The geeky world – digesting an afternoon reading the geeky stuffs

It's hard to distinguish myself from a geek:

This week I have received three warning letters from eBay concerning about my bad consuming behaviours – bidding without paying. Such emails reflect nothing but my craze of e-shopping. Apart from various fake eBay buyings, I have also done a lot of business with Amazon this week – a voice recorder and some few books. One of my secret admirers (or at least I'd like to think it this way) even sent me a book anonymously via Amazon. My life is half based on virtual spaces: I update my iTunes and MSN Messenger every two weeks, I use google everyday, check my hotmail ten times a day, most geekily I have a blog empire in which each blog doesn't make much sense. But then from what's written you can also tell that my geeky experiences are really confined with e-consumerism which is not too much distinctive from the traditional forms besides the fact that it is designed more to slackers like me.

Of course most of the geeky producers are not half as lazy as I am. They do some good things except from draining money from the Generation G (game/geek). Pam Omidyar, who happens to be the wife of eBay founder, is working on an interesting "'serious game' ": link called re-Mission, modelling a female fighter called Roxxi fighting against cancer cells. After the testing this month, they will send this game to several health centres free in the hope that young patients suffering from cancer would benefit from the game playing experience: gain some knowledge of how cancer cells work and confidence in fighting against it.

Technologies based on virtual spaces seem to have merged with real life solutions more and more. Apart from helping to fight cancer, we also see in-game advertisements booming; a good number of faithful game fans putting on costumes in the games and name such act as Cosplay – which gradually becomes a serious art; if a USB -compatible vibrator is invented cyber-sex can be as 'real' as sex in bed; so that someone suggest that our generation is no doubtedly a generation G, giving out some significant features to distinguish this peer from others, if any:

1. arrogance: heroism towards killing the bad to preserve the good
2. sociability: being alone at home with a connected computer is not 'alone'
3. coordination: 'visual processing dramatically increases with as little as 10 hours of gameplay'
4. flexibility: to win a game there is always several ways, same to real problem solution.
5. competitiveness
6. insubordination

But is there generation G? I have not gotten any concrete evidence yet, but people spending a lot of time on virtual seems to be concentrating in the city. It is at least more explainable like this: living in block apartment, the space distributed to each person on average is far from sufficient to feel free. So in order to chase that eternal desire for freedom virtual spaces become extension of real spaces. I think it's rather generation U (urbanisation) rather than generation G. :) Moreover, like other medias, the creation of virtual space does not change the core of the system – it is after all consumerism that is the bread feeding this whole internet/game industry, among which there are charities and NGOs like the Hope Lab who hosts re-Mission mentioned above. Generation G (or even generation U) is after all no difference from generation XYZs.

(information generated from the Wired magazine April 2006)

: 17 Apr 2006 18:46 |  Tags: Zp V Academic |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem