January 10, 2010: The Four Big Myths of Profile Pictures
Are you that type of person who always has had trouble deciding which picture to choose for your profile picture? Yet, a better question would be who doesn’t take extra time to decide which profile picture they put up. Past articles and studies have shown that people actually do judge a person based on their profile picture. So much for “don’t judge a book by its cover”, right? In this post, dissects the common views often induced from types of profile pictures. For example, the article starts off my classifying these “views” based on three primary factors: facial attitude, photo context, and amount of skin. Following these three classifications, the article discusses issues such as ‘is smiling better’ or ‘is it bad to take photos with your webcam or phone’. Each myth comes with statistics derived from 7,000 profile pictures and gives examples of each myth. This article is very interesting and for all facebook users. Check this out and be a little more careful before you put up the picture of that night you were hammered out of your mind!
Check it out here:http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/01/20/the-4-big-myths-of-profile-pictures/
Vinh Pham
10961090
May 27, 2010: Avatar Days
This video follows MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games) players who talk about their online personas and in the process compare their MMORPG lives in the mundane light of their real lives. What is interesting is that each player’s World of Warcraft character is put in the context of their real lives. In discussing their WOW characters, each player highlights the similarity between the virtual world and the real world. In one of the scenes, a player compares Facebook/Youtube and how WOW accomplishes the same feat as a social vehicle, “If you look at things like Youtube and Facebook, there are people communicating and telling stories, creating stories, and that’s what you do in World of Warcraft. You get together and you talk and you bond in there…warriors get together and go on quests…” This is interesting in that it highlights the social connectedness of MMORPG’s. Though MMORPG’s do have some sort of social connectedness, it is not usually compared to the extent of the social connectedness that exists on Facebook. In this player’s opinion, however, they seem equivalent. Overall this movie is shot with some amazing scenes, which really give feel to the dull context of real life as compared to the WOW online community. In one of the scenes a player discusses his Tauren Druid in WOW (World of Warcraft) as being able to “turn into bears, birds, and all kinds of beasts”. This scene is pretty neat because you will see a tauren druid sitting at a cubicle in an office and walking around in the context of the boring, “real world”. Similar scenes are shot with other WOW characters and how they go about dealing with their daily lives.
My friend sent me this video a few days ago and it’s pretty neat so check it out! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9TEdGbvtnc
Vinh Pham
10961090
*two posts from two different weeks
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