Woke up, went and got breakfast at a cafe around the corner, logged into their wireless network.

Jumped on beatport.com (an digital download site) sat there for (10 mins), listening to tracks and drinking my coffee.

Ate breakfast while surfing the net for (10 mins).

Downloaded a bunch of mp3′s while finishing my coffee (10 mins).

Read some stuff for one of my courses at uni while the tunes downloaded (20 mins).

So far, that’s almost an hour in front of my laptop, on the net, by myself in a cafe eating breakfast, drinking coffee and reading.

It’s 10:15am and I head to Fisher library. I sit down take my laptop out, and jump on jstor (an online database of academic journals), download a bunch of articles on neural plasticity and philosophical zombies. (25mins).

Chuck the freshly downloaded articles on my usb drive and walk downstairs to print out the first few I wanted to read. For some reason the printer takes ages to… print. I stand there for about (10 mins) before I decide it would be more fun to sit outside in the sunshine reading the first few pages the printer spat out.

While I’m sitting outside, I pull out my laptop and fire up ‘Mixed in Key’ an application that determines the pitch of an audio file and then writes it into the file name and id3 tags. I drag the mp3′s I downloaded earlier into MiK’s GUI and click analyze.

However, the university firewall apparently blocks access to the site, which took me about (20 mins) or so to figure out, time which I could have spent reading, which is what I planned on doing at that time.

Now it’s midday and I have a lecture. I put my headphones on and walk for (5 mins) to the lecture theater for (1 hour) of analog media such as pen and paper.

After the lecture I go back to library and get on the net, jump on play.fm, listen to some music read some stuff, print some more, eat some more and then go home.

Its now 5pm and I cook dinner, eat it and then have a mix with the new tunes I just bought, using ‘Traktor’ on my laptop, before going to sleep at about midnight.

First of all, make participation in the study mandatory for completion of a course at University, or even more unethically – a high school class (i.e. where the subjects would be under 18 years of age).

So, you force them to participate. Then it might be useful (if designing an unethical study) to make the focus of the research particularly personal; say, the when and how of peoples first sexual experience.

Now, we have a group of minors, forced into a situation where they have to divulge personal information. It is highly unlikely that you would get accurate data if it were collected in a focus group format, so a questionare might be the go.

However, since were being unethical, lets make it so that after each subject fills in the questionarre, it is submitted to another classmate for approval; i.e. that they have answered the all of the questions, and that the answers are not obviously made up.

Then, we might conduct a focus group with members of the same peer group based around the data collected in the questionarres. It would be very unethical if anonimity was not catered for, especially when names are recognizable (since all the subjects would be in the same class at school).

In order to rectify this unethical study we might do the following:

Make participation voluntary

Don’t conduct this particular study with minors

Maintain anonymity of subjects

Make sure that not even the researcher would be able to match answers with subjects real identity. Obvoiusly make sure that the data is collected so as to provide an avenue for realistic assessment of the research goals, but it would be useful to provide as much anonimity as possible, so as to collect realistic data.

We worked together to develop a list of questions to ask the group. Here they are:

1. What is the first video you remember?
2. What’s your reaction to having one in your inbox?
3. When do you view them?
4. What do you do with them (i.e. fwd/delete) and why?

I was expecting the first question to be quite easy to answer. However, I was surprised when a respondent answered something to the effect of: ‘I dont remember which one is the FIRST one I remember. I remember a whole bunch, but I don’t know which one is the first one!’.

I thought the question would come across as a word-association type question, i.e. just say the first thing that comes into your head. However, it seemed to put everyone on the spot, and overall the first question didn’t go down very well.

You can have a look at the video to see what I mean, but overall, I think the most important lesson to be learnt here is that you need to phrase your questions carefully, and make sure they match with the level of moderation you are using as facilitator of the focus group.

I thought of the information that I was hoping or expecting to obtain from the subjects, and then made a list of questions in an order that I thought would best conceal my intensions.  Here they are:

1. When did you start using these sources?

2. Who showed you how to use the sources?

3. How satified are you with the source?

4. Are you more likely to read more of one author if you source thier material from a physical book, compared with sourcing thier material online?

5. If you can’t find what you’re looking for online, what do you do[give up/go to a library]?

I found the interview process interesting. I think the following summs up what I learnt.

‘an evasive answer, is not a genuine reciprication…’ [May, T. (1998)  p.122]

Women, as interviewee, are more likely than men to develop the relationship with the interviewer. This means that, in a similar fashion to evasive answers being ingenuine, over enthusiastic responses might be just as inaccurate as under enthusiastic responses [ibid, p.124].

Basically, one needs to phrase your questions very carefully, so as not to lead reponses in a particular direction.

check out the mp3′s of my interview’s!

So, the World of Warcraft is largly dependant on the Warcraft franchise, which has been around for around a decade. The story line of this franchise, as well as board games, playing cards and other commodities make up the representation of this virtual world.

Obviously, the avatars players create make up a large part of the identity of this game. Guilds that players maintain membership in add to the dynamism of the environment.

Much the same as my opinion of falling trees, WoW makes no sound unless someone is around to hear it. There is a large host of unofficial sites where players develop macro’s (functions which enhance gameplay), discuss strategy, and plan campaigns. Were it not for the dedicated analysis of the games mechanics and subsequent sharing of this content online, the game would be massive, but not multiplayer.

Indeed, the dedication of players is evident when one hears of players dying from DVT, or economy class syndrome, due to sitting in front of a computer for too long.

Blizzard, the company that produces the game, obviously has some concern (at least for thier brand) when it comes to the life draining addictiveness of this game. There are a set of parental controls available to limit gameplay.

I wanted to observe one of those computer stations that are set aside for locating books in a library. I couldn’t do this because it was apparently too early in the morning for anyone to be looking up books. Instead, I hung around a section of the library with about 80 or so computers. At the time I was there, 36 students were there, mostly working alone, with only one pair working together.

Since I didn’t really know what to expect of the subjects, I improvised a checklist of noteworthy behavior after an initial observation of the scene. There was a distinction between those who had word processors and web browsers running, and those who were running web browsers only.

I decided that those with word processors open must have been doing assignments, while those with only web browsers were studying. However, a new group soon emerged, the procrastinators.

9/36 students were on facebook, 4 of those 9 switched to university related work; 1 opened a word processor, 3 remained on the internet (I couldn’t actually tell if they were doing university related work or not).

3/36 students were accessing their email accounts, none of which were the email service provided by the university. All 3 were surfing the net when they weren’t emailing.

6/36 students were using the universities online learning system, which provides information related to a students course work for the semester as well as administration services and the like.

There was a nice even split between those using word processors and those using web browsers.

Of the 18 students using word processors, 14 were accessing online journal databases. All of these 14 also had print outs of what I assumed were sourced online (perhaps they were photocopies of books from the library), 6/14 had books in front of them, as well as the print outs, while the remaining 4/18 students with word processors open had only had books in front of them.

There were a few things I learnt from this observation exercise…

Methodology: The aim of the research was to identify trends in online identities and peer relations and the extent to which social networks determine these patterns. Therefore the study was based on a sample of 16 teenagers (age 13 – 16), and consisted of open ended questions and subject observation.

Discipline: Sociological ethnography.

Concepts: The research deals with Technological Determinism, The Social Shaping of Technology, Adolescents and Personal Identity.

Research Findings: The study found that the design of profiles is often constrained by peer expectations (p. 407), suggesting a level of social shaping of the technology, there was an interesting idea that the privacy settings on sites such as facebook are utilized in order to externalize the process of ‘choosing ones words carefully’. e.g. a ‘cyborgian’ shift in todays teenagers, where the information they choose to disclose about themselves in externalized to the social networks privacy settings, one could argue that the social network is shaping society (technologically determined).

However, the conclusion seems to be that the function teenagers felt was most required for the site was a private messaging system, which i would say is evidence that people aren’t willing to externalize their thought processes.

end rant.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/technology/companies/27amazon.html?_r=1

I just thought it was kinda funny that the Orwell fans have there copy of 1984 mysteriously deleted…

We had three groups in the class, each group had to analyze Baroness Susan Greenfield’s comments about the internet and possible consequences of people living their lives online.

Here’s a link to the interview..

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2009/2641287.htm

My group was assigned to take her comments seriously, and develop a research proposal which would define the nature of addiction and its relationship with online social interaction.

After listening to the interview, my thoughts congealed around the idea ‘meaningful’ experience is replaced by ‘virtually meaningful’ experience in perhaps all electronically mediated social interaction.

So, here are the requirements for the project…

>Ontology: The study will be based around the observation of material phenomena.

>Epistemology: In line with our ontological conception, we will adopt a positivist/objectivist position. We are of the opinion that the lack of subjective interpretability of our research method and data creates an avenue for developing justified true beliefs concerning addiction to the internet.

>Theory: The lack/replacement/displacement of meaningful experience resulting from online social interaction effects the use and development of the pre-frontal cortex in an analogous fashion to other addictions, such as gambling.

>Methodology: The research is required to be as objective as possible, while still considering the subjective nature of a research subjects conception of themselves as ‘addict/non-addict’.

>Method:  MRI scans, Data collection via WoW (world of warcraft) add-on, surveys, observation.

MRI scans would be employed to collect data on the effect of withdrawal from the internet.

Observation would be used to analyze the variation of social interaction between heavy/’non-heavy’ internet users.

Surveys would be useful in providing insight into subjects opinion of themselves as an addict. (e.g. someone in the throws of alcoholism is unlikely to refer to themselves as an alcoholic.

The WoW add-on would determine the amount of meaningful experiences a user encounters, based on our obviously superior objectivist understanding of meaningful experiences. This would then be useful in analyzing users responses in the surveys.

Discussion -

Basically, my research proposal is based on this youtube video …

Mind training and brain plasticity, in my opinion involves introspection. Introspection is possible online. it is indeed plausible, and does happen. The development/exploration of personal identity has been fairly well documented … I’ve read of few articles (I’ll reference them soon).

However, the bells and whistles one encounters online could easily distract from personal introspection.