RIP Google Glass?

GoogleGlassGoodbye

Today, I received an email from Google Glass, telling me that it's over! Here's what they had to say:

and I am also posting the 'memories' file they sent us - 'Volume 001 as they put it (how many volumes are expected?!). I will write a piece about this over the next few days, but what I find most fascinating is the sense in which this may be seen as a failure by critics. Certainly, we expect anything new to stick around for a while - even though we change our iPhones every couple of years hmm. Ok, well, maybe Google Glass for 2 years isn't so bad - but it's only been 6 months or so in the UK. That's a bit too brief.

It will still work of course, just no further development. But, so what? Does that matter? IT does enough as it is is and I can't imagine needing much support. Although, my first Glass did break due to overheating and the reflective foil of the projector bubbling up and rendering it unusable. The did send another one though, quickly. hmm, I don't know how to feel. Abandoned? Let down? Disappointed. Or, the owner of what will become a cult object - the first wearable camera, kind of.

Truth be told, I have had nothing but fun with this device, and the people who have tried it out have loved it. Here's the video I made from the IAAF World Junior Championships last year. This was typical.

So, I think I will stick with Glass for a while, but then RideOn just contacted me about these. Next..

International Drones for Research Network

This week, I've launched the 'International Drones for Research Network', an initiative that emerges from my thoughts around Project Daedalus, but also from the many conversations I have had with colleagues over the year about the utilization of drones for a whole range of research projects. Personally, I am curious to learn about new projects and want to share experiences and knowledge about how drones are developing and how they might be used. The network starts of as an email group, we will see where it goes from there.

The Secret Life of Passwords

This week, the New York Times published an article written by Ian Urbina, titled 'The Secret Life of Passwords'. I have been talking with Ian about this article for a few months now and a lot of research on his part has gone into this extensive, fascinating investigation. I am quoted in the piece a couple of times, but I thought it might be worthwhile publishing my entire responses to Ian, as a supplement. So, here they are, pulled out of emails, slightly edited for clarity.  

Dear Ian, what a very interesting line of inquiry. 

You are right, this is not something I have focused on specifically in my published work, but I have given some thought to this in the course of my research. In particular, I have two comments to make, one around the prevalence of data mining for passwords and the other related to the future of verification. Here are some thoughts which may or may not be useful. Feel free to quote anything or seek clarification, if useful/interesting.

I agree that passwords are a very interesting gateway to personal life stories and what we has been meaningful in our lives. I think we could quite reasonably say that the passwords we choose relate very closely to the things that matter in our lives. They are our secret autobiographies.

Unfortunately, mattering is a problem vis a vis security. This is because what matters to us, increasingly, is also embedded within our extended digital lives. Consider an anniversary, the date of which could be tagged in Facebook. Previously, someone might have used an anniversary as their password - perhaps their mother's birthday - but these dates are much more public now and so these meaningful passwords are much less desirable. In fact, if you look at the most secure systems, randomized, temporal, unique codes are the preference. The best passwords, it would seem, are those which are devoid of any meaning and impossible to guess.

Furthermore, it has become preferable for these passwords to be valid only within a fixed temporal period. The platforms which host our content ask us to change them regularly, sometimes every time we login, as is the case for things like online banking. In this sense, the concept of passwords as being closely tied to what we care about is disappearing, as the number of places where we need to verify who we are expands. Instead, verifying ourselves is becoming a matter of series of having a unique string of zeros and ones - almost like our DNA -  as more and more of our semantic selves is shared online. It seems that the more public we become, the more vulnerable we are.

So, in terms of the future, I think it is very interesting to reflect on present systems of verification, beyond passwords. For example, the Captcha verification system utilizes a kind of primitive Turing test to verify we are human, by requiring us to demonstrate we can understand letters, words and place them alongside each other. Yet, even here, one can envisage improvements that, for instance, take into account our character on a computer - how fast we type on the keys, the pressure we exert on them. This kind system would get closer to something like a unique digital signature.

Did you see that Google just acquired SlickLogin - which verifies id using sound waves? That's a nice example of how I think passwords will become a thing of the past - in your terms - part of our digital memoirs. I think one crucial element of this debate is the fact that passwords have, for a long time, been chosen on the basis of what we are able to remember, so they do, as you suggest, access aspects of our personal psychology in a very intimate way. What we choose is closely tied to our memories of the things that mattered most to us.

This is changing also as verification becomes a matter of biometric measurement. Already, the iPhone 5 uses a fingerprint verification and we have been aware of retina verification as a way of authenticating ourselves for some time now. So, the erosion of memory as a means of verifying who we are is, i think, inevitable. After all, it is a matter of reliability and our memories are more fallible than our biology.

In terms of academic research on this, in my studies, I have come across a great deal that talks about personality and choice over passwords. For instance, some research discusses how, what we choose as our passwords, reflects what sort of people we are. We might choose meaningful people in our lives to whom we have emotional bonds, or we might choose things of which we are fans, for instance, a football player's name. In some cases, these choices may be relatively subconscious, they say something important about ourselves, even if we don't consciously identify them as such. What appears salient to us in terms of memory may just reveal itself to us, without much in-depth thought or consideration.

In my view, we have also to take into account two life courses when thinking about this. The first life course relates to our actual age; where we are and what we've gone through. If you are 13 and starting a facebook account, you are less likely to choose a meaningful anniversary than a favourite popband or sibling birthday perhaps. If you are older, your range of memories from which you can choose will be far greater. The second life course is our journey through technology.

If you have had to renew your work email password every 12 weeks for the last 10 years, you may well have exhausted your most memorable moments, but there again, what an interesting thing it would be to examine all of those passwords over the years and build a picture of somebody's life. I think it would be a wonderful window to their world and their lives.

We also have to take on board how universal passwords are being generated now by logging in with large social media applications, like Twitter or facebook. This again changes how we project our sense of history and identity - in this case we tie those memories increasingly to the lives we have lived within these social media platforms.

I hope some of this may be useful, but happy to dialogue a bit more, if that's useful.

best wishes,

Andy

Some additional quote sent subsequently:

"If passwords do become a thing of the past, there is something that we will lose as a result. Our daily encounters with personal memories, which have no place to be recalled elsewhere in our lives will cease to be present."

"Passwords are a window to what matters to us in a most personal sense. They are not like anniversaries or like significant public landmarks in our lives like weddings or children being born. Instead, they are the things that may matter only to us. And so it is a loss of intimacy with our past that we sacrifice by ceasing to remember."

"While their demise will not change the fact that these things will still happen to us, we may stop thinking about these moments in the same way."

"In some small sense, we will lose part of our selves and, as a result, we will need to renegotiate our personal histories in the process."

Smart Cities, Smart Sports

My talk from the City Events programme in Paris this week. There was a lot of talk on alternative sports events, perhaps cities are tired of multi-sport mega events, which they don't own and can't fully exploit or get behind. Plus a little film I made of the BMX demo.

Project Daedalus

Ok, there are grants, and there are grants. This one is pretty, pretty, pretty, damn cool. We've called it Project Daedalus, after the creative father of Icarus, artist, crafter, mindful of technology's limits. Project Daedalus is an experiment into digital enabled flying technology. Myself, along with the truly amazing Abandon Normal Devices and Marshmallow Laser Feast won funds from the Digital R&D in the Arts programme, funded by Nesta, AHRC, and Arts Council England. Here's the one pager. And here's something MLF made with drones a couple of years ago. Mindblowing..

My top 10 digital platforms

This month, I was asked by All Media Scotland to collate my top 10 digital platforms. this is part of a series of top 10s they have done with media practitioners. I chose to focus on the things I have discovered in the last year or so, which are taking my practice in new directions. Here's my list on their website.  

Sport, Technology, & Social Media

This week, I was in Plymouth giving a public lecture on social media and sport. The lecture spanned wearable technology such as Google Glass to virtual reality simulations.

Google Glass Envy

Some old guys consider their relevance when confronted with the next generation

#LoveHE + Love Social Media?

Actually, it's not compulsory to love either, but if you work in HE and want to keep an eye on some of the latest innovations in social media + creative technology, then join this new Social Media News Jiscmail group I just set up. I've created it in the hope that it could become a vehicle for me to learn about new platforms, but also share info about new apps that are out there, which can be used. I'll collate any list of apps periodically and locate them on a webpage somewhere, so that the knowledge is open and out there. In the mean time, if you'd like to keep one ear to the ground on social media and its use within higher education or research generally, then join the group. Its value will me made by its members, but I'll send through post from time to time about cool new stuff.

To Tweet, or Not to Tweet?

This year, I've joined the AHRC Peer Review College and for the first time, it is publishing a column by members within its newsletter. Mine was the first to be published and here it is...

To Tweet, or Not to Tweet?

By Professor Andy Miah Creative Futures Institute University of the West of Scotland

For AHRC Peer Review College

In December, the LSE held an event about the future of academic impact. One chunk of the discussion was dedicated to social media and it made me wonder what A&H researchers should be doing today, to prepare for tomorrow. While a lot of the conversation was about how social media can promote the reach of research impact, I also want to claim that it is fast becoming a primary vehicle of research development.

I receive more invitations to speak and collaborate via Facebook & LinkedIn today than I do by email. I find more resources through Pinterest and Google Scholar than I do via my library. I meet more people with whom I share common research interests through Twitter than I ever did at academic conferences. I co-author and edit university documents in Google Drive saving hours of time spent sharing versions of drafts, sometimes working in real time on one document with over 10 people. I am also one of those people who has switched from Endnote to Mendeley, preferring the convenience of a multi-platform software, which I can install onto my home machines as well, without having to go through university IT. By the way, did you see the BBC article recently about bringing your own device to work? ‘It may be coming to a university near you, as more people want personalized, not institutionalized devices.

What about journals or conferences, I hear you ask? Are these not still primary vehicles of research development? Certainly, they remain important, but the point is that they are each increasingly being delivered by social media as well. Furthermore, I can digest a lot more because of these platforms. I no longer visit journal websites or receive email alerts about new editions. Instead, the RSS feed of the journal goes straight into my social media environments, as soon as it is published.

So what is next? The first thing to figure out is that there is no single way of doing this well. We each have to figure out how to use social media in a way that enriches our working life, but also provides some added value. That said, there are some smart principles worth adopting. Setting up an ongoing ‘future media’ working group will help you keep abreast of what’s hot and what’s not. Understanding where your peer community and audience operate is also crucial. However, perhaps the most important thing is just getting more people using it. Experience shows that social media is one of those things that requires practice to really understand why it matters.

This doesn’t mean that all academics need to tweet or use Facebook, but it does mean understanding that publishers, research, and our peer community now occupy social media in the way that we 1990s digital newbies occupied email. As the dull uniformity of email dies a slow death, there’s now the possibility of getting more done by figuring out social media and it is the variety, creativity and spontaneity of these environments that makes them appealing.

If this all sounds like too much trouble, then stop using email for a month or two and you’ll get a feeling of what life will be like very soon for the average academic who chooses to opt out of social media. If you’re ‘too busy to blog’, then you’re not doing it right.

Scotland on Sunday profile

A couple of weeks ago, the Scotland on Sunday published a 4-page profile piece about my work. It was written by the awesome Anna Burnside, with whom I've been in dialogue about my research for a few years. It's a really lovely article and a real privilege to have given so much space to explain what I do. It's certainly the most in depth and personal examination of my background, motives and interests. Here's the link to the full piece. The portait was taken by an amazing photographer called Ian MacNicol, who turns out to be (we think) the only Scotland based photographer accredited at the London 2012 Olympic Games. Small world!

How should we treat the tweet?

In the last couple of days, @kk and @Dutchphoto have tweeted links to Olympic activism plans for Vancouver 2010. Responses from their peers have varied, but there seems to be three primary modes of reading the performative act of tweeting. It’s either tweeted treated as advocacy ie. I’ve heard about something and, since I support it, I’m going to share it. Alternatively, it can be seen as a news service to something others may not find easily ie. I’ve heard about something you might not learn about through your own media sources, so I’m going to send it to you all as I think you should be aware of it, regardless of your position. A third option may be the vanity tweet ie. I’ve heard about something and if I share it with you, you’ll think higher of me.

Now, I’m not saying that all tweets are like this. Of course, some tweets are to friends and function rather like instant messaging as a chat device. However, I wonder if all re-tweets might be characterized by these three categories. The challenge, of course, is that readers cannot know for sure which act is being undertaken. So, when we tweet, perhaps twitter need to permit users to categorize the tweet as one of the three (or more).

Discuss.

Ai Weiwei, Google and China

Today, the headlines about Google in China prompt me to post something about Ai Weiwei out of respect for his troubles. He has been all over the BBC today, talking about being censored online in China. In Beijing during 2008, I attended an event with Ai Weiwei and Norman Foster, which was about the new Beijing airport terminal Foster had built in time for the Games. Back then, Ai Weiwei had recently withdrawn from his role in the Opening ceremony of the Beijing Games out of concerns about human rights infringements taking place in China. He was accompanied by Steven Spielberg, who was confronted with protests over China's relationship with Darfur, led by Mia Farrow.

Ai Weiwei is an artist activist, who has been in the limelight for China digital censorship issues for years. The Guardian has a nice editorial on his life.

So, to my thoughts on Google in China. As @CharlieBeckett put it on BBC today 'Google isn't a charity'. If China don't enable Google to generate revenue, then it's not a political act that it withdraws, but a financial decision.

Of course, what makes this newsworthy is not really the financial aspects of the story though, but the realization that global culture has not yet arrived. It has taken the foremost digital organization to prove this, but regardless of how you feel about the limitations of the Great Chinese Firewall, we may do well just to sit and reflect on that for a moment.

Finally, here's a shot of Ai Weiwei taking pictures during the panel debate in Beijing reminds me of his playfulness.

and for poetic value, a shot of the photo book created for the airport terminal. It's called 'Becoming' and consists of Ai Weiwei's photography of the new terminal.

The Media: An Introduction (third edition)

New book chapter published here on 'The Body, Health and Illness' with Emma Rich. Edited by Daniele Albertazzi and Paul Cobley [kml_flashembed publishmethod="static" fversion="8.0.0" movie="http://www.andymiah.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/MiahRich2009Media.swf" width="600" height="860" targetclass="flashmovie"]

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Abstract:

This chapter discusses media representations of health and illness and offers a description of the ways in which media habitually represent the body. Issues such as disability, eating disorders, body image, genetic engineering, sexually transmitted diseases, mental disorder, cosmetic surgery, drug cultures, abortion, fertility treatment, euthanasia, gerontology, and so forth, are within the general remit of this chapter. However, it focuses on three main issues as exemplary: ‘beginning of life’, eating disorder, disability and ‘end of life’ issues. These examples, it will be shown, urge  consideration of the kind of ethical principles which might inform media representations.

http://www.pearson.ch/HigherEducation/Longman/1471/9781405840361/The-Media-An-Introduction.aspx

London 2012 Creative & Digital Industries (2009, June 19, Manchester)

London 2012 Creative & Digital IndustriesManchester, 2009.06.19

Paul Newman Media City

5 BBC depts., 1600 jobs BBC Five Live BBC Childrens BBC Sport

Local radio, comedy, some news and current affairs

Peter Salmon, BBC North -    chief commissioner of Media City

Anne Thompson NWDA, Sector Leader Sport

Scale of Olympics ME: numbers of media are inaccurate. These are the IOC and Organizing Committee accredited figures 13k broadcast, 7k print. But in Beijing, you had another 11000 media present and many more without accreditation from the official broadcasters.

CompeteFor -    main mechanism to receive contract opportunities -    must be registered and published

Claire Stocks (Editor, Olympics, Sport Interactive) & Tim Plyming, Chief Executive, Digital Olympics BBC Sport

Beijing 2008

Digital Olympics

4.5million visitors to website each day 2million of them looking at clips

2004 – Athens 2.5million live streams

2008 - Beijing 38-40 million live streams

Digital Olympics -    bring all parts of technical development to crecendo in 2012 last 3 Olympics have been described as a digital games, but nobody has really delivered this yet

we have a unique timing clash – switch off of analogue

Digital Britain provision of 2mbps broadband in every homoe by 2012 raise awareness of digital content

30% of population happy wth analogue signal

audience expectation -    extended choice, immediacy, interactivity

Beijing Tv – 74% Online – 31% Radio – 15% Mobile – 2%

aspiration for 70% online reach

nbc Beijing 2008 -    first time they developed rich video services -    Beijing was biggest event in us history -    But rich digital services were complimentary

Sold out advertising target within a week of Games

Hours BBC put in can at last games Sydney – 300hrs Athens – 1250hrs, 4000 HD Beijing, 2750hrs, 4000 HD London – 5000hrs, 5000 HD

How connect audiences across all platforms to this HD content?

3 phases towards 2012 1.    build up: news stories 2.    2011: countdown phase – cultural Olympics, torch relay, music festivals 3.    2012: programme of events leading to games time. ME: but what about Games time as a distinct phase? How can you integrate non-sporting dimensions?  How involved with non sport depts. Of bbc be with other content

Pulling all content together ME: but people don't want a distinct platform, they want you to allow them to pull it into something else, like Facebook

Legacy from Olympics – an integrated platform for post Games events

IPTV -    2012 first IPTV Olympics

Mobile -    in Beijing, followed live text commentary

ME:  what about street reporters?

Unless got a high end unlimited device, you’re not really using mobile for video

Audio might be the main story for mobile, not video

Radio (DAB)

Live Sites -    interactive services, interact with mobile, Bluetooth download zones

ME: are there plans to deliver navigation and orientation content to mobiles, rather than produce print material?

Alex Balfour

25% of world online by 2012 (+44%) 17 countries will have > 60% broadband penetration by 2012, uk 58% to 74%

people having conversations online Mobile trends: - mobile penetration 100% in Western Europe

early adoption 13.5% vs innovators 2.5%

8 yr cycle to get to 60% penetration

simple new media model 1.    new media products and services (help efficiency or cost effective) (eg. ticketing, education programme) 2.

put out on YouTube, Flickr

ME: if you are in the 2.5% of innovators, what platforms are you looking at for use in 2012? Is Twitter a clear commitment for instance? Are there others that you think people here should be working with, developing the applications, etc.

If not on Facebook, then we’re invisible.

ME: Can we engage people in Olympic park using digital? Eg. harnessing the Sponsors venues, which are the most prominent – or around pin trading, the other major games time cultural experience.

ME: how are you working with Olympic park infrastructure to make it more interesting?

Cultural Olympiad – artists taking the lead

ME: What are you not yet into, but which you have plans to be involved with?

Opportunities around venues, dressing buildings etc

Bring together digital content.

ME: you talk about dressing venues, have you found that you can talk to the individual sponsors who will be in the venue to build digital into their programmes?

My2012 -    technology platform and sponsor already -    channelled through social networks

Inspire Mark programme

Sponsors have expressed interest in digital

ME: Is digital the first way in history that sponsorship will enter Olympic venues?

To contact me: 200 word email

Debbi Lander

SKV Equivalent Advertising Cost

Q and A

www.londonolympics2012.com -    how can we get support?

Brand protection -    have been looked at and we’ve approved or raised questions

Anti-Social Media

Talk today at University of Leicester for Social Media: uses and abuses here's what I said, more or less.

[slideshare id=1646461&doc=miah2009antisocialmedia-090626170618-phpapp02]

#antisocialmedia By Professor Andy Miah, PhD

The rhetoric of social media appeals to notion of collaboration, sharing and democratized participation. Web 2.0, open source, and syndication are all exemplary concepts of new methods of exchanging content and platform development. Moreover, their collaborative architecture extends from developers to end users. Yet, the environment of web development and the symbolic capital that accompanies the use of the Internet remains a highly competitive and monetized form. These circumstances compel us to scrutinize the rhetoric of social media and to reveal the complex financial and experiential sociologies that underpin its trajectory. In short, to fully attend to the emancipating and subversive potential of social media, we must address ways in which processes of exclusion remain intact, despite the opening up of technology. This paper addresses such matters and investigates how the culture of participatory media can be both enabling and disabling of social collaboration.

Paper

In the early days, the Internet was rubbish. There were no pictures We had to write everything in code. We didn’t really talk to anyone.

Thankfully, we had games consoles. First there was pong, then space invaders Followed by all kinds of other stuff like pit fall, frogger, and manic miner (which, in retrospect might be seen as a prescient of the decline of industrializtion – the miner strikes happened a year later - but don’t quote me on that)

There were also incredibly complex adventure games, which required us to open doors and so on, like this one.

(just in case you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, you can Bing any of this #ungoogle)

By the way, one of the things I really like about twitter is its revival of @. Remember how everyone used this in everything to signal anything online?

These games were social Computing was social. We played games together We even played them outside, in the world with others

Then Games became anti-social We were told that they made us violent

So, we created new worlds through the Internet First, email (suddenly everything was @ this and @ that) Then chat rooms We made Utopias through Sims, Second Life, World of Warcraft Gaming and Internet came together

Games were social again, but in a different kind of way. The notion of sociability had changed.

It meant something else now.

At the same time, we were now mobile.

But again, In the early days, mobile was rubbish. First, there were problems of size Then problems of signal After this, we have the damn contracts

(we were even charged loads for very little eg. sms)

But then it got better. Things got small, more functional And then they became more sociable

The companies began to realize they can’t charge us for voice So, some gave us 3 network allowing skype to skype calls While others gave us other ‘freebies’, some of which were bad, others good. Lots of stuff will now be free.

We could then integrate platforms Mobiles could do more stuff Like use twitter Or play twitter games, like vampire.

We could even use very small apps for very big things eg. Twitter for Iran Democracy

so this is what happened but there is a dark side to this period and that’s really what I want to talk about

so let’s look at some examples

First Facebook - Friending and unfriending

Are you Interested 2.7m users (1.5% of current user base)

Second Life Paedophilia playground (2007)

Top-Down use, rather than bottom-up Flickr and 10 downing st

This week.... Habitat tweets Iran

Others are more subtle......

Dopplr – tells me how bad I’ve been

Worst (and best) of all my Wikipedia entry (I’m a big fan of Wikipedia) but my entry really pisses me off

So what went wrong? Well, nothing of course. It has always been at least as bad as it has been good. Anti-social activity has always been part of computing culture Spam, Viruses – even when my computer crashes, I sometimes think it’s just trying to get at me.

And for those who know me – as I expect most of you here – I champion the good way over the bad – though learn a great deal from the bad

But if we want to understand how to promote more good than bad, then we need to understand that concept better – what is social media?

Convergence just doesn’t cut it. Technological enhancement doesn’t do the job either. Something more profound is taking place.

To conclude “social media is a product of various trajectories across computing, gaming, mobile and online development, but most importantly our socialization into these cultures

If we fail to socialize, we will struggle to get social media”

Anti-Social Media (2009, Jun 26, Leicester)

Talk tomorrow in Leicester for Social Media: Uses and Abuses will mention the ZX Spectrum, Flickr, Dopplr, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Bing, iPhone, Second Life, The Sims, World of Warcraft, and much, much more.

Have you experienced anti-socia behaviour in social media environments?

http://www2.le.ac.uk/ebulletin/bulletin-board/2000-2009/2009/06/nparticle.2009-06-17.3587483528

http://usesandabuses.wordpress.com/

Digital Games Research Association Scotland (2004, Dec)

Digra ScotlandDec, 2004-12-14

James Carse – game theorist at NYU – ‘finite and infinite games’

Sutton-smith – the ambiguity of play -    seven rhetorics of play -    modern o    play as freedom o    play as development o    play as imagination and creativity (arts, media, science) -    ancient o    play as power and contest o    play as group identity o    fate and chaos o    play as laughter, subversion

prodigy90_med – advert on gaming – sport related narrative

relationship between ethics and gaming

aint misbehaving: play in organisations, matt statler et al, imagilab, 2002

Daniel Livingstone

AI in Games -    ai = adding behaviour or character -    not officially AI -    e.g. Guard State Machine o    player, guard, player doesn’t want to be seen by guard. o    Basic programming is using a ‘state machine’, not really AI, but creates illusion of AI. o    If we make a noise, guard will ‘hear’ and investigate

Natural problem solving systes -    brains, evol, -    immune syst -    artif o    – artif neural networks o    genetic algorithms (and evolstrategies) o    artif immune sytems

The Genome -

European Federation of Sexology (2004, Brighton)

European Federation of SexologyMay, 2004, Brighton.

Monica Whitty - cyber infidelity -    check 2003 paper in CyberPsych and Behav

Kitzinger and Powell (1995) story completion method Representations of internet infidelity Gender differences -    Taylor (1986) men judge husbands affair as more justiable -    Sheppared nelson, andreoli-Mathie (1995) men rate infidelity as more acceptable -    Women more unset by emotional -    Sex intercourse main act to case jealousy

Content analysis on hypothetical situation

Is it betrayal? -    51% betrayal as unfairful -    84% act of betayal

reasons for why scenario not infidelity -    just friends -    just flirtatious and fun -    it’s a computer -    don’t know person will never meet -    no physical sex -    person cheating with is of same sex

why wrong? -    emotional infidelity o    “it Is cheating” -    sexual infidelity o -    secrets -    cant have relationship wit more than one person o    “not prepared to ‘share’ him with someone else”

impact on relationships: -    aggrieved feelings -    break-up -    loss of trust -    revenge stories -    betrayer feels hurt/depressed/upset/anger -    less time together -    shock -    sexuality inadequate -    self-esteem

Griffiths and Young – online addiction

Conclusions -    limited to a hypothetical sitn -    cyber-affairs potential serious impat on relationship -    equal important given to emotional and sexual infidelity

Rules of acceptability in relation to online acts not clear defined. We know more clearly about this offline.

Louise Madden www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/ICT Locating t social in lang of computer mediated sexuality: case of sexualised spamming in realtime chat.

All messages are initial messages,

ME: what kind of utopia?

Trudy Barber

Brief history of technosex -    erotic imagery from China -    1734: mechanical vibrator -    1880: romantic novel -    1900: electrical vibrator for self tratement -    Rachel Maines: the Technology of Orgasm -    Devel of orgasm influ emancipation project

Vulcanisation of rubber – originally for industry, now a fetish -    unforeseen conseqs of technology -    covered in their technology of choice -    gas mask

new sexual expt with new digital technologies -    minority report: Pleasure emporium -    PVC Trinity – in matrix o    Whole of matrix is about fetishism (wanting to be in computer, computer in you)

Electro Stimulation -    electro sex pack

ET-312B – 100% Digital ecstasy -    programmes that can let you – Phaser – connect body to musical track that will let you decide when to have the orgasm -    technological determ or mediation?

Online we become subject and object of desire

www.fuckingmachines.com -    website for technology

mechanical metaphor (Brooke 1991)

technologies are mechanical ext of penis or clitoris

Master R’s Willing ‘victim’ – one of her subjects, (amazing fetishes, also loves artwork, critcket, etc) -    ‘intel inside’ -    possibly find him online -    cost and battery life main hurdles to this being possible -    Master R’s postmodern harem -    Adult digiplay -    Postmodern masturbation -    www.televibe.com o    can plug into -    do not have to be a bodiless entity in cyberspace.