Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA26645 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 17 Jul 2001 14:53:57 +0100 Message-ID: <3B5442D6.5A912725@bioinf.man.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 14:51:18 +0100 From: Chris Taylor <Christopher.Taylor@man.ac.uk> Organization: University of Manchester X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.77 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U) X-Accept-Language: en To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq References: <20010717122838.AAA29276@camailp.harvard.edu@[128.103.125.215]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
What really pisses me off about the internet (well admittedly this has
been overtaken by events a bit) is that William Gibson et al. more or
less decided what we were going to get before it had even happened
(because people were happy to grab his hand-packed metaphors and
monikers); so now we'll never know what we would've had. Actually until
I read that Nokia/kids thing I would've kept that argument to myself
because I'm not sure that isn't the way these things usually happen
anyway.
As for internet gaming, I urge anyone with a half decent connection and
graphics card to play (or at least watch) counterstrike, which is
team-based terrorist/counter-terrorist us'n'them stuff with guns. It is
a sociologists/psychologists dream - the group behaviours, the
individual behaviours, learning - I'm not kidding it's a goldmine! The
addiction for me comes from playing other real people, with all their
quirks (partly because they are more fun to play against, but partly, as
I say, from an ~ologists point of view - bi~ or at a push eth~ in my
case). As for the darker side, I think it's more or less an extension of
that 'electrocute the person in the next room that you can't see' class
of behaviour. I like to think I'm more or less 'myself' though. An
interesting one that you see on game site polls every now and then is
'Which sex do you play as' (given a choice, as in Quake3). Can of worms
anyone?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chris Taylor (chris@bioinf.man.ac.uk)
http://bioinf.man.ac.uk/ »people»chris
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