by getting rid of all of his old records for him. I originally intended to sell them on Ebay, but time and effort were my enemies, and I ended up trading them at a store here in Lethbridge for some DVDs.

Why I am collecting DVDs is a bit of a question since I don’t usually like watching movies again until I have forgotten about the story enough to make it interesting again. This is usually a span of around 3-5 years so by the time I end up watching those films again, the DVD format will be obsolete (well maybe not quite). I just like the security that if I suddenly want to watch The Last Samurai again, it will be there waiting for me.

To get back on track, I was organizing my Father’s records for sale and the collector in me started twitching like a pack-rat. The album covers were interesting in a way that no other music medium I have ever owned has been. I did buy a lot of tapes back in High School, because I wanted to appear moderately cool. I had little regret tossing those in the trash. It was not that the music was garbage–well, some of it was–but tapes get pretty junky after a while.I don’t really have a solid attachment to the music I have downloaded either. It is just 0’s and 1’s on my hard drive, and if I lost it, I could just download it all again. I might even pay for it this time.

So, I had all this music from the 60’s and 70’s to which I had no attachment, but I wanted to keep some of even though I did not have a record player or the means to get one in the foreseeable future. This got me to thinking, and from the readings for class it seems I am not the only one on this track. If the music industry wants to stop losing money from all these people downloading songs, all it needs to do is make a product that has some long term appeal. Make it collectable. Make it unique.

If I was going to get into music, it would probably be records. I like the feeling of history, and I like the feeling of having a unique music collection.

But none of that is probably going to happen in the near future. So I will continue burning cd-r mixes of those same 200 songs I love, and listen to them exclusively as I drive around in my car, singing at the top of my lungs while teens mock me at the stoplights.