Who Should be the Police in Second Life?

The virtual reality created by the internet technology provides us a second life where we can do almost all the practices in our first lives. We get information, make friends, finish work, study, shopping, even dating in that world.

Most of the time, we are overwhelmingly happy to see the online virtual world is becoming more and more real that we can do everything as we do in real life. We build up community where we share thoughts with friends. We bring classroom into the virtual world where the studying experience become more interesting and efficient. We made trade and shopping online open to everyone with easy click in front of your computer. All these improvements we achieved in virtual world make it as a real society. However, we all know that conflicts and problems always come out in real life when there existing so many needs and wants. It is the same with the second life in virtual world that we built. Online harassment, assault, fraud and any other kind of activities that concerned with people’s rights is not uncommon for everyone. Therefore, when we can resort to lawyers, police and laws in first life, who is responsible for dealing with the same problems in our second lives.

This is actually a question that hard to find a definite answer, because online activities in virtual world all take place within a much larger scale of people than in real life and the anonymity provides too much freedom for people’s behavior. When the virtual world activities are more like real life practice and more serious, with more and more people join in second life activities out of different purposes and needs, it may cause terrible problems due to some anonymous’ irresponsible and detrimental behavior. As I mentioned in last class about the young guy who looked for medical suggestion online in China and died because of someone’s irresponsible suggestions, it was really the first time that such reports got the nation-wide attention about the “anonymity”, “laws” and “responsibility” in second life. This case was brought to the court afterwards, but no specific laws had been made and no one or institution claimed responsibility for this. A young life was lost in second life.

According to the news I mentioned above and what happened afterwards, it really warned people that to deal with such problems in second life is more complicated than in first life. First of all, virtual world is like real life society but with just decades of years’ development, so it takes long time to make regulations, disciplines, laws and clear and strict distribution of responsibility. It is the must that we need to do for virtual world. Second, during the process that the virtual world is being improved, our awareness of the rule of “anonymity” in second life is essential in preventing more problems. Knowing that no responsibility is taken by anonymous people when you make friends, spend money or take other people’s words seriously, you can stay relatively safe in virtual world. 

Personal Understanding and Experience of the Reader-to-Learder Framework

In this week’s reading, the one The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivation Technology-Mediated Social Participation really intrigued me most by its very clear, logical and thought-provoking discussion. It mainly explores and classifies the different level of people participating in online social activities: readers, collaborators contributors, and leaders. This kind of scientific method of studying online user community is completely brand new to me, but I did, after reading it, find it make so much sense to think about the social online activities I experience in daily life. Furthermore, I believe this detailed study of motivation and behavior of people’s participation online on each stage can help designers, managers and researchers to improve the interface design and promote both the quantity and quality of online social participation.

This reading reminds me of my role in social online activities and I realize it varies a lot according to different circumstances. Moreover, many factors of website design which influence people’s involvement also give me a lot of ideas by thinking on my real life experience.

For most of the time, I’m not much socially active online, thus I am just a reader who only read, browse and care about information that I need. For example, when I search information on Wikipedia as a reader, I tend to believe what I see on the website edited by other people with more expertise, never raise doubt the accountability and even never feel responsible for correcting the wrong information. As a reader, I only use it because it’s designed clear and simple for novices, people around are all using it and the content of it accurately fulfill my needs. Or when I go on a new website for the first time without any sense of belongingness of this community, what matters most to me is the interesting and relative interface and content design, which I believe is the most important factor for readers. Since contributors or collaborators may care more about the quality of their participation experience.

Certainly, there are cases where I become collaborator or contributor in some social online activities. Since I am a huge fan of films, I always go to my favorite film news and reviews website Mtime to post reviews, rate others review, join forum discussion and reply other people’s question. After read this article, I find that my enthusiasm to spend my time working on that makes me as a collaborator in this online social activity. Then accordingly, the factors that mostly influence my participation in this community is no longer the appearance design, but the accessibility of getting involved, visibility of my contribution, recognition of my expertise, possibilities find similar people to collaborate with. The requirement of being a collaborator and a contributor are quite similar, but on different levels. For contributors, which is confined in smaller group of people, they care more about trust and belongingness which motivate them to work for something big.

The last role the leaders, which I didn’t experience myself and involves much fewer people, also exist in my online social community Mtime. There are some users spend much time organizing discussion or activities on the forum, designing their own forum homepage, synthesizing information from collaborators and contributors, making policies for all the community members. At the same time, their roles are also being highly respected and honored. In this case, the factors the influence learder’s experience and behavior is the sense of leadership, entitled with special power and effort being valued and respected.  

Session 1: Reflection on "The Machine is Us/ing Us"

When I was watching the video “The machine is Us/using us”, a question come to that why people have this kind of negative reflection on technology since it was design to serve people originally. Being used by machines implies that we are becoming impotent, unprotesting consumers and loosing critical judgmental abilities. Are we really like that when faced with the advancement of technology?

Then I tried to think about where this worries come from. Here is an idea put up by some scholars that all kinds of technology no longer serve for its primary purpose which it was designed for. Candles, being a very supportive example, were created to make light to meet basic living needs. However, candles are still popular commodities in stores but more for decoration or other purposes. Computer technology, also being a machine, is the same. With decades of years’ development and advancement, the function of it nowadays has goon much much farther than the original goals before. It is used for entertainment, education, management, finance and so on. However, these fabulous following changes and advancement of technology, or more specifically in new media, brings about many problems and cause serious consequences. Some social network mobile apps, for instance, are designed to serve people’s need of getting in touch with friends with a more interesting experience. With wider and wider of consumers and profit-seekers, however, we can also hear from tons of news saying that sexual harassment, fraud, or privacy disclosure almost happen everyday because of too much credence people give to it.

It actually reminds me of an idea that it is the subsequent development and change after a machine or technology is introduced that makes it somehow out of its original track and out of control of us.

But I think we cannot simply put it that way that “Machine is using us”. Rather, I would agree more that Machine is us. It is kind of within us, created by us, used by us and improved by us. It may came out in a very limited version, like the internet, just serving our most urgent and basic needs. Then according to our changing requirements, we tend to revise it to be a more advanced version to fulfill more jobs. There are mistakes, like us, that a machine can turn into chaotic or immoral, and then we fix it. We are not just sitting there, accepting what the machines gives and being impotent consumers, we are always being active and progressive to use the machine and make it better.