Since this is a blog about internet culture, I think it's appropriate to start it with one of my favorite xkcd strips:



Title: Online Communities; click for actual size.
note: I have 3,012 favorite xkcd strips.


This blog is a manifestation of a writing class assignment. I chose to write about internet culture from my viewpoint. Why internet culture? Mostly because I believe that there's a whole lot of it (that also means some of a lot that I will never touch) and I can go just about anywhere with it. There's a gazillion things I don't know about the internet and I don't want to cover everything - just the ones that I know about and have interest in. The same topic can be picked up again and again, of course. I just have no intention of writing a 2,500-word entry covering every little thing about that certain topic.

If you're not logged in your LJ account (or if you don't have one), you will see ads in this blog. I apologize :( This layout is made by refutare, by the way.

You will see a strip from the webcomic xkcd to illustrate a point in the entries every so often. I checked the CC License; it says I'm allowed to "copy and share (but not sell them)".

Your writer is an Indonesian girl currently studying in San Francisco State University. She's a part of generation Y, a fangirl (of many, many things), and a social creature with better social skills on the internet than in real life. She's a liberal, thinks Jason Mraz is a little like Jesus, and dislikes MySpace with a passion. In her spare time, she writes, reads, and watches TV. It doesn't feel that odd to describe yourself in third-person.

All and all, the one thing that needs to be remembered is that the writer of this blog does not claim to be a know-all of the internet. She's as much as learner as every other person and she's doing this for fun (and for, hopefully, a good grade).

That said, thanks for visiting!

(Not Necessarily) Useful Glossary:

• xkcd - the best webcomic ever.
  
• Indexed - also a great webcomic journal math lesson a combination of all of those things.
  
• LJ - LiveJournal. Social networking site. Blog.
  
• urban dictionary - what you don't understand about internet slang, you can find most there.

Christmas was never a big occasion in my family. There was no reason for it to be. My parents were Buddhist and their children, well, couldn't be bothered. I remember a small tree — the most ignored tree in the world — that seemed to appear out of thin air every year. I would go to sleep one night and when I woke up, one forlorn tree in the corner of the living room. The tree was not, and never would be, a centerpiece. My parents put it up only because I liked the way the lights twinkle in the dark. There were no gifts, no parties, and I believe the concept of caroling was a foreign one. Christmas was making its way to be a commercialized holiday in Jakarta — but in my household, we'd spend the entire morning watching a marathon of Christmas movies on TV ("Home Alone" was our personal favorite), and then went on the day as if it were every other day.

I might have given the impression that our Christmases were sad and desolate. It wasn't true. Christmas Day just wasn't that significant to us.

This general apathy towards Christmas was carried on as I moved to San Francisco for college. Of course, my sister and I enjoyed more of the good cheer, more of the big store sales, and more of the Christmas movies — but come Christmas morning, we simply stayed on our respective bed exchanging Christmas greetings with our online friends, left the bed a bit late, and had a quiet brunch someplace open and not packed.

This year, though.

This Christmas, I'm going back home to my family. We're going to have the only family vacation we probably can have for some time (it gets harder to congregate when everyone grows up and older, and go their own ways; alone together). We're going to a place where Christmas is a serious (seriously commercialized) business in hope to be able to get into the spirit: China. This Christmas is probably the only time I can enjoy a meal and talk to both my parents about what I've learned at school, my future plans, and what I want to be. I know that there will still be no gifts exchanged and no carols sung together. But at least we'll be there, together, sharing stories; even if we have to use public holidays as an excuse to get together.

Alas, I think I'd prefer thinking of it as a conscious effort to get together.

Alternately, had I been raised in a normal Christmas-loving traditional American family, this would probably happen every Christmas:



( image taken from xkcd; title: Christmas Back Home. )


Still not quite a normal Christmas day.

Happy Holidays, folks.

i wish this strip was drawn before that week i wrote about DRM/FCM.


image taken from xkcd; title: "steal this comic".

I think it's easier just to give a (not-so-friendly) honk to the tailgater, but that's not the moral of the story. Let's look beyond the programmer girl's triumph and realize that if she could access his computer and install speech synth like that, does that mean she could access his files, read his e-mails, find out his passwords, perhaps steal his online identity?

The answer is yes and no, depending on how cautious our tailgater is about his online habits.

Most likely, like every other average netizens, not too cautious.

The best (and worst) thing about this is that we all can learn to do what she did. It's not easy work, but once you've understood how the codes and the system works, it's only a matter of being creative. With enough practice, you'll go from road-rage-programmer to this:


image taken from xkcd; title: IPoD

... and if you're obsessive enough:


image taken from xkcd; title: Trolling


Programmers get more and more creative everyday. It has its advantages: many great applications are created every day, netizens now have the ability to choose what kind of web browsers they want to use (e.g. Firefox over IE), the ability to use alternative tools if they can't afford the original programs (e.g. GIMP over Photoshop), or find some way to use the original programs anyway (e.g. torrents). In a way, these programmers create work-arounds to beat the current system and/or provide transparency (e.g. Wikileaks).

Of course, it also has its disadvantages. Among other things, programmers invade the necessary barrier we know as online privacy.

The most productive thing I did in 2008 is deleting my MySpace account. I think I made the right decision.

This is a classic case of not being cautious about your online habits. Now imagine if, even though you had been cautious (i.e. making your stuff friends-only or private), some people can still read it. It is possible. I just checked the Internet Archive website and discovered, to my horror, that they had entries from the blog I left years ago. I've set that journal to friends-only even before I deleted it, and if you search for that journal in LJ main site, you'll get the message: "Error // This journal has been deleted and purged".

Still: Wayback Machine finds it... and there's nothing I can do about it.

The world wide web is such a big part of my life that it's difficult to keep my online and real life entirely separate, but I'm doing what I can do to keep it safe. I use monikers I don't use with my real-life friends, I keep my work/school e-mail separate from my online e-mail, and I try to divulge as little information as I can about myself online. You don't have to safeguard something that isn't private to you.

It's probably not enough, but we make do. I can live with these compromises; I don't know about other people, though.

Links related to online privacy/security:

• Facebook stirs uproar over online privacy.
  
• Sarah Palin's hacked e-mails: aka Do Not Put Incriminating Information In Your E-mail Inbox.
  
• Wikileaks: invading the privacy of government on regular basis.
  
• Internet Archive: because nothing is truly private on the internet.
  
• Sex In The City: an article about the Jason Fortuny Craiglist Prank—one of the best internet pranks ever—that sparked a debate about online privacy and became an internet phenomenon. The actual prank can be read in ED with a little effort on researching.

Some semi-related links, just for kicks:

• xkcd's l33t series about the greatest hacker in history. There are 5 parts to this series.
  
• bash.org quotes about FBI watching the IRC channels.
  

Image taken from xkcd; Title: With Apologies To The Who

Video-sharing websites. We all have at least two of them: one as our main go-to website, and another as a backup. If you're an average netizen like me, YouTube would be your preferred go-to website. I don't have a preferred alternative website after YouTube, because 1) YouTube has everything I'm looking for, or 2) if it doesn't, then it's a video of specified type/genre and I can usually find them in one of the websites listed at the end of this post. What's yours?

Anyway, we're not here to talk about YouTube.

In 2003, Dmitry Saphiro founded Veoh, a video-sharing website and Internet Television service. I liked Veoh. Veoh distributes content from major media companies (ABC, CBS WB, Viacom, etc.) aside from user-generated content. Now, this is way before Hulu or Fancast. Before Hulu and Fancast (and fifty million other video-sharing websites), Veoh was like the TiVo I've never had.

In late May 2008, Veoh discontinued service in more than forty countries, claiming that it wanted to focus its funding on the markets with the most viewers. These countries included Lebanon, UAE, Malaysia, Indonesia, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Thailand, Iceland, Egypt, and many more. As written in the Wikipedia entry about Veoh:

As of June 2008, visitors (IP addresses) in the vast majority of countries, including Asia, portions of Europe, Africa, Central America and South America, as listed below, have reported being blocked ... Dimitri Shapiro, founder of Veoh talks about the recently implemented new business model that limits its video services to a select group of wealthy countries.

In late May 2008, thousands of users scattered around these forty countries cried out with righteous indignation. I would've, too, but I was in US. I went to Indonesia a month later and switched services to Hulu. All was well.

Or not?

If you look at the bigger picture, this blockage is a bigger problem than we've probably imagined. Veoh blocks access from countries who don't generate enough revenue to them. This practice goes against the principle of Net Neutrality. It's not nearly as extreme as the future imagined by proponents of Net Neutrality (should congress pass the bill proposed by Big Telephone Companies), but it still goes against the principle. Those who don't contribute enough to their resources can't have access. Worst of all, Veoh does this to countries where the concept of Net Neutrality is almost nonexistent. There are not nearly enough people to speak up for those countries. What's stopping other companies to do the same like Veoh did?

Net Neutrality is a big issue in US, Canada, and some parts of Europe. In US, the main movement of Net Neutrality is focused in Save The Internet blog. Right now, I've completely left Veoh and looked for the videos I want in YouTube or the websites at the end of this post. It's just a temporary solution, though. In the end, I'm not doing anything to help save the internet except from signing a petition and putting declaring my support in my (personal) journal.

Is it enough?

Here are a few of the websites I go stop by to get my videos (and some others which I don't, I just find them interesting):

• GameVideos - Video game-related videos (interviews, trailers, etc.)
  
• imeem - Share digital media — not just videos. My favorite feature of this website is the ability to upload a song and share it to other people in playable mode — my friends like to know what the songs I'm recommending are like before downloading them.
  
• BigThink - Expert interview videos about various ideas. I really recommend checking this one.
  
• Howcast - An educational, often humorous, video-sharing website teaching people how to do things.
  
• TED Talks - An amazing website recording the experts and experienced sharing their ideas.
  
• JibJab - Focuses on parodies.
  
• MyToons - Share animated videos.
  

The image above best illustrates the current system in fandom: there is porn for everything--and if there isn't, someone will create it. In many cases, porn translates to erotica--porn in words. I suppose it's easier to write about tentacle porn rather than trying to enact it.

Then again, we can argue that tentacle porn seems to thrive more in the form of anime than writing--no thanks to you, Japan--but that is for another entry.

This principle also applies to fanworks--or fanfiction at the very least. A fanfiction is exactly what the moniker suggests: fan-written fiction. People have speculated that the first fanfictions were written by Star Trek fans and were inserted in fan newsletters, which are mailed to other Star Trek fans. As you might've figured out, this was way before internet. Then the world wide web appeared and the amount of fanfictions grew exponentially. Over the years, as the concept of fan-written fiction came into the attention of media, many things have been assumed of fanfictions. Escapepod said it best: "it's a copyright violation (which is true), it's not "real writing" (not quite so true), it takes no skill (untrue), and there's a lot of crap out there (true of any art)" (Escapepod, 2006). Even though they have once been the poster child for free culture movement, fanfictions have been mostly ignored by the copyright law proponents (except for this one case involving Anne Rice and her vampire chronicles) – the law-enforcers had bigger things to worry about (i.e. downloading music from the internet). As far as they're concerned, as long as fanfiction writers do not claim to (1) own the characters or premises used in the fanfiction, or (2) make profit from the fanfiction, it's all good.

This kind of leniency has encouraged variety and creativity in the kingdom of fan-writing: unique subgenres appeared, fanfiction-exclusive terms were created, its nature was (and still is) largely debated. For readers, fanfiction is a way to satisfy their fannish curiosity and/or fantasy of having their favorite characters placed in situations that otherwise will never happen in canon (original) production. It applies to writers, too, but for some others, writing fanfictions no longer consists of writing an original plot with pre-established characters and universe. A good deal of research goes into the process. In some cases, the characters in fanfictions appear to have more depth than the canon characters themselves.

The last trend has happened mostly in Real People Fiction, or RPF, which is fanfictions written with real people (usually actors, athletes, or musicians) as their main characters. There is a debate about the nature and ethics of RPFs that I will not go into right now, but I don't think it's hard to find if you search for it in Google. The arguments commonly used by the writers are that public personas are presented as an object to the audience, especially when it involves pre-packaged, manufactured entities like boybands. Some writers refuse to have their characters portrayed as shallow or characterized with all the limitations set by the industry, so they "develop" the personalities according to their interpretation.

Of course, there are also bad fanfictions. A lot of them usually appear in slash (male/male pairing) fandoms, be it regular or real-people. The main reason for it is speculated to be because slash fandom is created by and for women, and a large part of the fandom consists of heterosexual women. The bad fanfictions are written without knowledge of the dynamics of a homosexual relationship. This results in a male/male pairing with a male/female dynamics, and the fanfiction becomes unrealistic.

This doesn't mean that heterosexual or non-sexual fandoms are free from bad fanfictions--sometimes it's self-insertion (where the author inserts herself into her writing as one of the main characters under a different name--as many have claimed re: twilight), sometimes it's just bad writing.

A few interesting (or at the very least informative or exemplary) websites about fanfictions:

• Fanfiction.Net - A large directory of fanfictions. One of the earliest fanfiction websites.


• Sugar Quill - One of the biggest fanfiction websites for Harry Potter.
  
• Godawful Fan Fiction - Self-explanatory.
  
• Livejournal Search - Slash fanfictions seem to thrive more in LJ than in forums or regular websites. If you're looking for slash, real people, or real people slash, this place is your best bet (see: lotrips_finders).
  
• Fanfic Symposium - A collection of essays about many trends – old and new – in the world of fanfiction.
  
• Glossary of Fanfiction Terms (Wikipedia) - A comprehensive list of fanfiction terms.
  
• Fan History Wiki - A wikipedia dedicated to documenting the history of fandom – a large part of which involves fanfictions.

(For those who are curious: yes, I read fanfictions. Yes, I write fanfictions. Yes, I read slash. Yes, I read and write real people slash fictions.)

Let's talk about Wikis.

I'm sure we're all familiar with at least one of their manifests: Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia. It is my quickie-research tool, which is not necessarily a good thing, because Wikipedia is just a smaller, more-focused version of Google: it's hard to tell whether it's fact or fiction. It is definitely easier to use than Google. One of the main reasons is because citations are abundant. I can write a paper about a certain topic and half of my Works Cited page often consists of the same cited links from the Wikipedia page of the same topic. XKCD, my favorite webcomic, once made a parody out of this concept:




Title: Wikipedian Protester: SEMI-PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION.


Since the birth of Wikipedia, a lot of websites have used the Wiki model to create their own themed encyclopedia. The rule of thumb in the wiki model is information comes from general public, ordinary users, common people like you and me. There is no corporate control, no one exclusive source, no censorship, and no bias from advertising. This also means there is a check-and-balance system between all the contributors. In a way, Wiki "has become a powerful media democracy tool" (from Media Democracy@wikipedia).

I'm also sure that many of you have engaged in what is commonly called "wiki-hopping" - or "wiki-walking" to those of you who are less active than others (verb, can be written with or without the hyphen). Wiki-hopping is one of my favorite spare-time activities. The practice involves following a bunch of hyperlinks in your wiki page to other wiki pages that might or might not be related to your initial search topic. Unfortunately, I also engage in unintentional wiki-hopping. This usually happens when I'm in the middle of writing a paper. I'll start with a plan to do an in-depth search of "magic bullet effect" and end up wasting an hour reading about the neo-nazi movement.

Alternatively, this is what happens to my fellow wiki-hopping friend: "A lot of the time when I go to Wikipedia to do research for some school paper I end up knowing more about the gestation period of the Tazmanian Devil than whatever I intended to look for in the first place." - lanceucation.

In case that still sounds vague to you, here's a visual explanation of unintentional wiki-hopping:



Image taken from XKCD; Title: The Problem With Wikipedia


Here's a list of some well-known websites that use wiki models. There are a lot of small Wikis that don't make the list - mostly school-oriented Wikis (like BECA670 pbwiki), text-based small role-playing game community Wikis (e.g. Second Heaven High and Out On The Edges), or other special-interest Wikis made for small-sized audience.

Here are some Wikis I find interesting:

• Wikileaks - a Wiki containing (used-to-be secret) official government documents leaked anonymously.
  
• TV Tropes Wiki - a Wiki I frequent to learn about elements of writing fictions. It is written in informal, sarcastic, and often humorous tone. I find it essential to not screw up when creating a character or devising a plot in a story--or so people don't think I'm a newbie in a role-playing game. This wiki has advertisements, but I'm sure the information is free from bias.
  
• Uncyclopedia - a satirical wiki. Not a reliable source of information. I usually frequent this just for the comedic value. Check out its policy and guideline.
  
• Fandom Wank Wiki - a Wiki documenting fandom dramas. Check out The Wankocalypse (aka The One Wank To Rule Them All), a big drama that occurred in Lord Of The Rings fandom (of course).

Happy wiki-hopping :)

I suppose to blog about something that is familiar to me would be the obvious choice – because you need to know what you're writing about (or you better do a damn good research on it). I can start by identifying the obvious: I'm a college student, I'm an international student, I'm a girl, I'm of Asian descent; or I can write about what I'm into: Jason Mraz, blogging, role-playing, Korean pop, webcomics, etc.; or I can blog about the issues I'm interested in: pop culture, being a part of generation-Y, being an Asian in a western world, and culture shock.

The one thread that connects most of those life aspects is being a part of the internet culture. Even though I wasn't born in a technology-savvy country (Indonesia is a third-world country; it has a lot of issues to worry about rather than keep up with the current technology), I've been acquainted with the internet since its early years. I've pretty much proved to myself that I can get just about anything from the world wide web: entertainment, information, social needs, and many more. I grew up with internet. I'm not claiming that I know gazillions about it. I might not know every little thing there is about it – and of course, there's a part of internet that I know nothing about, but I think I'd like to share what I do know.

Of course, I would be happy if I have readers my readers would share their own knowledge about how to optimize the function of internet.

The entries will mostly be about websites, internet gadgets, internet etiquettes, trends, or anything that is related to the world wide web and its virtual society. Perhaps at the end of the semester, I'd have found someone to update this blog together with me and share their own knowledge about internet.