My thoughts on the project with Second Life will be about Nonprofits in Second Life.

What do I care:  what can a nonprofit do in Second Life and how they do it? Is there any difference between doing Nonprofits in Real Life and Second Life?

Method: Don’t know very clearly yet. I will follow their event calendar first and see what happens.

Is that appropriate for a project in this class? Or, anything better?

Anyone? Thanks!

DW

(Please click on the “……” to view the snapshot.)

I use my own Macbook Pro to log on SL.

The machine becomes extremely hot again when I get into the world.

Because of the turtle speed of the computer or the Net, things around me always reveal themselves part by part. There is the ground, and then buildings, grey figures of avatars without any detail, and then clothes are on, skin colors are applied…… Things just happen and appear before me, and I see them after 1 minute of their happenings.

This is a dead city. No one is around; but I hear two people talking using mics, in an intimate tone. I walk as quickly as possible to get away.

I call out the map, trying to locate places where most people are.

I transfer to the most crowded place: atisha, 23 people.

I am on a big ground. No, in a house. A lot of names, no bodies below them. Vague posters on wall. Porn posters on wall. I see grey bodies on top of each other, moving back and forth. Holy cow!

Typing sound: I’d like you to be harder.

I walk around, bearing the rapes of words and visions. The whole place is for mating. “Want a try?” “Need a landmark?” “Oh yeah, yeah…”

I transfer to the second crowded place on map. It is a store with hundreds of shoes and clothes. Designs are ugly, like the avatars in this game (in my humble opinion).

Avatars walk in and out.

I try to speak with my mic. “Hm… Hm… does any one know where to get Lindens?”

No reply. Avatars walk away from me.

Maybe they are too busy.

I cannot stand my Mac’s refresh speed any more.

I fly up high and stop flying and drop.

I do this for a few times, and then I walk straightly into the sea. I cannot be drowned.

“Anybody here?”

I log out Second Life.

Dawei Wulluf

2. About “ordinary”, I recalled what my editing teacher said when reading. Conversations are based on assumptions and backgrounds, so do editing. No matter what you are doing, a documentary or a fiction, you are trying to communicate, trying to tell something “remarkable”. And before showing the “remarkable”, you have to show people what is “normal”. For example, if it is a disaster movie, before a storm coming, we see shots of warm families and happy activities. These are the shots that set up the time period (modern or ancient), location (China or America)… and more importantly, the “ordinary” situation of the normal world of this movie. Peaceful situation, then anti-peaceful, hence the “disaster”. If disaster comes first, the “remarkable” is weakened. And I believe, by setting up the “ordinary”, we set up (or pick up elements from the co-known concepts, like “house is torn down by wind, disaster”, to form) the context of this conversation.

3. This week, I re-read all the readings so far and I found out they all indicate one thing: the world has changed. Nowadays, people invent and adapt technology, and then use them in so many ways that during these practices, people create new meanings, new contexts, and even new ideologies. These new things have the power to change behaviors, of communities. But it is always people’s minds and ideas that have made the whole circle goes round and round again.

DW

When I was in college in China, I was in an anthropology research team heading Yunnan. They needed a cameraman and an editor, and I was both. My professor asked me to write diaries everyday besides shooting dailies for the team. I wrote about weird and funny things all along the way, from a Korean ring tone came out from a Chinese remote mountainous villager’s cell phone, to the gazing from Chinese villagers on the bikinis of French art students playing under a waterfall. I was writing “fiction-like” diaries, some events were exaggerated while being written. I did that for fun, not knowing that I would use the diary as the base of my graduation thesis.

After I got back, professor told me to watch the footage and the diary at the same time before editing. Interestingly after tens of times reviewing, some meanings, or “things that can be told” rose from those random recorded materials. That was the misunderstanding and misinterpretation between the two cultures, hence the impossible nature of “culture rescue” from one “developed” culture to another (this maybe to big a topic, though). So finally I wrote a very short paper on the former concept. And also I did a short documentary and a small flip book focusing on the feeling and expression of the villagers after they have seen the trailer trucks from “civilized people” (yes, they are this remote from city), and the feeling and expression of the French students after they have seen the art form of the villagers.

I did not have in mind a topic when I shot and wrote. I did not think deep. I did not even know I was doing autoethnography (or maybe I was not) until I read this paper. I was just amazed by the period when something of meaning rose from a chaos.

DW

A phenomenon caused by Ipod, a new hardware, and Itune, a new software. A good example of people changing their habits of buying, treating music, and consuming. New media change behaviors on a community scale.

DW

An awesome piece of music video. And there is something more than that.

I think this video says more or less the same thing as the video Jason showed us in class about the DJs talking about their inner feelings and what they recognized in and of Dj-ing. In that video, I saw a bunch of people who really jumped out of the technology circle to concern only about their own thoughts and feelings. This is what Hayles talked about, the joy of being post-human, listening to the need of individuals and the relationships of individuals. And this video, too, has the character of “using technology” merely as an expression of ideas, no matter the “technology” being the piano, the drum set, or the camera and editing machine.

DW

The first time I read it. These two chapters to me were about cell phone uses of low-income people in Jamaica. They use it differently besides phone calls. Cell phones are symbols of identities when Jamaicans interact with each other. And that was all.

At the second time, it was: A medium, or a technology, is being used in a certain set of situation. And people in this set of situation use cell phone to create different contexts so that new meanings have been created, not only the meanings of the usages of cell phones, but also the meanings of the interactions, relationships, social behaviors of the communities. And what’s more, is the way the authors used to do the research and present it to us. It shows me vaguely what ethnography is: about people, about single cultures, about interactions and relationships.

DW

Sorry to have kept you waiting for so long! Let’s catch up the time!!

Anything posted here is widely open to discussion. So please, guys, say anything you want, especially when you see something wrong (this will happen a lot according to my anthropology and ethnography level).

Thank you, my friend!

DW