一塊地 Piece of Land

 
I found this posting from Google Reader's recommended items, as I was trying to figure out how Google Buzz works. Since Google has already linked my Gmail contacts to Google Buzz and people can automatically follow me unless I block them, I was able to see Marc's shared items on his Google Reader through Buzz. As a result, more than trial using Google Buzz, I also become a user of Google Reader.

This video is about the commercialization of the top number one portal site Yahoo! in Taiwan.
I've done this video for my Digital Method course. Stayed up three nights for my first production by the use of Wayback Machine and Sony Vegas. It's not well-made due to an extremely short less-than-4-day period for the whole video+writing assignment.


 

This week I read Ian Bogost’s “Videogames and Ideological Frames” (2006) and Gonzalo Frasca’s “Videogames of the Oppressed: Critical Thinking, Education, Tolerance, and Other Trivial Issues.” These two light readings (29 A4 pages in total) were digestible and inspiring. Both of Bogost and Frasca attempted to expand the role of videogames in our modern culture. By applying critical perspectives, Bogust focused on the political ideological framing presented in political videogames, while Frasca claims that videogames could indeed deal with human relationships and social issues. I find it interesting reading these two pieces together: Frasca argues for creating possibilities for educational and sociopolitical awareness via open-source game design, on the contrary Bogost reveals to his readers that how videogames design can be manipulated by political use.
The topic of gaming reminds me of our previous class discussion about virtuality and reality. I believe Bogost had noticed the relativity because in his article he used ample real-life experience and empirical-based theories to support his argument for the metaphor of visual rhetoric in those videogames. Meanwhile, Frasca chose to ignore the line between virtuality and reality—he believes that the ‘simulation’ that forms games has always been presented in our culture, as a type of representation of civilization. I consider Frasca overly expect the possibilities of ‘the possibility of change,’ which he referred from Augusto Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed” as an experiment between actors and audience to foster their critical thinking. Here I quote from Rob Shields’ book The Virtual:

For the past decade, cybersphere has played an important role for activism(as cyberactivism). The 30 November (N30) protesters against the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999 denoted the significant use of the Web to organize, publicise and mobilize[1]. As a social media addict, I have been following environmental protection groups (EPGs) on my Facebook and Twitter which made me ‘a virtual environmentalist’. More than a passive news feed receiver, I hope to understand the cyber activism of radical EPGs, such as Greenpeace and the Friends of the Earth, which mainly aim for donations and volunteerism for their operations.