WSU Digital Diversity

Dead Blog

2004-08-02T10:51:00.000-07:00

The class is over and so is this blog space; I will not be adding any more blogs. For now, you'll have to find me on campus if you want to know what I think.

All my class-mates were awesome, as were both professors. Good luck to all!!

It's been fun, not like skiing deep powder snow on a cold sunny day, but fun.

robsblog

Live Strong!

Gaming Just a Game?

2004-07-26T20:07:00.000-07:00

The video ‘Game Over’ shown in class made a much better case for gender and race bias in video games than its main theme of connecting video game violence to violent behavior, in children or adults. The racial and gender bias cases could be made (weakly) by simply showing a number of the games themselves. I considered it a valid point from the view point of technology; it would be easy to make ‘politically correct’ versions of violent video games by making gender, skin color, dress, and body type a player option for the player as well as the ‘targets’ or other objects. You could have an over weight, short, black woman chasing down and slaughtering nerdy looking white men in your version of your favorite ‘run ‘n shoot’ game. It would still be violent, racist, and sexist; just equally to all.

The ‘conditioning to be violent’ case requires a demonstration that there is a causation connection between time spent playing violent video games and (frequency of) violent behavior. It can not be claimed that violence didn’t exist until the advent of video games; so it could only be argued that violence is increasing because of increased exposure to violent video games in statistical respect to all other factors (by using multivariate regression statistical analysis techniques such as those used in ‘Virtual Divide’). There was no such statistical evidence offered by the producers of ‘Game Over’. Indeed several historical studies (quoting a sociologist on OPB radio aired just after Columbine) have indicated that the rate of violence per capita in western society has remained constant for the past three hundred years. What has changed is the reporting of violence. A hundred years ago the reporting of a mass school killing in Colorado may have not even reached New York, much less have witnessed live on television. What is increasing is our awareness of violence, making it seem more frequent even though it isn’t.

Instead, ‘Game Over” tried to make their case using comparisons to how the military and police have used virtual training to overcome the human ‘safety switch’; the human reluctance to kill humans that prevented so many WWII riflemen from firing their weapons. This may have backfired; their West Point expert not only pointed out the ‘conditioning’ nature of virtual training, but also the militaries additional real life training. The dramatic increase in ‘riflemen fire’ measured between WWII and Vietnam was due to pop-up human silhouette target training well before video games were available. The training achieved a conditioned response; see target – shoot target. However, the motivation to apply the conditioned response of killing comes from the physical state of violence inherent in war (or police work) that the soldier (or police officer) finds themselves in, not from their training. The reason our soldiers kill enemy soldiers lies in their identification as enemy targets (otherwise friends who ‘popped up’ as well as foe would be shot). Without the motivation (this are the enemy targets trying to kill you) the conditioning (this is what to do to enemy targets) would be useless; it takes both.

It may be said that I made the opposite point when I called out the danger of the interactive ‘conditioning features’ such as games on hate group websites. However, I call to attention the motivation to act racist already exists in the individuals who frequent these sites. The ‘enemy targets’ have already been identified; only the conditioning is missing.

The retired colonel elaborated on the additional ‘real life’ training giving motivational context to the ‘see target – shoot target’ conditioning. Just as the occupants of ‘the Falcon’ (Blue Sky’s virtual pub) know their really participating in near real time interactive communication on the internet, and not actually hanging out in a real pub; the soldiers know it is just virtual training, no one is going to die. The trainee must bring additional emotional content to the training to make it real (and his sergeant is there yelling his guts out to see they get it). It was this additional context/content that the producers tried to ignore when trying to connect video games to criminal violence. It was a huge leap of imagination to see the programs discussion of video games in terms race and gender as ‘identification of targets’. Discussion of other possible (family, social, economic) sources of this essential motivational context was absent from the program. If some one lives with violence in their life already, video games may reinforce (condition) notions of appropriate responses to that violence; but ‘Game Over’ failed to demonstrate this connection as well.

Just because sociopaths like violent music, TV, movies, and video games doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be sociopaths if none of these existed; pre-technology history is filled with mass murderers.

Slow Blog Postings

2004-07-23T15:52:00.000-07:00

OK, it’s almost 4pm Friday afternoon and I see my blog hasn’t appeared yet, nor has Katie’s. I posted mine at 3:52pm yesterday (Thursday) afternoon, so it’s taking BlogSpot more than 24 hours to refresh their pages. So that makes commenting by the Friday 5pm deadline problematic. I’ll check back through the weekend and comment on Katie’s blog as soon as I see it. My apologies to my group for the late blog, but I made my dead-line.

What Identity?

2004-07-22T15:52:00.000-07:00

“All the world is our stage, and we are merely players; performers and portrayers. Each the others audience inside the gilded cage.” RUSH, “Lime light”

It’s not surprising that people who mud or chat might present themselves less than accurately, we dress up for dates (at least the first), don’t we? So why not take the opportunity to do the same online? Lori Kendall identifies the “performative nature of identity” in both our on and offline lives, and the fact that we all know identity is partly an act. We allow each other this ‘shell’, so we ourselves can enjoy the comfort of not having to expose our faults and weakness to strangers. It’s a thin and somewhat translucent shell, but cherished to some degree by all cultures. You can call it ‘personal space’ or ‘identity’, or individualism. Like a name we choose to call ourselves; our persona is who we choose to say we are.

Nor is it surprising that ‘long time’ online identities tend (or trend to) to approximate our ‘true’ identity; our ‘true’ identity still being a construction we wear like underwear, but well practiced and closer to our skin. Even though “offline rules concerning identity do not apply online” (Kendall), it’s just easier to remember the truth, or (at least) reasonable approximations of the truth, and most people just can’t keep a consistent lie going for long. Anyone can claim to be a ‘rocket-surgeon’ online but you better be able to back it up, especially in an intimate textual environment like a mud filled with techno-nerds (my brothers) like Blue Sky! We’ll eat you alive (discover the fraudulent claim)! I’m not surprised mud’s like Blue Sky are hostile to guests and ‘newbie’s’. Having a long standing account is demonstrated proof of viability within the group; you fit in, care about others in the group, and obey the rules (it’s kind of a ‘DUH’ statement).

“How did I get so nerdy?”
I glad nerds took over the world in the eighties (Don’t worry, it’s not the power or that we want to (or can) fix the world; we were just tired of the wedgies). I scored high on the ‘Nerdity Test’, and am proud of it! What I found strange, even for nerds, was Kendall’s finding of ‘heterosexual masculinity online’ in Blue Sky: really, women distancing themselves from femininity on purpose? Just to fit in? Wow.

I choose my persona, on and offline, partly from what I think you (meaning ALL of you) expect; partially to meet those expectations, and partly to challenge them. How do you choose yours?

Bots, and Agents, and ALife, Oh My!

2004-07-13T17:32:00.000-07:00

OK, first the rant; reading ‘Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life’ by Sarah Kember is punishment! Endless quotes, long sentences strung together with semicolons and commas, and her use of vocabulary as a weapon make it very nearly unreadable! I mean really, ‘epistemology’ (a theory, or the study of the nature or grounds of knowledge especially with respect to its limits and validity, Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary); how many of us non-philosophy/theology/literature majors get to talk that much about metaphysics and the nature of knowing or being? I’m having a very hard time finding (much less understanding) her point(s)! END OF RANT. Sorry, but I had to get that out.

What is ALife? That’s a tough question to answer for someone who has a good idea of what life is in the first place, but way out of my league! What is life? It’s the kind of question everyone knows the answer to but no one can seem to communicate. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary begins with, “a principal or force held to underlie the distinctive quality of animated beings, an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction.” Sara Kember adds the ability to evolve and adapt in her description of ‘second order emergent’ ALife, as well as asserts autonomy as requisite.

Well, that’s some definitions, but they don’t really ‘satisfy’, do they? Let me try to ‘pin down’ the definition of ALife a bit more. Artificial life, by its name suggests that ‘it’ is not biological in the sense of evolving here on earth from previous life-forms. This may be a ‘species-centric’ point of view, but I think ‘Artificial’ signifies ‘created by humans’ (I’m not going to argue with the anthropologists out there over what the other great apes can or can’t do). ALife is therefore electro-mechanical (so far) in the physics of its existence, as apposed to electro-chemical (notice I avoid the use of ‘biological’). Electro-chemical ALife is coming soon in the form of nanotechnology, so even that boundary is blurred. It seems even the ‘easy’ task of defining what makes ALife ‘artificial’ is difficult, even Webster’s cops-out with “contrived by art rather than nature, produced by man to imitate nature”. I’ll take the last one; the ‘Artificial’ in ALife means ‘produced by man to imitate nature’.

It might follow that the ‘Life’ part of ‘ALife’ means ‘the state of nature’; so what is ‘the state of nature’? Taking ‘nature’ to be the universe and everything in it, is the universe itself ‘alive’? Cosmologists tell us the universe is emergent and growing, and (to the limits of our best evidence) the universe is autonomous, so it meets some of the criteria for ‘life’, or more accurately, the environment for life much like the artificial environment of ALife that Kember talks about. We have no way of knowing if the universe adapts or responds to outside stimuli because (by definition) the universe is the boundary of all we can see or know. The same limitation precludes us from knowing if the universe replicates. ‘We’ (all ‘living’ things) might just be a part, cell if you will, of the greater universal life form. Life and existence may be the same thing, but we’re too small and dumb to know it.

I'm not doing very good pinning anything down; maybe defining life isn't black and white. ALife may be stuck in a definitional void we carbon-centric beings created to house the point in time where our own carbon life form ceased to be regularly occurring self-sustaining chemical reactions, and began to be autonomous replicating life. If our greatest scientists could travel time and ‘be there’, they would still argue like a bunch of theologians about when ‘when’ was! But some relatively short time after the argued ‘when’, all would point at and agree ‘that’s alive!’ Just like the carbon forms of life ‘we’ (just humans now) all agree are alive, ALife will reach a point where its complex, autonomous interaction with us will grab us all by the cuffs and scream “I’m alive!”, forcing universal human recognition of its viability.

Many would argue the early ALife, such as ‘the Game of Life’ John Conway developed in the 1960’s, is not life. True it does contain many of the listed attributes, but is far too simple! Its operation from a few simple ‘local’ rules can’t possibly be the ‘supernatural’ quality that life is! Many would continue that argument for the more advanced forms of ALife developed and used with great success by the defense industry and the military. This is the same carbon-centric argument that will persist until the final debate is silenced by an ALife ‘agent’ defending itself in a carbon-based legal forum, much like the Star Trek; Next Generation episode where Data asserts his status as a life form.

Virtual.Bias@wsu.com; A quick Summary

2004-07-07T13:17:00.000-07:00

The thesis of my paper was the WSU website was professionally to be free of bias in any form. My argument was the images of individuals shown were selected, designed, and shown specifically to avoid any depiction that could be seen as biased, and the visual impression of each page and the overall website would be one of inclusiveness.

I spent several hours viewing the images on the pages of wsu.edu. I collected (counted) data, in the form of 92 images, from a statistical simple sample of convenience and did some basic ratios of race, gender, and age. Because of time restrictions due to personal reasons my external sources used were woefully insufficient, and I caution my readers to suspect my data and conclusions.

I found the site statistically to be overly White, female, and young. Groups that were starkly underrepresented in percentage of total population were; Hispanics, Arabic / Persian / Middle Eastern, and those over the age of thirty. I found no images of individuals who could have been identified as Hispanic. Also, there were no images of individuals over the age of thirty who could be identified as students.

The overall (non-statistical) impression given is one of inclusion, with women and Blacks well (Over?) represented in numbers and ratios, and excluding the mentioned examples, all are shown without role bias. All images are shown respectfully, with no comic or compromising situations, or positioned to depict lower status. Specific effort was given the College of Engineering website to make what is often seen as a traditionally male profession look ‘visually comfortable’ to women.

Those who would refute my thesis would find abundant ammunition in my paper, but the issue isn’t black or white. That the WSU website has some ‘unseen’ bias is not remarkable, nothing in this world is free of bias. What is more important than the statistics is the impression of intent, and there were positive examples of ‘design for diversity’. The appearance of diversity cannot be communicated by comparing population statistics; to appear diverse a website has to statistically tread on the majority by judicially ‘boosting’ the numbers of minority images and enhancing the roles in which they are viewed. The point is to leave the visual ‘impression’ of diversity to help recruit for actual campus diversity.

My conclusion is a light shade of gray, a C+ grade for the WSU website; it passes the diversity test but needs improvement.

Online Religion & Hate II: Late blog

2004-07-01T20:31:00.000-07:00

All I really have to add is: NEVER UNDERESTAMATE THE POWER OF THE INTERNET TO DISTROY! After all, it was invented by the Department of Defense, and was originally intended to be a weapon.

Online Religion & Online Hate

2004-06-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

Although Brenda Brasher's book 'Give Me that Online Religion' defiantly has a positive, utopian outlook of the affect of the internet on religion, and it's overall positive impact on humanity, she does give coverage of the darker uses and outcomes made possible by the instant, interactive media the internet has become. Even before viewing the Hate.com video I felt Brasher's book made only passing reference to the power of the internet to take a few dispersed individuals and weave them into an effective organization capable of powerful evil (or good).

The interactive nature of the net gives it a previously unavailable power of conversion. This is not the same as simply downloading information. With live action video games and interactive video a much deeper conditioning is possible. Ideas can be planted (often by stealth), nurtured by repetition, and brought to an emotional pitch inspiring real life action. The internet is hate group heaven.

Or take the 'War of the Worlds' scenario; several (but still few) reputable sites, for example NASA and the European Space Agency, are hacked into and cataclysmic disaster is declared! Would widespread panic break out before officials could de-bunk the stories? An extreme religious (or hate group) could use the same type ruse to call to action their dispersed following, and with the belief in the end times brought on by the impending disaster, influence them to take action they would never consider in 'normal' times.

So ends the 'in class' portion of my blog 'Online Religion & Online Hate'. Look for part II after I've had some time to re-read and expand.

The Politics of God (part II)

2004-06-24T15:48:00.000-07:00

The Politics of God: Religions Purpose, Function, and Impact on Cultures

First, let me say that being a Christian, it’s easier for me to focus on (pick on) Judaism / Christianity for most of my examples. I apologize in advance for any offence, inaccuracy, or lack of inclusion.

I suspect the first ‘cultural purpose’ of organized religion was to exert a measure of control or rule of law over a dispersed group within the fledgling civilization or culture. In defining the hierarchy of ‘Gods’, and teaching belief in their power to control the reality of the present as well as impose future consequences, early governments used religion to define and control day to day behavior within the society. Religion focused on explaining how everything came into being and dictated what purpose it had. Religious ‘secrets’ were kept by the priests, holy documents were not available to common people (even if they could read), and questions were not encouraged.

For most citizens it wasn’t about what the Gods could do for you, but what was expected of you for the Gods, and by proxy, the religion / government. Early religions required service, labor, taxes, and even human sacrifice from the citizens of the culture, for little, if anything, in return. No heavenly salvation was given as reward, but heavy punishment (damnation of some sort) was threatened for not complying. Often, the best that could be looked forward to was to be killed at the rulers’ funeral so a wife or servant could continue to serve the hierarchy that was established in life.

Often, ‘nation’ was defined by the state religion. If the neighborhood needed ‘cleansing’ of some undesired peoples, your God(s) would require you to go to war for them, and they would not even help! If you failed, you not only suffered at the hands of your enemy, but also your own culture / religion would punish you.

Later, religions began to changed their focus to how we should treat each other rather than our service to the God(s). Eight of the Ten Commandments refer to how we relate to each other, and only two (Love God, Don’t take His name in vain) speak to how we relate to God. The God of the Old Testament might command His subjects to go to war, but now God went with you and exerted effort to affect the outcome in His (your) favor.

Over the past few hundred years, revolutions in society and technology have redefined governments’ power to ‘at the will of the people’, and have torn apart the partnership of power that government and religion had enjoyed. The printing press ended the European church monopoly over religious documents (the Bible) and promoted literacy throughout the society. Religion was no longer as much ‘top down’, and became much more a servant of the community, society, or culture. And not just the Christians, Hindu, Islam, Buddhist, most modern religions preach respect for self and community, as well as holding all human life sacred.

The God of the New Testament explicitly does NOT want His followers to go to war (or kill for that matter), and if life is to be taken, reserves the exclusive right to perform the act Himself. The New Testament is almost wholly focused on how humans should treat each other, and glorifies service to humanity as the truest act of love for God. Held forth is the fantastic, and ever easier to obtain, reward of salvation, to live forever in the presence of God. The threat of punishment (damnation) is much less important than the missed opportunity of the reward. This is a far cry from early religions neglect of the common citizen and need for the shedding of blood.

Enter the internet! The physical barriers have dropped completely. No church walls, no national borders, no language barrier, come see what our religion is all about and join if you like! Look what the lowly printing press did, now imagine what the vast store of easily accessible information the internet provides can do. I’m not quite as optimistic as the author of ‘Give Me that Online Religion’ (Brenda Basher) that the deep seated religious prejudges and hatred will melt away in short order because of new understanding brought about by the free-flow of religious information enabled by the Web, but even a pessimist can see there is bound to be a profound affect.

Modern religions serve to give continuity to an ever more rapidly changing society. They seek to answer questions of ‘why’ more often than ‘how’. They also tend to ‘serve’ rather than ‘rule’ their communities. Modern religions are much more focused on what God can do for you.

The Politics of God

2004-06-23T15:33:00.000-07:00

The Politics of God: Religions Purpose, Function, and Impact on Cultures

I suspect the first ‘cultural purpose’ of organized religion was to exert a measure of control or rule of law over a dispersed group within the fledgling civilization or culture. In defining the hierarchy of ‘Gods’, and teaching belief in their power to control the reality of the present as well as impose future consequences, early governments used religion to define and control day to day behavior within the society. For most of the citizens it wasn’t about what the Gods could do for you, but what was expected of you for the Gods, and by proxy, the religion / government.

Over the past few hundred years, revolutions supported by common citizens have redefined governments’ power to ‘at the will of the people’, and have torn apart the partnership of power that government and religion had enjoyed. Religion is no longer as much ‘top down’, and much more a servant of the community, society, or culture. Now religions serve to give continuity to an ever more rapidly changing society. Religion is much more focused on what God can do for you.

This was written in class in 10 minutes....................

Profile

2004-06-23T15:27:00.000-07:00

Robert S Schonek
Born in Portland Oregon on 12/11/1957

Graduated Aloha High in 1976.

Student: WSU Manufacturing Engineering (senior)

Pastimes: sking, kart racing, camping, hiking, Mt. biking, fishing, hunting