Toluu

Masters of Media, New Media MA Amsterdam

The digital Grim ReaperDecember 18 2008

Isn’t it remarkable that a profile on a social network site is almost always linked to a person that exists in real life? Most profiles are related to someone, some group or something that is palpable. Of course, some people do have more than one profile, due to the wish of not linking private and work, or maybe due to a past one won’t be remembered to. But it seems that every profile relates on a fleshed body.

Is every profile a representation of flesh? At least one is not. The Grim Reaper is someone, or somebody, who, or that has a profile on a social network site. On Hyves, he’s called Magere Hein (the Dutch name of the personification of ‘death’) and his profile can be found on manmetdezeis.hyves.nl. The Grim Reaper adds friends randomly. His invitation: ‘The Grim Reaper wants to be your friend. Would you like to be in a relation with after-life?’ In other words, if one accepts his invitation, one becomes friends with death. Or, at least, with death’s representation on a social network site.

Digital cemetery
Are you dying after accepting ‘death’ as your friend? Unfortunately, Magere Hein fails online. People who see ‘Grimmy’, should die. That’s the story. Profiles that see the Grim Reaper, should die too. If one accepts the 2.0 Grim Reaper, one should demolish his or her pr

Chip music and the 8bit demoscene - Hacking, Open Source and RemixingDecember 15 2008

Anders set up a Commodore to give us a nice blue and white powerpoint straight from the machines memory. I have been wondering if this was an act of maximum open source or not…

Chipmusic and the 8bit demoscene - Hacking, Open Source and Remixing
Lecture by Goto80 aka Anders Carlsson
http://chipflip.wordpress.com/

demo•|ˈdemō|: noun
A demo is a linear, non-interactive audio-visual presentations that runs in real-time on a computer or console (Added by Anders: also advanced calculators etc.)

History
Whereas the demoscene is predated by display hacks from the 50s, and phreaking (experiment, hack or explore possibilities in the telephone system) in the 60s, the roots of the demoscene lie within the cracking scene of the very late 70s. In the cracking scene kids illegally copied and spread videogames via BBS’s (the first webpages with a modem that you can call into), often adding their own tags at the intro of the game.
Over the years these start screens became more important then the spreading of the game itself, as kids would spend mo

Gun vs. OLPC ComputerDecember 13 2008

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has once again put itself into the eye of the storm. The organization recently released a commercial where we see a child polishing a shoe, a little girl standing on a street corner and a young boy training to become a child soldier. The commercial starts with the line “Children are fast learners” and closes with the line “Let’s give them the right tools.”

When I first saw the OLPC commercial I thought of Wendy Chun’s analysis of MCI’s 1997 commercial “Anthem” she describes in her book Control and Freedom. In the MCI “Anthem” commercial the viewer reads text like “There is no race” and “There are no genders.” The commercial goes on to say “The Internet, where minds, doors and lives open up.” The commercial is interesting in that it argues life online is somehow different then our lives in the real world. That the Internet makes race and gender disappear. Chun argues that the idea presented in the MCI commercial is not about asking people to stop discriminating against one another but to “get online if you want to avoid being discriminated against.”

So does the Internet really exist without racism? And does the sug

Censorship Online: ISPs Block Wikipedia ArticleDecember 9 2008

Last week a controversial article on the English Wikipedia has been censored by British ISPs. The UK-based IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) blacklisted the article Virgin Killer and the related image as potentially illegal in the United Kingdom. The article is showing an album cover by the rockband ‘the Scorpions’. Several large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that cooperate with the IWF subsequently blocked them from being viewed, affecting an estimated 95% of residential Internet users in the UK. Also the image is not just being blocked but the access to the Wikipedia article itself. The particular image is from 1976 and therefore it’s unclear why it’s been affected right now. A lot of newssites state that someone filed a complaint against this article. Due to this block a lot of users cannot use Wikipedia at all while the image is still visible on multiple other website throughout the Internet. This weekend though, it has already been deleted from amazon.com.

Apart from the debate about the picture being illagal or being child porn, what’s happening here when articles on Wikipedia are being blocked by ISPs? Do they have a moral duty to protect their users from viewing certain content online? What about freedom of art or freedom of speech? Is the UK following the example of China where multiple websites are blocked? In the past owners of Internet forums had been prosecuted for certain

Convergence of Social Networks and GamesDecember 7 2008

A PICNIC Special this year was called ‘Games go Social’ which was about the future of gaming and social networks. An upcoming trend as both industries are evolving is that both can learn a lot from each other and lately the 2 industries have been converging. Gaming companies are adding more and more social features while social networks and virtual worlds are adding more and more gaming features. Social gaming is hot and companies such as Playfish or Social Gaming Network that develop social casual games for people to play with their social networking friends, are doing extremely well.

The social casual gaming market is evolving fast and a few weeks ago I encountered and interesting company that has developed the first 3D multiplayer game for among others Facebook: Paradise Paintball. The 3D multiplayer shoot ‘em up game is developed by Cmune, a Beijing and Seoul based company that builds social 3D applications based on their 3D Cmune platform. All their games an