Politics in Second Life

In 2007 Estonia held the first online voting for the national parliamentary election. It was a big turning point for Politics in second life. Alec Charles, principal lecturer in Media at the University of Bedfordshire wrote an article about Estonia: The Electronic State: Estonia`s New Media Revolution. Charles state that “technology becomes a tool for the reinforcement of existing power structure” because using e-voting system is seen as an advantage of the educational and capable groups. Charles also talks about when the official government stopped printing its publication and made it exist in an almost exclusive electronic form which a third of the population cnat access and how that increases the existing power structure! Link.

So, it appears like a flawless great idea since it`s making the voting process easier and the government services more practical, but not everybody can access the internet and even among the people who can access the internet many of them are not good in it.

Barak Obama used Second Life heavily to win the 2008 election. And since entering the white house his administrating used social networking and Internet tools, such as facebook , YouTube and twitter to interact with the public. Link. In the same campaign Obama announced his Vice president by sending a text message to his supporters.

The current events in Egypt also reflected in Second life not only with social network like facebook and twitter but also in 3D virtual community websites like Secondlife.com when Anti-Mubarak speeches were banned from Second Life Egypt by the owner of its sim whose clearly a Mubarak supporter. Link. In real life, the people in Egypt were banned from sharing national decisions for almost 30 years under Mubarak`s brutal regime,  and now it can happen in Second Life too! So, is second life really different after all? Or is it simply “he who owns the gold, makes the rules”.

Robots will take over!

Many technological researches and development were meant to make people’s lives easier. Car travel faster than a horse carriage, printing is more practical than hand writing and so on. But later in history of developments machines became so advanced that it replaced the human worker, and that what we can call a Robot. The word robot can be defined as “A mechanical device that is capable of performing a variety of tasks on command or according to instructions programmed in advance” Link.

The word robot was first used in a 1920 Czech play called RUR (Rossum`s Universal Robots) in which mechanical slaves rebel against their human masters. The playwright, Karel Capek, borrowed the world robot from the Slavic Robota, meaning a forced laborer.

Science fictions always raise the concern that robots or machines would take over. But in reality machines took over long time ago with our full consent! In 1962 the first industrial robot was online in General Motors automotive factory in New Jersey (Link).  That first use of robots in mass production lines meant that many people lost their post for the new comer whose multi tasks, fast and much more functioning. American author and entrepreneur Marshall Brain, wrote a paper about this subject: Robotic Nation, he talks about how ATM and self services checkout line is practical from a customer standpoint. however  he also argued that: “robotic system will eliminate jobs in massive numbers. In fact, we are about to see a seismic shift in the American workforce. As a nation, we have no way to understand or handle the level of unemployment that we will see in our economy over the next several decades” Link.

National Intelligence Council released a report titled “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World” Link. The report talks about how military and economic challenges that will face the U.S from other countries would play a huge role in the development of robots workers. Also the report talks about some benefits such as robots taking care for the elderly, and the fear that the robots eventually will disturb the unskilled labor markets.

Intelligent planes without pilot are used in Afghanistan and other areas by the U.S. Army. It is mainly small planes designed for surveillance but it can also drop bombs. The idea of military robots claimed to reduce causalities, but a Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Noel Sharkey warns that “Terminator-style machines that decide how, when and who to kill are just around the corner” Link. Professor Sharkey believes that their use is likely to make conflict and war more common and lead to a major escalation in numbers of civilian deaths.

Finally, David levy, a British artificial intelligence researcher released a book called “Love and Sex with Robots” Link. Levy predicts that human will love and marry robots by 2050!

One-to-Many medium to the Networked Society

For centuries the most dominate medium was One to many. Such as Public speeches and Books. Nowadays, one to many medium is still dominate but Many to Many medium are taking more space. But still, One to Many is more organized and controlled. For example with blogging, a one to many medium, the message is clear and undisturbed. It flows smoothly from the one to the many. While in an online forums, a  many to many medium there is always too many messages flying around which make it hard to be organized. Nevertheless the variety of opinion and discussion is the main strength of many to many medium.

One-to-Many & Many-to-Many

In 1963 Jurgen Habermas defined what he called the Public Sphere as a virtual or imaginary community which does not necessarily exist in any identifiable space. In its ideal form, the public sphere is "made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state” Link.  In the digital age one to many medium is different and interactive. Most blogs and online newspapers offer a space for people to comment and discuss the content and sometimes refuse it with presenting some evidence, not to mention the massive and active “many to many” online forums. That does definitely offer a kind of public sphere. Bloggers now are very active socially and politically. They can start riots and rallies in many countries. They applied a public sphere as Habermas described it.  Although a limited public sphere was always active, it expanded in a mass revolutionary way through technology. Social communication became very easy; activists can now pass their messages to large number of people with little effort because modern societies are mainly networked.


But Networked society is a two edged weapon. Its pros are mainly “making people communicate in a much easier and effective way”. For example: family and friends can connect all the time by fast and cheap means where ever they are. However, the main cons come as a result to these pros. As much networked society shortened distances between people, it has been argued that it destroyed the real values of simple human face to face communications. It also raise some concerns privacy and identity


More about the Network Society in Youtube video below:

Military Impact on Technology

Ancient Greeks had used technology in military to build their empire. The first advanced catapult was developed by the Greeks. Thousands of years after the Greeks, technology superiority determined World War II when American army dropped 2 atomic bombs on Japan.

Over the years military always played a big role in the development of technology and not just for weapons. Many of the military development turned out to be a very good for civilian use and affected the shape of society. Walki Talki “two way transmitters” was developed for military uses. The most important information and communication system “the Internet” was a result of post World War II arm race between USA and the Soviet Union.

So, Military impact on technology has many pros on making it fast and efficient, but the military use the same means to its own purposes and goals. For example, the pentagon opened a unit in Hollywood for propaganda. As showing in the Youtube video below, Phil Strub “U.S. Dept Defense Film Liaison Unit” said that the relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon is two way exploitation. In the same video, David Robb, the Author of “Operation Hollywood” said that if a film maker is willing to change his/her script to fit the pentagon point of view then they will get all the military equipment for free!. Films like Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) were denied support from the military because it was so critical. Also U.S. Military released the Video game "U.S. Army" which considered one of the top Video games these days. The game basically promote recruiting new solders and according to the U.S Army official homepage, top gamers can earn a special invitation from Army to share their practices and ideas!

Copyright, Copyleft and Creative Commons

Copyright as we know it was established in 1709 so writers and publisher can gain protection against copying their work. Since that time a lot have changed and it can be argued that Copyright has lost it purpose in many ways.

It’s alleged now that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has sued or threatened to sue about 28.000 people for copyright infringement. Most of these people are college students and teens!! Which make a person wonder is this right or wrong. Especially in our digital age. According to the International Federation of Phonographic industry, the global music industry sales had fell by 10% in 2009. Most the blame is on the illegal music downloading of course. So, it look right from the industry`s prospective to sue everybody. Mark Mulligan, Online distribution of music analyst said: “The music industry has been fighting hard against piracy for over a decade, but they haven’t managed to stem the flow” Link. He believe that the reason is because technology is moving to fast  for the Music industry and young people now believe that music is free and they never experienced saving money to buy a record.

Remixers also are targeted for a lot of law suits from the music industry and here things get complicated because remixers think of their self’s as artists and they claim that their work is based on fair use of other copyrighted artists work and that led to what’s called Copyleft  which look like it`s against Copyright but its not. Copyleft basically means that a person who owns a copy of any kind of copyrighted work can reproduce it or adapt it but with the acknowledgments for the original author. Copyleft also refers to any work in the public domain that not copyrighted and free.

Copyleft movement is adapting new idea called Creative Commons. It`s considered as a huge cultural revolution for artists and inventors. Creative Commons or CC means the work could be licensed to be reproduced, adapted or used in anyway by a legal agreement which determines how much and in which ways it can be used, Link. however there some questioning about CC that how is it different from fair use and why would anyone give away their own work.Tom Merritt, executive editor, CNET.com, has argued these concerns in this Link

Copeyleft and Creative Commons are shouts against copyrights laws that limited inventions and creativity and made it only for profit, and forgot the true propose of copyright that was made to protect the rights of inventors and encourage them.

Stanford professor Lawrance Lessing the founder of Creative Commons explains in this Youtube video:

Cyborg: fiction or Reality?

In 1987 the movie “Robocop” was a huge hit. The movie is about a half human half machine cop who has super powers and fight crime. At that time it looked like another super power fictional cyborg, but nowadays, and after more than 20 years it might not be fiction after all.

In 2010 Martin Aircraft Company (Link) introduced the Martin Jetpack as the world’s first practical Jetpack and announced that its going to the commercial market. According to the company`s website there is strong demand from wide range of markets including Military, Civil defense and recreation.

Martin Jetpack

So, what was just an idea in a science fiction movies such as super half machine cop or flying super hero like Iron man is actually becoming a scientific reality.

The term Cyborg itself is still controversial, some scholars such as Dani Cavallario, think that any artificial part to enhance the body make the person using it a cyborg, however, that not the case because many problems aroused with Cyborg. For example,  the double amputee South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius is competing and sometimes winning with “able body” athletes because of what the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) calls “superior mechanical legs”. That’s led to the argument that is it right to someone with super enhanced legs to compete against normal able-body athletes! Link.

Oscar Pistorius

Other problems with Cybrog is not yet here but it`s coming. Since Martin Jetpack is going commercial that’s mean people would be flying around and that need some system, special human airlines so they don`t crash. It doesn`t seem serious now but 20 years ago flying people was just a myth.

According to Roger Clarke in his paper The challenge of Cyborg Rights: The term Cyborg Rights defines them to be “legal, social or moral freedom to act or refrain from acting, or entitlements to be acted upon or not acted upon” Link. Clarke talked about the rights in details and outlined some of the grounds for it like religion or philosophy. He argued that it`s time for Cyborg to be debated and regulated.

Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia



Wikipedia “is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model”. That what is written in Wikipedia to introduce itself. The project was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. According to the New York Times, as in 2008 English Wikipedia had more than one billion words, making it 25 times bigger than the largest English print encyclopedia. Link                                                                         

So, Wikipedia promote itself by saying basically that anyone can edit its content. But is that really a good thing? How can we trust a source that anyone from anywhere can edit it content? That is why many people now are against the Wikipedia phenomenon which led to creating websites to expose Wikipedia`s errors. For example, a website called Wikipedia-watch.org  (Link) is set to claim that Wikipedia is evil and it has many claimed cases of vandalism and plagiarism by Wikipedia editors. Also this Youtube below shows some of Wikipwdia`s flaws:

In 2007 a BBC article by Jonathan Fildes “Science and technology reporter” investigated an online tool which revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries. “The Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency's computers made edits to the page of Iran's president” Link. This raise the concern that it is not normal people editing Wikipedia but also government agencies can be involved in that too, that means this massive free information service can be systematically edited for organisational own goals. 

 

On the other hand many religion and celebrity biography are protected or semi protected which limit the ability to edit. The reason is that these kind of subjects are tempting for vandalism and mostly would be edited for the wrong reasons.

In the end Wikipedia is a great project with some errors and mistakes. It can be very useful to make an information background about anything. And the debate about its good and evil, vandalism and accuracy, will stand for a long time.