Topic 2 – Virtual environments and cognition

Exercise 2.1: Virtual environments and cognition

I joined Facebook in 2007 and enjoyed the initial ‘honeymoon’ period when I got excited every time I got a new friend.  It didn’t take long before I crossed the threshold whereby there was just too much noise (which I personally think is around 30) and I was being notified of what people who’s names I could hardy remember were having for dinner.

I searched for CSU and got back a number of results, one of which was Colarado State University.  This prompted me to update my search to the specific “Charles Sturt University” which returned 108 results.  The first retrieved looked the most promising and had 710 members.  I joined and made it 711.  I then found ITC510 (after a couple of attempts – my mistake was to prepend CSU to the beginning of my search) and became the group’s 16th member.

a. I don’t have an ethical problem with Facebook.  You need to accept an invitation before someone can see anything truly personal or have you appear as a friend so I don’t see any issues.  The advertising is obviously quite well targeted to the information that you’ve provided as part of your registration – particularly your sex, age and location – although the groups that you use must almost certainly come into the equation as well.  My only issue would perhaps be with advertising to facebook’s younger audience – particularly when such detailed information is being used to manipulate such young and impressionable minds.

b. The University College London’s Visual Cognition Group is primarily concerned with “detection, discrimination and short-term memory of visual stimuli” (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2009).  Social cognition on the other hand describes how people process social information (“Social Cognition”, n.d.).  There is a close relationship between these two things as visual cognition will provide input for our social cognition, but is only one aspect of what drives our interaction with other people.  It is interesting to note that damage to the Fusiform gyrus in the frontal lobe can lead to the inability to recognise faces – an excellent example of where a breakdown in visual cognition could adversely affect social cognition.

Exercise 2.2: Virtual worlds and citizenship

Downloaded, installed and setup and account for second life. The concept of a starting look was useful as it lowered the barrier to entry.  After spending a few minutes exploring the many options for customising the appearance of my avatar I walked around the help island before removing my pants for a laugh and finding myself unable to put them back on.  I chatted to some of the other avatars but they were unable to help me with my lack of pants!

I used the search facility to teleport to IBM’s island and read some of their marketing billboards before finally finishing up at a party island where a large number of people were dancing to music that I couldn’t seem to here.

I found that the most engaging aspect of the experience was the fact that the other people in the game were really there – in a real, dynamic way.  It changed the nature of the interaction and I find myself behaving more as I would if I were actually there.  I think that this is where social cognition plays a big part.  The way that you respond to this type of environment is very different to something like a chat room and has much to with the way that our brains are wired to process social stimuli.  By creating an environment that resembles certain aspects of reality, this type of social network can tap into our natural social cognitive makeup to elicit specific types of experiences.

I also visited the Second Life Grid microsite.  This reveals much about Linden’s strategy – which seems to be going beyond gaming and their own development by ambitiously providing a framework in which companies can build their own virtual worlds.  They are also positioning Second Life as a platform for meetings, interviews and orientation for new hires.  I was a little skeptical at first but watched the video showing Ernst & Young’s cookie factory for training of their auditors.

Exercise 2.3: Create and record your online persona

Discussing the way in which we project ourselves to others reminds me of an excellent brand guidelines parody I saw last year from a graphic designer who had presented a brand style guide document – of the type typically created for corporates – for himself.  This can be downloaded in PDF format at identitystudios.co.uk.

The construction of my Facebook profile is something that I have been doing since joining in early 2007.  This is comprised of obvious things such as your profile photo and the applications that you choose to feature on your page.  It is also made up of more subtle and transient things such as the content and tone of status updates, photo comments and wall posts.  As Facebook is primarily a social environment for me, analysing my Facebook avatar is an exercise in analysing what I attempt to project socially.  My photos are informal and usually show me enjoying myself in some social context.  Most of my posts are jokes and reflect my attempts at a good sense of humour.  Again, my applications are novelty-based and added for their humour value.

The construction of my Second Life avatar was far more focused on its physical aspects.  This is simply a function of the visual nature of the environment – and someone only briefly dabbling in it doesn’t have the persistent artifacts such as photos and wall posts to worry about.  It seems that in an environment with no limitations, the men are all tall and muscled and the woman scantily clad and large-breasted.  I however was inclined to make my avatar look like my real-life self.  I’m not sure whether this is a reflection on my healthy self-esteem or simply a sign of my laziness!

I would say that I don’t have a persistent avatar across my ‘virtual’ social networks and environments.  This is for the same reason that I don’t have a persistent persona in my ‘real’ interactions.  I see this as a natural function of judging social feedback and adjusting yourself accordingly.  The way that I project myself at work is different (however subtle) from when with my friends which is again different to when with my family.  I think an excellent example of this is the fact that many people I know are feeling awkward as Facebook’s recent influx of the older users has them receiving friend requests from their mothers (“Facebook demographics: biggest growth in older users”, n.d).

Exercise 2.4: Online identity and your state of presence

Dick Hardt speaks about the history of online identity and the new approach that his company (among others) is taking to it.  His ideas are very much centred around issues of security and authentication – and although he explicitly mentions the word persona (and personi!), what he is describing has more to do with the mechanics of online registration and authentication than the actual persona that we choose project online.  I feel that the sets of information that his company’s technology enables to be shared are extremely reduced attributes that are at a lower level than those that truly define my persona for a given community.  To use examples from earlier in this topic, my Facebook persona may be quite different to that of my Second Life persona and even more different to my LinkedIn persona – but the information that could be shared by a system such as Hardt’s would in fact be the same between all 3.  Attributes such as name, date of birth, address, credit card number etc do not go very far to describing something as subtle and evolving as an online persona.

Hardt’s mentions of phishing, pharming, privacy invasion and identity theft was extremely brief and I failed to grasp how his solution made this better (I would in fact have expected it to make it worse given the fact that everything about you can be packaged up and sent via your browser without you – or however is using your browser – having to ‘manually’ identify yourself).

Phishing describes the practice of creating fake sites and using various means by which to get unsuspecting users to visit them and provide sensitive details such as banking credentials.  The most common example of this is the ubiquitous email from your bank asking you to ‘confirm’ your login details.

Pharming is a more automated means to achieving similar ends to phishing.  This involves manipulating the technologies that route traffic – particularly hosts files and DNS servers.  Recently, the machine I was using at work had a hosts file had been tampered with and many major sites had their domains redirected to spurious IP addresses.  Unlike phishing, pharming cannot be detected by a dodgy address in the browser address bar.

Privacy invasion is a broader theme than a specific practice.  Email harvesters which are then used to send unsolicited spam messages to someone’s email address are an example of privacy invasion.  Other examples my include situations where someone is able to find out information about you that you would rather keep private – this may even be basic things such as your date of birth.  This stencil are from Banksy springs to mind when I think of privacy invasion:

Banksy's "What are you looking at" piece

Identity theft is the act of doing something whilst pretending to be someone else.  This is usually mentioned in the context of financial fraud.  A personal example of this would be when my credit card was maxed out by someone buying domestic airline flights.  They were clever about it and only left a very short amount of time between booking and flying.  Luckily for me the credit card company footed the bill.

Visual Cognition Group. (n.d).  Retrieved August 17, 2009, from http://www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/Research-Groups/Visual-Cognition-Group/.

Social Cognition. (n.d.).  Retrieved August 17, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cognition.

Facebook demographics: biggest growth in older users. (n.d.).  Retrieved Aug 22, 2009, from http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/07/09/facebook-demographics-biggest-growth-in-older-users/.