#ohyeah?

Jan Hammer Group - Oh,Yeah?

As I read Chapter 3 in “From Counterculture to Cyberculture”, more specifically the Communities of Consciousness section, I can’t help feel this urge of contradictory behavior coming from the people who abandoned the normal, bureaucratic style of society, to create their “back-to-the-land” societies. We understand these people have a rightful problem with the way government and big businesses were operating at the time, but the way they siphoned themselves off into small communities that seeked to enhance, for the lack of a better term, themselves with the use of smaller technology (mainly in the form of LSD, peyote and rock ‘n roll). The reason why I find this so contradictory is that these people who created this new civilization were economically stable and well-educated white people. That sounds very similar to the problems that were apparent when discussing government and big business. One quote that helps support my point is found on page 76 that reads, “Even as they imagined themselves to be colonizing new social frontiers, many New Communalists recreated the conservative gender, class, and race relations of cold war America.” The book keeps listing reasons why these small communities literally did not advance anything in terms of breaking away from the boundaries set by the government and society itself. Despite what Siva, the female resident of New Buffalo thought, these communities still had gender roles as it is apparent in this humorous quote, “A girl just becomes so . . . so womanly when she’s doing something like baking her own bread in a wood stove. I can’t explain it. It just turns me on.” Men worked the land and constructed the buildings while woman made sure the water was safe to drink. The author finishes this section by explaining that though they lived upon land that formerly belonged to farmers and laborers (they did), appropriated the same image of the working-class (they did) and used education, money, and technology to build these communities (they did), these “refugees” saved the bureaucratic society from itself by trying to attain a higher meaning. It seems that these New Communalists who set out to create a better society got too wrapped up in their psychedelic dreams of a better society that they never realized how similar it ways to their old ways of life.

Today Sean showed us a very interesting and intriguing video in class. The clip went over different copyright laws and loopholes per-say.  I thought the video explained a lot about the different copyright laws and the speaker when over a lot of the different things that cannot be copyrighted. Her biggest topic was the issue about fashion designers not being able to get copyrights to their designes. Like hair cuts, fashion designes do not qualify for patents and copyrights. She also talks about how other countries are trying different things to make it so that people cannot "knock off" higher end brand name clothes. In all the fashion designers themselves say that their revenue has not been affected too much because the customers that buy the knock off items are not their customers and a knock off will never be the original. I dont believe that knock offs are a good thing but they can also be looked at as a good thing. When a knock off is made it can make that specific fashion available to someone who has less money and can keep that fashion alive. In my opinion if the market for high end clothing is not affected then I dont think they should enact a copyright law against knock off clothing. 

This past class we watched a video of a speak named Dan and he provided us with a lot of information that had to do with peopleʻs performances in relates to incentives/rewards. He discussed a lot about how people donʻt necessarily do as well when there is a reward after they complete their job, and I found that very interesting. Although all the information he provided and statistics he used from the different Universities I could not wrap my head around the thought that people do worse when there is a reward after the complete the job or task at hand. I was always under the impression that people who know there is a reward after completion would do a fairly great job because of the end reward. The fact that he brought up people who got self sufficient rewards upon completing a task provided better work was very puzzling to me. I could not believe how much of a better job things could be done when people are given a different form of achievement. After watching that video it made me think a lot about how different companies I have worked at did reward systems and special achievement systems. I started to realize the points that Dan had made actually were very true, people find a more self reward if they achieve a certain goal that provides a self reward compared to an actual physical reward. People also take more time and effort on their task when they are not distracted of achieving a prize because they are narrow minded in just getting the award compared to working with the task at hand. I really believe this video had a lot of similarities to our past reading.

According to the reading I found it interesting the difference between cinema, and actual interactive games. According to the writer he believed that with cinema there was no way a person can be considered interacting with the cinema because no matter what happens the end will be carried out the same. The person viewing the cinema will have no control over what happens thus their emotions are not involved with what is going on. Unlike video games we dictate what the end result will be, we are the ones that decide the fate of the ending. We take the time and use personal emotions to make decisions. We have played different games in class and I have noticed with the different games we played it created more insight for us in how we play games compared to watching something and having no control on what happens. As a participant in watching a cinema or playing a video game these are two completely different things. Because of the amount in interaction in both along with the personal emotion a person feels both do completely different things like I have mentioned. I believe interactive games will always have one up over cinemas when I comes to interaction, although cinemas are trying to evolve the type of interaction between the move and the people through 3d stimulations it will never have the same emotions as interactive games.

From the reading this past Thursday, I really got caught up in the game that the author mentioned: Chore Wars.  Honestly, I find this game to be somewhat silly for adults to take part in the reason being that they should not have to play a game to do chores that they should be doing on their own.  Yes, it does seem extremely motivating for children but for adults I think it is something that we would get tired of faster than you can say the word "chores."  I do not intent to insult those who may be interested in such games, but I do however think that we should be able to our chores (as miserable as it may be) on our own because we have been raised to do so and because we know that we have to.  I do agree that it may make doing chores a lot more fun but I think that doing my chores on my own and seeing the end result is a reward in itself.  For this reason I believe that we should be self motivators and that we should not have to rely on a gaming concept for the rest of our lives, even for the little things.