Virtual murder deserves..five years in prison?

Yahoo news which is a ridiculous source of simple attention getting headlines posted something kind of interesing. I don't know how relevant this is to the academic world or protocols, but my last post certainly wasn't either so here goes nothing.

Online Divorcee Jailed
A woman who was divorced by her husband without warning became angry, hacked unto his online video game and killed his avatar. How crazy is that! It gets better though, the man reported this to the police after learning his character was dead and she is now facing five years in prison and a $5,000 dollar fine.

Theres two ways you can look at this. One is completley hysterically and consider the story just
another weird yahoo news story. Another is that she murdered someone online which is like making a threat in real life and she hacked into someone's account. I remember making a non-serious threat to someone on a myspace blog in high school once and they took it to the principal's office. The principal didn't know how to handle it exactly because one it was outside of school and two I was young so the writing was prosey and ridiculous sounding. I was told not to do that again and watch what I post on blogs. Probably a good lesson to learn early.

In this story, however is an adult taking their anger out on another adult by being violent online in a game. Than again, there is so much violence in games that don't people regularly injure or kill each other's characters in games like Socom or Call of duty?
I could see the police convicting her of stolen identity online. The murdering of his avator not so much though. If it was flamming or nasty attacks made through email maybe.

People these days.

An Artificial status

I love facebook honestly, but the concept that things such as relathionship status and one lin-er status headlines are ridiculous. I recently changed my relationship status on facebook and five people commented on it. None of them heard the situation from me and none of them knew the context in which it happened.

The assumptions and interest made me think of how artifcial and clueless social networks make us. Instead of details, emotions and a real life context in which things happen. We are condensed into "Monica is......"what are you doing here". Her relationship status is either, "Single, married, in a relationship or it's complicated." That's it there are no other options. Even if we were given chance to explain our relationships or our statuses, our status in this world as it relates to others and how we feel about ourselves, is still percieved in their own way by others on msypace or facebook.

Of course that is the purpose of social networks to give an impression of oursleves to our freinds. It's condensed, artifical and out of context though! We have to gather the pieces and base our opinions off of assumptions. Not face to face communication or first hand expereinces with that person.

Than theres the other purpose of social networks is to network and communicate with each other. In other words, commenting equals endorphans and feelings of acceptance. These comments are usually one lin-ers or within hours of each other. Instead of calling up a freind and asking how are you? How are you feeling? It's a reply to your status which is unexplained and usually misinterpereted.
Yea, I am a little frustrated, but I dont blame my freinds. It's the social network technology that makes everything so non-emotional and artificial in our social lives.

Virtual Shopping

Since the Internet and I are so closely connected, its no wander I like to buy and sell online. My brother is worse than me, books and cds are constantly showing up on the doorstep. He doesn't order much of anything else online though. I think I may have bought a piece of jewelry once, but other than that I've pretty much kept to text books. Selling my old ones to pay for my new ones.

I think the public hasn't quite gotten comfortable with buying personable items through amazon or retail store websites. Which is ironic because through craigslist there willing to meet a perfect stranger to look at goods. Still clothes, shoes, food, appliances, I think these things will always be kept in our stores. For one if your in an apartment, you can't order anything too too large and a lot of people live in the city. The feel of shoes and clothes are never the same because one size doesn't always mean the same thing with different brands.

For me, I think I want to try out ordering shoes or maybe a jacket just to see if things actually fit. I bought two shirts online once and the sizing was so completely wrong. Of course I am too lazy to ship it back to them so my money is spent and I am left with two shirts that don't fit. So I am not comfortable ordering anything with a size associated with it because I don't want to waste my money.

However shopping online whether it's on ebay, amazon or any other retail site has it's advantages that physical shopping does. I like the fact that you can search for something and add it to my shopping cart. I am the kind of person that only goes into a store if I need one thing and I usually come out with maybe two things. So direct shopping online is nice. Of course the websites have their ways of trying to lure you into buying more than you need. Just like a regular store, but its much more personable. For instance, they wont just recommend things on special, but they'll look at what you've boughten or looked at recently and make the recommendations based of that data. Which is pretty irritating for me since related textbooks aren't usually going to be of interest to me.

I do however like that at the end, they add up the subtotals before everything is "rang up". You can return things without having the cashier call it a void and than have to embarrassingly as for a manager's signature on the void. So I worked retail for a while lol.

So like a very direct person like me, I like the advantage of shopping online, but there will always be things I will have to go the store for like groceries and shoes.

Where's Waldo

So in proving that I obviously don't do a good enough job protecting my privacy, I looked and found myself on the public internet. So when I googled Monica Jonen. The first result was my amazon profile, which shows what I've browsed before and what I am interested in buying. I wrote a review for a teapot that I bought too, which it shows. Oh wow, not very exciting since I mainly order my textbooks online.

The next result is my blogger page! Yup, my profile that I have on this site. Which only gives out my location (a computer in Tacoma) and my general interests (movies/t.v/interests). So far not too scary. Although my picture is up on my profile, so that kind of gives away what I look like. Which has a link to my myspace page which is set to private thank you very much!

My favorite is the result after that, it's a company's (If you can call it that) website that sells salsa mix. I wrote a review for them and they me over in the testimonial's side.

Okay so so far, I like to buy things on the Internet and blog! The search results for me are pretty accurate actually! Mainly because I use my name and am pretty active on the Internet.

I am excited about the next few results because they are my published articales in the online version of The Ledger! The meet and greet and husky voices have my name under them because I wrote them! That's pretty cool.

There is also the letter to the editor in The Olympian and the mention of me in the Evergreen Echos.

My blog post about Steve Jobs is on there as a result, which is neat as well. Than a Friend of mine on facebook comes up, as well as my own facebook picture and tidbit. I love it though because they have the location of Olympia and I've moved! So they no longer have the location, nanner, nanner!! Well actually I could change that, but I dont want to because I feel like I am living the live of a ghost lol.

Myspace and Facebook give out my age and a picture of me and the state in which I live. Other than that, they are private profiles. I only accept freind requests from people I know physically.

Zillow.com I located my home in Olympia which was hardly visible since its in a bunch of trees.

My new home you can locate exactly since it's in the city. That is kind of creepy, becuase it's the actual location of someone's residence.

On intellius.com, my mom, dad and brother are on there, but my age is not! Surprisingly, I am the only Monica Jonen on intellius.

When I searched my commonly used user name. I found a lot more of my profiles. Diigo profile, youtube videos I added and my profile, a ton of progressiveU blogs I posted, twitter updates and my live journal blog. So I got a lot of results with my username.

Overall it was kind of weird to be able to see my profiles, my blogs and things I've been published in. Any random stranger is able to find out a lot of my own personal thoughts and daily happenings. I realized how much I do on the internet and that was kind of a bad thing. I am so out there, that there is no way of going back and becoming anonymous. Once my profiles and blogs are on the web, a trail is created and there is no way of completly deleting your identity.

I am sort of okay with this since I willingly put my thoughts out there, perhaps I'll say less about my location and day to day going ons. With livejournal, progressiveu, twitter, blogger, myspace blogs and facebook..I realize I have a lot on the internet about me.

Where do you get your news?

The future of newspapers is a grim one. News and journalisim will remain the same, but the way in which it happens will change. Online articales give jobs to reporters, but their news reports will be more accessible to more people on the web. The internet has taken down the newspaper business with two assults. Advertisements and Classifieds, the two money makers of newspapers. Craigslist defers people from looking at the small pictureless classifieds in the newspaper and draws people to an online ad with pictures and it's free!
Newspapers do have local news though which big news websites aren't as concerned with.


I think when the millenium generation makes its way in society, newspapers will only continue to suffer because we are so technologically savvy. Like in the EPIC movie, newspapers will only be for the elderly. I can't however imagine newspapers going extinct though, because of the demand from people in areas less city and more rural.

I work on the Student Newspaper, The Ledger, our adviser Niki works at the TNT (Tacoma News Tribune). At one of our meetings, she came in stressed because her coworkers were being offered buyouts and being layed off. She told us that the newspaper's classifieds couldn't compete with craigslist. They were losing money from classifieds ads. My future goals required some rethinking. Will I be able to be a journalist and work for a newspaper? Maybe I could work for newsource online. Publishing news through a online newsource.

The world wide web is capable of publishing updated news and providing it to you cost free with google news and MSNBC just to name a few. The cost a subscription to a newspaper is definatley less than the cost of getting news online. But you do have to own a computer with internet access or an iphone with internet access.


I am old fashioned in a lot of ways, just like I was in favor of the value of physical mail. I am also an advocate for physical newspapers. Not just for kindling which my family uses them for in the end. The newspaper is delivered once a day and therefore has more value to it since it's not at your command, like online news. Newspapers also mean day old news though, with google news or forbes.com, its updated every couple of minutes. All through the day you can read whats going on by the minute. Reading the morning newspaper is more like an event. Of course reading the school newspaper which comes out every two weeks is not as up to date, but more valuable because it is rarer.

Steve Job's worth more than 300 tons of gold.

On my weekly ride home with my dad, I was telling him about all that I had learned in my Internet class and he gladly told me his version of the personal computer history. Since of course he lived through it. We were talking about Steve Jobs and he kept emphasising that he is worth billions of dollars. I think because he could be a tad bit jealous. Just say'n.
I was surf'n around for news sites and got onto Forbes.com to read this articale. http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/03/steve-jobs-heart-tech-personal-cx_bc_1003jobs.html?partner=links appearently a citizen blogger reported that he had another heart attack and rushed to the hospital. This affected the apple stock. It went from $100 dollars a share to $90 some dollars a share which is supposadly 9 billion dollars. It went up again as soon as an apple spokesperson denied the faulty report. Wow.
Later in the articale, it goes on to say that Steve Jobs is worth more than the New York Yankee Stadium, 10 most valuable paintings on earth and the Space Shuttle Endeavor.
This all fascinated me because his income and worth is based off of something that was non-existant a hundred years ago. Its hard to imagine life without ipods, itunes, macs and personal computers. It existed though, strange huh. I just wander what new inventions will come about and how much their company's will be worth?