Someone Searched my name!!!

Alright so this should be a short blog. *hold your applause haha*. I was searching through my google analytics report....Which is a site that tracks the trafficking sources, who is on your site, how many people go on it etc. There's a bunch of graphs and tables and percentages which are confusing to try to figure out... and I found that someone had googled my name and found my blog. It makes perfect sense, my name is all over the Internet. Someone had actually googled it though! My name which when you google it, isn' that rare! Someone googled my name, Monica Jonen.

About this time, I could feel a strong sensation of fear twisting in my gut. I was so scared and freaked out by the thought of someone actually finding my blog by searching my name that I desperatley tried to find out who it was. At first, I was like oh it has to be my best friend. Well after checking, it turns out they had no interest in finding me on the web! This scared me even more.

Some stranger out in the giant world of the web was trying to find me! Creeeepy. So after walking around for a couple of days with this reoccuring fear that some odd man was trying to find me on the Internet. I found out my mom had googled me to see what I had on the Internet. She was looking for saftey reasons and was dissapointed by how much I had on the Internet. I own up to it though, I guess I feel once it's out there, I can't do much of anything to get it back.

I dont know, what do you think about getting your information from sites back? Impossible right?

The Tacoma Art Museum

This blog should share the space of my writing class and Tacoma, not just my Internet Class. In that writing class we took a trip to the Tacoma Art Museum. I was told to practice my descriptive writing and thoughts about the affects of public space. Here's what I got, its pretty much prose too so don't expect context.

Lack of focus, unable to slow down. Ignorance, nerves unending. Suddenly boom.
The woman. She's struggling, hurting, hurting more and more as I watch her. I found him staring at her which originally peaked my interest. The more I got to know her though, the more the scared fear and emotions were evoked. Death, digging nails, a dead plump baby. Her eyes evoked, cried out to me. Asking me to engage with the murders. Asking why they killed her family. The should take her too. Put her out of her misery. She won't stop crying out to me. I stand in awe at this painting by a man and suddenly become fearful, is he a murderer too? I shiver, squirm, shudder and flee. Not before I read though. Pshh they say it's erotic. It's not. Her breasts are up in the air, her body bent back, her nipples exposed to the death seekers. There's nothing erotic about this painting. There's everything powerful instead.

This room is big and the giant walls have a high elevation ceiling. White with big spot lights. Giant posters with bold colors that talk of trade. Between countries and discoveries. People from India are on the walls. Weddings are on hold. There's tall ships and cine a mon plasted up on the galleria wall. What is trade? You have so much space to answer this question. Room to conceptualize, worlds, countries, people. This giant room invites global thinking. I like it, I think big and travel. I sail and visit India. I wander the positive and negative affects of trade all in this big room. Cargo ships of blue and black to elepahnts of transport. What do we give other countries. Anything?

What I've learned today so far.

In class, there were two nicely done in depth presentations. They weren't simple and quite lengthily, but I suppose that is the point when it comes to academia. New Technologies, technologies in Toyko (who are five years ahead of us techwise arg), the lone Communications professor critic of the Internet (what can I say writers are cynics sometimes), the attack on the blogosphere and the tracking of buses and UPS Trucks (*drifts off to the MIA song*) and smart mobs.

What I thought was interesting, but not surprising was the text gang. At first I laughed at the idea of it until the presenter said an incident happened where a girl wanted the leave the gang so she got beat up. This is an example of technology at it's worst just like the youtube video of the girl being beaten by a bunch of cheerleader preppies. *shivers* I am so glad I am out of high school.

Wifi was also presented as a new form of changing technology. It is positively cheaper and gives more access to people, but there is a huge threat and negative side to that the presenter failed to present. So I am going to use an example of my own life here about this. I was at a friend's house and she lives in a an apartment complex, well the party was going great and than a computer techy decided he wanted to hack the other people's wireless Internet in the apartments. This made me feel a little uneasy, nothing too tragic happened, but it made me think of my own wifi in my apartment. Is it secure enough, can someone hack into it use it up, run up our bill, get into my computer because of this drifting unsecured network??? Luckily my brother and I have a password you have to use to get on it. Still, there is the immense chance of hacking with wireless Internet.

Another unconnected point to wifi lol, that I'd like to point is the ridiculous argument against the blogosphere. Yes there are no limitations of what people can write, sure rumors turn into fact, and ya it's personal opinion. I however think that blogging is the conceptualizing of our world around us. If information is merely, data and knowledge is understanding. Than why don't we encourage blogging as the development of thoughts and personal opinion which helps us understand not only ourselves but all the data we get on a day to day basis. For example, this blog is me saying that yes I not only attended today's lecture, but understood and am intellectually thinking about what was presented in class. *lol I am not a suck up...noo lol* Seriously though, the lone critic was out of line in lambasting blogs. It's just a form of journaling, but only it develops community and while it has it's negative side affects. It's used for good by most of the people on the Internet.

Alright before I type a bazillion words and you get bored of reading this, I want to talk about something I am really excited about. Digitally tracking buss es and UPS packages. How cool is that! The fact that these are realistic things that are happening makes me squirm. Okay, let my explain my silly excitability. I ride the bus occasionally, because my bike is the only form of transportation I have right now, which is fine. But there was this one time..lol *not in band camp* that I was in the middle of Lakewood at night in the dark and standing at a bus stop. It gets better too, I had no idea if that bus was coming, if that bus was out of service, if I was going haft to find a new way home etc. It was the scariest moment in my life. There was no time schedule or anything. I know I am irresponsible, not the point. All I knew was it said 57 to downtown Tacoma and that's where I wanted to go. If I could see where the bus was somehow, I would have been much more at ease knowing it was coming to pick me up which it eventually did.

I could use another example of when I was waiting for a bus to go down to Olympia and it was an hour late! What! That's crazy you say! Well it was because it broke down and had to be repaired. Can you imagine the benefits of being able to let people know who are relying on that bus that it's going to be late and it's a 10 miles away waiting for a tire change. That would be amazingly helpful to the people. Just amazingly. I would love it if that technology was in place a few years from now. The transit system would be updated to the 21st century which it desperately needs.

Well those are my thoughts on today's presentations in class. Any questions? CommentS?

Thea's Park

Tacoma Culture

Today was a long interesting day that seemed eventually centralize around a theme. To be chronological, I started out making an amazing egg sandwich with salsa, cheese and scrambled eggs. Than I buckled down on my Internet Class homework for a few hours. After deciding I had ADD and could not focus since the Internet was just a click away. I went to a movie. I watched The Secret Life of Bees in the Grand Cinema of downtown Tacoma.

After walking through the cold, but interesting Fawcett Ave, I arrived to the small theater that only has I believe four or five screens. There was a bunch of retired old folk that were there too because it was the middle of the day on a Friday. Normally young college students are preoccupied with class, work, homework, etc. Not me though, I had become restless so here I found myself walking through a small volunteer run theater to see a movie I'd randomly decided to go see.

What ended up happening was me watching an emotionally heart wrenching movie that moved me to tears. I don't want to give away the story line, but lets just say it had to do with abusive situations between family, African Americans, racism, death and life. All set within a beautiful pink house in South Carolina and the 60's. I didn't expect the movie to be so powerful or intense. Either way, I am glad I went and saw it because it was amazing.

After coming back to the apartment and having dinner. I persuaded my neighbor who is a good Friend to walk with me to the Art Slam at the Rialto Theater. Which I found through FeedTacoma.com. I think we were both pretty impressed. For me, the art was wonderful, but the poets and spoken word that I found interesting. Just to clarify, the Art Slam was a bunch of artists putting together a short slide show of their work and than having 50 artists slide shows being shown. Anyways, the spoken word was composed of three African Americans and two Caucasians. Topics like hilltop being displaced and the minorities being discriminated against in the city were presented through spoken word. Slavery and the history of African Americans in this country were also put out there through poems. I was really moved by all of the art through film, paintings, poems I witnessed tonight. Tacoma for me has a lot of culture as for tonight. Overall, a night well spent.

Cyber Crime

I have to do a presentation in my Internet class next week on the book I read (World Without Secrets). Since we divided the chapters in the book between team members. I actually only read chapters 10 and 11 that talk about music pirates and data mining or Internet crime. I found these two chapters interesting and relevant what goes on today.

To go back in history though, the author, Richard Hunter, predicts the downfall of major record label companies will fall because of cheaper venues legal and illegal ways to download music from the Internet. One of my classmates has already written about the threat of illegal downloading in his blog about Illegal File Sharing. The itunes a dollar a song make less money than selling whole albums. However, downloading music from itunes by buying it only lasts for so long. Hunger tells us that, "If fewer CDs are sold in favor of single-song purchases, or if pricing pressure from digital downloads caused CD prices to drop, or if consumers don't really want all those songs anyway, growth turns negative (172)." The example used of music pirating in this book is Napster. Who was caught and convicted of illegal music downloading. His predictions about the music industry struggling because single song downloading was correct.

Buying music online through downloading does however benefit independent artists who are trying to get their music out there and who are unable to become partners with major record companies. Andrew fry talks about these independent artists in his blog, Support Independent Musicians with SongSlide.

In the other chapter, the issue of cyber crime is brought up. "The most important cyber-crimes, the most deadly cyber-attacks, are all about stealing information (Hunter 196)." Stealing credit card numbers, passwords, account numbers, and other information about you is easily sold for lots of money by cyber-criminals. How do we avoid viruses that steal our information and software that attack our computers? Well the author gives us a couple of tips to protect ourselves. " In particular, be careful with passwords, put a firewall on any Internet-connected machine, and don't accept e-mail from anyone you don't know, especially if it's got an attachment (Hunter 201)."

I am hoping I will be able to present these two topics to my class in the following week when I give my oral presentation. I think giving tips to my audience on how to avoid being attacked by a cyber criminals and raising awareness on how single song illegal downloading affects artists and major record companies is a good goal.

The Five Senses versus the Gorgeous Avatars.

There are five senses that keep me from becoming thrilled about a virtual vacation. Scent which ties things to memory. The aroma of foreign restaurants when you walk down the sidewalks of a down town. Touch, the feel of sand in your toes at the beach. Sound, the combination of people's random conversations and traffic or the sound of silence while waves crashing or birds chirping as your background. Taste, oh this is important, the taste of exotic foods or fresh salmon from the Pike Place Market. Sight, the massive scale of giant old trees towering over you and filling your vision with green and all the colors of fall. Sight, sound, smell, touch and taste will keep me traveling to new places and physically soaking in the feeling of freedom from home and the newness of a brand new landscape.
For this class assignment though, I will take a look at how people like to escape reality using the internet and avatars (which are extensions of their own identities) to go on a virtual vacation versus flying somewhere and exploring this earth. Utilizing the internet for a virtual vacation is a relativley new concept for me if you couldn't tell. I love traveling and going on vacations, so this virtual network will be interesting for me to grapple with.
I have a small guess that the idea of social virtual worlds came from interactive video games. I was talking to an avid World of Warcraft gamer recently and I asked, "So what is the purpose of the game?" and he replied without two seconds of thought, "It's a social network." I was kind of suprised, becuase of the intense point system and quests in the game. I thought he would have gone into a speech about killing zombies and defeating the enemy, etc. Nope, to him the main purpose of WOW was to be social with other gamers. Therefore creating a subculture that goes beyond chat rooms and forums. A couple of geniouses figured this out I think and decided to make worlds where people can become avatars and make freinds online! Two examples are IMVU and the Second Life. IMVU is a 3d virtual chatroom basically and is purley designed for socializing, while the residents in Second life are able to go shopping, visit places, buy land (with Linden dollars) and dance in clubs. In other words take a vacation from reality while entering into another dimension.
I have had an avatar on IMVU before a long time ago and it added a 3 dimensional aspect to an otherwise one on one chat on IM. I took a daring leap into World of Warcraft this weekend just to see what all the hype was about and I found that this third dimension that is added to relationships gives socializing an exciting new purpose. The people I was interacting with and vacationing with were killing zombies, wolves, flying dragons and going into all sorts of weird places. On the Second Life, people can shop for things they can't afford, create images of themselves that they wish were true and talk to people they don't know but consider freinds.
If I were to take a virtual trip, I'd gather all my freinds on facebook and myspace tell them to go on Second Life or IMVU or WOW all at the same time, so we could add another dimension of fun and creativity to our freindships. Build on what is already true in reality, instead of start to base my life off of the life within my computer. That's just me though, the real world will always call me and I will think my face to face foosball games with freinds will always bring more joy and excitement into my life than typing up virtual interactions.

The City

While I was out to dinner with a Friend of mine tonight, she mentioned over Chinese food in downtown Olympia that your safety is compromised in big cities and if I lived in downtown Tacoma or downtown Seattle, I had better watch my back. I wasn't offended by her comment as much as I didn't know how to respond to it in the way that expressed my opinion of people's misconceptions of cities. So that is why I am writing this blog on a sleepless Friday night so I can examine my views on their views of the city. Make sense?

She along with my family and other Friends that live in suburbia like to keep me informed of the dangers of the "City". In my Urban Studies class, "Images of the City", we are learning about the different representations people get through media, literature, art, film etc. Negative images of crime, poverty, gang violence, drugs and immorality, more specifically race and minorities.

In sharp contrast to popular media are Tacoma's positive community building blogs. Exit133 and FeedTacoma, both put out happenings in the area that aren't related to crime or violence or race. Instead they focus on positive change, change people want in the city, local stores and local events. Of course they aren't mainstream enough where my Friend down in Oly will know of Tacoma's community nor will my mom's view of Tacoma will drastically be changed. But what if they were aware though of these blogs? What if these blogs were as big as king5 news? Well for one thing, the suicide rates would go down. I swear I get so discouraged and sick by watching the news because it so full of crime, murder and death, it depresses me to no end. That's another problem for another blog though.

Seriously though, if these news broadcasts picked up some of the stories that these local Tacoma blogs pick up, people's views would start to change. I think people would start to see it on their own level instead of as a place they can easily look down upon. Cities are a beautiful place to visit and explore, but the idea of living in one repulses people. I don't blame them, the constant noise pollution sucks, but I don't feel that cities are all crime and violence as they are portrayed to outsiders. I have lived in Tacoma for two months now and while my inner fears sometimes take over, my trips to Stadium Thrift way are pleasant. The Sunday service at the Presbyterian church was full of welcoming people who weren't out to pick my pocket for offering. lol.

What I am trying to say is that it's extremely shallow to label a place a certain thing until you have gathered enough of your own experience there to gain enough evidence to support your claim of that place. In other words, don't be judging unless you've walked a mile in your own shoes in the city.

Feed Me Tacoma!!!!!!

On Monday, Kevin Freitas came to my Internet class and talked about feedtacoma.com. What is it you ask? Well a farely simple news feed from Tacoma's bloggers, personal and built up websites that relate to Tacoma. The overall purpose? Develop community and bring people together which casts a positive light on Tacoma's community. Unlike exit133.com, there are no ads, moderators or financial profit.

Who keeps comments moderated? Kevin told us that since Tacoma has a relatively small town feel, the fear of becoming known in public keeps people from flaming. The site is also self moderated by the site's users.

How come there are no ads and business profit? Well you have to a brain scan on Mr.Freitas to answer that question. No, I think it's because community is the most important thing. The creator didn't need site profit and the site is like a "Utopia". Just like a park, there are no billboards, commercial greed or signs of advertising. feedtacoma.com is a place for people to mingle, gossip, stay updated with the community happenings and than connect in the real world.

While Kevin says, this site acts as an equalizer for citizens. I would like to argue that point. While this is a public feed, it's condensed to bloggers, commenters, Tacoma business etc. People who are avid Internet users. Which you could say is just about everyone nowadays. Except for the poor that actually live in the city who don't own laptops. I see feed Tacoma's contributers as urban professionals educated or middle class. Deep within the heart of the city, Tacoma has many poor citizens that are excluded from this virtual community.

However the positive aspect of this is that when virtual community seeps into the physical community, everyone benefits. I was impressed with the chalk off Friday community that began from feed Tacoma. Anyone can join in on that and it happened in downtown Tacoma, not on a particular website.

This is all of course through my critical lense that I am seeing this, but it's defiantly something worth talking about.

A CyberPunk's opinion on the financial world of CyberSpace.

I'd like to start my collective thoughts on e-financing with the topic of age. In my humble opinion, adults I believe are more interested in buying stock and have a greater need for managing multiple accounts than younger adults/teenagers do. Parents tend to have more loans, bills, accounts, stock and savings plans in general.

Now lets look at who uses the internet in general. I would say that I am more in touch with blogging, efinance, social networks, etc than my 25 year old brother is and I am a few years younger than him. So not only from my own expereince, but I think the general consesus is the younger you are, the more internet savvy you are going to be. Are young people more careless than older people though? Who has a greater need for banking and buying stock? Why is everyone willing to put their financial status on the internet.

Well let's look at the tremendous benefits of banking, buying stock and doing credit transactions online. If you bank online, all your transactions are automatically updated or shown as processing unlike a once a month checking statement. You can transfer money from different accounts with a click of a button. You dont have to memorize an account number, but merely a pesonal password. It's easily accessible from your computer which means not waiting in line or getting out of your pajamas. I think that is the best advantage to online banking, not having to go to a bank to do my banking. Of course, online banking has reduced the cost of real estate for banks which is also a positive.

So these are some of the reasons why some people are so willing to do online banking despite the risks of identity theft. Maybe I am not scared enough, but online banking seems safer to me. Mainly because my account number cannot accidently drop on the floor and my debit cards/purse can't physically become lost or stolen if I am doing everything virtually.

Back to my beginning argument though that younger people are more interent savvy, but older adults need more financial organization. While mature adults are picking up on all the benefits of internet financing, young people are picking up on the accessibility to better stock options and loans i.e the responsibilities of being an adult. Buying stock online is cheaper than going through a broker, it's easily updated by the minute and anyone can trade. In other words, it's instant, almost free and unbiased. Now, no wander why people are so quick to do finances online.