GIST

 I view Frankenstein as, among many other possibilities, a tale of the effect that perceived ugliness has on the individual. Victor is rejected by all who lays eyes on him. He is not only hideous, he is repugnant and horrifying. Even Frankenstein's family, his rightful family as the creation of Frankenstein, does not accept him. Individuals who are isolated from society because of their differentness suffer great psychological turmoil because of it. This made me think more contemporarily of individuals who are singled out for physical defects such as cleft lip, dwarfism, down syndrome, and the distress it must cause them.

 So far, our conversation on gender and information has left an impression on me that was quite different than the one I initially entered with. When it came to gender, I often did not realize how much of an influence our society has on what is appropriate behavior for a man or woman. I often believed it was genetic, and that the fact that men and women typically behave a certain kind of way was scientifically determined. After readings from Roughgarden and other writers, I began to realize that humans have a much more complicated code of behavior than other animals. Information on the other hand, I began to understand depended on who the intended audience was, as information is often delivered in codes that are coded to reach a certain audience.

I greatly apologize for this late post. I have lost the document I wrote notes in -mainly because I'm still getting used to macs.. and I just managed to find it. Here it is: 

My group did a two part performance that happened in and out of class. We all took on anonymous virtual personas and created a chat group about sex robots. Then we posted the resulting chat on this forum and asked the class to read it. In class we had everyone try to figure out which group member was each virtual character. The idea was that we could all be a totally different person online and class members would not be able to distinguish each of us. There were two flaws to this idea though. When given the option of who was behind the screen name, class members automatically looked to personal traits they saw in each of us to make the choice.

For our final presentation, our group (consisting of Maria, Julia, Katherine, and myself) put together a game of Apples to Apples using terms and vocabulary from the course. 

Apples to Apples is a game of association and definition. Each player is given seven noun cards and a stack of adjective cards lays between all of the players. One player turns over an adjective card and it is their job, for that round, to judge the noun cards that are applied to that adjective. For example, I turn over the adjective card "Virtual." Maria lays down "Serendip," Julia lays down "MMORPGs" and Katherine lays down "Batman." I choose "Serendip," because I think that best fits the adjective (although Batman would be a close second).

      While discussing gaming, I was interested in the difference between virtual reality and “meatspace.” Meatspace refers to the publicly shared physical reality of our society—it’s where most people carry out their daily lives. A lot of avid gamers seem to give up this reality, at least to some extent. But no matter how invested a person becomes in a virtual life, they can never fully escape the fact that they are still a part of the collective meatspace, and exist in this reality, too.

 Hi!  I realized that I never posted my notes from when we skyped with Michael Chorost:

Leading Questions:

·      What do we make of the idea of a public figure? Do we have privacy?

·      How tough will it be to integrate humanity with the internet?

Discussion:

 I was stumbling through the internet and I found this video:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13192077

This video basically talks about the third category of gender in Pakistan. While some Pakistani transexuals have been more accepted in the community, even working for the government, many are still excluded from society. The government recently installed a new gender category in the country, so transsexuals can have their own category.

All this talk about gaming led me to remember the term 'identity tourism' coined by Lisa Nakamura. Identity tourism is the process by which people assume an identity in the virtual world that is entirely different than their own. However, I want to challenge this notion, like I have before, of having this very distinct virtual world where the rules of 'real life' do no apply and where everything is fantasy. Though it is easy for people to assume online identities that are different from their identities in meatspace, identities created online still take their roots and affect the 'real' world. My point is that it is impossible to isolate online identities completely.