一塊地 Piece of Land

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:

相信很多支持有機食品的人都是環保份子, 不知大家在上街買菜時, 是否都會自備購物袋? 之前在Daily Holas網站裡我說過根本不必花個幾百塊台幣去買美國製的購物袋, 現在我還是這麼覺得! 每個人有不同的看法, 但對我而言那就像追求流行, 不可否認地, 節能減碳/環保綠化已經逐漸變成一種(商業)風潮. 
購買, 就是一種消費; 消費, 就是消耗地球資源. 環保份子能做的就是透過行動去避免加速天然資源的殆盡. 阿姆斯特丹的有機食品會不經意地流露出環保觀念. 譬如說:可溶解的包裝材料.
用玉米澱粉製作的分解袋, 外觀比普通塑膠袋還清澈透明, 拿起來會有ㄑㄑㄙㄙ的清脆聲音;  環保包裝不但凸顯出有機食品的特色, 同時也吻合了消費者的環保訴求.

At last Friday’s eComm, Google Wave gave us a short product demo and a brief introduction about its Federation Architecture. Currently Google Wave is still at a preview stage and only a limited number of Google users are invited for hand-on testing. What Google Wave sells is its real-time communication collaboration. There are several technical features I found innovative about Google’s demo, but what seems the most inspirational to me is Google’s potential to collect online users’ real identity, which would be treated as a huge leap forward for Google’s business map.

常常搞不懂荷蘭人的辦事效率跟行政邏輯, 說真的, 就連荷蘭人也搞不懂! 還在台灣的時候, 為了跑文件常常跟學校抱怨, 譬如說: 辦簽證需要提供銀行存款證明, 裡面必須清楚列出簽證單位需要的各種資訊, 格式跟內容一定要達到他們(莫名又不統一)的標準, 為了一張紙把我搞到每天跑銀行哀求, 最後動用關係才拿到學校首肯. 在跟學校爭論的過程中, 他們也承認: "啊我們也知道你有困難, 他們(簽證單位)就是那樣要求, 我們也覺得很蠢呀!"
每個人都知道官僚主義, 可是沒有人可以解決, 荷蘭人應付的方式就是: 大笑就好!
 
(pic from here)

As a keen Facebook fan of Greenpeace, I am pleased to see how Greenpeace makes a huge leap of digital campaigns on Facebook. The Greenpeace Photo Contest is by far the only environmental campaign that connects Facebook community and the action for climate change- you need to change your profile photo in order to submit your photo for contest. 
 

Just as Dave Winer suggessted Tweeter's next advantage should be the making of news, last Friday Facebook launched Live Feed as a rivers of news which allows users to receive updates in a real-time chronological order. I didn't get a clue at the very beginning, when I logged on my Facebook and found out that new function. At first I thought it's a redundancy to have both News Feed and Live Feed, nevertheless, after comparion I suddenly realized how much information I had skipped in the old version News Feed because of its algorithm.  
 

Last week I took an excursion to a national park in Germany along with Steve. We decided to escape the very flat Netherlands and get closer to mountain areas which we are both more familiar with. One thing I didn't expect was that it was freaking cold out there and I didn't have enough gears to protect me from bone-chilly coldness. Other than that, everything was perfect: fine weather, decent affordable foods, gorgeous scenery, and we saved 40 Euros by taking sloooooow train back to Amsterdam.
Location: Saxon Switzerland (in Germany) and Bohemian Switzerland (in Czech)

Couple weeks ago i met Anna from a swing dance floor. The lovely australian girl told me that she's going to lead 350 people to dance Charleston in the mesuenplein on 24 OCT.  I was planning for being part of the 350, alas, it seems like I might be travelling in Germany at that time.
  
www.350.org provides me more information of what I can do if I end up in cities outside Amsterdam. I see a global wave of self-organization for the concern of climate change. Many years ago Petra Kelly referred to Joanna Macy and said that the primary goal of Green politics is an inner revolution, it is "the greening of the self." Yet in our current 2009, the revolution is no more inner and self. Part of the reason is because of the Internet, and the other part reflects a sad fact that climate change is no more consciousness but already a crisis now.

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.

Data visualization is a subject in computer science that deals with the use of interactive, sensory (audiovisual) representations of abstract data to reinforce cognition, hypothesis building and reasoning. In their words, data visualization is the graphical presentation of information, with the goal of providing the viewer with a qualitative understanding of the information contents [1]. We know data is abstract, but can we reagrd piles of books as abstract too? In the sea of knowledge books are physical, yet without flipping book covers and browsing book pages, they could be seemed as an abstract database.  
  
(pic found from here)