Tara McGowan's List: Psychosocial

• Rose Luckin, Professor of Learner- Centred Design at the London Knowledge Lab and a visiting professor at the University of Sussex, is working on a study examining the internet's impact on pupils' critical and meta-cognitive skills. “The worrying view coming through is that students are lacking in reflective awareness,” she says. “Technology makes it easy for them to collate information, but not to analyse and understand it. Much of the evidence suggests that what is going on out there is quite superficial.”
• This year, researchers at University College London reported the results of a five-year study into the “Google Generation”. When they examined the behaviour of those logging on to the websites of journals, e-books and other sources of written information, they found widespread evidence of “skimming activity”. Users viewed no more than three pages before “bouncing out”.
• their boredom threshold is falling.

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• “An avatar is your embodiment in virtual worlds and virtual game spaces,” explained Matthew Falk, an Indiana University researcher of what he and others call “synthetic worlds.”

• For Todd Schrivener, a superhero avatar named Shocking Blue helped zap away the worst despair of his life. 

   

   In June 2006, Schrivener’s wife, Becky, was diagnosed with breast cancer. A friend suggested Schrivener try the online game “City of Heroes” to fill his restless nights.
• People may develop profound feelings for their avatars, said Donna Russell, an instructor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who won a grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to develop Second Life as a teaching tool.
• You can watch a video clip of a virtual memorial service—attended by dozens of respectful avatars—for a player who died in the real world.
• Students at the University of Kansas School of Medicine learn how to prepare someone for surgery by logging onto Second Life and transporting to the hospital’s “island,” where an avatar patient awaits on a gurney.
• Librarians Bill and Diana Sowers—aka “Rocky Vallejo” and the vivacious “Cindy Elkhart”—built an island they named “Rachelville” that emphasizes children’s literature. The girl whose image and artwork adorn the site is their daughter, who died of leukemia seven years ago.

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• he world’s first use of the law to tackle eating disorders is broadly aimed at the media and fashion world, but especially at the websites and blogs of the so-called pro-ana movement.
• Last month a website that originated in France caused an outcry for encouraging children as young as 9 to embrace plastic surgery and extreme dieting in the search for the perfect figure.
• Fines of up to €30,000 (£24,000) and a two-year prison sentence will be imposed on offenders who “provoke a person to seek excessive thinness by encouraging prolonged restriction of nourishment” to the point of risking death or damage to health. The prison term is raised to three years with a €45,000 fine if the person dies.
• The law, modelled on legislation for abetting suicide, was tabled by Valérie Boyer, an MP from President Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement. Roselyne Bachelot, the Health Minister, gave it the Government’s blessing at the unveiling of a code for the media, advertising and fashion industry on “promoting healthy body images” and fighting anorexia.

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• The Miss Bimbo internet game has attracted prepubescent girls who are told to buy their virtual characters breast enlargement surgery and to keep them “waif thin” with diet pills.
• Competing against other children they earn “bimbo dollars” to buy plastic surgery, diet pills, facelifts, lingerie and fashionable nightclub outfits
• France, where it attracted 1.2 million players.
• The Miss Bimbo site was set up by Nicholas Jacquart, a French entrepreneur. He moved to Tooting, South London, recently and with a 30-year-old businessman called Chris Evans set up Ouza Ltd to promote the website in Britain.

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• As the pool of traditional summer jobs shrinks, tech-savvy young gamers are honing their computer skills to capitalize on growing demand for virtual goods and services.
• . Research firm Gartner Media estimates that by 2011, 80% of Internet users worldwide will have an avatar, making animated online personas as common as screen names. Such companies as IBM and Adidas have moved into Second Life, helping to drive employment.
• Here are seven young and successful virtual-world entrepreneurs.

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• an increasing number of colleges and universities are embracing it as a tool to reach students raised on computers and video games.
• Students don't sign up for a Second Life course, but they might be asked to use Second Life as part of a course. A student might attend a lecture or PowerPoint presentation in a virtual meeting room on their college's island. Or an instructor might set up a homework assignment in Second Life.
• "You can build something that's impossible or very expensive to build in the real world, then look at it and interact with it," said Dean Terry, associate professor of arts and technology at UTD, and director of the school's virtual worlds lab. "Because things like gravity are optional and you can't get hurt in Second Life, you can visualize things that you would not be able to visualize otherwise."
• "You can take risks that aren't safe in the real world and teach more complex subjects in three dimensions," said Colleen Lin, DCCCD's Web site content developer. "When you're resuscitating a dummy in real life, it looks like a dummy. But you can program an avatar to look like it's choking or having a heart attack, and it looks more real to the student responsible for resuscitating it."
• compares Second Life to a three-dimensional version of the World Wide Web

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• Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
• MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) are persistent virtual worlds falling within the fantasy genre, in which the player controls his or her character which subsequently becomes a part of the online fantasy world.
• 32 players was obtained upon contacting players in discussion fora, where they were asked to fill in a web-based questionnaire in English. A battery of 12 questions was tested dealing with the various aspects of relationship between the players and their avatars.
• The motivation to succeed is significantly stronger among younger male players (i.e. adolescents) and among those who play more intensively. According to Griffiths et al. (2004), the intensity of playing (measured in the number of hours per week) is also characteristic of younger, adolescent players.
• From the player's viewpoint, the avatar is a kind of individual overlap owing to which they may experiment with their identities.
• the focal role of so-called images in one’s psyche (e.g. Hillman, 1997, Kast, 1992), which are certain complexes around which fantasies and emotions resolve and which can be experienced as certain independent parts of one’s psyche.
• it may mean that the player does not perceive the avatar as something “more” but simply as a game mechanism, i.e. something the purpose of which is to reach something else, such as entertainment, social contact, self-esteem, and self-efficacy through success etc.
• it is younger players who tend to identify with (i.e. not to distinguish from) their avatars, while the younger the respondents were, the stronger the phenomenon.
• “immersion” factor shows a deeper interconnection of the player and the avatar. This factor connects imagination, daydreaming of the game and avatar with the emotional relationship towards it, which has support in the psychodynamic approach considering imaginations and emotions as “two sides of the same coin”
• Wolfendale (2006) implies the existence of a stereotype that the attachment to the avatar is something negative and that it concerns socially isolated individuals (or that it leads to social isolation).
• majority of “gender swappers” are male.
• Adolescents demonstrated the highest tendency to identification of themselves and their avatars, i.e. they had the highest need to perform well in the game.
• there is thus a possibility that MMORPGs provide adolescents with space to complete their developmental tasks, typical of this age. Adolescents are focussed on developing the feeling of their own competence, which is strongly linked to the feeling that the individual was an actor and that success resulted from their own skill and capabilities: the perception of one's own performance is thus more important when developing a positive self-assessment that others' opinions.
• the importance of the compensation factor decreased with age.
• Our study shows that the age is, at least to some extent, an important factor affecting the style of playing MMORPGs, since there is a significantly lower level of identification among adults than among younger players.
• among adults, the motivation to play MMORPGs is represented by something else than their avatars (it can be, for instance, the social dimension of the game, etc.). On the other hand, for younger players, the virtual character may be an important motivation factor, especially from the viewpoint of performance and success in the game, as in case of adolescents.

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• there is widespread awareness that information in some way is effecting a transformation of the social world, especially its economically advanced segments.
• all three realms of society—the polity, the economy and the culture—are, if not revolutionised, then at least subject to major principles of innovation.
• To be against the information society is to be against technology, against the economic development of one’s nation and the growth of that venerable Kantian ideal, a world society.
• The article, then, is concerned with establishing the need for a normative theory of the information society.
• cyberspace remains an area where normative settlements are almost completely absent.

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• Societal oppression, lack of rights, and the HIV epidemic were powerful reasons why gay men came together as a community in inner cities, which eventually became gay-identified neighborhoods, Rosser said.
• istorically gay neighborhoods appear to be disappearing, driven by high real estate prices, young gay people remaining in the suburbs, and greater integration of heterosexuals into inner cities. Achievement of civil rights also appears to play a role; young people in cities where they have equal rights may simply not feel the same need for community. Rosser noted that the changes are consistent with theories of social assimilation.
• n another study, Rosser has led a group of investigators to develop one of the world’s first online HIV risk reduction interventions, called “SexPulse.” A randomized controlled trial testing the effects of “SexPulse,” currently in progress, will be completed later this year.

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• he thinks of the friends she's met online, the people she's connected to and bonded with on sites like Second Life, Facebook and MySpace.
• But virtual worlds - where people create computer-generated representations of themselves called avatars and play games, build societies, and meet for chatting, parties and more - also encourage deep, I-feel-like-I've-known-you-all-my-life friendships.
• Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, which was created five years ago to study social behavior in virtual worlds. "This is a large part of our population putting stock into our online selves."
• ick Yee, also of the Lab, was a graduate student when he conducted a survey of 30,000 gamers that found that nearly 40 percent of men and 53 percent of women who play online games said their virtual friends were equal to or better than their real-life friends.
• Howard Rheingold, the critic and writer who is credited with inventing the term "virtual communities,"
• Colin Trethewey is a spokesman for Weblo, a virtual world where people can buy and sell every property on Earth with real currency. He tells of one of Weblo's stars, who is a woman living in a small town on Canada's west coast. In real life, she's isolated by her location. Online, she's the mayor of 50 major cities, including Pittsburgh.
• "Friends online seem to be less conditional. They tend to give you honest, unconditional advice," Christina said in an e-mail interview.
• "My avatar doesn't have any injuries. She doesn't get hurt when she falls down," O'Keefe said, quickly adding that she doesn't present a false self to her online friends. "I'm just as real out there as I am out here."
• Kimberly Young, a clinical psychologist who teaches at St. Bonaventure University and the director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Pa. "Already, we see people engaged more with their BlackBerry than with each other when they go to bars, dinner or anywhere."
• Rheingold said that even if online friends don't become best friends, there's a benefit to building a "portfolio of weak ties." When you experience something traumatic, he explained, like losing your home, you're most likely to seek shelter from one of your closest friends or relatives. But when you lose a job or are seeking a mate, a sizable network of weak ties can come to the rescue.

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• HomeNetToo is a longitudinal field study designed to examine the antecedents   and consequences of home Internet use in low-income families. Funded by an Information   Technology Research grant from the National Science Foundation, the project   began in the fall of 2000, when 90 families were recruited to participate in   the 18-month study. Families agreed to have their Internet use automatically   and continuously recorded, to complete surveys at multiple points during the   project, and to participate in home visits during which basic instruction on   how to use the Internet was provided. In exchange, each family received a new   home computer, Internet access and in-home technical support.
• Does Internet use affect children's psychological outcomes?
• the HomeNetToo project we focused on two types of psychological outcomes:   general affect and feelings of self-worth. More time online was associated with   less negative affect, but only during the first three months when home Internet   access was still a novelty. More logins were associated with more negative affect   throughout the trial, possibly because they indicate interruptions in Internet   activities. Feelings of self-worth began high and remained high. Using the Internet   had no effect on these feelings.
  

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• we consider virtual worlds to be computer-based simulated environment where users interact with other users through graphic or textual representations of themselves utilizing textual chat, voice, video or other forms of communication.
• through this forum we are contributing to the development of specific space within the scholarly and creative communities for discourse on the wide variety of topic areas that are involved in virtual worlds research, including history of virtual worlds, cultural and social theory, quantitative research, qualitative research, virtual ethnographies, pedagogy, education and virtual worlds, development, experimentation, ideas and the intersection of virtual worlds and society.

• Co-Founding Editors:

   

  Joseph Lopez & Jeremiah Spence
   Journal of Virtual Worlds Research c/o ACTlab Department of Radio, Television & Film
   1 University Station A0800
   Austin, Texas 78712-0108

   

  Email: contact@jtlopez.com

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