Connected, but alone?

The topic of our blog this week is utopian and dystopian visions of digital communication. Our assignment was to watch Sherry Turkle's TED talk "Connected, but alone?" and discuss about the topics brought up in it.

Alone together is an expression that represents the fact of being alone somewhere, maybe at home or as Shelly  says in the video in a queue or in a car at the red light, but we don't feel alone thanks to our smartphones, we are always connected with something or someone so that we have the impression of being with each other. "We want to be with each other, elsewhere" but we are still alone, thinking that we're having true relationships and conversations through a cellphone.

For example while having lunch with friends it is not uncommon at all that one or more of the participants have their smartphones out and they do not participate in conversation but instead they rather send messages or look at funny pictures in 9GAG. Pictures about our everyday activities are taken all the time and put on social media to, in a worst case scenario, prove others what a great and active life one lives.

Sherry Turkle's vision about the use of technology nowadays and in the future kind of dystopian. " If we don't teach to our children how to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely". For her, we can use the digital communications but in a restricted way, human relationships and conversations face to face are more important than digital conversations, especially for those still growing up. Being alone according to her is very important sometimes, just to be with oneself and to think about everything.  So basically according to Turkle, technology is not all bad, but we must be careful not to only use means of technology while communicating with each other. In order for us to grow and learn more about ourselves, we cannot always plan and write out the things we want to express.

A.T.

Second Life

The assignment of this week was about Second Life. We did not necessarily have to create an account but we did it because it is the best way to understand how it works. 

So, Second Life is a virtual world, both a game and a social network. The purpose of the game is to create oneself a second life (as the title indicates). Anyone can create an account and have his own avatar. All the avatars in the game are in fact players from all over the world (this may be the main difference with The Sims: here Second Life is an online community). The player can choose what will be the appearance of his avatar. Everything is possible, it is not supposed to represent the player the real life. There are few communities of non-human people, but mainly, people who play want to have a human appearance. 

Do you want to be blond? Or dark haired? Do you want to wear an elegant suit or to be provocative? 

You can be everything you want.

People who log on Second Life can find a job, get a house and meet other people by guiding their avatar. The place in this game was created by Linden Lab but it can be modified by the users. Places truly represent places in the real life. It is a whole world of creation, that is what make the place and the characters unique. All what is in Second Life is brought by people, they create the contents of the game: for example clothes, buildings, objects... The only things that are needed are creativity and imagination!

About what people do in Second Life: it is easy, they can do what they want and create themselves a new virtual life. They can meet, interact with other people and even find a job. Money in Second Life can be changed into real money in the real world. So, people in it can find a job they do not have in their real life, maybe to change from everyday routine. Each person has a particular purpose: it can be to meet new people, get money or create communities. 

Second Life can be considered as a social virtual community. There are relationships between people: it can stay virtual but if they want, they can communicate through vocal chat, talk privately or publicly and why not, meet in real life. In Second Life, people bring their own personality and they find what they were looking for. 

Who are you, in the real life?

A.D.

Imaginary travel company

For this week's assigment, we took the role of a travel company. Since everyone likes vacations, we didn't feel the need to specify who our potential customers would be.

More specifically, we would send people on vacations like just about every other travel company in existence, but we would market them as a type of "dream vacation". At the end of the vacation, we would interview our customers about their vacations and use these interviews as commercials, possibly with pictures that our customers had taken (with permission, of course).

"What was your dream vacation like?"
"I saw a pigeon. It was awesome."

Seeing these normal people talk about their experiences would seem a lot more trustworthy than regular commercials.

These commercials would be available on content communities, with focus on websites that produce videos. We would also have a social networking site through which we could share these videos with other people, possibly in some way that would catch their interest.

Well, this was a blast. Thank you all for taking the time to read this. (Picture mine.)

-T.H.

Trustworthy and untrustworthy websites about travelling

The goal of our fifth assignment was to find a trustworthy and an untrustworthy website that relates to travelling. The Internet is full of credible and very interesting websites about travelling but we chose site lastminute.com. It offers a lot of information about deals on hotels, city breaks, spas, restaurants, theatre and getaways. The company that operates that page is leading travel retailer in UK and the site gets more than 1.65 million visitors a week [1]. Moreover, the website was voted as one of the UK's Superbrands for 2015. Considering that, this is the site which offers services and advertise product, the persuasive means used in the website is Pathos: “It's never too early to start thinking about the perfect gift. Treat mum to a luxury spa day, an afternoon tea at a 5* London hotel, or a night out at a popular West End theatre show.“ or “Footie mad? Manchester’s newest hotel might be the perfect place for your next getaway.“

Arguments for the trustworthy website lastminute.com

•          Website has a professional appearance
•          We can find information easily and fast
•          High quality pictures
•          Text is grammatically correct
•          Website gives us enough information
•          Information about website are easily to find
•          Organization behind website is a big company

The second part finding the untrustworthy website was more complicated task. However, it is very hard to find this kind of website now days. After long time searching the Internet we finally find the website - euromost.info. This website provides 38 European city guides, 30 European country profiles, travel guides with business and tourist information for central eastern, northern southern and western Europe, the Baltic states, Scandinavia and Russia. The site offers information mostly about cities and countries. The website uses Logos as the persuasive means: "The earliest known documentation of this city is 1147 AD. Since then it has been an integral part of Russian society.”

Arguments for the untrustworthy website euromost.info

• Website doesn't have a professional apperance
• There is no search provided to search for specific information
• Website is badly designed
• Low quality pictures
• The website is not easy to use (site is no transparent)
• The site fails to meet with customers' requirements -> we can't trust the website
• There is only weak contact information mentioned on the website
• The link "sitemap" doesn't work correctly

[1] The Independent. The Independent [online]. August 2013 [cit. 2015-03-03]. Retrieved from:  http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/travel/the-10-best-lastminute-travel-websites-8786559.html

- M.M

Valentine's day Invitation by European Treotters

For our assignment we decided that the sender of this Valentine's Day invitation could be some student union and the receiver could be a group of students who would like to spend time together in a special evening, different from the usual.
The design fits of the invitation is very nice and suitable for the occasion, thanks to the colors (in particular pink, purple and white) and for the hearts; it appear too happy and attractive and we think that it would capture the curiosity of the students.
We was thinking that is a good idea to add a picture on the invitation about the travel because it is our central theme and we know also that the union of the verbal and visual is very effective, more convincing and interesting.

Surely the purpose of the group is to promote some kinds of values; the aim of the invitation is to offer a night of enjoyment and relaxation, and a chance of a romantic escape for someone who has been unfortunate in love; emphasis on the purpose is not to judge those "unfortunate"..but to create for them a good occasion to meet new people and spending time together.
Furthermore the purpose is not to promote Valentine's Day as a specific international day for love but to make it possible any day as a blissfully romantic escapade that is not tied to any specific day.
Our purpose is also to bring travel into anything what'd make a romantic escape better than an adventure; a romantic location abroad for the lucky winner of the lottery.

Visual characteristics

Our third assignment was to log in to Pinterest, find photos to do with our theme and pin the ones we found interesting. As our blog focuses on traveling we decided to pin pictures from our favorite destinations: unforgettable places we have visited or maybe dream to visit one day.

Source

Our board consists of pictures from a variety of countries such as Ireland, Philippines, Japan & Australia. The board downright shouts vacation!

All the pinned photos are colorful and picturesque and they were shot outdoors. Other common    qualities are nature and landscape. An element that appears in notably many of our boards pictures is water. We also thought that the pictures could’ve all been taken by a pro.

Even though the photos have lots in common, they too differ in many ways: color, country, view angle, time of year, environment and the list goes on… There are pictures of peaceful places with no sign of people but pictures of crowded cities as well.

The origin of the pictures? Someone travels to a place and takes a picture to capture the moment. These travel destinations were in that moment emblematic to the photographer, in such scale that they now want to share them with others – we have to note though that a user sharing has not necessarily taken the picture. The aim is to more or less commercialize the place and adduce why this specific attraction should be visited.

Source

Some of the photos were probably taken by a private person and few by a company, but the minute they were uploaded online (for different purposes: personal profiles or travel sites etc.), they possibly started to spread like wildfire. The pictures could’ve first been used for advertising and now they're just circulating, cause people find them pretty. This might have led to a situation where a person sharing a picture does not know the origin of it.

- N.K.

This was what the European trotters came up with this time!

Lexical, syntactic and textual characteristics

For this week assignment we needed to pick a forum and analyze the comments’ textual, syntactic and lexical characteristics. Since our blog’s theme is traveling it felt natural to pick a forum focusing on that subject, and so we chose to focus on Tripadvisor and especially one particular hotel listed on the site, Santa Claus Holiday Village. Tripadvisor is a site dedicated to traveling; it’s a search engine of sorts, helping people find hotels, inns and flights at and to their chosen destinations. The site hosts over 200 million reviews, opinions and photos. Reviewers have to sign in to the site in order to leave a comment of their chosen location, either via their Facebook, Google+ or Samsung account, or by using the site’s own log in system. All comments and reviews are moderated and go through a screening process before published on the website, which normally takes about 24-48 hours.

Lexical characteristics found in the comments:

The language used in the comments was usually grammatically correct. However, we did find one acronym used (s.c. for Santa Claus) and one emoticon, :). There was also a comment left by the username username cherrywong: “The staffs r friendly n helpful”, which uses a few shortened words. All in all the user reviews were written in clean English.

We are all looking at you, cherrywong.

Syntactic characteristics found in the comments:

As stated above, the comments were in general very well written, people had clearly put in time and effort to give a rounded and well-supported opinion of the hotel. However, there were some comments that were lacking verbs or were using unnecessary dashes and dots, perhaps to emphasize their point or for stylistic reasons, such as one comment that read: “When in Roveniemi - especially winter time & Christmas - look no further. Little cabins beside Santas park & shops makes this a great stay! Especially for families. Where you can also find reindeers lurking, Santas post office & restaurants...a wonderful wonderful magical place! Some of our best memories were made here. Already planning to return :)”

Textual characteristics found in the comments:

Even though there was not much to be said of the comments in terms of syntactic and lexical characteristics, textual characteristics make up for them in great amounts. For example, multimodality could be seen on the site in terms of the stars used to grade the hotel for location, service, rooms, cleanliness and so on. The site also gives people titles in terms of how much they have contributed, which might add or reduce the value of the reviews left by said user. The people who have registered to the site also have personal profiles which could be seen as a way to create networked context.

Identification is mandatory on the site, but it does not mean you have to comment using your own name. Some people choose to use their real first name as a username, sometimes mixing in letters - e.g. Vicky75_11 - some prefer to use pseudonyms, for example “druindubai”. The commenters’ place of residence is also displayed.

The struggles of a Tripadvisor user.

The site system offered little in the terms of dialogue. The staff of the hotel could answer the questions and feedback left by the reviewers, and you can also ask more about the hotel from the people who’ve left comments. There is also an option to rate a review, which could be considered a dialogue of sorts.

As noted before the comments were well written, almost nobody used slang words etc. Humor and playful titles were used every now and then to emphasize the writers point, such as “I would have strangled an elf for a beer after 8pm”, "If heaven was a place on earth...”

Elves should never stand between a man and his beer.
- a Finnish proverb?

The reviewers also used a lot of emotional wordplay, trying to awake their feelings towards the hotel and their vacation through the restriction of 200 characters per comment. Titles such as “My winter wonderland”, “Happiest place on Earth”, “THE ONLY PLACE TO STAY WHEN IN ROVANIEMI” are thrown around in almost carefree manner, and comments ooze the same sort of high-spirited enthusiasm, for example one user commented “It's the most surreal place and I'm almost a believer now with all the Christmas magic I was exposed to!”.

That's it for the second assignment, was a lot of fun and a lot of work!

- JS

Inceptselfie

Group 13 of our Communication in the Digital world class went through the first week’s group assignment like this. The group leader formed a Facebook group and made sure everyone made their way into it. Next we discussed the name for the group and since our group consists of people from four different countries, one of us came up with the European trotters. The name stuck and traveling seemed like an easy theme to tie together this multinational group. We all also agreed that selfies are highly relevant to communicating in the digital world nowadays. Consequently, we agreed upon a suggestion of inceptselfie for our word and concept after a discussion on whether the blog theme should be aligned with the word choice. Obviously selfies can be taken anywhere and if people do go traveling, one would expect to find at least one selfie within the pictures from this vacation travel.

Many of you may wonder what an inceptselfie is. It is when someone takes a regular selfie and in the picture, you can see someone else taking selfie on the background. The word further elucidates how selfies have become so common that you may end up taking a selfie within someone else’s selfie. How crazy is that?

Source

- T.S.