Second Life Locations

Places for New Second Life Avatars

Ahern Welcome Island – Ahern (12, 12, 40)
New Citizens Plaza – Kuula (54, 175, 29)
The Shelter – Isabel (44, 244, 79) [club]
Ivory Tower Library of Primitives – Natoma (210, 164, 27) [building
tutorials]


Sights



Svarga (7, 123, 22) [living ecosystem]
Rambler Country, Texas – Gluphisia (240, 62, 93)
Anime Paradise – Nakama (128, 127, 21)
International Spaceflight Museum – Spaceport Alpha (44, 77, 24)
The Future (133, 211, 65)
Seacliff (168, 200, 24)
Something Awful - Baku (128, 128, 33)
Oil Rig – Anwr (105, 170, 40)
Phantom Island (90, 204, 21) [rollercoaster]
Jessie Combat Sim (127, 128, 40) [fighting]
Silver Motorsports Complex – Silver Island (131, 121, 22) [racing]
Cave Rua – Rua (167, 44, 7) [diving]
Neo-Realms Fishing Camp – Hearts Enchanted (203, 192, 24) [fishing]
Hollywood Sports and Entertainment Complex – Hollywood (141, 53, 25)
Xtasia – Sri Syadasti (88, 161, 80) [Mature]
Starlight Room – Starlight Isle (149, 200, 37) [casino]
Fairchange Island (178, 173, 38)





Abbott’s Aerodrome – Abbotts (16, 170, 64)
The Edge – Edge (126, 126, 101)
Sutherland Dam Club – Sutherland (199, 8, 24)
Nyte’n’Day – Couture Isle (7, 128, 49)
Midnight City (114, 141, 26)
Adidas (104, 183, 55)

Wikipedia Edits

HENRY JENKINS - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Jenkins

07:25, 16 April 2007 Mjdieter m (Added detail on convergence culture)

04:29, 17 April 2007 128.250.122.70
04:30, 17 April 2007 128.250.122.91
04:32, 17 April 2007 128.250.122.91

WEST COAST EAGLES - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Eagles_FC"

22:49, 18 April 2007 138.130.53.25 (→Lyrics)
22:50, 18 April 2007 MartinBot (Reverted edits by 138.130.53.25 (talk) to last version by MartinBot)

PUSSYCAT DOLLS - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussycat_dolls

07:37, 16 April 2007 Mjdieter (→Empowerment messages)
10:28, 16 April 2007 Design m (Undid revision 123192522 by Mjdieter)

THE PUBLIC SPHERE - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sphere

07:32, 16 April 2007 Mjdieter: (→Overview and historical development)
21:59, 18 April 2007 86.41.217.49: (→Overview and historical development - deleted irrelevant reference to thomas apperly.)

Google Will Eat Itself

I was just showing the GWEI project in the Monday workshop and read this on Geert Lovink's net critique blog:

"Google Will Eat Itself (http://www.gwei.org) announced that their domain gwei.org is now fully censored on all Google Search-Indexes worldwide.

What a scandal!

The idea behind GWEI is simple:

Google Will Eat Itself generates money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money GWEI automatically buy Google shares. GWEI buys Google via their own advertisment. Google eats itself - but in the end “we” own it. By establishing this autocannibalistic model we deconstruct the new global advertisment mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-based economic model. After this process GWEI hands over the common ownership of “our” Google Shares to the GTTP Ltd. [Google To The People Public Company] which distributes them back to the user(clickers) / public.

Let’s break the silence and put a link to this project on our sites and blogs: http://www.gwei.org. Give Google back to people! GWEI is an interesting case how to imagine a new global public sphere. How to reverse privatization and rethink a truely public Internet without the Googles and Yahoos."

The Google Masterplan

A paranoid, though provocative, short film on Google and information aggregation. Though not covered specifically in this course, the concept of digital panopticism is probably closest to this position on surveillance and control, see Greg Ulmer, Profiling Machines: Mapping the Personal Information Economy (2004).

4 Corners, You Only Live Twice

The television program Four Corners on the ABC has a report on Second Life available to watch (or read the transcript) from here.

Is Second Life Ecologically Sustainable?

For later in the semester when we explore virtual worlds, from the blog Rough Type:

Philip Rosedale, the head of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life has been quoted saying: "We're running at full power all the time, so we consume an enormous amount of electrical power in co-location facilities [where they house their 4,000 server computers]. We're running out of power for the square feet of rack space that we've got machines in. We can't for example use [blade] servers right now because they would simply require more electricity than you could get for the floor space they occupy."

If there are on average between 10,000 and 15,000 avatars 'living' in Second Life at any point, that means the world has a population of about 12,500. Supporting those 12,500 avatars requires 4,000 servers as well as the 12,500 PCs the avatars' physical alter egos are using. Conservatively, a PC consumes 120 watts and a server consumes 200 watts. Throw in another 50 watts per server for data-center air conditioning. So, on a daily basis, overall Second Life power consumption equals:

(4,000 x 250 x 24) + (12,500 x 120 x 24) = 60,000,000 watt-hours
or 60,000 kilowatt-hours

Per capita, that's:

60,000 / 12,500 = 4.8 kWh

Which, annualized, gives us 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they're in the same ballpark.

<...>

UPDATE: In a comment on this post, Sun's Dave Douglas takes the calculations another step, translating electricity consumption into CO2 emissions. (Carbon dioxide, he notes, "is the most prevalent greenhouse gas from the production of electricity.") He writes: "looking at CO2 production, 1,752 kWH/year per avatar is about 1.17 tons of CO2. That's the equivalent of driving an SUV around 2,300 miles (or a Prius around 4,000)."

Tactical Media

From the lecture on tactical media, some references for those interested students:

Critical Art Ensemble - An influential art/activist collective founded by Steve Kurtz and Steve Barnes in 1986. Webpage features downloadable books on hacktivism, including Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas (1996) and Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media (2000).

Floodnet - a piece of software that uses a technique called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to stage political protests on the Internet.

Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT) staged a number of these so-called virtual sit-ins in solidarity with the Mexican Zapatista movement. In the same way that real protests are designed to bring a social or political issue to light in the public sphere, Floodnet is an attention grabbing form of tactical media – in this case, for the Internet rather than real demonstrations such as blocking city street traffic.

One idea behind this notion of the virtual sit-in is a belief that power operates differently in the network society and that traditional methods of protest are no longer suitable for the contemporary landscape of informational capitalism.

I/O/D 4: The Web Stalker - an alternate web browser (i.e. Explorer, Firefox, etc.) that offers a completely different interface for looking at HTML pages.


According to Matthew Fuller:

"The Web Stalker performs an inextricably technical, aesthetic, and ethical operation on the HTML stream that at once refines it, produces new methods of use, ignores much of the data linked to or embedded within it, and provides a mechanism through which the deeper structure of the web can be explored and used."

CarnivorePE - created by the Radical Software Group, this downloadable program is inspired by surveillance software used by the FBI. Carnivore listens to all net traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) on a specific local network and serves this data stream over the net to creative interfaces, called 'clients.' The clients are each designed to interpret the traffic in various ways, to visualise the information with unexpected and aesthetic properties.

In this manner, Carnivore operates as a platform through which artists can produce applications that re-present the data stream in unique and innovative ways (see Amalgamatmosphere, Carnivore Webcam Sniffing and Network Is Speaking).