Monuments of our Age: Foundations of Civilization in the Digital World

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By Greg Bayles, graphic remixed from Mary Harrsch

Last week, I posted a bunch of my curation findings as to digital civilizations specifically. This week, however, I've been working to flesh out my research in terms of the requirements for civilization to exist, and I've had some pretty good success through both social and more traditional modes of inquiry. On Monday, I posted to my Facebook and Google+ profiles asking for people's insights as to the foundational elements of civilization. Google+ didn't yield a ton--just a post from my sister--but I was able to start up a rather healthy conversation on Facebook and got a lot of insights from friends, especially those studying political science, history, and anthropology.

You can check out the conversation below if you prefer to just read through the responses (I personally like the one about chocolate-covered almonds), but to sum up the arguments, my friends gravitated toward five or six main points:

1. Social surplus (extra resources)
2. Unified sense of culture
3. Code of law
4. Cohesive economic system
5. Territory (according to the UN)
6. A population (a more obvious but nonetheless essential component)

Modding: Games' Remix Culture

One of the major aspects of remix culture that Dr. Burton touched on but didn't have much time to get into is modding. Essentially, modding is digging into the code of an existing game to alter it in some way. Mods range from basic "unofficial patches" that just fix a few bugs that annoy players to complete overhauls that change nearly every aspect of the game such that it's unrecognizable from the original.

Interestingly, modders haven't faced much trouble with copyright issues, and many of the best mods have been adopted by the games' original developers and released as official content. The main reason for this is good mods sell games, and bad mods get ignored. If a mod is good enough, people will buy the original game just to play the mod, so it's in the developers'/publishers' interests to just let the modders do their thing. On the modders' end, it's good for them because it's an easy way to show their coding skills and get it out to a lot of people quickly without having to build a game from scratch.

Just like music remixes, however, mods have produced an entire subculture, and many of the world's most successful games actually began as mods. I'll show you three quick examples: Counter Strike, League of Legends/DOTA 2, and DayZ.

Copyright Culture of Pinterest

Since I am using Pinterest as my curation tool, I wanted to look into the issue of Pinterest's copyrights. It's kind of a mess, not going to lie.

Courtesy of Pinterest-Anti-Christ from commons.wikimedia.org

Just looking at the terms of service this is what the user agrees to when they pin their own stuff:

How Pinterest and other users can use your content
You grant Pinterest and its users a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, store, display, reproduce, re-pin, modify, create derivative works, perform, and distribute your User Content on Pinterest solely for the purposes of operating, developing, providing, and using the Pinterest Products. 

So, if you put it up for use on your own Pinterest account, just know it has a pretty open creative commons license. Not bad, right?

Waiting Out the Copyright Crisis

Creative Commons License, by AJ Cann

My argument is that the solution to the copyright crisis is in allowing copyright law to drown in its own obsolescence as we move on in creating meaningful, integrative, world-changing content that is connected, open, and free. It's taken me a little while to really come to that stance, but in any case, the Copyright Law Panel at BYU on the 25th of October gave me the chance to deliberately think about copyright and thus helped me to come to this conclusion. I think that with time, we will build up a large enough creative commons base that we won't any longer need to lean on copyrighted materials as a primary foundation for modern media arts and digital studies.

Well, to start off, do copyrights have a place in society? Yes. Absolutely, in my book. While I most certainly agree that there are other ways of making money than by copyrighting material, I think there are some really good justifications for short-term content ownership and capitalization. Whether that means five years or ten or even fifteen, I'm not really sure, but what I do know is that if copyright law does end up getting a makeover, it's still probably going to be a pretty ugly beast.

Curating with Storify: First Result

Working with Storify and reading Ian Bogost's How to Do Things With Videogames, I've finished my first round of curating.

As a curation tool, Storify has its strengths and weaknesses. It's best for smaller curation projects, that perhaps together build up into a larger body of collected work. Each "story" is best focused and tight, however, with a clear concept combining the elements. I did a merger of a story and more traditional curation by writing a story following the "video games as art" debate since Roger Ebert's famous denunciation of the medium, then provided a (very) long list of links at the bottom for further discussion.

One cool thing about using Storify is because it's a fairly new tool, I'm in the top three results when you search for videogames on the service.

I found it really easy to use and really kind of fun. I hope it catches on.

Here's my first Storify story for you to peruse:

http://storify.com/pcbills/video-games-as-art

We the People: Digital Civilizations

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By Greg Bayles, graphic remixed from Luc Legay

I've been getting more and more interested in the idea of digital civilizations, so I wanted to throw out some of the thoughts that I've had over the past couple of days. Earlier in the week, I completed a book preview on Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken, and while I found a lot of really useful information, I think the most influential for me has been just a couple lines from a NYT book review. William Saletan remarks, "The Internet isn’t heaven. It isn’t hell, either. It’s just another new world. Like other worlds, it can be civilized." Now obviously my interest in digital civilizations predisposed me to be way more excited about this than perhaps the average person, but for me, Saletan's words came as a powerful reminder about a concept that I've held dear for years: we are the creators of our realities.

Girl Wide Web 2.0: A Look into Digital Identity

I want to continuing exploring identity, so for my book I chose Girl Wide Web 2.0: Revisiting Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity. I'm hoping this book can explain more about how digital identity varies from different cultures and locations.

Preview

Through the preview of the book, it looks like the book does spend some time defining the differences in which girls determine their digital identities, but it also looks like it spends some time with some of the methods that are used online, such as MySpace and fangirl websites. It seems to spend a lot of time on the online communities that girls participate in, which is helpful for defining their identities.

Early Social Proof

No one responded to my update on Twitter. I was unsuccessful doing searching for conversations about the book as well. I'm going to try to reach out to one of the contributors of the book, because it looks like several of them are on Twitter. We'll see how that goes.

Similar Books

Instant Identity (Mediated Youth) by Shayla Thiel Stern
Growing Up Girls: Popular Culture by Sharon R Mazzarella
Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott

It looks like these books are pretty similar in their intent except for the last one Grown Up Digital. This one's intent lies more along the lines of how digital culture is changing and how the "net generation" is changing it.