Excuses and a bit about Second Life

Roughly two months later and there’s been no activity on the blog on my part.  What I thought was going to be a relatively lax semester has actually wound up being quite busy.

Luckily my Literature and the Culture of Cyberspace class has been providing me with plenty to think about along with introducing me to the work of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.  How I’ve gone this long without reading their work astonishes me.

As the semester progresses I find more and more of the readings in my Cyberlit class begin to parallel Second Life.  Love it or hate it, I’m alarmingly indifferent on the matter.  I find the social nature of Second Life immensely interesting but at the same time I can’t get over the wonky control scheme.  I recently wrote a paper for Cyberlit that started off as a discussion of the steps being taken towards immersion in computer games but it quickly dissolved into looking at the feted inner core of Second Life.  I find it ironic that the internet was supposed to be the great equalizer, though the digital divide quickly emerged, yet in Second Life we have another example of the appearance of a class of social elite.  Really, I shouldn’t be surprised since it is called Second Life.

News and the First Real Post

Though it’s Labor Day here in the United States and that usually entails cooking out and the day off work, I’m posting anyway so I can get into the practice of regular Monday updates. If sometime during the following week you notice some design changes to the blog or even snippets of the below post missing, fear not, I’m just experimenting with WordPress and publishing in an interactive medium respectively. Without much further delay, here is a paper I wrote last semester about how I saw torrent technology as a means of activism.

Torrent technology as a means of activism seems farfetched. How can something used to pirate millions of dollars of copyrighted materials across the globe possibly be used as a tool of advocating change? Well, by doing exactly that. Analysts at CacheLogic, an Internet-traffic analysis firm in Cambridge, England, report that BitTorrent traffic accounts for more than one-third of all data sent across the Internet so any group that chooses to distribute their information this way would have the potential to reach numbers of people previously unheard of. BitTorrent has played a fundamental part in the Grey Tuesday and later Dean Gray Tuesday protests by serving as the primary form of distribution for these illegal materials.

The seeds for torrent technology (no pun intended) were planted in BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen’s work with MojoNation, a system of encryption by breaking files apart and then storing them. After leaving the failed MojoNation, Cohen began work on a similar technology which would eventually become known as BitTorrent. BitTorrent works by placing some of the file tracking work to a central server (the tracker). The difference between BitTorrent and other p2p programs is that in order to receive files, you have to also share them. The more a file is shared with others and readily available the faster the download. To make better use of available Internet bandwidth BitTorrent downloads different pieces of a file you want simultaneously from multiple computers, solving a common problem with other peer-to-peer download methods: Peers upload at a much slower rate than they download. By downloading multiple pieces at the same time, the overall speed is greatly improved. The more computers involved in the swarm, the faster the file transfer occurs because there are more sources of each piece of the file. This feature could prove crucial to the success of the Gray Tuesday protest.

Hello, World

F1R5T P05T!!

As you can probably gather from the ‘About’ page, this blog will play host to my thoughts on digital media culture and the way it plays a role in our lives.

I’m looking to publish a worthwhile essay about once a week, in addition to any interesting articles I may find between postings.  Having said that, look for my first piece sometime this week.