Author: Rosalia P.

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Women in the Game Development Industry


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While the average person does not see the code that backs most of our technological choices every day, there are others whose lives are consumed by creating code. More specifically, there are people whose job it is to create the code that makes your favorite video game, for example, function so effortlessly.

As pointed out in Dr. Sample’s “Code” article, the reality above is one of the greatest features about code itself — that it is made by people (60). Now, another reality that Dr. Sample points out is the pay gap between male and female coders (the difference was at $9,000 in the article). What is the reality like for women in the game development industry today?

Catt Small, product designer and video game developer, gave a TEDTalk a couple of years ago on diversity in the game development industry (video above). At the time, she recalls that women made up roughly 22% of the workforce, with only 33% of the overall 24% being actual developers. Why is this number so low? She attributes these numbers to access to learning how to code and stereotypes about who can/cannot code.

For middle school and high school I was privileged to attend Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering, where engineering courses were mandatory for all students. While there, I was exposed to the world of code, an opportunity not afforded to most students attending public schools. While I do not plan on pursuing a career in code, I still valued the experience. The future of video games and code could lie in a middle school student, but if they are not exposed to learning how to code, then they won’t even know what they are capable of doing.

Ultimately, the questions become: How do we become advocates of diversity in video game development? How will diversity in this realm affect gaming experiences?

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Rosalia P.

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The MP3: The Container Technology That Gave Way to More Container Technologies


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The MP3 was revolutionary because it transformed not only how audio recordings themselves sounded to the listener, but also transformed the medium through which audio recordings were heard. The ability of the MP3 to serve as what Sterne calls “a container for containers” is what allowed it to be so accessible to users (828). It’s small size as a file gave way to new storage devices, or MP3 players, which transformed where and how people listened to music. The image below shows the first MP3 player to be developed.

Source:
http://mp3-mp4-player-product.blogspot.com/2009/01/celebrating-10-years-of-mp3-players.html

Most familiar to me and my childhood was the evolution of Apple’s iPod. The first one I owned happened to be the blue iPod Nano (shown below), and when I lost it I remember feeling like my world came crashing down. The ease through which it made music accessible was amazing to me. I had every single one of my favorite songs on there. Suddenly, hour long train rides became much more manageable.

Source: https://theipodrenaissance.wordpress.com/a-brief-history-of-the-ipod/

 

The ease through which MP3’s were able to be shared also seemed to give way to a whole world of music piracy. I remember the hype around Limewire and Frostwire, and the ease through which files could be downloaded, transferred in to iTunes or your MP3 players folder on your computer, and listened to on the way to school. My sister’s library seemed to be never-ending. While it is said that MP3 file formats dimish sound quality, I believe that the prioritization of quality was pushed aside by many in exchange for convenience and ease of access. I can’t imagine having to walk around today with a CD player to listen to my favorite songs.

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Rosalia P.

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Lab 3: Animated Gifs


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1. Fandom GIF

Counter Fandom GIF

If you are an avid Game of Thrones viewer/fanatic, you would recognize the scene in the first GIF. After a full-fledged battle between Jon Snow (King of the North), Snow’s small team, and The White Walkers (the super creepy zombies with blue eyes), the two sides have what seems to be the biggest, most intense stare-down in TV history. What’s so important about this scene is that it foreshadows the drama to come. In my counter-GIF, I chose a scene that does not represent any series-shifting moment. The counter-GIF could have been in any episode out of the entire series — it is not telling of a specific situation or of specific, potentially important people. It is a boring GIF of white walkers walking.

2. Reaction GIF

Counter Reaction Gif

The reaction GIF of Idris Elba flipping his desk has to be my most-used GIF. It is an emotion that cannot even be expressed in real life most of the time, as it is a very extreme emotion. This is in part what can make some reaction GIF’s so special — they allow you to express an emotion/reaction that you wouldn’t be able to express even in person. In my counter-GIF, I played to the idea of the first GIF being an extreme situation. The counter-GIF is extremely boring — nothing exciting is happening, no emotions, especially no extreme emotions, are visible. It is a GIF of a life scene that is extremely common — students doing work in the library.

3. Wobble Gif

Counter Wobble Gif

A wobble GIF is typically an image that is made to “wobble” left and right. In the first GIF, you see a cat and a person in a static position, but the image itself is wobbling. In my counter-GIF, I tried to play with the idea of this static position, and wrongly introducing the wobble later in the GIF. The start of my counter-GIF might make the viewer feel like they are looking at a static image. The quick movement after could signify the beginning of a wobble GIF, but it is instead just a simple panning of the camera, the GIF then returning to the beginning loop.

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Rosalia P.

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Snapchat: Pros and Cons of Distant CCM


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Recently, I came across the tweet above — a newstory about a couple that had been arrested after posting a series of snapchats of them shooting guns outside of their car windows. The first question that came to my mind — and probably came to mind for many others — is why they thought that shooting guns out of a car window was an appropriate thing to do. After reading Roberts’ article, I began to give this situation more thought.

One of the biggest reasons that Snapchat became so popular was because of its ability to allow users to post anything they wanted in the moment of its occurrence. While other social media platforms allow you to “flag” posts (which, as Roberts points out, is typically where the CCM process begins for larger platforms), Snapchat makes it a little more difficult to raise attention to snaps that users might deem to be inappropriate. Furthermore, in reference to the snaps in the tweet above, the ability for users to post snaps with real guns in live action should not be possible in the first place. Due to the nature of Snapchat, however, this prior screening is not possible. Instead, you must go to the Snapchat website and fill out a form to file a report, what might be considered a daunting task for most.

The flip side to not being screened/flagged on Snapchat was that, as seen in this case, it allowed for the culprits to be detained. Furthermore, Roberts would potentially make the argument that this content could be used as advocacy — for, for example, gun control. The fact that the series of snaps made its way to the Twitter world (and received over 6,000 retweets/8,000 likes) is also telling of the power of social media.

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Rosalia P.

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GIF’s are the new JPEG?


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In reading Miltner and Highfield’s article about the GIF, I came to realize just how entrenched the GIF has become in daily life. One of their main points is highlighting the fact that everyone has accepted the GIF as an important type of media, even the Democratic and Republican national conventions (9). You can also see how social media platforms and other major digital companies have allowed for its use in within their frameworks. In the image above, you can see how Apple has included the “images” keyboard capability into messaging, allowing you to search for a certain kind of GIF to include as a part of your conversation. I use this keyboard at least once a day. I can’t even imagine certain conversations with certain friends without using GIF’s. The transition from static image keyboards to GIF keyboards is a testament to just how much GIF’s have revived themselves and inserted themselves into our daily technological actions.

I have attempted to partake in the art of creating a GIF before, including an attempt for this blogpost. There are websites such as ezgif.com that allow you to convert a video to a GIF. It sounds extremely simple, but there are so many components into creating the perfect gif that one might not always think of: it needs to be of good quality, of good pixel size, and it needs to get the message across, to name a few components. While I managed to create the GIF, I had significant trouble trying to embed it into this blog post. I don’t take for granted any of the wonderful GIF-connoisseurs out there.

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Rosalia P.

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Can You Survive At The Dinner Table Without Your Phone?


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Today, we cannot seem to go anywhere or do anything without the presence of technology. If we look back to the rise of electricity and the invention of the telephone, as Carolyn Marvin traces in When Old Technologies Were New, we see the shift towards dependency and as a result a change in lifestyle. What most interests me is how technology has shaped relationships in the home.

Marvin writes: “Home was the protected place, carefully shielded from the world and its dangerous influences. New communication technologies were suspect precisely to the extent that they lessened the family’s control over what was admitted within its walls” (76). This fear, arising just from the invention of the telephone, is still true today. What we come to find is that not only has technology influenced what has been “admitted within [the] walls” of the home, but it has shifted how members of the family interact with each other as well. The video below shows this shift, highlighting just how distracted family members have become — not even paying attention to each other while at the dinner table. The son is constantly being fed information through the television, the daughter and mother through their phones, and the father through his computer.

Even in my group of friends today, we have to make conscious efforts to put our phones away when we go out to eat. Chick-fil-a even rewards you if you can last the entirety of your meal without using your phone. The rise of electricity and the telephone shifted familial dynamics in ways that I consider to be irreversible. Even if you make a conscious effort to remove technology from a specific setting, our day to day lives are built on technological interactions, so our conversations and discourses will always be influenced by what we see, hear, and engage with.

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Rosalia P.

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The Female Digital Assistant: Promoting Female Subservience


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Ed Finn’s remarks on the performance of gender of virtual assistants, specifically “the predominance of female voices” in digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, made me realize just how engrained and propagated these ideas are in day to day life. In the video below, you see Jamie Foxx interacting with Siri in what seems to be a flirtatious encounter. To have such a commercial aired across the globe seems like a smart business move – who wouldn’t want to buy something that not only made your life a little easier by, for example, setting reminders for you, but also helped to boost your confidence by making similar, flirtatious comments?

In the article “How We Trained AI to be Sexist” by Kerry Davis, Davis highlights the work of Jacqueline Feldman, the mastermind behind MyKai — a genderless artificial intelligence digital assistant. Feldman writes all of the Kai bot’s interactions — making sure that the comment it makes are as non-complacent to harrassment as possible. She makes sure to call the Kai an it, not a she. The development of the Kai bot is an important move for the future of digital assistants — it is a reflection of company values just as much as it is a reflection of the need for change in our society.

If the idea of a genderless digital assistant does not spread throughout the artificial intelligence world, what does the continued propagation of gender performance in artificial intelligence mean for the future image of females and the role females play in everyone’s day to day life?

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Rosalia P.