Skip to main content

Home/ Writing about Literature in the Digital Age/ Group items tagged avatar

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Gideon Burton

My avatar, my self: identity in ... - Google Books - 2 views

books.google.com/books

avatar identity new media media studies

shared by Gideon Burton on 11 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Gideon Burton on 11 Jun 10
     
    Good background on identity and its application to new media in chapter two.
Krista S

The demographics, motivations, and derived experiences of users of massively multi-user... - 0 views

sfx.lib.byu.edu/sfxlcl3

online escapism gender identity

shared by Krista S on 02 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Krista S on 02 Jun 10
     
    Male players were significantly more likely to be driven by the Achievement and Manipulation factors, while female players were significantly more likely to be driven by the Relationship factor. Also, the data indicated that users derived meaningful relationships and salient emotional experiences, as well as real-life leadership skills from these virtual environments. MMORPGs are not simply a pastime for teenagers, but a valuable research venue and platform where millions of users interact and collaborate using real-time 3D avatars on a daily basis.
Krista S

6 Maps of Digital Desires: Exploring the Topography of Gender and Play in Online Games - 1 views

74.125.155.132/scholar

online escapism motivations gender identity

shared by Krista S on 02 Jun 10 - No Cached
  • Women in many MMOs perceive the game culture rather than the game mechanics to be the primary deterrent to poten-­ tial female gamers
  • On average, respondents spend twenty-­two hours each week in an MMO. The median was twenty hours per week—the equivalent of half a workweek. There were no significant gender or age differences in usage patterns; players over the age of forty play on average just as much as players under the age of twenty
  • While about 27 percent of female players were introduced to the game by a romantic partner, only 1 percent of male players were introduced in this way.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Overall, about 25 percent of players play an MMO with their romantic partner. Female players are more likely to be playing with a romantic partner than male players (see figure 6.1). About two-­ thirds of female gamers are playing with a romantic partner, while less than one-­fifth of male gamers are
  • Men are allowed relatively free access to online games, but a woman’s presence in an online game is seen as legitimate only if it occurs via a relationship with a man.
  • It isn’t the case that women play only for socializing or that men play only to kill monsters. On the other hand, there are gender differences in these self-­identified motivations. Male players score higher in the Advancement, Mechanics, and Competition motivations, while female players score higher in the Relationship and Customization motivations. There were very small or no gender differences in the other five motivations—Socializing, Teamwork, Discovery, Role-­Playing, and Escapism.
  • In a recent survey, I asked female gamers about what they saw as potential deterrents to female gamers in the MMO they played. Almost every respondent cited the proportions and clothing options of the female avatars as problematic.
  • To a certain extent, this encourages players to think about women as token spectacles rather than actual players.
  • More important, many female players have learned that it is danger-­ ous to reveal your real-­life gender in MMOs because they will be branded as incompetent and constantly propositioned; In other words, they must either accept the male-­subject position silently, or risk constant discrimination and harassment if they reveal that they are female
  • Also, there are very few other places (in physical or virtual worlds) where high-­school students are collaborating with professors, retired war veterans, and stay-­at-­home moms
Sarah Eeee

Dissent Magazine - Arguing The World - Are English Departments Killing the Humanities? - - 0 views

www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php

shared by Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • The focus of this post is not the thousand-and-one times told tale of how the corporatization of the university and state divestment from higher education has had a particularly disastrous impact upon humanities departments
  • We can treat these realities as facts to be taken for granted.
  • We might wonder if there are conditions of intellectual deprivation for which the institutional structures governing the humanities are partly to blame.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • For Arnoldians, literature would play the cultural role once occupied by religion, with beauty civilizing the modern individual.
  • The avatar of that attitude was Harvard’s Douglas Bush, who speaking in 1944 identified the cultural tradition running from the ancient Greeks through Milton as “that heritage for which the war has been fought.”
  • To put it another way, the English department currently labors under a deep paradox: it devotes much of its intellectual energy to declaring the limits of Anglo-American culture while being structurally wedded to that culture in a way that necessarily privileges it.
  • At the risk of being impolite, I will be pointed about their implications: this is not a progressive program of higher education, but is in fact a perniciously anti-progressive one. It confirms the casual undergraduate presupposition that nothing occurring before 1980 is of real significance, that the free market is the culmination of the human desire for liberty, and that digital fora for blather are now fundamental to meditations on our role in the universe.
  • In its youth it promised an education in literature without the hard work of learning languages, much to the dismay of classicists. In its middle age it offered a stripped-down version of philosophy under the banner of critical theory, an intrusion that philosophers bore with Stoic calm. Now in its senescence, the English department is being beaten by communications at its own game of watering down curriculum and reducing humanist traditions to what today’s adolescent will find—to use the favorite malapropism of the text-messaging generation—“relatable.”
  • In an age more forthright in its bigotries, Irving Babbitt advocated a New Humanism that readily embraced a meritocracy of learning. The humanitarian, in Babbitt’s phrase, “has sympathy for mankind in the lump,” where a humanist “is interested in the perfecting of the individual.” The return to the classics, or to great texts traditionally conceived, never seems in my mind fully to dispense with such patrician sensibilities.
  • The humanities programs of the next century might rather be structured around “world humanisms.” In such programs the phrase “great texts” would evoke the Bhagavad Gita every bit as much as it does The Iliad. The learning of at least one world language would be required, be it Arabic, French, or Mandarin. At its center would be neither the vernacular nor an artificially constructed “Western tradition.”
  • Instead it would explore on their own terms, and in their rich cross-fertilization, millenia of world traditions offering insight on the relationships between individual and society; on our ethical obligations to our fellow beings, human and non-human; and on flourishing and justice.
  • An example of a “world humanisms” approach is suggested by a conference that I recently attended in Istanbul, which brought together philosophers and theologians from North America and Turkey. One of the many rich portraits that emerged was of first-century Alexandria, where the Neoplatonism of the Jewish philosopher Philo directly influenced the early Christians Clement and Origen, as well as laying the foundations of Islamic philosophy through al-Kindi and al-Farabi. We are blinded to the study of this kind of influence by a focus on “Western Civilization” that favors Athens and Rome to Alexandria and treats Origen only as a precursor to Saint Augustine, that supposed inventor of an exclusively Christian syncretism between philosophy and theology.
  • Our task as humanists of the twenty-first century is to make those long and deep traditions visible, and to do so in the teeth of those forces that would strip them away, be those forces technological, commercial, political, or intellectual.
  • Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11
     
    An alternate take on the "future of the humanities" argument. This author proposes a revamped sort of literature study incorporating modern languages and a fervently international approach to literature, thought, and culture.
  • Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11
     
    This one skirts the edges of the digital humanities, by proposing a vision of future literature study. Explicitly digital projects could be useful for finding the international connections this author calls for.
1 - 4 of 4
Showing 20▼ items per page