IMVA

"Check this out," my roomate said in excitement from his well worn out computer chair. I immediately got up from my chair and saw something that impressed me, an evolution of the traditional InstantMessenger. He showed me IMVA, Instant Messenger with avatars, where you can not only talk...but walk, change the scene of conversation, and express a variety of emotoins from a punch in the face, to a belly laugh, to a french kiss.
From my roomate's first day of use, he already has an avatar girlfreind. They met at a coffee shop. Since he has the free version of IMVA, he can not have sex with her, but they can still hug and kiss. If you pay a subscription fee you can have sex. An avatar prostitute? Maybe.
Anyway, although the avatars still look cartoonish, people are already investing more time, emotion, and life experience controlling their avatar with a computer mouse. It is possible to be attracted to the avatars of IMVA just like you would be attracted to a person in the real world. The visual cues of the avatars are enough to arouse someone.
In other words, IMVA is like Second Life. Perhaps future generations will come home from school and meet their avatar freinds and family online. The strangeness of these online social experiences will fade over time, and the children of the future may become indifferent to true organic reality.

"The times they are a changin."
-Bob Dylan

Music today

It seems to me that with more sound comes less music. In Bach's day, there were only about 40 keys on a keyboard. Today, there are 88 keys with thousands of different sounds. In which era was better music produced? What I'm trying to say is...less is more.

Lineage

My roomate is playing Lineage right now. His breathing is heavy, he's been playing for many hours....sometimes he ignores me when I ask him as question.

2/16/06

If anyone over the age of 60 came to IU for the first time they would think they were in a science fiction movie. How odd is it to see little white wires coming out of students bodies attached to their ears? IPOD! It just looks odd to me. I can't help but think my generation is tuning out to the real, organic world with all their various gadgets.
People are not interacting in a "normal" face-to-face" way anymore either. I bet the average person has more freinds on MySpace than in real life. In fact, I have 62 freinds on MySpace. The way we communicate with eachother is changing. Maybe I am just crazy, but face-to-face communication is becoming a thing of the past with all this new technology.

2/13/06

I talked to my grandmother over the phone, she told me people actually used to sit down, stop everything they were doing, and listen to the radio. Radio had everything...comedy, drama, music, sports, news. Then TV came along, and radio had to adapt itself by playing only music. Then I talked to my mother and asked her how many TV channels there were when she was in college. She said 3. I was amazed. Wow, how times have changed. Today, I get around 50 channels, and my mother now with her satellite dish gets about 300. There is so much information floating around that newer generations of people will not be able to relax and develop their own personalities. The more media floating around, the more useless media, and the more people waste their time with it. Young people don't know the difference between good and bad media, so they just watch or listen to anything. The standards of quality in entertainment are being lowered, not just becuase everyone wants to make money, but because people don't have time to relax and come up with something original. Too much information can be a bad thing.

1/29/06

Reality TV
- It sucks. Its the most lazy attempt at trying to entertain someone. The shift in idea is quite simple; in the past; people would create scenarios revolving around rich, good-looking people. Now, real people that have those same charachteristics (rich, good-looking) are simply being filmed (The Newlyweds, the Bachelor, etc). Evolution in entertainment? Hell no. Devolution is more like it. I bet sometime a show will come along where you just film a guy taking a dump and masturbating. Then eating a microwaved burrito and watching the Simple Life. Who's to say that's not entertaining? It can be on PBS.
The standard of quality in entertainment is gradually diminishing. Call me a negative SOB, but everything being created nowadays is sucking really badly. Past generations of music, film, and TV used to have something impressive and thought-provoking in them. The quest for the almightly dollar is becoming more sought after than substance in entertainment. Here's the breakdown for how the sexes live vicariously through TV shows.

Female: Good looking, successful, intelligent woman who still can't find a man.
Male: Stupid, fat, lazy man who gets tons of women.

1/23/06

Education-
It seems entirely possible that the future of education could entirely take place in front of a computer monitor. After all, isn't most of attending class based on sight and sound, listening to the teacher lecture and watching his visual presentation? This could simply be done through a computer. And, frankly, if there is any personal interaction between the student and instructor, it is usually through the instructor's initiation.
So what's stopping a pay-per-view lesson on the History of Singapore or Personal Finance 101? The more sought-after instructors from the more prestigious schools could charge more money, of course. Looking at it from a socially utopian standpoint, any lower class individual could have an Ivy Leauge education, if this were done right.
How far are we away from this vision? If you take into consideration how much we are dependent on OnCourse (and even you are reading my work right now through a computer) and class websites, we are not too far off from complete cyber-education.

1/18

I was sitting in class today and I saw a student watching his Video IPOD before the instructor arrived. He was watching some television show on a little screen with his headphones plugged in. Now, this may seem innocent enough, but doens't this guy watch enough TV at home? I've been noticing TV's in cars, on the airplane, as you're walking down the street, and now in class. TV is omnipresent. I wouldn't be surprised if within a generation or two we will have TVs implanted in our heads. The world is becoming more Orwellian every minute.